It is the unholy alliance between “social conservatives” and “economic conservatives” that is the big obstacle to political enlightenment. For “economic conservative” read “rich people who want to be even richer and non-rich Americans who have swallowed the lies of kleptocrats.”
I apologize if you think I mistook you for a social conservative, sleestak. (I address ideas, not specific posters.) However you used the term “conservative” and “liberal” without qualification. Odd for a libertarian.
Can you point to where you stated that in this thread (before just now)? I sure don’t see it.
This sort of response shows only that you’ve bought into the Starve the Beast policy. You are right that context is important. Consider the context that taxes on corporations and the rich have been cut to the bone, and are now getting even lower.
The question you’re (not) answering here is: HOW do you cut spending?
… And while you’re at it, fight your ignorance by Googling Budget Reconciliation Act of 1993.
Are you saying that NEA is worthless fluff or that its budget doesn’t amount to much? Have you looked at pie-charts of government spending? Cutting so-called fluff is useless.
Do you support the Trump tax cut? Do you expect the GOP to follow through and slash military spending?
Oh my. Google “Does supply-side economics work?” and filter out hits from right-wing sites.
Do you disagree that much of Trumpism is based on fiction?
This Deficit Reduction Act of 1993 has been called the largest tax increase in history. Among other measures it increased the top income tax rate from 31% to 39.6%. The sky didn’t fall apart; instead the tax hike was followed by one of the greatest booms ever.
Has anyone ever said that the boom was 100% due to the tax hike? Of course not. Has anyone ever implied that the boom would have been even bigger had Clinton instead caused the debt to soar like RWR and GWB did? I think so — the right-wing does like to indulge in fictions.
Googling just now, a top hit on the 1993 tax hikes is Forbes.Com which argues that the tax hike must have been a bad idea — the Democrats lost the 1994 midterm elections.
Well, duuh! Americans aren’t known for their brains. When Democratic Congressmen voted the tax hikes they already knew many would lose election because of it but made the sacrifice for the good of the country. This Democratic fore-knowledge is well documented.
Is 1993 ancient history? In another thread, asked for examples where Democrats denied a Supreme Court vote the way McConnell did in 2016, an (R) reached back to a Whig President before the Republican Party even existed!
Obviously young’uns don’t know about the 1993 budget. They should: it is a unique and important story. It moved toward debt eradication so well that financiers like Greenspan complained that if the U.S. stopped issuing long bonds there would be adverse consequences. And then the GOP under Bush-43 laid waste to this debt reduction effort. No wonder liberal thinkers became disillusioned.
Knowledge of the 1993 budget seems to have gone down the “memory-hole” (cf. George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four). Too bad. Right-wingers are entitled to their opinions. My complaint is that they also feel entitled to their own facts.
The 1993 budget was an economic boon because it helped with confidence by reducing the deficit. Along with tax increases, it also included big spending cuts which took effect over the remainder of the Clinton Presidency, until the Republicans in their infinite fiscally responsible wisdom ended Paygo. Although Paygo was part of the Bush/Democrats budget deal in 1990, which was the precursor to the 1993 act.
I’d like to go back to as a conservative, I dont have to go find liberals. Heck I went to college and got liberal agenda shoved down me. Practically every tv show and news channel has a major liberal slant. This isnt the 70’s where tv would actually challenge anyone. And then every major newspaper has a liberal slant. Hasnt every major newspaper endorsed the democratic candidate for president since Ike?
It could be worse for you; I would nitpick this and say that you’re 100% right that most major outlets have a liberal slant, BUT it only applies to social issues.
On civil rights, gay rights, womens’ rights, abortion, separation of church and state, political correctness, affirmative action, health care, the social safety net, and the like. I would argue this is a good thing, but I can see how it would annoy conservatives.
On the other hand though, almost all of the mainstream outlets have fallen in line with the conservative point of view when it comes to economic and foreign policy issues. Brian Williams practically creamed his pants live on air describing how we are “guided by the beauty of our weapons” when Trump bombed the Syrian airbase. Several other liberal commentators suggested he “became president today” or “was Presidential for the first time.”
This is not at all an aberration. For all their criticism of Trump, they can’t help but praise him when it comes to war. They’ve been fully on board with any military adventures since the pre-Iraq War hysteria. They’ve drunk the kool-aid of “American exceptionalism,” hyper-nationalism, and an economic policy rife with handwaving and absolute worship of consumerism, corporations, and Wall Street.
The unquestioning dogma when it comes to foreign policy and economic issues are mirrored pretty well in the political parties; on social issues the Republicans and Democrats are night and day, but when it comes to war and economic policy, it’s hard to see much of a significant difference. I can easily imagine a massive tax cut for the rich having been passed under Hillary Clinton. She probably wouldn’t have been so brazen with it, would have played politics and made concessions to the Republicans even if she had a super-majority, and would have cloaked it a hell of a lot better, but the giveaway still would have happened. I’m also relatively sure we’d be just as hostile to Iran and be selling just as many weapons to Saudi Arabia to set the Middle East on fire. The North Korea situation wouldn’t have developed, but that’s largely a matter of Trump being an arrogant, narcissistic blowhard, not a policy difference between the parties.
You actually really nicely encapsulated all the issues I’ve had with Democrats of late. Yet I continue to support them despite my reservations because I care deeply about social issues.
To the extent there is a liberal echo chamber, the solution isn’t to create a Republican one.
IMHO on the OP with a healthy chunk of liberal bias,
The reason you don’t get these sorts of programs from conservatives is that the whole anthropological, lets get to know eachother so we can dig deep, and, you know, really connect so that I get where your coming from and you get where I’m coming from and we can eventually get a dialogue going resulting in a kum ba yah moment and a big group hug of mutual understanding, is itself a heavily liberal attitude. Its the sort of attitude that leads to liberals preferring foreign aid and diplomatic spending to military spending, and led to what the conservatives called Obama’s apology tour.
Conservatives don’t do these sorts of programs because that’s not how they roll. When encountering an unfamiliar culture, the conservatives mindset isn’t to send ivory tower moral relativist anthropologists, it’s to send missionaries, or failing that, soldiers.
Interesting counterpoints. My knowledge of neuroscience and statistics is not developed enough for me to know what is true and what isn’t, but I appreciate the cites.
I don’t think the democrats would’ve passed tax cuts on the rich. Under Obama, taxes were hiked on the rich in various ways.
A new medicare tax of 3.8% was added to high earners and to investment income
Increased the top income tax rate to 39.6%, up from 35%
Higher taxes on dividends and capital gains
etc
The real problem with the democrats IMO is that they are unwilling to confront the plutocrats. The banks, the health care industry, the military industrial complex, etc. that are causing a lot of problems. They don’t want to step on toes.
We need to confront the big banks who engage in risky business practices that can bankrupt the world, and we need to confront the health care industry that is so poorly run that it costs 2x more than any other nation. We also need to address a business climate that gives no power to workers.
But the democrats are terrified to take them on. The ACA removed any new rules that would’ve offended the wealthy and powerful interests in the health care industry.
I agree we have 2 hawk parties on national defense. No idea what the answer is there. I do know if Al gore had won in 2000, we never would’ve gone to Iraq. Gore spoke out early and often against Iraq, and after Obama won the war started winding down. So there is a difference between the 2 parties, just not a gigantic difference.
Has Haidt contributed anything useful there? As far as I know he’s a “both sides” centrist. Example. I can’t find it now, but I also remember him saying the biggest threats facing America were the alt-right and liberal college activists. I’ve linked to his stuff before, it’s a novel take, but I’m skeptical his model would actually be more useful for enacting social change than existing studies of authoritarian psychology, or vulgar socialism.
People have been coding liberal values in conservative language before Haidt, too. Like Christian socialists. Finding out what someone cares about and then using your politics to address it is one of the more obvious methods for door to door activism and propaganda in general. I’ve sometimes found I’m able to come to agreement with working class conservatives more than “woke” liberals, especially if they’ve had a bad experience with the cops or the healthcare system. Liberals have nothing to say to these people except learn to code; conservatives have answers, but they’re terrible answers.
They can’t confront the plutocrats because protecting the plutocrats is their job.
Liberals are capitalists, which means they believe in using state violence for private profit. Anti-imperialist capitalists exist, but their ideology rests on sand. If it’s OK here, why not over there? A lot of the critiques from self-styled anti-war liberals are really process complaints (e.g. Bush should’ve used more troops in Iraq), as well as being clearly partisan in nature. The anti-war movement collapsed after Obama’s election.
I don’t really see how you can call this “debunking”. If the original hypothesis is wrong, and you “widened the lens” and found another area, or even a wider area, where you can see the effect, that doesn’t mean the research is wrong. You also should be aware that this isn’t the only study that saw a correlation between political preference and grey matter mass / activity in the brain.
Having said that, the real reason why this research may be meaningless is that brain anatomy is not fixed and changes over time. So it’s possible that having more mass/activity in a certain area may be the result of political beliefs rather than the cause of it.
I really hope that you don’t believe that. If you do, you are 100% wrong about myself, all my liberal friends and my family.
My Wife and I are moderate leaning liberal. My side of the family is mostly the same or more left leaning. My Wife’s side (except for a nephew) are very conservative/right leaning.
Except for my Wife, ‘her’ side of the family is very religious. Mine, agnostic/atheist.
Different politics and ideas about religion. We all get along great, we’re adults.
This highlights another problem of either side understanding the other - filtering out whatever you don’t want to hear, on the assumption that it can’t be right. Salon says that conservatives are that way because they have different brain structures. Filter out the part where it is debunked as bad science, and it is that much easier to assert why conservatives think the way they do. Wrong, but easier.
Same thing happens on the conservative side, of course, and is denied just as hotly.
I don’t know how one could argue that political beliefs don’t stem from brain structure. To say that is untrue, you’d have to believe there is some magic non-physical author to our thoughts. Now, whether researchers have found the differences between liberal and conservative brains is debatable, but they obviously exist. The experiment in the paper referenced in the Salon article found some differences in activity, and differences in mass have been shown in earlier research.
The blog ITR Champion linked to earlier has some legit criticisms of the research, but “debunked” is not his conclusion.
Or they come from different environments, or different experiences.
And the one side does not need to argue that it is untrue - the side proposing the idea needs to prove that it is true.
The two clauses of these sentences contradict each other. If researchers haven’t found the differences, then it is not obvious that they exist.
Again, a demonstration of the difficulties in liberals understanding conservatives. (And vice versa, but this is a demonstration of the phenomenon going one way).
[QUOTE=ITR champion;20675308as non-coastal and deeply Republican territory as you can get. And yet the fact remains that I am forced to absorb opinion from the liberal coastal elite all the time. If I go to the gym, there are 20 TV’s, and the majority are showing coastal liberal elitists. e.[/QUOTE]
CNN is run from Atlanta, hardly a bastion of Liberalis.
And calling all liberals “elitists” is pretty biased.
Actually, Revenue Officers are not armed. They will take your bank account, and maybe your house or car, but they very rarely try and take anything by armed force.
Research DOES show differences to exist and if you read the 2011 study referenced by the Salon article you can critique the methods and conclusions yourself. If I’ve interpreted the criticism from Dan Kahan correctly, his main objection is not the results, but claims the researchers are guilty of p-searching, searching massive data from the fMRI scans for correlations with the subject’s political orientation, “widening the lens” by increasing the voxel size until a significant p-value was found. I didn’t get that from reading the original research, but I don’t know enough about the experiment to defend the paper or claim that Kahan’s critique is flawed.
Either way, the researchers also claim to be able to predict one’s political orientation with about 73% accuracy by looking at the scans, so obviously there is something to it.
I have noticed conservatives like to dismiss this research and I’m curious as to why. I’m not talking about conservatives that have read and have legitimate critiques, but ones that hear about the results and seem offended for some reason.
When Democratic Congressmen voted the tax hikes they already knew many would lose election because of it but made the sacrifice for the good of the country. This Democratic fore-knowledge is well documented.
