Yeah, I don’t get Velocity’s statement at all. In the US, physicians are generally well-educated small-business owners/partners with high incomes. With the exception of plaintiff’s trial lawyers and criminal defense lawyers, I would expect most people in that category to be conservative – i.e., most doctors, dentists, veterinarians, engineers, accountants, lawyers and so on.
In the US, I think the place you’d see conservatives in a liberal domain the most is in higher education.
I deployed to Iraq with someone who is a history professor at a small liberal arts university. He liked to say he was the only conservative on the faculty. He may have been exaggerating but I bet it wasn’t by much. Knowing his personality there is no way he pretended to be anything for anyone.
You may be equating conservation with conservative; my feeling and experience is that this isn’t the case. Something big like the Sierra Club or Trout Unlimited down to things like local watershed groups often have strong right-wing roots but those of us more on the left (IE damn hippy tree-huggers) have pretty much taken over. I’m not sure how it happened but I can point to a rough when - during the early 70s when the movement for clean air and water included doing so against the will and profits of some major industries. And some would claim at the detriment of those same industries.
30 years ago you would have been right. But even in the Mighty DU our stake has been rising. At “Duck Dinners” (their serious fund raising operation everyone else tries to copy) these days its not unusual, depending on the locale, for a hunter to find himself in the minority. What was often described as “the Sierra Club for rich heavily armed Republicans” has slowly moved at least to center politically. Will it continue the shift? That will be something interesting to watch. It comes down to do enough liberals like me sometimes or to some level hunt.
Some of the amateur musician circles I frequent are noticeably left-leaning, complete with songs and statements that suggest they blithely assume everyone there shares their political views*. But a few of us, including me sometimes, don’t.
*How can you possibly sing folk music and not be a liberal? OMG!
24 posts and no one has mentioned the SDMB?!?! 
Ding Ding Ding, we have a winner.
Going back to the early posts, it used to be there were conservatives/republicans who were pro choice and liberals/democrats who were pro life. It seems this doesn’t happen anymore, at least openly. They all tow the respective party lines.
As far as professions, journalism and higher education seem to be the most overwhelmingly liberal professions.
Funny, I see the exact same thought presented with “conservative” inserted for “liberal” on the firearm forums I visit. As mentioned, reality is liberal in some respects and conservative in others. Of course, we all know that libertarian is the true reality.
Toe the line.
For academia, more in the liberal arts than elsewhere. Also, Hollywood!
I think it’s hard to make a general rule on physicians. Those in private practice probably do tend to be conservative on the economic scale. As has been noted, they tend to be fairly well-off small business owners. The ones in university practices are maybe less uniformly conservative. University physicians’ income, although high by any reasonable standard, is not generally as high as those in private practice, and university physicians are in an educational environment that probably leans liberal. On social issues, it’s probably a real mixed bag.
My wife is an infertility specialist. She’s fairly liberal both socially and economically. One of her coworkers lines up pretty well with her views, the other is much more conservative. My wife is very pro-SSM, helps lesbian couples get pregnant, sees transgendered patients, etc. On the other hand, one of her colleagues refuses to see same-sex couples. Some of her colleagues in academic medicine hated the ACA; some supported it. ::Shrug:: YMMV.
My genetal experience with professionals such as doctors is that the more “liberal” ones just go about their business. The more “conservative” ones seem inclined to let you know about their opinions. You never notice the “liberals” because the do not typically feel the need to spew.
That is how it is around here, anyway, and it is pretty widespread. The further right a person is, the more likely they are to preach it.
How many engineers have you actually worked with? Two?
Everyone knows that engineers tend to be conservative.
I’ve been to the General Convention of the Episcopal Church several times and out of the 1,000 or so deputies you might be able to count the number of political conservatives without having to take your shoes off.
I don’t know about that. I’ve worked with hundreds of engineers, and I don’t think they skew more conservative than the general population. This site seems to confirm that (with the caveat that I live in the SF Bay area, so my sample is going to skew a bit more liberal):
Social work is an odd category. Most social workers I’ve known are as liberal as can be. I mean the category itself seems to scream for big government, universal health care, food stamps and a lot of other things that slot right into the left-wing agenda.
But I’ve also met a surprising number of social workers who are religiously conservative, who feel that charity is best performed by private organizations, etc. Philosophically, they see their role primarily as helping individuals rather than helping society.
I think they were specifically objecting to the claim that aerospace engineers were conservative. Engineers in general trend conservative, especially compared to scientists. But I’m sure there are certain fields where this isn’t true. For example, here in the power industry, our engineers are more conservative than the already conservative average engineer. But something like software development (who like to call themselves engineers ;)) would definitely trend liberal, especially in the startup scene. No clue about aerospace, personally.
I’m a scientist, and one could safely make anti-conservative jokes in the lunchroom for all to hear because the most right wing person I’ve ever met in science is still left of center.
Certainly high income earners skew conservative, but people with high education levels skew liberal. So there are two forces (or correlations, at least) offsetting each other. Professional medical organizations such as the AMA are definitely on the liberal side except on a few issues (primarily tied to their incomes, like whether to accredit more medical schools). I know lots of doctors who won’t join (or quit) the AMA because it’s too liberal. I don’t know any that won’t join because it’s too conservative.
The same is true of the American Bar Association, except that the ABA doesn’t really do much to protect lawyers’ incomes.
Didn’t Ann Coulter claim to be/have been a Deadhead? Aiko! :eek:
That survey found that 47.4% of engineers describe themselves as being Conservative, while only 11.9% identified as being Liberal. In other words engineers are almost 4 times as likely to identify as Conservative than Liberal.
What was your point again?
Is that Korean? What does it mean?
It’s what Coulter yells before she chops the heads off her sexual partners.