posted
I watched an episode of Glenn Beck this weekend. His audience was full of African American conservatives...funny thing, they all sounded just like me, were educated and successful. I'd like to find a study of the 5% of African Americans that vote R compared to the 95% that vote D. I would suspect they performance gap between them would be significant.
quote:Originally posted by malanthrop: I watched an episode of Glenn Beck this weekend. His audience was full of African American conservatives...funny thing, they all sounded just like me, were educated and successful.
:snort: Then they didn't sound much like you, I'm afraid. But I'm sure they were "articulate."
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Uh, dude, I'm educated (not so successful YET, working on it) and black and I am not a conservative Republican.
I don't think I know where to start when it comes to arguing with you so instead I will eat some dinner.
quote:Originally posted by malanthrop: I watched an episode of Glenn Beck this weekend. His audience was full of African American conservatives...funny thing, they all sounded just like me, were educated and successful. I'd like to find a study of the 5% of African Americans that vote R compared to the 95% that vote D. I would suspect they performance gap between them would be significant.
quote: Weird, formed by anti-slavery expansionists opposed to the Democrats. First came to power under Abe Lincoln. There are many reasons for war. Saving the union was not the "reason" it was the objective. Are you suggesting if this anti-slavery party hadn't come to power and/or slavery did not exists, there still would have been a civil war? Some suggest it was a war about "states' rights", what exactly was the right the Southern Democrats were fighting to keep.....SLAVES.
You're lying again. The reason President Lincoln was fighting the war was to preserve the Union. He said so in plain language, as emphatically as possible: if I could do it freeing all slaves, or no slaves, or only some slaves, I would. You don't get to claim Abraham Lincoln as a Republican who was fighting to end slavery and uplift minorities.
You just don't, malanthrop. I gave a direct quote from Lincoln illustrating why you don't, and you still persist in behaving as though you haven't been soundly refuted.
Why are you sticking around here? You don't appear to get any gratification from irritating people, rather you persist in continuing discussions you've plainly lost and behaving as though decisive points against your arguments were never made at all. You're not here to actually discuss politics, because in the overwhelming majority of discussions I've observed you in, you aren't actually discussing at all. You're not here to change anyone's mind, because even you must see you're not doing that.
Isn't there some conservative website you'd be more happy on? And it's not even as though by sticking around here, you're not giving those damnable leftists the satisfaction of defeating you-the vastly overwhelming majority of folks around here consider you a laughingstock where they don't think you're just an ordinary troll.
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As for myself I actually want malanthrop here. I may not agree with everything or most of what he says, but he represents a viewpoint that I think is better if present.
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Orincoro: Thanks, liked your music btw. Probably should post in that thread.
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quote:Sadly, I now believe the burden of proof has shifted. While an excellent chief executive in Alaska, there is reason to believe that Palin lacks the intellectual skills needed to be an effective President. Most important, she does not seem to recognize this and shows no sign of getting them.
I have not given up on Palin and find much in her to admire, but she would not get my primary vote based on this book and what I know about her to date. I hope I am wrong and am open to changing my mind.
She has more promise than any Republican candidate I can name and I still have hopes for Sarah Palin, but hope needs substance or it becomes a disillusioned faith.
The liveblog is detailed, goes chapter by chapter, and spells out exactly why he supported (and still supports) Palin, and exactly where he likes the book and where he does not.
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Finally! A practical application for AP US History (well, not exactly practical...) Just to clear up any confusion, although I know malanthrop's been told this: Lincoln was trying to preserve the Union, although he personally did not like slavery, he only began to use it as a rallying cry in 1863 after Gettysburg to help turn the war around.
I think it's interesting how much our political parties have changed positions on civil rights. In the nineteenth century it was the Republicans were pushing for civil rights, now it's the Democrats. I think that their economic perspectives have been much more consistent. But really, it doesn't make sense to compare the modern political parties with those of the 1800s. There's been so much change.
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quote:As for myself I actually want malanthrop here. I may not agree with everything or most of what he says, but he represents a viewpoint that I think is better if present.
If his viewpoint was presented honestly, or even half honestly, I would wholeheartedly agree with you, BB. Unfortunately it's not.
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quote:As for myself I actually want malanthrop here. I may not agree with everything or most of what he says, but he represents a viewpoint that I think is better if present.
If his viewpoint was presented honestly, or even half honestly, I would wholeheartedly agree with you, BB. Unfortunately it's not.
I think mal honestly believes what he says he believes. The fact he is choosy about which arguments he responds to, and dodges the others to me does not mean he is dishonest, merely that he can't be troubled to as extensively respond to what others have exhaustively presented.
I myself have been faced with a wall of evidence against what I believed. There are times where I'll spend the hours necessary to look into it, and I benefit both from having better arguments for future engagements, and for changing my mind from time to time. There have also been times where I realized I might be wrong, but that I also did not have the time to determine that either way. I don't always post that I have those doubts, or that I am not willing to investigate the matter further at that time, often I just stop posting.
Even if Mal does not acknowledge any changes in his beliefs in any of the many threads he posts in, to me that does not mean that nobody is convincing him of anything.
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quote:I think mal honestly believes what he says he believes. The fact he is choosy about which arguments he responds to, and dodges the others to me does not mean he is dishonest, merely that he can't be troubled to as extensively respond to what others have exhaustively presented.
I think he believes what he says, too, but there comes a time eventually when even believing what you're saying doesn't preclude dishonesty.
For example, if I say, "2+2=5" repeatedly, and lots of folks refute my statement in detail to the point where you could send a guy to the electric chair on a similar degree of reasonable doubt, but I still persist in saying, "2+2=5", I'm being dishonest. I'm lying to myself first, but that doesn't change things.
He's not just 'choosy' about which arguments he responds to. It's a pattern. He cherry-picks arguments and parts of arguments to respond to so consistently that the pattern emerges of someone just refusing to hear something that contradicts his worldview. That refusal is where the dishonesty comes in. Furthermore, mal's refusals to discuss don't come after hours and hours of research-they come after, in this thread, literally minutes. The count-on-one-hand kind of minutes.
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The difference between you and him is that when presented with things that damage his argument, he simply ignores them. No dismissal, no nothing. They just don't exist as points. I don't know how many times he has just flat out ignored responses in one thread, and then gone into another and spewed all the same crap. Even if you continue to believe all the things you believed before, you don't go on as if you're totally unaware that people are responding to you with specific things you aren't talking about. Half the time he claims to have addressed things he clearly never has, or he just says "your delusional!" and moves on.
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quote:I think that their economic perspectives have been much more consistent.
I'd disagree, but I'm not really sure it's of much value. Economic theory for the first hundred and twenty or so years of America's history was what your position was on the tariff issue. Don't get me wrong, it was a huge issue; whole books have been written about tariff policy in the 19th century (I've read one and a half of them, and it's very dry). But it's NOTHING like the debates that the parties have over economics today. The scale is so wildly different that they're really incomparable.
But, if you want to take a swing at it, I still think they've shifted tracks considerably. When Grover Cleveland, a Democrat, was in power, he refused to help ANYONE int he states. After a drought wiped out a generation of farmers in Texas sometime in the early 1890s, he vetoed a spending bill to provide $20,000 to help them buy seed. Now sure, you can't help EVERYONE, but damn, that's cold.
On the flip side, even within tariff policies there were huge differences. Southern Democrats howled about tariffs on certain manufactured goods in the 1820s, because they wanted cheap imports, and it ended up starting a mini trade war that killed cotton exports for a time. But if you had suggested to them a drop in tobacco or cotton tariffs, they would have been just as pissed. Economic policy in early America was very much a local issue unwedded to political ideology.
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quote:Palin, though notoriously ill-travelled outside the United States, did journey far to the first of the four colleges she attended, in Hawaii. She and a friend who went with her lasted only one semester. “Hawaii was a little too perfect,” Palin writes. “Perpetual sunshine isn’t necessarily conducive to serious academics for eighteen-year-old Alaska girls.” Perhaps not. But Palin’s father, Chuck Heath, gave a different account to Conroy and Walshe. According to him, the presence of so many Asians and Pacific Islanders made her uncomfortable: “They were a minority type thing and it wasn’t glamorous, so she came home.” In any case, Palin reports that she much preferred her last stop, the University of Idaho, “because it was much like Alaska yet still ‘Outside.’ ”
posted
Juxtapose, a second hand account along with "the reason" doesn't seem very strong to me. I'd more easily buy the "it wasn't glamorous" line, than the "minority type thing," but I haven't read the book, so really the quote is coming to us third or fourth hand from the reviewer.
Now I *have* always been fascinated by Palin's lack of a consistent college career. At one point she had refused to release her transcripts and such- is that still the case? As I remember, her academic qualifications were rather pathetic on paper.
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laugh : I'm giving a reason why a word is used in a certain way. That has little to do with the issue. You're talking about why "conservative" is used in a certain way. I supplied the answer that a lot of people believe that "conserative" = a lot of crappy things. You replied that "a lot of people believe stupid things." There's no answer to that. The word is used that way because conservatives believe in a lot of things that a lot of other people believe are stupid. You can obfuscate all you want, I don't really care. A truism isn't going to help anything- yes, a lot of people have believed things that are wrong. A lot of people have believed things that are *right* too. The explanation for a definition of a word doesn't truck with the accuracy of that usage. I simply state: a lot of people take as synonymous: "backward" and "conservative," and they do so because they believe that backward thinking and conservative thinking are the same. Who cares if you don't agree? Yes, because you are lazy, and an idiot, and you are looking for something that connects your racist stereotypes of blacks with your hatred of liberals and intellectuals. Orinoco, you are proving my point with your responses. I find it interesting that you insist upon belittling the opinions of others while stating how intolerant conservatives are. If you truly believe that calling others lazy and an idiot are the actions of a "progressive thinker", then I am more than happy to be an "ignorant conservative".
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quote:I think that their economic perspectives have been much more consistent.
I'd disagree, but I'm not really sure it's of much value.
I disagree, too.
For another example of how Republican and Democratic economic policies have shifted, look at "Fighting Bob LaFollette". An anti-war, pro-union, anti-big-business, darn near communist, Republican.
Malanthrop, the fact that this shift in party ideology is all news to you shows that you might want to do some history homework.
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I think that was illustrated quite well when he likened the Republican party of the nineteenth century to that of the twenty-first, but hey, whatcha gonna do?
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Meh, it's tough being a minority. I can't really blame one from running away from that kind of situation, not everyone can take that sort of thing.
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Okay, putting aside the dubiousness of the claim for the moment, I suspect that whites were at least a plurality on and around campus.
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quote:Originally posted by Mucus: Meh, it's tough being a minority. I can't really blame one from running away from that kind of situation, not everyone can take that sort of thing.
Meh, I've known a lot of white people who've lived in Hawaii and none of them have had significant racial problems. Being a member of a privileged minority just isn't that tough.
Not everyone can take that sort of thing, but then again not everyone is cut out to be President of a racial diverse country either.
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Juxtapose: I'm assuming the claim meant that she was uncomfortable *being* a minority. If it is the case that she was so provincial that she couldn't even take the mere presence of Asians being around *as* a minority, then thats just dumb.
(Well, dumb on an absolute scale, she's done enough dumb stuff that it would still have some competition on a relative Palin dumbness scale.)
The Rabbit: Meh, I know there are significant populations of white people that find it difficult to adapt when they're suddenly in the minority. Hell, I know some Chinese people that grew up in a white-majority area that have understandable issues working in an asian-majority area.
Being immersed in a whole new culture, language, values, etc. can be rough. (It is probably easier if you've had to hide being a minority Muslim all your life like the President though )
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quote:Originally posted by kanelock1: If you truly believe that calling others lazy and an idiot are the actions of a "progressive thinker", then I am more than happy to be an "ignorant conservative".
Sure, you were going to take offense if anyone disagreed with you, so I could give a crap. This is typical of you, under any of your various alts.
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Orinoco, first off I have no idea what you mean by ALT. Second, I am not offended by your ignorance. I find it refreshing to know that once again I was able to get another compassionate, caring, tolerant liberal to admit that they "don't give a crap" about someone that has a different opinion. I know not all of you feel the same way ( that would be stereotyping), but it gives me a warm, fuzzy feeling to expose the true feelings of people who claim tolerance, but refuse to accept differing points of view. Respond or not, it doesn't matter to me, as I refuse to continue this discussion.
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quote:The Rabbit: Meh, I know there are significant populations of white people that find it difficult to adapt when they're suddenly in the minority. Hell, I know some Chinese people that grew up in a white-majority area that have understandable issues working in an asian-majority area.
I'm sure that's true. So what? The issue isn't whether or not Sarah Palin's reactions was outside the range of normal human behavior.
The issue is whether or not Sarah Palin's reaction should cause us concern about her ability to lead the country.
So while her reaction may not be outside the norm, it also isn't on the side of the norm I'd call healthy or the kind of response I would like to see in a person leading a large diverse country.
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quote:So while her reaction may not be outside the norm, it also isn't on the side of the norm I'd call healthy or the kind of response I would like to see in a person leading a large diverse country.
That's essentially how I feel on the subject as well.
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quote:Juxtapose: I'm assuming the claim meant that she was uncomfortable *being* a minority. If it is the case that she was so provincial that she couldn't even take the mere presence of Asians being around *as* a minority, then thats just dumb.
It's sort of difficult to say. The claim isn't made very clearly, and the ethnic picture of a college campus in Hawaii in the early 1980s would be sufficiently complex to defy an easy label. (ETA: that is, an easy label for a white Alaskan female)
Whatever the case, I wouldn't doubt that she felt like a minority.
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quote:The Rabbit: Meh, I know there are significant populations of white people that find it difficult to adapt when they're suddenly in the minority. Hell, I know some Chinese people that grew up in a white-majority area that have understandable issues working in an asian-majority area.
I'm sure that's true. So what? The issue isn't whether or not Sarah Palin's reactions was outside the range of normal human behavior.
The issue is whether or not Sarah Palin's reaction should cause us concern about her ability to lead the country.
So while her reaction may not be outside the norm, it also isn't on the side of the norm I'd call healthy or the kind of response I would like to see in a person leading a large diverse country.
Have you read the linked article from the New Yorker? You are making essentially the same case as Tanenhaus, and this is after he's read the book, and confirmed much of this with the evidence of her own words (leastwise, the words she claims as her own and has put her name to).
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quote:Originally posted by The Rabbit: The issue is whether or not Sarah Palin's reaction should cause us concern about her ability to lead the country.
That may be your issue and you can post away on that all you want. But it's not my issue
I was posting on whether Sarah Palin's reaction was outside of the norm of normal human behaviour.
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Some people may dispute about how much President Abraham Lincoln really cared about the issue of slavery. But one fact cannot be denied. He is the President who issued the "Emancipation Proclamation," which resulted in all the slaves being freed once the North won the Civil War.
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quote:Originally posted by Ron Lambert: Some people may dispute about how much President Abraham Lincoln really cared about the issue of slavery. But one fact cannot be denied. He is the President who issued the "Emancipation Proclamation," which resulted in all the slaves being freed once the North won the Civil War.
Emphasis mine.
The Emancipation Proclamation did no such thing. Well-educated high schoolers know better.
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quote:Originally posted by Ron Lambert: Some people may dispute about how much President Abraham Lincoln really cared about the issue of slavery. But one fact cannot be denied. He is the President who issued the "Emancipation Proclamation," which resulted in all the slaves being freed once the North won the Civil War.
Whatever President Lincoln's motives for issuing the Emmancipation Proclamation, it still remains that the Republican Party has changed since then.
Bob LaFollette campaigned on government ownership of utilities and railroads, also a Republican and more recent a Republican than Lincoln.
President Reagan was a union leader once upon a time.
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Come now, this is nitpicking. The Emancipation Proclamation freed the slaves only in the rebelling states, true. But you can't tell me that it didn't lead to the freedom of the few remaining slaves in the loyal states! I invite you to re-read mal's post; his words were "resulted in [the slaves] being freed" (my emphasis), not "freed the slaves". Eyes on the ball, gentlemen; you are objecting to the least important parts of mal's posts, and avoiding the substantive points he makes. A pattern of discussion, I might add, which is unfortunately rather common around here when comfort zones are challenged.
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Getting back to the first question, what is the difference between Liberal and Conservative thought processes, I've recently began researching a simple difference.
As simple differences, they are over general and don't take into account cultural forces.
Conservatives are Binary.
Liberals are Spectral.
What I mean by that is Conservatives see the world more on a on/off switch--Good and Evil, Right and Wrong, Them and Us.
Liberals are more spectral, seeing a whole range of solutions states, not just the extremes. You can be for us or against us, or somewhere in the middle. No person is wholly good or wholly evil, but sit on the spectrum between those poles, and can be shifted from one to the other.
Binary thought is easier. Its easy to write off illegal immigrants as one great big threat to be removed. Its easy to write them off as poor manipulated peons forced to work torturous hours by our system--so their is Binary thinking on the liberal end as well. Most liberals, however, see them as individuals, ranging from the good hard working people who can improve our society to the murderous gangsters running drugs and other people.
Binary or Spectrum. Which are you?
Well, I am spectrum enough to believe that no one is either all Binary or Spectrum, but everyone has a bit of both, depending on the topic.
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quote:I suppose Abe Lincoln was a "progressive". The facts of history are, the Republican party fought to lift up the minority, end slavery and give civil rights to the minority.
KoM, this is the statement of malanthrop's I was objecting to. Eyes on the ball indeed.
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quote:I suppose Abe Lincoln was a "progressive". The facts of history are, the Republican party fought to lift up the minority, end slavery and give civil rights to the minority.
KoM, this is the statement of malanthrop's I was objecting to. Eyes on the ball indeed.
Its a bit of an overstatement, but still not technically untrue. The Republican party did not fight the civil war to end slavery (at least not primarily) but they definitely did fight in a broader sense to end slavery and to amend the constitution to extend rights to the freed slaves.
But the larger point still stands. The republican party isn't the same party Lincoln lead 150 years ago. The democratic party isn't the same party Jefferson founded 2000 years ago.
In much more recent history, the republicans adopted the "southern strategy" they officially and openly chose to oppose rights for minorities in order to win the support of white southerners. After that move, its pretty hard to argue that republicans have maintained some sort of continuous stance on civil right since their pre civil war foundation.
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And besides, if the Republicans maintained their politics of 150 years ago, they wouldn't win any elections today. Neither party is the same thing as it was then. Tracing the evolution of the parties shows that they have evolved- nothing shows that more clearly than the paradoxical popularity of the Republican party in the South, where the Republicans were at one time representatives of the hated northern aggressors. So things change.
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I guess we're at that point again, where — and keep in mind I'm not just seeing this here — the Republican party is defended on the basis of the virtues the party held versus the Democratic Party ... back in a time that nobody is still alive from. Do people actually believe that this makes a compelling argument for voting for them as they are today? I guess they do.
You might as well make the argument that Detroit is a great city to live in, based on a picture of how it was back when your parents were kids.
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Well, it makes sense that the GOP has to go back so far to find something to be proud of. Recent history of the party doesn't offer many encouraging trends.
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... The reason why I find this weird, super weird, is because they're relying on this argument even though you don't have to go back a hundred and fifty years. You definitely don't have to go back further than 1994. The conservatives being an utter trainwreck of crazy is a such a fairly contemporary thing, and the cause can be traced back to a handful of individuals that, you know, aren't in moldering pre-industrial graveyards. They are either recently dead or still puttering around.
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I think mal is specifically trying to find something that
a) Republicans did and b) is stereotypically a Democratic thing.
Hence the Lincoln bit. Mal likely does not think that Iraq was a vast mistake, and he almost certainly thinks Reagan's economic policies were a great idea, and incidentally he also bankrupted the Soviet Union. But these are more Republican-type accomplishments; he wants to say "See, we're not only better than you at Republicanism, we're better Democrats to boot, hypocrites that you are".
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quote:Liberals are more spectral, seeing a whole range of solutions states, not just the extremes.
I was really hoping you were about to explain how we can move through walls and stuff. But perhaps I've said too much.
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quote:Originally posted by Samprimary: ... The reason why I find this weird, super weird, is because they're relying on this argument even though you don't have to go back a hundred and fifty years. You definitely don't have to go back further than 1994. The conservatives being an utter trainwreck of crazy is a such a fairly contemporary thing, and the cause can be traced back to a handful of individuals that, you know, aren't in moldering pre-industrial graveyards. They are either recently dead or still puttering around.
I guess crazy is as crazy does, eh? Unfortunately we're just seeing a lot of irrational stuff from these people at the moment. It's a whole new ballgame.
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Kudos Darth Mauve. I tend to agree with you. I believe people should be, and generally are, more or less open minded about things. In my opinion, if you come across people that cannot, or will not realize that people have different points of view, that seems a bit wrong to me. I never try to force my beliefs on others, as i would not like others to force theirs on me. I may not agree with someones opinions, but I will always respect your right to have them, as I would ask the same of others.
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The problem is, right now at this point in time, there is one party that is very much more about not respecting the beliefs and customs of others, and one that is...well, really also pretty damn bad about that, just not as bad.
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The problem is, right now at this point in time, there is one party that is very much more about not respecting the beliefs and customs of others, and one that is...well, really also pretty damn bad about that, just not as bad.
Which is basically the point that I was trying to make at the start. It is getting harder to tell the differences between the POLITICAL PARTIES in my opinion. The basic philosophies of conservatives and liberals have not changed, it is the parties that seem to be abandoning them
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