If Liberals are so empathetic...

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I'm having trouble seeing where you're going with this. Sure, that's not what loyalty means. So what? Are you saying that any word with moral implications has to tie back to fairness for some reason?


They still would be considered heretics AFAICT. Why would this be incredibly surprising?

My point is: you seem to be saying that many people are loyal to morally sound institutions and people, and their loyalty to these institutions and people is morally beneficial. I agree with this. But that doesn't mean that "loyalty" itself can be considered a moral building block.

Here is another example. Suppose that I point out that many people are members of morally sound institutions, such as charities and non-Nazi churches, and that their membership in these institutions is morally beneficial. Does that mean that "membership" itself can be considered a moral building block?

I would say loyalty to anything other than flesh and blood human beings is undesirable. It implies an unwillingness to change, or to accept flawed ideas or institutions in the face of better alternatives. This seems pointless and wasteful.

Um, this sounds like a subtle attack. I skimmed it because it just seemed silly to me, if you want the truth.

Anything humans come up with is going to be imperfect. Existing "flawed" ideas or institutions are a result of long sets of compromises that while nobody is happy with, everybody can live with. Is accepting a compromise agreement pointless and wasteful?

As i'm sure you know, liberal and conservative is a gross oversimplification of politics; there are many groups within both. Most people only join since the core beliefs of that group are the nearest possible to their own and they hope to manipulate the direction the entire political spectrum takes. It's most obvious in the US with the extreme nutters on each wing trying to pull everybody else their way by threatening to leave the wider political party if they don't get their way.

Much of the time, I think your "better" alternatives are what you consider to be "better" based on eliminating every compromise every other group in society wanted in order to be able to live with the institution, which leaves you being the only group satisfied with the result. While you would doubtlessly consider the end result of eliminating any compromise to be "better", I think we need to be able to agree that this a sentiment that would be far from universal. If the idea was genuinely "better" in the definition of "produces a measurably more effective end result for less cost while being fair to all sections of society" then to be honest I don't think there would be any argument over it.

No, but that's not loyalty, thats pragmatism. Loyalty dictates that you would remain steadfast in a situation where few were happy with it, few could live with it, and the outcomes were poor. You can't argue for loyalty on a pragmatic basis - that's arguing for pragmatism.



I find that the groups most likely to exhibit strong loyalty are idealists and generally aren't willing to compromise with any other groups anyway.



Then you do not believe in loyalty, you believe in pragmatism. You're willing to make a switch to obtain something, if it is pragmatic to do so.

What can you expect. He's another W. Cleon Skousen cultist. There's references to "The Five Thousand Year Leap" all around his site.

Though I have seen some extreme conservatives insist that Obama is Muslim due to his middle mane of Hussein, putting him in an evil category.

Their arguments are based on things a lot more interesting than his middle name, they actually go into a deep analysis of how faith is supposed to be passed on in the Muslim religion, and then all the reasons they think his claim to be Christian ring hollow. Of course, as a Christian, I can see many ways that thought process goes off course, but if you want to debate it effectively, you have to understand that it is based on much more than a name.

The problem with loyalty is that it can lead to evil, and to acting against one's own conscious. Loyalty is appropriate when all other things are equal or near equal, but there are points and times one must draw the line. And I can easily think of examples from both the extreme right and the extreme left where the appropriate lines fail to be drawn. Fanaticism and loyalty are often paired up, but that is also when it gets destructive.

I wouldn't call membership (by itself) morally beneficial. I can't see how membership and loyalty could be compared like that, either.

I would call loyalty a generally good thing, but I can't see how anyone could call membership in general good or bad.

No, that's fabricating a new definition of loyalty.

Loyalty
noun
1. the state or quality of being loyal; faithfulness to commitments or obligations.
2. faithful adherence to a sovereign, government, leader, cause, etc.
3. an example or instance of faithfulness, adherence, or the like: a man with fierce loyalties.

I am loyal to my country, and it's institutions. That does not require me to ignore the obvious and indisputable fact that many parts of our governance are the end result of a thousand odd years worth of compromise agreements. Since I live in a functioning democracy I am perfectly at liberty to point that out and express my opinions on our governance. I may also call for lawful alterations to those sections of our governance without being disloyal, since we have freedom of speech up to the point where you start discussing to overthrow those institutions by unlawful means. At that point it would be sedition.



Well, as I'm not liberal by any reasonable definition of the word you'd probably call me conservative and I, like many people I know exhibit very strong loyalty. Personally, i'm willing to compromise however that means to me that we end up negotiating on the issue to resolve concerns and end up where that compromise leaves us, which is probably somewhere close to halfway. I am not willing to engage in "compromise" as in we give the other party everything they want every time without addressing our concerns.



As pointed out, I am loyal by the dictionary definition of the word, as well as it's common acceptance in (British) English. If this does not meet your personal definition of the word, then I would respectfully suggest that your definition is irrelevant to me.

I hold that I can be a good citizen, and do my duty to my Queen, my Country and my flag, while lawfully engaging in my countries political process without being disloyal.

To me, "loyalty" seems to be a very similar concept to "membership". It is a description of a relationship of attachment or allegiance between a person and an institution, or between two people. And the moral problems seem to be the same for both concepts. Just as it would be morally questionable to remain loyal to an institution or person if the institution or person is a force for moral evil, it would also be morally questionable to remain a member of an institution if the institution is a force for moral evil. In both cases, I think that we can always "pass the buck" to a real moral concept in order to explain why a certain loyalty or membership is morally good.

The only problem for this view seems to be that the opposite of "loyalty" might be "betrayal", and "betrayal" is morally wrong, all else being equal. But I don't think these are true opposites. "Betrayal" really means "the breaking of an agreed-upon arrangement", whether the arrangement is implied or literal. The reason it is wrong is that it involves you not keeping your word, which really boils down to an offense against fairness. But you could be loyal to something or someone without there being any arrangement involved. For example, I could choose to be loyal to a certain political party by always voting for them. But there would be no breaking of any arrangement if I decided to drop my loyalty and stop voting for them.

Subtle?



And yet you still felt compelled to add another "I can't support this statement but I just know I'm right" comment...

Direct enough?

No, it isn't different at all. Parse the definition. Faith is a belief held without proof - faithfulness would be the quality of believing without proof. Faithful adherence, would be to adhere to something without proof, ie to refuse to subject it to rational analysis.

Essentially its not much different from fanaticism except by degrees. It is a state of deliberate irrationality towards the object of adherence, in order to maintain support of it.

Hmm... I wasn't going to respond to this again, but you have baited me.

I don't give a damn about the subject, let me just frank. I don't care about politics. What I look for is the way people respond. And I find your response unsettling. So, let's just leave it at that. Sometimes, I make a point that has nothing to do with the original topic. I am done with this thread.