Long: If conservatives could think...

The BBQ Pit
1

Then they wouldn’t be conservatives!

Okay. A lot of my friends and relations are conservative. I’m beginning to notice a pattern. They don’t listen; or maybe it’s not that they don’t listen, it’s that they don’t believe certain facts that don’t line up with what they already believe.

For instance:

Exhibit A (Nonpolitical, in a casual dinner conservation)
CONSERVATIVE: The violin and the fiddle are different instruments.
GUEST: They’re the same, just played differently.
CONSERVATIVE: I’ve been told different.
GUEST: Well, my father plays the fiddle, and I play the violin. They’re the same instrument.
CONSERVATIVE: I was told they were different instruments.
ME (to myself): Yeah. And you were just now told they weren’t. By an expert.

Several months later, mostly different crowd, same conservative. Same conversation! Once again, he says he “was told” the violin and fiddle were different. He was told that once, it’s wrong, but he will believe it forever. He gets all hurt and says that Guest just wants to fight with him, for some reason.

Exhibit B (Nonpolitical, casual conversation)
We are discussing a friend’s divorce and how the property might be divided up
ME: I think it’ll depend on how long she lived in California. Because it’s a community property state…
CONSERVATIVE: So is Colorado a community property state.
ME: No…
CONSERVATIVE: Sure it is. I used to work in a law office. It’s definitely a community property state.
ME: I don’t think so…
[and I worked in a law office a lot more recently than she did!]
CONSERVATIVE (Boots up laptop): Well let’s check. (Googles “community property state”) Um, let’s see. New York, California, Arizona, Idaho…Nevada…New Mexico…Texas…Washington, Wisconsin…
ME: See?
CONSERVATIVE: This list is wrong! I know Colorado is a community property state! You can’t trust anything you get from the Internet!*

*Unless it supports what you already believe.

Exhibit C (Political)
ME: (to State Senator Conservative Columnist, whose copy I edit every week) Okay, this is factually inaccurate. You say that Governor Joe Democrat brought David Soandso in from another state to run this agency.
SSCC: Right.
ME: I know David. He’s from Colorado.
SSCC: He–are you telling me he was born here?
ME: His parents moved here in 1953. When he was in kindergarten. He went to school here. He went to college here.
SSCC: His MBA is from Harvard. I think that counts as importing him from out of state to head an important Colorado agency.
ME: I don’t think you can really say that. His parents have been here since 1953!
SSCC: Aren’t you just supposed to correct my grammar?

Finally I convince him to drop this particular thing out of the column. Three weeks later, he takes it up again, as if we never had the conversation.

(This, by the way, was not the only inaccuracy in his columns. Who knows how many I didn’t even catch.)

Exhibit D (political)
My brother…keeps sending me the same email about Jane Fonda. She is a traitor, directly responsible for getting POWs tortured in Vietnam, and should be tried for treason. Instead, she has been nominated for a prestigious award, and this should be stopped, and…

Stop, stop, STOP.

First of all, she made some bad moves, but it’s 35 years ago. Give it up. Second of all, the email is wildly exaggerated. Third, she was named one of the 100 most influential women of the century in 1999. It’s not like she got a medal or something–it’s totally inconsequential in the grand scheme of things. Most people didn’t even know it, and of those that did, most of them have forgotten it, and they have forgotten Jane. It was, after all, ten years ago.

Three months later: Here’s that email again! Honestly, he’s sent it every few months for the last three years. I think it’s getting worse. If nothing else, he could stop sending it to me, since I find it very tedious. I don’t even bother directing him to the Snopes page anymore. I email him back, asking why he’s still sending me this.

Ah–okay. This time it’s something new. Apparently she wants to take a road trip across the country using an RV that runs on some kind of alternative fuel, and he doesn’t think this should be allowed. Because she tortured POWs in Vietnam.
Exhibit F (political)
A Republican senator and a Republican representative from the Colorado house both write op-ed pieces decrying the governor’s moratorium on energy development and drilling. This moratorium is also responsible for layoffs, blah blah blah.

There is no such moratorium written in the rules–it was there in an early draft, but was rather famously ousted, and there were headlines and everything. People who were even peripherally informed on the issue knew this, but these lawmakers, who had to vote on it, seemed quite unaware. (Of course, since they were voting against it, maybe they didn’t bother to read it.)

Furthermore, these rules do not take effect until next July. So even if there were a moratorium in there–which there isn’t–it wouldn’t account for layoffs or economic woes in the towns reliant on energy production. Those are FACTS.

A democrat writes a column responding to their columns, and calling them on it.

They respond to her column by reiterating just what they said before. Of course now they explain that, even though the rules don’t take effect until July, this could easily have affected layoffs at any time since the thing was signed, back in August. And this is true, it could have. No mention of the fact that there is no moratorium. None.

Exhibit G (political)
Rush Limbaugh. Numerous examples, actually, but he’s a big fat lying idiot and if I get started on him this will really be too long. So never mind.

The problem is, I know a lot of conservatives, and they are all willing to disregard facts, and then to come back and tell me that I only believe the way I do because I drank the Kool-Aid, or I’m thinking the way somebody told me to.

I really love when some LOON who thinks Obama is illegally president because he wasn’t really born in Hawaii thinks I am a nut.

Why do they do this? Did they eat stupid food for breakfast? What makes them feel good about believing this way?

Of course nobody likes to admit they were wrong, but most of the people I know will do it gracefully when confronted with facts. The conservatives of my acquaintance will not. They would rather change the facts. And, in their little heads, they do.

2

Well, in a sense, isn’t this a philosophical part of being a conservative, the accepting of pleasing ideas that one is then inclined to change very slowly? “Kerry is the Antichrist! And he looks like Herman Munster!”

“Well, let’s examine that–what exactly is the Antichrist? And what in the world does looking like a–”

“I’m not playing your liberal mind games! Them’s my beliefs! No fair examining!”

I feel that liberals are much more philosophically inclined to re-examine ideas. Of course, they may not move their positions any for all of the re-examining, but just makes them liberal hypocrites.

3

Oh my gos, this deserves a pit thread of its own. No! We are supposed to make you and therefore the publication not look stupid, which comprises responsibilities up to and including spelling, grammar, layout,

And as a fiddle player myself, I need to print up explanatory cards for that one punter who seems to turn up at every session. You think he’d have figured it out by now!

4

Joe Scarborough too.

5

CONSERVATIVE: You know, the fiddle and the violin are different instruments.

GUEST: That’s right! People in the Republican Party play the fiddle, while people in the GOP play the violin!

6

You know, the “Liberal’s are soooo much superior to conservatives in every way, even as people” and “conservatives don’t agree with us, therefore they must be dumb” really grates after a while.

I’ve know shit-dumb liberals, and I’ve known smart conservatives.
It isn’t intelligence that decided whether or not you are one or the other (or like most people, a moderate) it comes down to what you value and what you place the most importance on, and while intelligence infuences that, your upbringing and your experiences in life would be far more important.

7

There are some smart fiscal conservatives, but there are no smart social conservatives.

8

Anecdotes are boring.

Liberal, of course there can be. One can be an asshole or outright evil and still be intelligent. Like Hitler*.

*anyone who mentions Godwin is a twit.

9

I do find that conservatives seem to lack a certain, well… synaptic agility. They may not be “dumb”, but they’re often sufficiently intellectually incurious that their brains get flabby and inert.

10

Giggle.

So is it your contention that the similarity or lack thereof of a violin and a fiddle, or whether or not Colorado is a community property state, is simply an opinion?

The inability to revise one’s opinion based on new data is not a thing to be lauded.

11

Sad to say, I’ve met my fair share of liberals who were equally as dumb and intellectually lazy as a bag of spatulas.

12

At first I was inclined to suggest that confirmation bias is at play here, but there might be something to the correlation. Conservatives are, by definition, folks who are disinclined to seek or accept change. So perhaps it should be no surprise that folks whose synapses are not on speaking terms with each other tend to be politically conservative.

(Of course, there are exceptions to every rule. Including this one.)

13

I’m a conservative, and I’d be happy to take on any of the liberals on this board in any test of abstract logical reasoning that can be devised.

14

I suppose it depends upon how intelligence is defined. Attacking the Soviet Union just before winter was pretty stupid.

15

On a scale of 1 to 10, how would you rate the Bush the Second’s Presidency?

16

Yeah, that William F. Buckley was a real moron, wasn’t he?

This whole thread reminds me of the old Steve Martin joke: “Christy Brinkley is so conceited - she hasn’t even called me once!”

17

Oh yeah? If you’re so fucking smart, what’s the square root of a million, Einstein?

18

That’s concrete.

19

Heh, the existence of threads like this are proof that liberals can, at times, be just as ignorant as conservatives … says this liberal. :smiley:

20

Buckley did not fancy himself to be a social conservative. In an October 2008 Hardball inteview, his son said that his father considered true conservatives to be fiscally conservative and socially libertarian.