Who says that? The crime rate has been dropping steadily for years.
my favorite liberal don’t-confuse-me-with-the-facts-dogma:
“The arab world doesnt really hate us–it’s only poverty that makes them carry out suicide bombings.”
Don’t forget that 80% of the illegal weapons in Mexico originated in the U.S. Including the hand grenades and rocket launchers.
A statement that I, as a liberal, don’t believe. I don’t know anyone who does.
You’re combining two different things.
The Arab world as a whole does not hate us, that’s true. A lot of the younger generation love western things, for example.
As to the other assertion, poverty may be part of the cause, but it’s certainly not the only cause. I don’t know any thinking person who would assert that. There are many causes, religious fanaticism being an important one.
I’ve never heard that one. I usually hear that they hate us because we bomb them and prop up dictators over them.
Why should we have to come up with some list of “left wing myths” to counter this list? :dubious:
This list is neither left or right in nature, it is simply a list including statements regarding a selection of recent events/issues with, for the most part, clear right or WRONG answers (climate change is the ONLY one which I would grant any possible degree of subjectivity on, since there is some degree of possibly valid debate involved…ALL the others are cut and dried and a matter of public record.)
Many of the statements on the proposed “left-wing” list were actually subjective in nature, and not clear-cut, objectively provable in the way those on the original list are.
The question this study sought to address was which consumers of news were best informed re’ the FACTS. Obviously, they selected issues and items which were likely to carry political baggage, since they mostly have to do with political events.
But it is not as if the selection unfairly biased the results…you either know Bush initiated the bail-outs or you DON’T/believe it was Obama. And it is no surprise that those who got most of their “news” from Fox, which has a clear, self-declared right-wing bias, were, when it came to accurate knowledge of questions relating to politics, the least informed.
Now, whether this is a result of such viewers selecting to watch Fox due to pre-existing bias (duh) or being misinformed as a result of watching Fox (duh) or BOTH (double duh) is open for discussion. But this clearly reveals that regardless, they are not being informed out of their pre-existing bias/ignorance or to the degree that those who get their news elsewhere are.
InterestedObserver,
Thank you. You said it better than I was able to.
Exactly, which is why we know it’s a falsehood. But it’s a falsehood liberals parroted for years. Any time it was suggested that the police should get more aggressive or crack down on crime, liberals insisted that such measures were useless, that crime would NEVER go down until poverty was eradicated.
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Homeopathy, Eastern medicine, new age healing, and the like are effective medical treatments.
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White flight is responsible for the birth of America’s suburbs. Specifically, whites fleeing an influx of blacks to the inner city.
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Europe is a peaceful utopia where citizens are tolerant of all ethnicities, faiths and lifestyles, everybody is an atheist, 100% of all waste is recycled, there is no air or water pollution, most electricity is generated by clean sources of power, everybody soaks up high culture while low culture is nonexistent, obesity is nonexistent, everybody eats healthy locally sourced foods, etc.
First of all, of course we don’t “have” to come up with a list of left wing myths to “counter” this list. I was just curious what people would come up with.
And I disagree that this is as simple a matter as you make it out to be. Even if the original list includes only objective falsehoods, they’re still falsehoods that tend to support a right-wing worldview, and I believe that it is possible as well to find falsehoods that tend to support a left-wing worldview for which the results would probably come out opposite.
To keep things as evenhanded as possible, let’s take two ridiculous statements that I think any reasonable person would see as falsehoods, the first taken from the original list in the study, and the second that I just found on snopes:
- Obama was not born in the US.
- According to a study, George W. Bush has the lowest IQ of any president in the last 50 years.
I suspect that CNN viewers would be more likely than Fox viewers to believe (2). And we could come up with a whole list of objective falsehoods like (2) and run the study. And then we could parade the results around under the guise of “The question this study sought to address was which consumers of news were best informed re’ the FACTS”.
These sorts of things are common to the fringes on both the left and the right. You should listen to some of the hardcore right-wing radio shows and you’ll hear ads for all this kind of stuff.
Or, spend some time in Utah. Most of the fad dietary supplements come out of Utah and Orrin Hatch was the key leader in getting DSHEA (Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act) passed. Hatch and Utahns in general are anything but liberal.
Weapons of Mass Distraction.
Again, not one of these is a statement which has an objective, provable, matter-of-public-record answer (unlike the statements used in the study).
Now, something like, “The U.S. spends more, as a percentage of its GNP, on health care than any other industrialized nation” (true, ftr) is an example of a comparable “left-wing fallacy” (though it’s NOT, actually, a fallacy).
ETA, I’d actually be interested in seeing some examples along these lines. I’m sure there are some.
Are you serious? Do you really think that anyone believes any of this? I don’t even recognize this as a common strawman. :rolleyes:
Well. That’s not exactly what you said. The truth is that no one knows exactly why crime is falling. (For example, here’s an idea you might not be familiar with: I did a sort of literature overview of several studies that made a convincing case that the ultimate cause of the drop in crime is environmental - that it stems from the removal of lead from gas and paint. Lead exposure is known to cause lower IQs and having a low IQ is known to correlate with criminal behavior. The timelines of the first generation of children who were not exposed to environmental lead reaching their teen years matches up very closely with the beginning of the drop in the crime rate.) There is certainly no known correlation between additional police activity and the drop in violent crime that has been taking place in the US since the 1990s, no matter what Rudy Giuliani wants to think.
Therefore, I would suggest that it is not implausible that additional police measures could be useless, or not worth the cost. Without knowing exactly what these hypothetical liberal activists said, it’s difficult for me to criticize their ideas. The idea that crime can never be lowered until poverty is eradicated is obviously untrue, though.
I’ve heard American liberals suggest this sort of thing. Maybe not in such hyperbolic terms, but yeah. I don’t know why you’re so sarcastic about it.
FWIW, I’m an American liberal myself, but I’ve also spent a lot of time in Europe, so I know what a lot of bullshit it is.
My favorite lefty myth is that the oil companies hold a patent on a car that will get 200-300mpg, but they do not produce it so that their profits remain high.
Liberal Dopers pointing out that despite their liberalism they don’t subscribe to any of the left wing myths miss the point. I imagine few if any right wing Dopers subscribe to the “Fox News viewer” myths.
The point is that if you tested viewers of left wing outlets they would believe these myths at higher rates than the general population. Which is analogous to the claim about Fox News viewers.
There really isn’t any left wing equivalent of Fox, at least not of any significance. Besides, the right wing suffers from the fact that its view of the world is in many ways simply factually wrong; not just wrong in matters of opinion.