A Talmudic saying I think addresses a similar notion: “He who is merciful to the cruel is destined to be cruel to the merciful.” Update that to “those who are tolerant of the intolerant are destined to be intolerant to the tolerant”.
Statistics can be meaningless as well, when you’re looking at psychological and/or behavior realities, which is what much of these debates are about.
The reason I used unemployment as an example is because of something I heard on talk radio one day - it was the story of a woman who found out that, despite having similar job opportunities available after being laid off months ago, she decided to stay home with her toddler, since it was so great to be able to be home. Well, I’m sure it is, but she decided to continue living off government money so she could enjoy herself at our expense.
The “talk radio” show I was listening to? All Things Considered! Not exactly know for parroting right-wing talking points. And the worst part was that they were presenting it as a positive thing! That is 180-degrees from what I consider intelligent use of resources.
And if that job disparity stat is correct, why am I seeing all of these job openings everywhere?
Maybe your experience isn’t typical. You seriously don’t understand that what you experience doesn’t necessarily hold true for rest of the nation?
Never mind that you might be remembering poorly and “all over the place” might be three or four locations. Never mind that the jobs are likely for minimum wage and part time.
This is probably a root cause of the conservative mindset come to think of it. Not understanding why anecdotes aren’t data.
Do you put all of your energy into data? Why?
Do you recognize that data is a great tool, but that human experience varies widely, and therefore behavior study is equally important?
If we all we have to do is trade anecdotes, I’m having a hard time seeing how I could persuade you of anything, once you’ve made up your mind.
In what way could I demonstrate to you that most of the unemployed are not just being lazy, but genuinely can’t find work?
That’s just one story though. How do we determine how many people are unemployed because they can’t find a job versus how many are just being lazy?
Let me get this right. Is it your assumption then that if we stop giving people unemployment, they’ll all (or a substantial percentage of them) will sudenly get jobs? We didn’t have unemployment insurance during the Great Depression, and in spite of people being extremly desperate they still couldn’t find work.
Are things different now? Is our high unemployment rate due to millions of people suddenly becoming very lazy? Is the Great Recession really just the Great Vacation?
I listen to that show on a fairly regular basis. If you could remember which day you heard it, I’d like to listen to it.
The job openings are only part of the picture. The “Now Hiring” signs are very easy to see. Less easy for you to see are the number of people applying for those jobs. If there are more jobless people than there are job openings, how is it reasonable to expect everyone to be employed? Please answer.
In many cases, the companies are just trying to snag applicants who are already employed, assuming that the unemployed are less worthy of getting the job (by virtue of the fact that they’re unemployed! Quite the vicious circle)
Again, just to be clear:
[ol]
[li]You might be wrong. In that you might be highlighting the few Help Wanted signs in your memory because they buttress your point. You may actually have not seen all that many and you might be mistaken.[/li]
[li]If you aren’t mistaken, those jobs might be for minimum wage and part time. If that’s the case, no one who needs to make rent or a mortgage is going to survive on it.[/li]
[li]The conditions of your particular community have nothing to do with that of the country at large. What if your town happens to be the once place in America that is experiencing a job boom?[/li][/ol]
Looking out your window doesn’t give you a reasonable estimate of the state of the nation. You need to assess things like unemployment extensions with actual data, not some half-remembered Help Wanted signs.
It is a fact, that over the nation there are 4.6 people looking for each job. Does that sound like a time to extend unemployment insurance?
This post is a perfect example of something I see on this board a lot and it bothers me quite a bit. What bothers me are the unstated assumptions that your beliefs are automagically correct and that b) if only them poor dumb republicans really understood, well then everything would be fine.
The problem is that these issues are complex. It seems that most people on this board are unable to grasp that it is possible for two different groups of people to have a disagreement on an issue honestly, with no malice. The default position of the vast majority of people on this board is that conservatives/republicans are not only wrong, but evil. Or stupid. Note, there are plenty of conservatives/republicans in the wild that feel this way about liberals as well. On the SDMB the bent is liberal and, as far as I can tell, has only become more so recently*.
Take health care for example. The left/liberals on this board seem convinced that A) the government will do a fine job if they handle health care B) it will automatically be cheaper and more efficient and C) anyone who questions this is just evil. The ideas that it may not work so well, may not cost what the government projects and may interfere with health choices** are not even considered valid questions to ask. If you ask them, well then you are an evil republican who wants to kill the poor.
I am an odd duck, politically speaking. I am fiscally conservative and pretty liberal on everything else. Yet I find that political discussions on this board turn me off very quickly because if you disagree with the board groupthink you are called a sociopath. Then comes the pile on.
Oddly, I noticed the same thing happened to MSNBC. I used to watch MSNBC to get my news and watch the opinion pieces. These days it has turned in to the ‘Rachel Maddow Blames Bush For EVERYTHING, and all republicans are *exactly *like Bush you so all SUCK’ show.
Slee
*It seems to me that we’ve lost most of our conservative posters who posted well thought out responses. We still have a few but it seems like there used to be more.
**I still find it amazing that people who want the government out of the abortion issue would so willingly turn over the rest of their medical issues to the government.
If you have good conservative arguments, please by all means, make them.
But a superstitious fear of the government isn’t an argument against UHC. It is factual to say that it works better in other first world democracies than it does here. Our system is singular and specifically bad. The onus is on you to show why what has worked in other countries is magically unable to work here.
Well, this is a hijack - I was using it as an example of how and why the left and right might see things differently…
In any case, I understand your point about data v. anecdote, and of course I agree. However, within my community there are lots of job openings of many different kinds (fun fact! I just noticed while running an errand that Walter E. Smithe is hiring for their sales and design teams!). This is not based on “half-remembered” signs, but on signage and the job listings in our local paper.
What I am trying to reconcile (and what I think illustrates the point I was trying to make in regard to the OP) is that I see this information for my area. And then I talk to people who live in the same area, and they “can’t find” jobs. Because I’m not a dick, I don’t pull out the want ads and point out those jobs. But sometimes I really want to, because I cannot figure it out.
I’m a different kind of person. I would scrub toilets with my bare hands to avoid taking government money. And I’ve been damn poor.
So, where is the disconnect between the left and the right on this issue, and does that lead to a greater conclusion about the difference?
Look at the name of the forum. What do you think debating is for?
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The government funds, not handles, funds the training of physicians as well as the health care of veterans, indigenous peoples, active service personnel, the elderly, & poor children. Right now. The arguments are about how to reform that* funding* system, as we are seeing evidence of supply-vs-demand failure in the price increases over the last twenty years. We are not going to put social workers & superior court judges in the surgical theatre.
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I am quite aware that legislators will try to sabotage any government run system. I am also aware that conservative legislators will try hardest not just to get money out of it in a corrupt fashion but to make it actually fail, while they go for their care to a separate private system.
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And yet somehow Australia & the UK are managing to avoid seeing lower-middle-class families go bankrupt over medical bills, & when we in the USA say, “We want some o’ dat,” you respond with what, exactly? A serious critique of the sustainability of universal health care? No.
a) You talk about choices. Fine, we can extend the single-payer system we have to cover more persons, while keeping private medicine. Or we can massively expand the public system (at present, the VA & the BIA hospitals) while allowing private medicine to continue. Either would offer more choices in care. We have data from other countries–Canada & the UK–that have done those things in living memory. We can just try to fill in the gaps on the system we have. But an unavailability of medical care is not choice in medical care.
b) And you talk about your beliefs, as if this were a matter of opinion, or as if I insulted your family gods. And you whine that your political biases are being insulted as if your religion were being insulted.
- I don’t care whether your opposition to health care reform is born from evil, from ignorance, from stupidity, or from sheer contrariness. I don’t care what is in your heart of hearts. I want a system that works.
The sad thing is, I expect this post will fall on deaf ears, because I indict you in it enough that it will feel like a personal attack to you, & then you’ll whine more about being attacked. Bricker debates, he’s trained to do that. But too many people (both left & right) just hear much of what “the other side” says as a personal ad hominem attack & hear no more. Some people are too wrapped up in their own emotions. So what I have to say to you is,
Buck up, Buttercup!
False equivalence. We aren’t asking the government to outlaw abortion, in fact some of us (like me) would like to include public funding of abortion, where for health-of-the-mother reasons, in a public medical funding plan. And as I said above, this is about funding paradigms.
:Sigh: :rolleyes: No, you’re normal. You are not an odd duck. The entire mainstream US media is the same way, as are most “moderates.” So is a lot of this board. I am so sick of the dominant culture thinking they’re the clever odd ones.
:dubious: If there are 5,000 job openings in your area & 8,000 job seekers, there are still 3,000 persons who don’t get those jobs. Worse, if there are 2,000 job openings in your area & 8,000 job seekers, there are still 6,000 persons who don’t get those jobs. You’re doing a good job of playing the Conservative Who Can’t Grok Math, I’ll give you that. But I doubt you’re really that thick. If you insist on this argument again, I may decide you are a stubborn parody of the right.
[emph added]
If you are by some miracle of innumeracy serious, then I’d say that’s it right there. That pride in not taking anything from the government. It’s the foundation of one flavor of poor rightie Yank. (Others include the jingoistic veteran, the hardline religious rightie, the racist rightie, & the rightie on welfare who sees the government as an enemy to exploit. I don’t meant that to be an exhaustive list.)
Edited: Nevermind. Foolsguinea explained it better than I did.
Wow, that may be one of the five nicest things anyone’s ever said about me on this board. :wipes away a tear:
Wish I knew which thing it was I said better than Blalron.
Ah ha! We have an answer to some of these questions!
So, in the course of this conversation, I’ve laid out an example of how I, as a fiscal conservative, feel about something. It has actually crystalized into a real, controversial issue, based on personal experience, personal opinion, and one that effects a whole host of things which involve many, if not most, of the conversations and debates of American governance.
Now, the “hand up versus hand out” debate is not one that is unknown. It has been extensively studied - economically, psychologically, socially, etc., - and the debate about it continues. Both sides are served well to listen and debate the zillion different aspects of this issue, and it may well be something that is debated until the end of time. That is a good thing - keeping working and testing and asking and trying to solve this issue.
However, in this thread, I have, on the basis of something like 5 posts, have been fully categorized, lumped into a list that includes racists and religious wackos, marginalized and disposed of.
That’s exactly the kind of attitude on the left that lost the House in this election. It’s a bullshit attitude that cuts off any spirit of compromise and stalls real social progress.
No, you just refuse to do math.
All I’ve done is point out that you don’t do math, you don’t get math, you’re just all around bad at math.
Or you’re a flaming left-liberal trying to make the right look stupid, I mean, literally like a bunch of stupid innumerate people. I don’t quite know.
It is not a move to the right. It is a bunch of people scared about the economy. They are feeling desperate and are motivated by fear. If the economy picked up your right wing soapboxes would be preaching to empty arenas. Foreclosures, layoffs, driving by empty homes, outsourcing, all these things scaring people .They are hoping a change will help. It is not some kind of conversion. If they can turn the economy around in the next 2 years, the Repubs house will be swept out like it should be.
Honestly, tough that it bothers you. What bothers me is people voting against their self interest. If I didn’t believe that there was a right way to do things and a wrong way to do them I wouldn’t bother to do much of what I do. Taking power away from the corporations, providing health care to the sick poor, rooting out discrimination, providing ways for people to educate themselves that aren’t dependent on the wealth of one’s parents - these are good things to do.
And when people vote against these things, because they are scared that the gays will corrupt their children, or that the President is an Islamic Manchurian candidate, they are mistaken.
When I lived in Tennessee you’d see this a lot. People would vote against a state income tax. As is their right. But they would do it believing that they were financially better off paying a very high level of sales tax, even on food, when their income was such they would pay significantly less in income tax. The error there was in failing to explain things properly to people.
Of course it is possible. I’ve said elsewhere a significant majority of my friends are conservatives of various bents. These are good people, who I happen to have disagreements with, but who genuinely believe the policies they propose are better for all.
But there are also conservatives, including some on this board, who simply want what is best for them, even if that involves screwing over other people. I hold them in contempt.
I’ve lived under both private and state health care. On balance I’ll take state. I’ve always had good health insurance - so the health care available to me in the US has probably been better than that available to me prior to the US. But, on balance, I take state provision because I don’t just consider the effects on me.
I don’t remember calling anyone a sociopath here, though there are some who deserve it. I may have done, and if I did it was deserved.
There are still some, and I respect them and would happily buy them a beer (and hope to have the opportunity to). But there are others who are bad people, just like I am sure there are liberal posters who are bad people.
I don’t know anyone who wants the government totally out of the abortion issue. I think you will find liberals happy to have the government involved in licensing OB/GYNs for example.
Yep. For example:
I’m responding directly to this OP without reading the thread because this is one of the more reasonable posts from the “other side” I’ve seen in awhile so I wanted to give it due attention. Also, the pessimist in my suspects this thread, while only two pages at the moment has probably already devolved into a mindless train wreck like every other thread that pits right against left tends to do on this message board (maybe I’ll be happily surprised when I read through it.)
I probably can’t help much with the OP’s first question. I’ve never been one that wants or cares if the “other side” gives me “acceptance.” I tend to think about politics in two separate “modes.” There is the “Real World” and “the debate world.” In the real world, political beliefs are just a small subset of the whole of a human being. In my real world experience, most people follow political beliefs that they believe is best for them. I think that is exactly as it should be. For example there’s an old guy in my family that has voted straight ticket democrat in every single election since time immemorial. Me and him have had good political discussions my entire life. His argument has always boiled down to this: for his whole life, especially his working life in a heavy industry in which he was represented by a powerful union, the Democratic party was the only party that was directly advancing his personal interests. We can argue back and forth about whether that was really true (and I have, of course) but at the end of the day his whole point was “the Democrats are the ones who are protecting my interests.” I think if someone feels that way, they should vote for a Democrat.
If you’re looking for a conservative to acknowledge the validity of some liberal ideas, well there you go. I’m a conservative and I tend to think your political support and beliefs should align with your enlightened self interest. If you’re poor with few prospects, I can see a lot of reasons to get behind a political ideology that seeks to redistribute wealth in your favor. I do not expect human beings to act against their selfish interests, I know that I don’t generally do that.
A lot of the differences are just in a matter of process than a matter of ideology. At least where I’m from, a lot of conservatives are also environmentalists in the sense that they are outdoors people who love nature and hate to see it spoiled. Where they differ from the Greenpeace folks is the specific policies and regulations they think should be around. Conservative nature loves tend to recognize you do need to exploit some natural resources for the greater benefit of mankind, but a lot of us do genuinely believe you need to have sanctuaries that will be mostly protected from this. I like to think that over time there has also been greater acceptance amongst the right for technologies and policies that limit the negative environmental impact of industry. I don’t want to go through every single political issue in this vein, but suffice to say I think many on the right have similar beliefs as many on the left, and only really disagree about the specifics which are sometimes not very big disagreements.
As opposed to the “real world” there is “Debate world” which is a microcosm in which people boil themselves down into pure ideology and sadly this world is one in which it seems like the warring ideologues are only willing to paint the other side as absolute extremes. Keith Olbermann and Bill O’Reilly have gotten rich in this microcosm, and I totally agreed with Jon Stewart’s recent statements that most of America isn’t like that. I dislike that both the right and the left are, in popular culture, only really represented by the most extreme elements of both.
I will say this though, in reference to the “fighting for it” comment. You can fight for things politically without calling the opposition inbred rednecks.
As for the second question, “voting the people in who made this mess”, I think that just shows that the OP is a bit out of touch with the political process. I think there are a lot of people in this country who are very interested in politics but only at a national level, so they only think on the national level and only really follow the national sound bites. At the local level, things tend to be a lot different, by and large the people who are taking new seats in the next congress are, in fact, not the same people that got the country into the mess it is in now. Tabling the entire debate about whether or not you can blame the whole economic crisis solely on one party, the people getting elected weren’t Congressman before all this started.
I also think the OP needs to consider this secondary fact: Obama has been President for almost two full years. The majority of America was looking to Obama to be point man for fixing things. You seriously have to considering accepting it as fact that America has not been happy with Obama’s leadership, and has not been happy with the way things have gone since he was elected President. How long is reasonable for the American people to have to wait until they decide to start judging a President based on the state of the nation? Obviously Presidents will try to put as much of the bad onto their predecessor for as long as possible. From what I saw this election cycle, I think the electorate has fully transitioned away from the Bush Presidency and considers Obama fully accountable for everything now. There’s absolutely no reason to argue whether that is appropriate or just, because in politics all that matters is that such a shift has happened, not whether or not it was justified in some sort of message board debate-sense of the word.
I also think that just looking at it from a “purely political” perspective, the President has been too cautious. Aside from pushing the health care bill through to the finish line, I really do not feel like Obama has drawn many lines in the sand. Even the health care bill represented a massive compromise on what I felt Obama was advocating during the campaign. As a conservative, I say in all honesty I think the tax dollars of Americans would be better spent and more efficiently spent on a true single payer health care system than the clusterfuck that was pushed through the legislature by our President.
However, that’s neither here nor there, the President drew his line in the sand on that matter and got it pushed through, even though it was obvious fairly early on it was going to have “mixed” results politically. Well, I think that if Obama was playing the super cautious game, he probably shouldn’t have pushed health care through. I can see some aspect of Obama’s personality where maybe he really just wants to get reelected so he doesn’t want to become too controversial. Well, if that is his goal, fine, but that wasn’t the bill of goods he sold his voters during the election. If that really is his goal, it was just a plain bad decision that the one issue he showed some degree of strength on, was a politically divisive one.
In truth, I think Obama would have been far more successful if he had just come out guns blazing and been a forceful President. I’m a conservative Republican, and it should probably make you as liberal Democrats feel betrayed that I think Obama’s Presidency hasn’t actually been that bad so far. Mainly because Obama just hasn’t had much of a spine and hasn’t really pushed a very liberal agenda.
There was a time when President saw being elected to that high office as a once in a lifetime opportunity to push their ideas onto the national stage and ram them down the throats of the opposition. Jockeying for a successful reelection bid wasn’t generally something you saw Presidents worrying about from day one of their first term, but I really feel that Obama is just playing for ties during his term because he wants to win a second term.
Bush pushed through a lot of stuff when his party controlled both houses of Congress. I don’t really see where Obama has come down very often and said, “I want this, my constituents want this, and we’re pushing it through. I really don’t care if every Republican in the Congress votes against it because we’re going to push it through anyway.” I won’t even start on the pussification of Congress in regards to the filibuster. I’m sorry, but a filibuster needs to involve a few 70 year old men having to keep up a marathon performance. I can bet you any amount of money you’d want that if filibusters still had to be done like they were in the 50s and 60s every fucking thing that rolled through congress wouldn’t be getting held up in the Senate. When you make the filibuster not actually take any sweat, you’ve basically conceded that you need 60 seats in the Senate to get anything done. A lot of people have bitched out the GOP for being historically obstructionist on so many issues, I’ve just wondered why the Democrats haven’t actually flexed some muscle. They controlled both houses and could have easily pushed the envelope on those things.
I think Democrats need to seriously consider the possibility that the American people hunger and yearn for leadership. Obama’s policies by and large have not been significantly out of step with the American people. Obama himself showed this during his campaign for the Presidency. He won a major victory across most of the country. Yet, even with that mandate, and even with major legislative gains, Obama has seemed timid and afraid to stand up and say “the American people picked me, so I’m going to push my ideas through. I don’t really care what the Republics want, because the Republics have ruined this country and if the American people get behind me and help with our agenda things will only get better.” Obama has never been willing to say anything like that. Would I like hearing him say that? No. But I’m a hardcore Republic, Obama was never going to please me anyway, I’m not the voter he should be concerned about.
Obama I think also made major missteps politically by giving the Blue Dog Democrats too much power. The truth is most of those Blue Dogs were on shaky foundations anyway, they were swept into office because of unprecedented disgust heaped on the GOP and aided by Obama’s popularity during the campaign. Many of them, probably no matter what, once things had “died down” were going to be pushed out of office. Mainly because even as conservative Democrats they just were in heavily Republic districts and that was the truth of things. The Blue Dogs should have been used essentially “as much as they could”, but there needed to be a point where Obama was just like “well it’s obvious they aren’t going to be behind me when it’s going to hurt their chances at reelection, so I’m going to quit begging them to jump aboard and try to get things done with my base.”
I just want to address this part. And you can think about it in regard to any business or organization or club you have ever been involved with, and see if it applies.
You cannot push people toward the future. They will resist change. You have to pull or lead them toward the goals that you want to meet.
The Progressive goals that have been met that you cite above have not been accomplished through legisilation as much as through education and societal concensus.
The “huh, those guys sure have a point” is a very, very hard point to reach. But it is the point that you must reach for real progress.
This basic idea is what repeatedly impares the Progessive or currently Democratic goals.
It has to be done the hard way, you have to get buy-in from the people. You cannot push that camel through the eye of the needle, but you might be able to lead him through, with his cooperation.