h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

About becoming conservative when aged.

Is it not another idea accepted acritically?

What about Berni Sanders or Jeremy Corbyn?, Desmond Tutu, Peter Seger...?
http://youtu.be/qXBbIZlokB4

If you make enough statements, you get a better and better chance that some of them will turn out to be right. Churchill's output was voluminous Of *course* he was right about something.

Peter Seeger could have said all the wrong things and still have been right if the things he *did* were right. His work cleaning up the Hudson River was valuable.

I any event, a song doesn't have to have the right philosophy in order to be enjoyable.

But, what do you think? you know Sanders. What is your opinion?

I don't think I know Sanders very well. If I lived in Vermont I'd know a lot about him, but I'm in Massachusetts. I voted in the Republican primary, hoping to stop Trump's momentum, but that didn't work.

My father's barber thinks Kasich is the best of the bunch.

I neither like nor dislike Hillary Clinton. She seems like leftover meatloaf that should not still being served, but you sometimes have to stretch things out longer than you thought you would.

We don't get what we want, but if we want to live, we have to negotiate.....

I think what Maria is talking about is the idea of people becoming more conservative as they get older. I'm sure this true in some sense (I certainly have more conservative views now than forty years ago) but I would distinguish between conservative and Conservative. Politically I would align myself with Sanders and Corbyn but I have much more respect for institutions of social stability than I did when I was young.

I don't believe Churchill was right. I haven't seen any sign of me or any of my friends becoming any more conservative over the years.

I meet more conservative people now but that's because I mix with a group of people who are brought together by singing - it's nothing to do with liberal or conservative so it's more typical of the cross section of the populus.

I think most people's attitudes are set by age 20 and don't change.

I can't entirely agree with you, Gnomon. Most folks that I have lived and worked with have tended to become a bit more 'conservative' as they settled into adult life and see their kids growing.

Mind, most people that I have known over the past 40 years have been military and their families. Perhaps seeing the world from "our" perspectives has also caused us to become more serious about things?

I don't think your right to equate serious with conservative. I'm very serious about being liberal. And having children may have made me more so.

I was thinking 'conservative' in opinions and life-style, not political vote.

If I hold the same opinions that I did 35 years ago, does that make me conservative?

I have held roughly the same opinions since I formulated them about fifty years ago . I don't think I have become more conservative with age; in fact, I am more likely to express my liberal opinions as I have less to lose from them offending other people.
I am continually irritated by having to fight the same social and political battles that I thought had been won in the west fifty years ago

I have become conservatively more liberal as I age.

I pick up new habits and living practices here and there. I'm not just living the same year over and over again. I look back at politicians that I loathed in the sixties -- that means you, LBJ -- and I no longer feel the loathing. I'm even okay with Reagan to some extent. Never thought I would accept things that I used to reject, but neither LBJ nor Reagan would trash talk people the way Trump is doing now. Issues were important to LBJ, and Reagan had a sense of gentlemanly conduct. What have we lost? Can we get them back?

Yes where are the good men of the past

The ones that are dead lived their whole lives. The ones who are still alive haven't yet shown the full scope of themselves.

I've seen people get *richer* as they got older and becoming large-C Conservative because of that.

IMO politics is a little like sexuality. Left/Right equates to Gay/Straight where everyone is on a sliding scale. Where you are on the scale changes throughout your life depending on your experiences.


Personally I know few people at the extremes of the scale, those I have come across were pretty unpleasant and quite sad people.

in this case though it's conservative and Conservative and someone up there put their finger on it saying that as we get older we tend to earn more and get more stuff and don't want to share it.

I have become more radical as I get older and it's for the same reason that WS identified ( to ) which is this:

>>I am continually irritated by having to fight the same social and political battles that I thought had been won in the west fifty years ago<<

I am FLIPPING furious that the equality my mum fought for in the 60s, and I fought for in the 80s (well, we've never given up) which was, a lot of the time, the same fight, is now being fought by my daughters in the 2010s. I really can't care if I offend people on the opposite political spectrum, I am angry and I am noisy and I'm not sure that I should care about that.

I think it's worth distinguishing between values and opinions. Opinions ought to change as the evidence does, and as the political/social/economic/cultural situation does. Values are more enduring. I've found that my values haven't changed much, but some of my opinions have changed quite a bit over time, which is a good thing.

I wonder if it's harder for older people to envisage radical change, or to be positive about radical change. Either because they've (we've) lived so much longer with the status quo, or something that's more or less the status quo that it's hard to imagine anything else. Or because people who've been around longer have witnessed false dawns before, or if not false dawns, at least change that failed to live up to (probably unrealistic) expectations.

"Meet the new boss, same as the old boss"