Heck, people opposed to gay marriage have been given ample (excessive, really) invitation to explain their reasoning. Color me unshocked that determinedly willful irrationality on this issue extends to other issues as well.
I think one can be a Tea Party supporter without necessarily approving of the political intelligence or lack thereof shown by the Tea party politicians.
As for gay marriage, while I agree there are no rational arguments against gay marriage, there are really few rational arguments against ANY marriage involving consenting adults. Yet up until about 10 years ago, most people did not support gay marriage and today very few would be willing to consider other arrangements besides gay marriage. But it seems to me that we’re heading for that endgame, where any consenting adult can enter into any civil union or marriage with any other adult, whether they are closely related, or want to add more adults to their union, and probably some other forms we haven’t thought of yet.
Sure, but that’s because gay marriage is a 100% complete slam dunk. In a generation, people won’t be able to believe it was ever an issue.
Can you say the same about… Nuclear power? The death penalty? Gun control? Syria? Fiscal policy? Immigration reform? NAFTA?
I wonder if part of the level of divisive rancor recently has been somewhat caused by the gay marriage issue, which is one which to our side (the right side, obviously) (right meaning correct) is just SO CLEAR and how the HECK can entire swaths of the country and the body politic not see that they’re just being ignorant bigots… that we start to assume that the same is true of EVERY issue.
I don’t think the gay marriage issue is as slam dunk as you think. Were the overwhelming majority of Americans wrong up until recently? Marriage isn’t an issue to be approached by pure logic and it still isn’t today, otherwise we wouldn’t just be talking about gay marriage, but also plural marriage and marriage between close relatives.
It would have been possible and indeed likely during the 1970s. But moderate Republicans have been drummed out of the party and those willing to legislate are accused of being RINOs. (Legislate = compromise).
I acknowledge the word “also”. But I’ll also note that the board was more ideologically balanced (relatively speaking) when I joined. A lot of conservatives believe they were drummed out. I opine that they found themselves defending the quite-difficult-to-defend. Modern conservatives and market fundamentalism delivered us broken budgets and the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression. Neo-conservatives gave us the worst foreign policy catastrophe since Pearl Harbor. Tea Partiers are plain nuts. And congressional Republicans have given us nothing but a level of obstructionism not seen for at least 100 years. Cite by a guy from Brookings and AEI.
Interestingly, none of the preceding affects conservative jurisprudence, Bricker’s specialty. And indeed, that’s one of the few areas remaining of deliberative and defendable modern conservative thinking. Other parts suffer from either wackiness or a fear of marking one’s beliefs to market: this reflects craziness or lack of character.
MaxTheVool. I have a hobby: I collect conservative blogs worth reading. So far I have one in my collection: The Volokh Conspiracy. Though frankly I should have a look at The Becker-Posner blog.
Of course there are many fine business blogs and websites such as Economix at the New York Times, Bloomberg.com and The Economist Magazine. But their factual orientation makes them an amathema to the modern conservative. Bruce Bartlett at Economix is a good example. He was the economist who designed the Kemp Roth tax cuts. But his think tank fired him when he became too concerned with deficit reduction during the 2000s. Off to the cornfield!
So Max, can you point to any decent, reality based and data-friendly conservative blogs? I mean there have to be a lot of them if your perceptions are accurate, right?
I take it as a useful indicator, myself. Stupid on gay marriage, probably stupid on a lot of things.
The Agenda, by Reihan Salam, on the National review site. Cato and Reason also have good blogs.
Ross Douthat is always good if you’re into the social conservative thing, and Andrew Sullivan has always been thoughtful if politically heterodox.
SDMB political discussions are pretty boring for the most part because it’s a bunch of lukewarm social democrat pablum pushers beating up American-style conservative dinosaurs. Needs more socialists and anarchists for da lulz.
Did you ever stop to think that maybe the sources of info you are using is partly why you are wrong all the time? Isn’t there any shame in constantly being made to look like a drooling moron.
You’ve simply got to develop some semblance of critical thinking skills.
I remember him well from TV. Alas, the days of non-batshit conservatives & a few liberal Republicans are long gone…
When somebody identifies with the Tea Party but then wants to dissociate themselves from the worst elements of that group–it won’t work. Sorry, the Tea Partiers are the dregs of the Republican party. And, alas, the most vocal members.
Potential new question for adaher to ask: If a poster is incapable of retaining information longer than three months, would you take them seriously?
June 20th*:
[QUOTE=iiandyiii]
…but the main reason black people have overwhelmingly supported the Democratic party since the 60s is because the racist Democrats (like Thurmond) changed to Republicans when the Democratic party supported and pushed through Civil Rights reforms…
[/QUOTE]
[QUOTE=adaher]
That’s actually not true. YOu say “like Thurmond”, but really you should say only Thurmond.
[/QUOTE]
[QUOTE=iiandyiii]
You are incorrect. Thurmond was the most prominent (and the only sitting Senator at the time), but numerous other Democrats that supported segregation and other racist policies (like Jesse Helms) switched parties in the years after Civil Rights.
[/QUOTE]
September 9**:
[QUOTE=adaher]
All of those Dixiecrats save Strom Thurmond died as Democrats.
[/QUOTE]
[QUOTE=BrainGlutton]
Don’t forget Jesse Helms.
[/QUOTE]
*From the Elections Forum: “Will the Repulbicans Ever Figure Out Why They Lost?” (see post 576)
**From Great Debates Forum: Why do African Americans Support the Democrats–The Party of Slavery
The title of this thread intrigues me. Heck, if my husband, who I love very much and think is wonderful, was wrong more than half the time, I wouldn’t take him seriously.
Really OP, imagine if your partner/boss/best friend/neighbour/whoever was wrong more than half the time. Wouldn’t you find it difficult to take anything they said seriously because, you know, they’re wrong more than half the time! They get it wrong more often than they get it right. I would have to check every single thing they say, unless it’s something I already know myself and even then, I’d probably start to wonder if I was wrong.
Not when one side is American conservatism; they are intellectually and morally bankrupt. There’s not many issues where their claims have even a nodding acquaintance with reality, much less good arguments for them.
No; many are evil, not stupid. The problem is that they are wrong - blatantly so. You won’t find an online forum like the SDMB with a more “balanced” userbase because their lies and delusions can’t survive in a forum where people are allowed to criticize them. They need the kind of forum where any contradiction of orthodoxy is punished by banning to flourish.
The *world *would be better if there *were *more.
Or, we can say that the shortage of respectable arguments against us means we’re simply right - and that what we need to do is work harder to overcome reflexive oppositionists rather than waste time trying to convince them. It also means we ought to be pushing for more and faster progress, into areas where there really are reasonable arguments to be made against it.
About EVERYTHING? I mean, sure, there are some positions that are generally associated with the political left in American at the present that I’m VERY VERY confident are basically correct, such as gay rights. (Although it’s worth pointing out that at least part of the reason I’m so confident is because of umpteen SDMB threads in which the opposing arguments were consistently so weak, so even there the SDMB was useful). But there are plenty of other issues where there are not such clear-cut positions associated with each side, and/or where the “left” position is not one that I’m nowhere near as confident about, and some where there is reasonable amounts of disagreement even here on the SDMB among the left.
Simply making a blanket “we’re right, they’re wrong” is both stupid and counterproductive.
Who said that? :dubious:
And imaginary. You’re trying desperately to create an equivalence, for the purpose of appearing (at least to yourself) to be more thoughtful and above the fray than those greasy, compromised participants. But, among other, less-respectable aspects of that carefully crafted self image, is fallacious reasoning. Right and wrong, thoughtful and ignorant, caring and contemptuous do *not *deserve equal time and equal respect. You’re actually doing harm by pretending they do.
The intellectually and morally most-right position is, in fact, most often held by the most thoughtful and broadest-informed. Positions held by the more ignorant and the more hateful are, in fact, most likely to be the most wrong. Agreed?
Recall that if this board were magically transported to continental Europe or Japan, that I would be on the conservative end of the partisan divide, while I would guess that Elvis and elucidator would still be lefties. And I have no idea what Der would rant about in parallel Dope - the National Front?
Go back to the 1980s and Krugman was a member of Reagan’s Council of Economic Advisers while Brad DeLong considered himself a member of the nonpartisan center. And unions actually had a few congressmen in their pockets.
In most worlds, MaxTheVool’s sentiments would be the correct ones – maybe one day they will match our country again.
It’s not an inability to retain information, but a preference for spreading what he knows are untruths even once they’ve been publicly shown to be c-r-a-p.
Where it really gets useful is when someone is wrong 99.9% of the time. You just go with the opposite of what he says, and can have a very high confidence of being right! We really need to find someone like that! Ask him what Wall Street investments are going to lose the most money…
Hey, adaher, what Wall Street investments are going to lose the most money?