I was more referencing sleestak, your post brought his comment back up.
I disagree with the mentality that if you say something bad about a politician, you are being unfair or not understanding the other side. Trump is those things I listed. And Hillary Clinton deleted emails and says whatever a crowd wants to hear. And Obama was a naive, trusting wimp. And Bill Clinton was a sex offender. Things aren’t untrue because they are unpleasant.
Also on the subject of sleestak, I feel I do a good job of trying to understand conservatives. I’ve read quite a bit on their psychology and beliefs. In this thread I’d say my posts on conservative mentality are pretty in depth (I’m only referring to trumps base, who make up about half of Republicans).
But a lot of conservatives get upset if you are honest about what motivates many of them. Multiple studies have shown bigotry (nativism, white nationalism, sexism, etc) and authoritarianism are very important to trumps base. But if you bring that up with a conservative, they deny it.
No, this has not been adequately explored. Someone made a passing reference and apparently everyone’s happy to take it at face value.
I submit that when examined, the statement “conservatives understand liberals really well” turns out to be based on a lot of mind-reading and bad inference.
I will tell you what’s interesting about this “understanding”. When I review liberal-based sources, I see news reported with a liberal slant. No big surprise.
When I review conservative-based sources, I see some reporting, but a lot of what I see is also a lot of bad, dramatic mind-reading critique of liberalism, and ill-founded supposition about their thoughts and motives. “Liberals think XYZ, and they’re trying to do ABC. BUT THEY’LL NEVER ADMIT IT! GO ASK THEM!”
Then you go on CNN, and sure enough, the liberals aren’t admitting they want ABC or even XYZ! RUSH IS RIGHT!
This is easy enough to explore. Suggest something that you think you understand very well about liberals. I expect you’ll be shown that you don’t understand it at all, yet you’ll walk away with that belief entirely unchanged. You don’t understand liberals, you understand a strawman that you carry around in your pocket when you want to poke something.
If we want to help liberals get an understanding of how conservatives think, another issue that we might want to talk about is pseudoscience, and in particular the way that liberals keeps citing scientific studies that supposedly prove their own superiority.
To begin with, we can note that you linked to an article in Salon. If there is scientific evidence that conservatives have bigger right Amygladas, or any reliable means of distinguishing liberals and conservatives by physical brain features, it would be helpful to have a link to the actual scientific paper that established this. Then we could look at whether Salon represented it accurately. Further, we could see whether it’s been replicated, whether the sample size was large enough to be taken seriously, etc…
But conservatives have seen a lot of supposed scientific demonstrations of liberal beliefs that turned out to be frauds or hoaxes over the years. (For example.) So seeing an article of this type in Salon, an extreme left publication by any measure, many would be inclined towards skepticism.
Since conservatives and moderates apparently understand liberals better than vice versa, and if the amount of mischaracterization is the same on both sides, then conservatives and moderates must be better able to see through the mischaracterizations that come from their side.
If there is no difference in the amount of lies on both sides, and one side has a better understanding than the other, the one side must be better at seeing thru lies.
This may not be the same study (the salon article quoted a psychiatrist named Gail Saltz, nobody with that name authored this paper) but the findings are the same.
More acc activity in liberals, more right Amygdala activity in conservatives. Also this paper has many citations to other papers on the subject.
Haidt does a good job of answering why liberals can’t understand conservatives. Liberals have 2 channel morality, conservatives have 5 channel morality.
Authority, purity and in group are important to conservatives, not so much to liberals.
I read a wee bit of that study so please correct my understanding if needed:
*Conservatives appear to have unusually developed emotions of disgust and fear.
Liberals are more strongly motivated by rational thought, and are characterized by greater understanding of, and control over, their emotions.*
If this is true, it is easy to point out that the emotions of disgust and fear are primal and non-rational. Your disgust and/or fear may have no logical basis whatsoever. It may be a relic of the past, an unexamined belief of your culture, or whatever. However, if you are lacking in the logic, reflectiveness, and rationality department, you might base a lot of your behaviors on those emotions without regard to what sense it actually makes.
And, you will be extremely unwilling to confront the irrationality of those behaviors.
Making it hard to have much of a dialog with anyone except those who share those fears and disgusts.
I do think that the underlined part of the premise is where you go very wrong.
Liberals are easy to understand, that’s why conservatives understand us better. It does make one wonder as to why there are many on the conservative side that make stuff up about liberals, but then, they are usually the ones to make stuff up about conservative values as well. Clothahump’s somewhat recent OP about conservatives vs liberals as an example. Whoever wrote that is very ignorant about both sides, but more about liberals than conservatives.
Conservatives are harder to understand, because they claim to be for family values, and almost elect a child molestor, they claim to be for the middle class, but pass tax cuts for the ultra-wealthy, they claim to be for the children, but cut funding for CHIP. What conservatives say, and what they do, are very hard to reconcile. It requires quite a bit of contortionistic efforts in order to justify your actions to your principles. And those of use that are not used to following contorotions of “moral logic” get confused about what values the conservatives really have. Conservatives are judged on what they actually do, and all the excuses that are made to try to justify them are really more ad-hoc attempts to avoid admitting to hypocrisy than actually following any sort of moral code.
Meanwhile, liberals are judged by conservatives not on what they do, not on what they say, not even on what they thing, but on what the conservatives thing the liberals think and want to do, even if there is no evidence that those things have any traction in liberal circles.
So, yeah, some conservatives do understand liberals better than most liberals understand conservatives. But there are many conservatives that do not understand liberals at all, and those are the ones who are the most insistent that they do.
Again, show us the evidence for this before we start repeating it as fact. Slee mentioned he thought a certain book covered it. I’m not about to read an entire book to debate a point on a message board, and neither are you, but the critiques I read say that the book is, scientifically and logically, not very strong.
So can we at least see the evidence, or are you content to take it on (ahem) authority?
AIUI, the fear is that they won’t have guns for self-defense when/if a murderer or robber or some other criminal tries to make a victim out of them, although I’m not a gun owner and can’t speak to any personal knowledge of what they are thinking. (The idea that the government will take their guns is a circular argument; “We need guns because the government will take our guns.”)
Plenty of things conservatives worry about do come to pass. They feared gay marriage would become legal nationwide in America, and it did. They worried abortion would become legal nationwide and it did. Romney warned of Russia’s aggression and his words were derided, until Russia did forcefully seize territory from Ukraine. Neville Chamberlain’s opponents warned of the dangers of appeasement, and those dangers were realized. Conservatives in Europe worried that Islamic immigration would lead to trouble and there were attacks of that sort indeed. In San Francisco, an illegal immigrant did carry out the shooting that led to the “Kate’s Law” debate.
I’ve noticed that one thing conservatives and liberals share in common is that they will tend to reject a description or summary of their political views that is factually faithful and accurate, but unflattering-sounding.
But the fear is that the govt is going to come and take them from them, one way or another, and then they won’t have guns anymore. That is an unrealistic fear.
it is the fear of gay marrigage itself that is irrational.
It is the fear that women have the right to choose what happens to their bodies that is irrational
I would not agree that that is how that played out, not at all.
Now we are going way back, huh. Of course, it is now the liberals that are warning of dangers of appeasing a wanna-be fascist, and those concerns are being dismissed by conservatives.
Yep, there were, kinda a self fulfilling prophecy. I could tell you that the way that the way islamic immigrants are treated could lead to trouble. Yet, conservatives continued to prevent them from being able to fully participate in society and the economy, leading to disaffected youth. Didn’t matter the religion or ethnicity, you have a bunch of young people with no job or prospects for the future, yeah, that’s a recipe for trouble.
That actually goes back more on the availability of guns, then the presence of an undocumented immigrant. People get killed quite often by white guys, by black guys, by hispanic guys, even by asians who are perfectly legal citizens. (And by carry out the shooting, I assume you mean accidentally discharged a fire arm in a way that it ricocheted off the ground and tragically found a target, as they way you phrase it makes it sound more like kate was intentionally murdered by some evil thug. Your mischaracterization of that case is just one more reason why it is hard to have conversations.)
That is possible, why not try to make a factually faithful and accurate description or summation, and we’ll see how it goes?
I think you’re begging the question. “Conservatives better understand liberals than vice-versa” is the point of contention here, so you can’t base your rebuttal on that very premise. I mean… You can… But it’s begging the question.
If you’re saying that conservatives see through lies and mischaracterizations and then still consume this tripe, what does that mean? I don’t frequent sources that I view as mischaracterizing the truth. Fox News is insanely popular among conservatives despite their knowledge of its obvious lies? Is that really what you’re saying? How can they trust anything about that source if it’s so full of lies?
Because I know liberals. They don’t see mischaracterizations of conservatives as lies. Their knowledge (at least the subset I know) is based on genuinely flawed assumptions. The stupidest among them never reflect on any alternative possibility. The smartest among them… Well, a lot of us hang out here.
I won’t deny for a second how uncharitable some liberals can be toward conservatives. Some of the responses in this thread are a bit cringy. The word “conservative” to me is about as specific as the word “Christian.” There’s huge room for variation in that label. To the extent we can generalize, it’s really only statistically.
Sorry, I was about to comment on how disappointed I was to see a Great Debates thread on an interesting topic devolve into a political pissing match… Then I realized I’m not in Great Debates.
Howso? What positions do liberals share that we are ashamed of or angry about?
I’m not denying they exist, but I am curious what they are. I know conservatives get upset if you talk about how important authoritarianism and in-group/out-group dynamics are to their political beliefs. But on the other side of the isle, I’m not sure what liberals are deeply ashamed of but believe anyway.
I know the concept of race and IQ is something liberals hate. Not so much because the science is 100% wrong, but because it flies in the face of egalitarianism. Other than that, I draw a blank. Either way, that is more about rejection of science for political reasons than being ashamed of your own beliefs.
When I typed in comparisons of red state vs blue state in search engines, it does look like the blue states were crowing way more than the red states, but it was over a wide variety of things, which I think the red states should be better at some things, anyway. A simple search engine shows that the red, blue color states were comparing intelligence, crime, porn consumption, divorce rates, drug use, etc. If the data is wrong, it is just wrong for whatever reason, but maybe the social studies can help sort it all out.
What do conservatives call Creationism? Global warming? Evolution?
An easy way would be to make taxes voluntary. Then you can contribute to whatever programs you want, but if you don’t, nobody with guns will come and make you.
Businesses the world over manage to make lots of money every day by simply asking people nicely to give it to them. If the government can’t make a convincing case for people to spend their money invading Iraq, or giving money to Israel, or blowing trillions of dollars on a fighter jet, maybe they shouldn’t spend our money on those things?
And social programs are among the most popular items in the budget. People would likely choose to spend even more than they do now on healthcare, welfare and retirement programs if they could choose not to spend it on another military quagmire or give it to another giant corporation. But if you’d prefer your money go to the troops rather than the poor, knock yourself out!
Ideally I’d like to see a pamphlet like the CFC used to give us in the Army, where you choose how much to donate, how often, and where it goes. You can pay by check or have it come directly out of your paycheck.
Seems like a reasonable compromise to me. But I’m just a silly anarchist who probably can’t grasp the subtle nuances you liberals and conservatives seem to have such a good handle on.
Name a wealthy, educated, developed country where this works for military, healthcare, education, pensions, safety nets, infrastructure, etc. Of the dozens of educated wealthy countries, why haven’t any tried this if it works so well? Every country seems to realize that taxes are mandatory.
What would really happen is people would shortchange everything to keep all money for themselves, and then when it blew up in their face they’d demand deficit spending on a bailout.
The average American reads at an 8th grade level and knows literally nothing about how the federal budget works. This is a recipe for disaster. But if you can find a country willing to try it, have at it.
5% of the population funds the whole army, and everyone else gets their country protected for free.
5% of the population funds the budget for feeding the jobless and everyone else gets not-living-in-a-dystopian-hellhole for free
This is not really a sustainable system.
If you’re talking about simply the ability to *direct *your contributions, on the other hand, then I may possibly subscribe to your newsletter - but I feel the debate on that may take up its own thread.
Thats kind of the situation we have now. The richest 3% of Americans pay 50% of all federal income taxes (but they make something like 30% of all income too).
But yes, everyone will try to freeload and it will cause massive problems. There is a reason no wealthy, educated country is libertarian or anarchist. They all have mandatory rules for a wide range of issues.
