Marginally? Is there anything a large number of Dems believe in anywhere as wacky as the birther shit?
20, even maybe 10 years ago, you might be right about the percentages being roughly equal. Lately the Republican party has been shrinking, and it isn’t the crazies who are becoming independents. They are not distilled crazies.
Good question. Is there anyone who could possibly qualify as a Republican leader who is arguing in good faith? Olympia Snowe is not a candidate. I haven’t heard McCain say anything crazy, but I haven’t heard him say anything at all.
I can think of two very vaguely similar situations for the Dems. One was in 1968, but note that the crazies on the left attacked the Democratic Convention, which hardly caved into them. McGovern in 1972 was hardly as far out there as Palin is. Then there was the Southern Democrat racist faction in 1964, who resisted seating integrated delegations from the south at the convention. Many of the Southern Dems left the party, and became Republicans. Like Strom. I can’t think of any similar situations since Williams Jennings Bryan, if you want to count him as a crazy with cross of gold.
Quite the point. And not just McCain, but the whole boatload. Those that aren’t actively provocative are either silent or tsk-tsk. Screw my outrage, my outrage is a given. Where the hell is theirs? Never mind being civil, defending the dignity of the loyal opposition, how about defending the dignity of their own party?
Hmm, that’s interesting. They do look like cross earrings! For the record, it is not forbidden for Orthodox women to pierce their ears. In all the Orthodox communities that I’m familiar with, it’s completely normal for Orthodox women to walk around with earrings. However, in the more religious communities, the women do not wear dangly earrings for reasons of modesty.
It is nice to talk to you again. I hold you in a great deal of respect, because I felt that while you have strong opinions at variance with my own, you always seek to understand what your opponent is saying, and you treat your opposition with consideration. What you say is always worth reading and considering, and there’s been an occasion or two where with a few words you’ve turned my opinions around 180 degrees.
We’ve rarely interracted, but I always felt privileged when we did so. Just wanted to say that.
Now that your sufficiently buttered up… on to your question
Personally, I feel like I don’t have much of a voice nor do I get much exposure.
I have nothing but abhorrence for Social Conservatism. I believe that freedom and equality should exist to the maximum degree possible. In order for that belief to be rational it must be accompanied by a high degree of tolerance and respect for those who are at variance with one’s beliefs.
Social conservatives don’t have that tolerance or respect. Or, if they do, I’ve never seen it.
While I was, and am largely a supporter of Bush’s foreign policy, fiscally I thought he was irresponsible and I had little tolerance for his social agenda.
The media coverage of the idiots doesn’t bother me too much, nor does it do too much to change my opinions. Most of the people I know who are conservative feel the way I do. I feel that there’s a lot of us. We don’t often post on message boards or get on tv. For the most part we just have our beliefs and live our lives. The activism seems to be the provence of the nuts, at least on the conservative side.
Then too, I sincerely believe the media is biased. They show what they want to show or they show what sells. Overall, I believe this bias leans strongly to the left in the mainstream media. Doubtless, if I went to a town hall meeting with a film crew looking to find instances of nutty, or insane behavior by liberals, it would be no big thing to ignore the 95% who are acted appropriately and reasonably, just film the nutty 5% and produce footage suggesting that all liberals are nuts.
Fox News certainly has no problem doing it. Even taking that exaggeration factor into account, I am still pretty disturbed and troubled by the scope and voice of the wacko right.
But, I think I have a fairly unique perspective. I watch Fox and CNN about equally. i read Time, and the National Review. I hang out here because I believe my ideas are best evolved through adversity. I think I sincerely want to see what’s wrong with some of my ideas and take away some of what’s best from those who disagree with me.
I hung out at FreeRebublic for a while, and, I was like unto a God. There was no growth in my beliefs, and nothing to be gained from being surrounded by people who were essentially yes men agreeing with whatever I said.
There was a time when I was very popular here, before I became political. I could do that again, but I’d rather be myself.
So, to answer your question, yes, I do feel disenfranchised and not represented well. It’s why I voted for Obama. While I thought poorly of many of his ideas, I thought highly of him as a man. I thought there was a good chance that the bad ideas of the man would fail, but the goodness of the man would prevail.
Now, you asked me about conservatism and that movement. To answer with criticisms of the left and say something like “at least we’re better than that,” would be a low value retort. But, I think there is something along those lines that needs saying. I see a lot that troubles me on the left. I see a lot of hate, and a lot of intolerance. I think it’s especially troublesome because the power is currently on the left, not the right.
What I try to do is not judge a philosophy by it’s extremes. I sincerely believe that liberalism is a better philosophy than conservatism. But, I also believe conservatism is more practical, because there are not enough people of high enough quality to make liberalism work.
I know some lefties that are just truly fantastic people that live their beliefs. I know some of them on this board; You, Spiritus Mundi, Gaudere, DavidB, Wring several others. Great people that define liberalism at its best. If everybody was like that liberalism would be the way to go.
But very few are.
So, while I despise the shitty people on my side, I fear the shitty ones on your side more.
Well, you’re informative. Just yesterday you told me that Charlie Manson was a leftist. I’m still rolling around that nugget of information, like one of those Egyptian beetles…
I think that liberalism is more easily hijacked by authoritarianism, and more difficult to fix when it goes wrong.
My strongest conservative conviction is the more you fuck with things the likelier you are to mess them up, and that while we are less likely to attain utopia, we are also less likely to attain a communistic hell.
Because comparing mass murderers isn’t a fun game?
Your idea that liberalism can breed more dangerous whackos than conservatism intrigues me. I don’t necessarily disagree with it, I’ve just never heard it before. I’ll have to ponder it for a whole, next time I’m sitting in my pondering chair.
My gut reaction, though, is that “conservative” people are generally (perhaps by definition) afraid of things changing. To get them riled up and ready to cause some havok, all you have to do is tell them that Thing X is going to change everything you like, so lets go kill some people who support Thing X. Add in the layer of deep religiosity that flows in most conservatives, and you’ve got even more fuel for the fire. *Thing X is evil, and was predicted in the bible, so we must do our holy work and stop it. *
Conservatives, well, they’re supposed to be afraid of big government (though they seemed to love it when Bush expanded the power and role of government), and it’s easy to make the government seem scarier than it is. (Know who else had a government? Hitler!) Liberals, as it strikes me, seem to be in a more lovey-dovey relationship with government, hoping it can fix all of their problems (perhaps a bit of battered wife syndrome), so it’s hard to scare them into great fits of action. I guess the PETA people are liberals, though, and they do some pretty disgusting things.
I could easily be wrong, though. If this place has taught me anything, it’s to be prepared to have your flimsy opinions handed to you via your poo hole.
It’s been a while since I studied Manson, but he doesn’t really strike me as a liberal/conservative kinda guy. More, just, completely fucking bonkers.
In my personal quest ignore all posts that do not meet my standards (ie: refer to me), I am forced to pretend than some (most) posts do not exist. This post pushed way past my own rectum and into my attention, and made me laugh. Er, until I flushed and, as I’m not my wife, my memories of BMs past last barely past their flushing.
That’s an interesting point, actually. I think Palin represents something close to the mainstream, perhaps a few degrees to the right of it. But to the crazies, she’s a god. She, and people like Newt, can try to have a mainstream republican conversation, but they sneak in words like “death camps” and “eugenics,” which are then used as starting points for the influential crazies to foment righteous anger.
I also think Palin et al know damn well that they’re doing that, but if you asked them they’d curtly deny it and try to change topics. People like Palin need the crazies if she ever thinks she’s going to get elected for anything again.
Yeah, yer new. It seems to some that American liberals are physically dangerous. No, there is little if no historical support for this; the Right has to go back to the Bolsheviks of 1917 (socialist, if that equates with liberal, in name only) or the Nazis (whose “socialism” was completely pandering) to find “woo-woo-scary” liberals in the US.
This wiki snippet closely approximates what I recall about Charlie’s “political opinions”. I read Ed Sanders’ book The Family, which I strongly recommend if you are the kind of person who thinks *No Country for Old Men *is light comedy.
Anyway, I don’t see anything remotely resembling a political leaning. Hell, I don’t know which way the Scientologists lean, but you can have them…
Not to get off on a tangent, but I’ve been planning for a while now to have a plot in a novel wherein it turns out a group of hyper religious nutballs with too much power have banded together and are working to manipulate the actions of government to align with their flawed religious doctrine.
