Ah. :smack: I get it. These guys are not contending that the study is wrong. They’re exemplifying and justifying the partisan reactivity.
Occupy Wall Street?
People have been conditioned to think of environmentally friendly as poor quality. So if you put an environmental sticker on it then people are going to become suspicious of the quality.
People think of fast food as fattening so if you give people a salad and tell them it was from a fast food chain they will tell you it has more calories than if you tell them it was from a cafe.
You can not overcome conditioning by just telling people it is better. People come into the study with experience of environmentally friendly products.
If you had read the study you linked to you would know that moderates also had a preference for not wanting the good labeled environmentally friendly.
Not so much “ideology over practicality,” then, as a dissonance between two aspects/branches/interpretations/concerns of the same ideology (environmentalism).
A dissonance even some apolitical scientists and engineers share, I should think. Nuke plants are probably a more eco-friendly power source than fossil fuels, summing up the pros and cons of each, but the consensus is not absolute yet, is it?
(At least, I hope so! I’m not going to take the time to read your posts to see what your thought patterns tend to be, but I’m really hoping you don’t actually deserve a :rolleyes:)
And I do love Tierra del Fuego, Ellsmere Island, and a whole lotta stuff in between!
That was not a choice of ideology over practicality, it was a choice of ideology (if sufficiently definite to qualify as such) over inaction.
Tiny smart cars may be great for the environment, but they aren’t particularly useful for getting 3 kids to soccer practice.
Oh, and to answer your (Debaser’s) question about how it was “over the top” – well, if I recall correctly, my wife and I realized that it really wasn’t that big a deal, so we did buy the product without reservations (and, indeed, all other things being equal, we DO prefer to buy things made in the US).
I think the slightly “over-the-top” part of it was some word or phrase which implied that people in other countries aren’t as brave or free or something or other.
I think you are dead wrong about why people on the right (or people anywhere really) like vouchers.
They like them because it gives them the choice.
According to the survey of research that I linked to vouchers are good for public schools. When voucher programs are implemented, results in nearby public schools improve, especially when compared to public schools that don’t have any chance of their students getting vouchers.
In any case, few if any public schools are “strapped”. Most are rolling in money, particularly the urban districts that deliver such awful results for poor children.
Cite, please?
Every book, article, column, or statement I’ve seen from someone on the right gives one reason for liking vouchers: vouchers lead to a better education for poor children. Thus I have to judge your statement as incorrect.
The real question, though, is this: given that vouchers lead to poor children getting a better education, why does the left overwhelmingly oppose vouchers?
Not particularly. There are certainly some social service projects where religious institutions could do a lot of good with money from the taxpayers. However, this needs to be balanced against the fact that wherever government money goes, restrictions and regulations and bureaucracy and so forth usually follow. Hence at least in the great majority of cases, it would be better for religious institutions to avoid financial entanglements with the government.
Can you link us to any serious criticism or the research that Dr. Forster summarized? Can you link us to any real research on the effects of school vouchers which disagrees with his conclusions?
If not, then what’s controversial about his research?
You are missing the point. Let’s do it this way: you seem to believe my statement is wrong. Okay. Then, answer this simple question: why did they choose the way they did?
For my statement to be wrong there must be no reason—zero, zilch. That these people made a decision in which they see NO benefit? You’ll have to explain that to me.
That’s nonsense. It’s easy to find burger joints in the city, even in the Village. Five Guys is big and they just opened a big location in Times Square. Shake Shack is extremely popular. There are tons of ethnic restaurants because it’s a huge city with people from all over and a lot of them like to try new things, but there’s no shortage of diners and burger joints that make stuff practically everybody likes. I don’t think this would fit the OP’s example anyway, but nobody’s avoiding “American food,” whatever that means.
I don’t think it’s ideology over practicality so much as ignorance of the scientific data. Back when I was a kid, I worked at a grocery store bagging groceries, and this old guy was complaining about the quality of the plastic bags. He said, “The bags stink cuz they’re recycled.”
I think many conservatives reject green products because they assume inferiority.
It’s the same kind of ignorance that causes people to think raw milk is better for them than pasteurized milk.
My thanks to Qin for mentioning nuclear power. It perfectly embodies choosing one aspect of idealogy (environmentalism) at the expense of another (technology, energy independence, ‘oil bad’, etc.).
For the rest of you (I’m looking at you, deBaser, and Magellan), it doesn’t matter why conservatives exhibit this behavior (probably because they’re human). ALL people (liberals, conservatives, judges, lawyers, politicians, etc.) do stupid sh*t sometimes, usually for reasons that seem perfectly valid from a particular perspective.
Stop wasting time (and thread space) defending the conservative attitude, and show us how liberals do the same stupid sh*t. It’s much more satisfying, more fun, and more informative.
Don’t waste this rare chance to sling some mud and do the right thing (promote cross-partisan understanding) with the same exact words.
There is controversy alright, but one thing that should not be forgotten is that on most of those examples many conservatives are not looking the real costs of not looking at alternatives will cause to all humans, not just the environment.
But that is not what I want to concentrate here, I want to reply to the DDT item.
There are several recent treads where I noticed that conservatives are relying on a big lie from very reprehensible sources, this is the most calm one though, it is just claiming that DDT was superior, it is when used properly, but the troubles and the abuse of it caused the limitations imposed currently on DDT.
The usual DDT propaganda point though includes the accusation that environmentalists are mass murderer for opposing DDT and causing many deaths, these canards have to be responded to as it is clear that many conservatives still do not know the whole history.
You got it right.
What products are cheaper when they’re made in America?
I have in threads that are about that issue. But I’m not going to jump onto your hobbyhorse in a different thread to hijack the thread. If you really want to pretend that that research is uncontroversial, well, ride on cowboy.
Actually, that’s a decent point. Not that environmentally friendly products are always vastly inferior, but that that’s at least a reason why conservatives might act against their self-interests: in this regard, they rise to the level of anti-vaxxers. They’ve got really ridiculous reasons for believing they’re acting in their own self-interest, but at least there are reasons. As such, I withdraw my objection to the comparison between these conservatives and anti-vaxxers.
Environmentalists who realise US population growth is damaging and unsustainable, but can’t discuss it because someone might think they’re bigoted. So that concern trumps their environmentalism.