So you would agree that there is parity with regards to the number of conservative posts versus liberal posts?
Possibly. I am embarrassed if I lumped them together, which is possible since it was all happenening at the same time (or so it seemed to me, I guess) and I’ll have to rethink it.
Thank you for your very civil response.
OK.
With the following caveats:
- my post earlier on this thread where I noted that the simplistic left/right axis is a pretty dumb way to characterize the board, tainted, as it is, by the nature of the U.S. two-party system;
- shaded by my having to wade through GD all the time, so that I may see someone as “left” or “right” based on religious discussions when they may be “right” or “left” (or libertarian, authoritarian, or anarchic) based on their political leanings on which they may post less frequently;
-
mhendo’s correct objection that counting only posters who happen to have been drawn to read this specific thread–and then further prompted to post to it
and - my use of the list of all posters on this thread rather than limiting it to the last two pages
then
I came up with 49 on the left, with 5 wingnuts (a bit less than 10:1)
and 14 on the right with 2 wingnuts (7:1)
with a few that I could not categorize (including 1 wingnut).
From that i conclude exactly this: that based on my subjective evaluation of who is left and who is right plus my subjective evaluation of who is or is not a wingnut, as cautioned by the clearly statistically poor sampling of this thread, there is not a clear proportional overrepresentation by wingnuts in either “camp.”
As the raw numbers show, Sam Stone has made an excellent point that even in a rather polite discussion, a 49:14 ratio of left to right posters is going to result in posters on the right having to respond to an overwhelming number of posts, (which does not mean more facts, but does indicate a potential reservoir of potential sources of facts or of opinions couched in different arguments that may need to be addressed in different ways).
I disagree strongly about this.
For me, the key is what type of evidence you expect me to draw from conservative sources. If it’s a matter of figures or straightforward reportage, i think a conservative source is often as good as a liberal source, and vice versa. If you expect me, however, to treat a conservative op-ed piece as a “cite” about what opinion i should hold, then i’m sorry but you’re going to be waiting a while.
The Wall Street Journal has the most idiotically juvenile conservative editorial position, but i’ll accept that paper as a source about the facts every day of the week. Same with the Cato Institute for that matter, an organization that i have relied on myself in the past and that i read with some regularity. Of course, that possibly wasn’t the best example for you to choose, because the libertarian folks at Cato would laugh just as hard at some of the Bush apologists on this board as the leftists and liberals do.
I can’t respond to your specific example on this issue, because i was so tired of both of those stories that i couldn’t be bothered joining any of the debates about them.
You are right that the axioms on each side are often different, and that perception of severity vary accordingly, but you still seem to be implying that this is somehow unfair, or that it makes the left worse than the right. Your own explanations insert your own axioms into each of these stories in order to make the left seem more prone to such failures than the right, and you apparently expect us to accept this as a fair and reasonable evaluation of the situation. Your explanation suffers from the very same partisanship that you claim is such a problem.
Your argument about numbers is probably right, and it would be right even if every poster on the board—both left and right—argued in good faith. It’s hard to debate a whole bunch of people, especially in a text-based medium where formulating a response takes time and where you have other things to do as well. In this situation, people on the minority side of any debate are always going to be in trouble.
Sorry, no sympathy here.
I’ve had dozens of people bail on arguments before, and fail to respond to what i thought were extremely well thought out and coherent posts. If you think that only the leftists and liberals on this Board do that, then i submit that you’re suffering from tunnel vision. It’s another price to pay for the medium; i’ts easy to walk away with no consequences.
Again, as i did with Scylla, i completely disagree with this statement. I’ve seen, i reckon, literally dozens, possibly hundreds of occasions, where a left poster has been taken to task by other leftists for a drive-by posting that added no substance to the debate. Here is one occasion where i did it myself; i know i’ve done it at other times too, but that particular one was easy to search because i remembered using the term “dude” in the post.
Also, you seem to be comparing the amount of times that we take leftists to task, versus the amount of time we take rightists to task. What you should be doing, in order to be fair, is comparing how often we take leftists to task with how often you and the other conservatives take rightists to task. We expect people to criticize wingnuts they disagree with; the issue here is who takes their own wingnuts, and i’ve seen no evidence that conservatives are any better than liberals in this regard.
As for the comment about Shodan, well, lets just say that we’re working from different axioms there. And there are conservatives worse than him on these Boards; funny how you didn’t bring up any of them.
Excellent point. I, for one, would welcome more smart conservatives. I rarely agree with the conservative viewpoint, but I’m happy to read intelligent argument.
This I don’t think is so excellent. Bricker went through a disgusted phase a few months ago, in which he brought this up a few times, and I thought about it, but I think we’re the same on both sides. I rarely give leftists grief, but then Shodan does not catch grief from the right, nor, even more egregiously, does magellan01. I think this one’s a draw.
Don’t be embarassed. It was a long time ago, and it was confusing as it occured. Plus, most of us have a life which prevents us from following these things perfectly.
It is always a pleasure conversing with you.
Fair enough, I understand we are not being rigorously scientific, we are simply doing an ad hoc calculation to see if it is suggestive.
Hmmm. I disagree. Your quick experiment shows a 10% wingnut factor for liberals and a 14% wingnut factor for conservatives. That’s a 40% difference. Had it been the other way around (as I’d predicted) I’d have considered it significant.
Yes, that’s to be expected what with the conservatives’ work ethic versus the relative sloth of liberals.
(heh, time was I could omit the smiley there and everyone would know I was joking)
Oh well, I have time now.
The Nation? I don’t pay them too much attention, Media Matters? the problem I do notice is that many times you miss that Media Matters do cite their points and even the video so one can later decide if they are fair or not.
Heritage Foundation? Don’t pay them attention, The Cato Institute? It depends:
http://www.cato.org/pubs/pas/pa-464es.html
Why the United States Should Not Attack Iraq. (2002)
Ahem, time was not kind to the “common knowledge” that Valerie Plame’s occupation was an open secret, if you bother you can see that even in the right wing media any reference for that common knowledge stops a couple of years ago, and when you go check it was affirmations by the Washington Times, Rush, Newsmax and others they never bother to tell you that Fitzgerald checked that and found there were no neighbors or others coming forward to confirm that “open secret”. What I said before remains: in the last 2 years I would have expected to have the names of the neighbors and friends outside the agency that knew of her cover and the case would be derailed for that reason as the right wing media was breathlessly telling their viewers, since it was not, Cheney will have to testify soon in that “no big deal”
Perhaps others, but I thought the Clinton official got what he deserved, the “who cares” attitude now is directed to the “this is new!!!” idea of the OP, it was not.
Meh, it happened to me before, who could have thought Bush in the last campaign was going to bail me out by godwinizing the discussion?
I think **Jody ** made a good point, some posters do think a post has to stand on its own, it could be that the posters also think they made a good point and there is no need to do a rebuttal of the rebuttal.
mmm, IMO I have seen drive-by sniping by all here but by Shodan too, but I have found **Shodan ** to be boorish.
I could not agree more, just don’t forget that many jerkish elements from the left have been banned, some that even I was happy to see gone.
Its all about calibration and perspective. The environment has changed, and some here have not. When first I broached the sophisticated political analysis that Bush teh suxxor, was lying with every breath, so on and so forth… it was controversial, radical, extreme.
Nowadays, not so much. And its not me that’s changed, its the environment. And all this gnashing of teeth (while, undeniably, music to my ears…) is just so much Bushwah, trying to pretend that the change on the board is somehow exceptional, some special circumstances must apply, they refuse to accept the thunderingly obvious: the people have changed.
The center has moved leftward after years of post-9/11 hysteria (a hysteria fostered and encouraged by those very same politicians who benefited, who sold us suspicion in place of faith, and fear in place of courage…)
And nowadays? I’m downright centrist these days! Imagine my surprise.
And with you as well.
The best analysis on the issue so far. One nitpick: The Cato Institute is not a right wing think tank. It is classically liberal with respect to economics and civil liberties.
What he said.
I keep seeing this “classically liberal” stuff, both here and elsewhere on the Internet, posted by otherwise conservative posters who seem to want to make themselves different from ye standard cookie-cutter garden-variety Bill Buckley conservative.
Yet, if one reads, for instance, the book “The Strange Death of Liberal England”, one finds that Lloyd George would fit quite well in today’s Democratic Party, and that the Liberal Party fell because it wasn’t as far left as Labor nor as far right as the Tories, which it seems to me is what would have happened to the Democrats if they had picked themselves up and moved themselves to England at that time.
So, that being the case, exactly how far back do you have to go before you get to this elusive “classic” liberal?
Just wondering.
A “Classical Liberal” is someone in the mold of Jefferson (minus the whole slave thing). Libertarian is the closest modern description, but a lot of us don’t much like the label because A) the actual Libertarian party is just as full of wingnuttery as the other ones and B) Libertarianism is slightly different than classical liberalism.
Here’s a Wikipedia definition that’s pretty good:
Describes me perfectly. It in no way describes Democrats or Republicans, or even Libertarians of various stripes.
Well, if you want to assert that the board is lopsided proportionally to favor right-wing wingnuts, who am I to gainsay you?
However, I consider the sample too small for legitimate statistical analysis and I suspect that both my counts of "left’ and “right” as well as my identification of wingnuts would be challenged by any number of posters, so I am not about to make a claim that we can confidently assert that one side or the other is overloaded with kooks. I suspect that with the way that active board membership shifts from month to month (along with the penchant for a few kooks to realize, themselves, that they have initially been over the top and to then calm themselves), that assuming a rough proportional parity is a relatively safe conclusion.
What it mostly describes is people what have been dead for a long time. Compared to Francisco Franco, pretty darn radical.
Erm, not to be too snarky, but I think that your claim that that describes you perfectly is just a bit disingenuous. There is no way, or at least no example in history that I can think of, of a nation with a large military also being one which recognizes “constitutional limitations of government, the protection of civil liberties, an economic policy with heavy emphasis on free markets, and individual freedom from restraint”. I’ve seen enough of what you write on these boards, anyway, to know that you have a large affection for things military. I, like most modern liberals, don’t. We consider the military a dangerous necessity, dangerous in the sense that no one’s liberty is safe where there is a large standing army under central government control present. In the good old days in the USA, armies were largely disbanded once their reason for being was done with, right up until Korea. No President since then has felt the necessity to actually get a declaration of war from Congress. So much for “constitutional limitations of government.”
There’s a bit of a gap there.
And classical liberals believe that a legitimate role of government is to protect the citizenry from external aggression. Classical Liberalism isn’t a suicide pact or a pacifist philosophy in any way, shape or form.
Of course having a large military is dangerous. It’s more dangerous to not have one.
Personally, I welcome new conservative members. The right-wing cranks, that is, not the thoughtful ones. They are so much fun!
The thoughtful people of any political stripe are just boring.
Having read enough of Smith, Bastiat, Mills, and our own George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, I’d say they would agree that government does exist to repel aggression, and strongly disagree that having a large military at all times is needed in order to do so. They would disagree because all of them, unless I read them wrong, considered a large military a large danger to liberty, and a large economic liability.
For instance, Bastiat (That Which is Seen, and That Which is Not Seen):
…or George Washington, who knew a thing or two about repelling invasions (Farewell Address) :
Nope, there’s a definite contradiction there.