I’d probably be considered conservative by many on the boards and I’m not religious at all.
While I could be wrong, it’s been my impression that most of the scientists in the early atomic age and computer age were mostly conservatives. I note also that conservatives seem to have no problem adopting and using new products born of science and technology, such as cars and airplanes and radios and computers and so forth. It seems to be mostly when science comes into conflict with religion that science and (some) conservatives come to a parting of the ways.
And it’s hard to keep a straight face when listening to liberals lay claim to intellectual superiority when they’re responsible for things like “social promotion” in school, where people get passed from grade to grade automatically and without having learned anything, which can result in people graduating from high school unable to read or write at a first or second grade level. Or when they foster and promote social change that results in huge numbers of children born out of wedlock and adults dependent on the government for their subsistence. And most of all for the naivety and gullibility that lead to the creation of communism, which of course resulted in the deaths of tens of millions of people over the last century and the repression and privation that those who survived were forced to live under.
Wondering if you could possibly find a broader brush…
Communism? Really?
How about “ideologically entrenched?” “Utterly judgmental?” “Overstatement in service of rationalization of opposition?”
Does the SDMB really lean strongly left? There are many right-wing or right-of-center people active in political and economic threads. In addition to active Republicans there are several former Republicans who left the Party recently with reluctance. Yes, there are more on the left than on the right, but that is true of any random group of well-educated people; and this will be amplified to some degree by the birds-of-a-feather or echo-chamber effects.
Was there a 2012 poll, Romney vs Obama? What were the numbers?
Underline mine: not all, not any, not everywhere. By my local standards I’m a conservative; in Spain, PSOE voters tend to be less educated than those of PP. Officially, PSOE is to the left of PP, although for some reason PSOE politicians are the ones fascinated with copying American social policies.
OK, so maybe I should have said religious instead of conservative, but the two factions tend to flock together for political reasons. I was just trying to explain one reason for the left-leaning tilt of SDMB.
Yes.
Depends on what you mean by well-educated. Republicans dominate for those with bachelor’s degrees; Democrats among the high-school dropouts and post-graduates.
If it was like every other Presidential poll on the SDMB, Obama got at least 75%.
Regards,
Shodan
Just my own likely faulted perception I will give. I get the impression that left leaning folks with good educations tend to think that not so well educated people need more of their lives and decisions managed for them. I am a conservative yet consider myself to be extremely sensitive to the plight of many minorities. My solutions are nothing like the solutions I see on the left.
Cite please?
Pew 2015 says:
Post-graduate experience
56% Dem - 36% Rep
College degree but no post-grad experience
48% Dem - 43% Rep
There’s an adage which seems to hold true here: the right think the left are wrong; the left think the right are evil. One only has to look at the portrayals of the candidates in the various elections: the Democrat candidate is a saint against whom no word may be uttered; the Republican candidate is a demon in human flesh. The same holds this side of the Atlantic too with Labour and not-Labour, most especially Tories and UKIP.
Not according to many of the conservatives in my office – Obama is an evil Muslim atheist Manchurian-candidate terrorist, and Hillary conspired to murder hundreds (including the Benghazi victims) for vague and undefined reasons. And most of the liberals I know think George W was dumb but not evil.
With regard to this, there’s a notable phenomenon of “belief clustering” that corresponds to what we call the right & left of the political spectrum:
It’s clearly not as simple as one side being consistently more aligned with “rationality” or science either now or throughout history. But there’s a perceptive analysis of this clustering that perhaps Totenfeierhints at above, originating with Thomas Sowell, described and expanded by Steven Pinker in The Blank Slate as quoted below. The political right are associated with the “Tragic/Constrained” worldview, and the political left to the “Utopian/Unconstrained” worldview:
Another blog post giving a good summary here:
Dubyah by himself is the epitome of the good ol’ boy. Not particularly bright, but you have trouble not liking him in the end.
Now add the Sturm und Drang twins and it’s a completely different story…
I suspect that the difference is that Shodan is looking at degrees as a percentage of the population of Dems and Pubs rather than the orientation of the population of only degree holders.
Hmm I wouldn’t consider Rousseau utopian so much as romantic. Voltaire, maybe.
The concept does’t map precisely to what you might otherwise call Utopianism, and that’s not really it’s purpose. It might have been better to stick with Sowell’s less loaded terms constrained/unconstrained. It’s an attempt at something akin to factor analysis, or principal component analysis, where a thinker’s position in the population on the Utopian-Tragic axis (aka the Unconstrained-Constrained axis) is claimed to be an important explanatory factor for variance in beliefs within the population. So it’s not a question of “is Utopian the best adjective to describe Rousseau”, it’s a much narrower “what’s his numeric score on the Utopian-Tragic metric”. On that basis, I think it’s pretty clear where he lies.
Many or most surveys (including Shodan’s evidently) cite ‘any college’ rather than ‘college degree.’ The Republicans do better in that category, compared with ‘college degree’ where, as Riemann points out, D’s outnumber R’s.
I did? That’s news to me. The entire conversation (including the one with Riemann) has to do with political/religious idea discussion. You can even see that Riemann and my discussion continued onward with the discussion of cultural bias and which ideas are superior. Though Riemann did attempt to talk about the more extremes of speaking of biases in geology and I rejected that reading out of hand as a reductio ad absurdum.
So, basically, what sleestak is more in tune with the discussion we were having.
I would generally agree that that is the perception, although on some issues, like climate change and evolution, the left thinks the right is wrong, and on abortion, the right thinks the left is evil.
I don’t see, on climate change or abortion, any difference between how the two sides see each other, at least on the SDMB. The left thinks the right would rather preserve oil company profits than save the world, and that the right wants to return to the days where women had no rights and were considered chattel.
Regards,
Shodan