Traditional values

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He knew about concerned citizens. Wherever they were, they all spoke the same private language, where "traditional values" meant "hang someone."
Terry Pratchett, The Truth

A return to traditional values is an oft-spoken desire of conservatives. It's part of fundamentalist psychology.

Traditional values include, but are not limited to, the many ideals listed here.

Contents

[edit] Commonly spoken of

[edit] Not so commonly spoken of

Probably because those who trumpet "traditional values" the loudest do not actually adhere to them.

  • Honor
  • Integrity
  • Charity
  • Modesty
  • Work ethic (only when it does not involve whoever speaking of it)
  • Family values (the real kind, not their redefined sort)

[edit] Skeletons in the closet

  • Slavery
  • Anti-Semitism
  • Feudalism
  • Women as chattel property
  • Infanticide (it must be noted that this does not include any time before "pre-uterine expulsion")
  • Endemic child abuse
  • Poor sanitation
  • Entrenched racism
  • Life expectancy not exceeding 70 30 50 years
  • Marriageable age of 9 7 12
  • Lynch mob for heretics and minority groups
  • Capital punishment for heretics [1]
  • Corporal Capital punishment for sexual deviancy [2]
  • Capital punishment for, well, everything. "It's hanging for a sheep, or murder in the first degree."
  • 80 hour work week[3]
  • No paid holidays
  • Lack of safety regulation at work Safety at work regulated by natural selection[4]
  • Primitive or non-existent health care Health care provided by free market natural selection[4]
  • Famine
  • Interdiction Prohibition of divorce
  • Censorship of science

[edit] Morris Dancing

On the other hand, Morris Dancing is also a traditional value, and nothing's better than dressing up silly, getting drunk, and dancing in public, to say nothing of the redeeming social value of learning to deal with the symbolism of grown men shaking their jingly bells and swatting their big, thick, knotty sticks together in a mature, responsible fashion.

[edit] Graphic arts

Graphic artists formerly recognised three traditional values: dark, light, and mid-tone. Societies where graven images are frowned upon generally make do with line and colour, rather than skate too close to realistic rendering with all those shades of grey. Noted home scholar Ansel Adams, being dissatisfied with just three zones of value, used some larger prime number, perhaps nine.

[edit] See also

[edit] Footnotes

  1. Where 'heretic' is defined in the broader sense as "people who don't play nice with their local church leader", or in the narrower sense, "Anyone the local church leader doesn't like."
  2. Where 'sexual deviancy' is defined as "Anything remotely sexual that isn't a married man and his chattel woman women trying to make one or more babies in the missionary position."
  3. This is the only place where we find the metric system to be better.
  4. 4.0 4.1 It turns out that denial of evolution is necessary to reduce the moral impact of such policy "improvements".
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