bluecanary:
There aren’t enough rolleyes on the internet to respond appropriately to this post.
Well, you can continue being a boorish, condescending ass to your political opponents if you want, just don’t delude yourself that you’re actually winning them over to your way of thinking.
Being nice in the face of a deluge of smears hasn’t proven itself to work very well either, as the last eight years has proven quite nicely. On the other hand, conservatives do very much like to regularly put out concern-trolling messages warning Democrats that if they do Democrat-related things, people won’t like them very much.
I take your posts as just that sort of thing, and I don’t believe for a second that there was any chance you’d have voted for Obama to begin with.
Well, you’re right, Hentor. Considering I was born in Britain and live in Britain, and have spent a total of 5 days in the US of A in my life it’s pretty unlikely I’m going to be voting for Obama.
However, like most people here in Britain I am hoping Obama is going to win - the thought of “perhaps so” Palin a heartbeat away from the presidency is a terrifying one!
But you don’t convince undecided or opposing people to vote for your preferred candidate by calling them idiots, ridiculing their way of life, or being ridiculously over-aggressive to them.
If Democrat supporters across the USA are behaving the way liberals in this thread are, the Republicans will win again, simple as that.
So, we should follow the example of civility and truthfulness established by the McCan campaign?
Thanks for clearing that up, except that’s already what I said, when I said “you’d have”, a contraction of “you would have”.
Typically, I wouldn’t adopt this strategy with someone I believed for a second to be honestly torn. I was, however, at a party Friday night, and someone opened a conversation by saying “What do you think of a terrorist running for president? Haven’t you heard that he’s a muslim?” I said, “Yes - from retards.” Nevertheless, by the time we finished talking, he was expressing a desire for voting records information and other resources to help him decide to vote for Obama.
So, although it wouldn’t be my first strategy, I don’t believe at all that being rough is likely to turn away any voters. It never seems to be the case that anyone worries that course, vulgar and outrageous supporters of the right are driving anyone away, does it?
bluecanary:
First, I want to make it clear that I’m under no illusion regarding winning over SA. It’ll never happen.
Secondly, to underscore Hentor’s point, I was once extremely polite and, well, non-condescending (?) to my debating opponents. But I have come to understand that I might as well be arguing with a tree-stump, hence my current disdain. I don’t have to respect opinions that aren’t worthy of respect, and SA has shown absolutely no respect for my political point of view – as the quote in previous post clearly demonstrates.
SA wants to blame liberals for the coarsening of US culture and political discourse. I provide counter-examples to show that this isn’t true. “Liberal culture,” whatever that might be, certainly can’t be blamed for the comments made by people like Ann Coulter, Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Michael Savage, Bill O’Reilly, etc., ad infinitum. It’s also interesting to note the striking similarities between the things SA posts about “liberals”, on the one hand, and the sorts of things Adkisson believed, which led him to walk into a church and mow down a defenseless congregation of “liberals.”
I don’t think that’s so unreasonable (wait for someone to jump in and say “oh, no, you can’t say retard, it’s so un-PC”). If you’d said something like, “So you believe the talk shows you moron?” then that would be the sort of rhetoric I’m worried about.
Also, I don’t think campaigning and discourse have to follow the same rules. If anything I have felt the Democrats haven’t gone negative enough with their ads; for instance they haven’t made anything of Palin’s casual suggestion of war with Russia on Thursday (yet, I hope)
Again, Hentor makes the point before I do, but just to reiterate: the right has a long and ignoble history of calling their political opponents un-American, idiotic, traitorous, terrorist, and so on. Look at what they did to Kerry! This doesn’t seem to have had a detrimental effect on their electoral success. I just don’t see why they can call us names, classify us as viruses, etc, and that’s okay; but if we diss them, well gosh! we’ll lose the election. (In fact, studies have shown that “negative campaigning”, in the sense of denigrating your political opponent, is much more effective that “positive campaigning.”)
In addition, I would treat any new “conservative” poster with respect at first; but my relationship with SA builds on a history in which he has proven himself to be utterly immune to logical arguments or matters of fact. Like Hentor, I’d prefer not to revert to the sort of tactics I’m using here; but if that’s the way the other side wants to play, I’ll be happy to oblige them.
I honestly wish it didn’t have to be this way.
I guess I do as well. Politics just isn’t like this here in the UK. People are Labour supporters, Conservative supporters, Lib Dems, socialists, libertarians and nationalists etc.
But they’re not at each other’s throats in anything like the same way Republicans and Democrats are. It’s amazing and dismaying in equal measure to watch it go down.
I should add that there are certainly hard-fought arguments in UK politics. But the arguments are about the issues. It is very rarely personal in the same way the US arguments so often are.
You read post #211 in this thread, right? But you’re still saying that it’s the liberals in this thread who need to relax, who are being boorish and offensive? I don’t get it.
I read that post. It looked like a response-in-kind.
EDIT: And also, that post (#211)'s last 6 lines make an awful lot of sense to me, even though I am far from sharing the poster’s ideology.
I wonder if that has to do with the fact that you do have representatives of the press who actually challenge political representatives aggressively, as well as have fairly confrontational exchanges between the Prime Minister and other political leaders.
Here, we just don’t get that at all. For the past two decades, there has been almost no public challenging of conservative leaders and conservative ideas. It frustrates the hell out of me.
We’re struggling over control of the most powerful single nation in human history. You guys argue over who runs the country that used to be Great Britain.
OK, way harsh. Thanks for Monty Python, if nothing else.
Well, OK, point taken. But, OTOH, it’s not as though the topics of the arguments that seem to arouse so much passion are exactly world-shattering. Was Obama getting at Palin when he said “lipstick on a pig”? Are “Obama waffles” racist? Did Obama once have a friend whose father was a Marxist? WTF!?
So, no, I don’t buy that it is the world stature of the USA that makes the politics so confrontational.
bluecanary:
Yeah, you know, I live in Sweden now (oh gawd, here he goes about that again!) and it’s completely different here as well. The level of political discourse in the US is simply abysmal. But hey! When in Rome, do as the Romans do.
Anecdotal side note: during a debate between then Prime Minister Göran Persson (Social Democrat) and his political opponent Fredrick Reinfeld (Moderate, current Prime Minister) a couple of years ago, Persson quoted some fairly arcane statistics concerning, I believe, the rate of change in unemployment figures two or three years prior; the media caught it almost immediately, it was first page news the next day, and Persson was forced to make a retraction/correction shortly afterward. “Forced” might be the wrong word, since he seemed anxious to set the record straight himself, and made no bones about misremembering the actual statistical facts.
That’s the difference between US and Swedish politics. Casting aspersions on a political opponent’s character, here, would be a quick way to get yourself removed from office.
It’s not quite like that in the UK either - that’s a bit far in the opposite direction to the US (as a small-l libertarian I’ve never thought much of Swedish politics either).
Yes, yes, indeed. The allegedly greatest nation on the earth, and we’re arguing about pig lipstick. Sometimes I wonder if I’m not really a character in an absurdist play.
blue, are you a Mr. Canary or a Ms. Canary?
Either way, 'luci owes you an apology.
Blaming liberals for the massive drug and gang problems in the inner cities, the spread of AIDS, women getting late term abortions, rape, murder, hell, everything short of the Chicago Fire (and that’s only because he didn’t think of it) is response in kind? What could or did anyone possibly say that warrants being blamed for everything that’s ever gone wrong in America? It’s an inflammatory, hateful screed fact-free, taking no responsibility for the right. How is it possible to believe that? And how should the people being accused of committing such heinous crimes against America react to said accusations? We have been told that facts don’t matter. Once you remove facts from the argument, all you have is screaming. Simple remember who is responsible for removing facts from the discussion. It ain’t the liberals.
Not everyone is saying that the right is evil. However, everything he said in his last 6 lines could be applied to conservatives with equal validity. I don’t understand why he gets a pass for spewing such toxically hateful bullshit.
Who said anything about the “inner cities”?
Work pressures (mainly that I do some :D) prevent me from adequately responding to Mr. Svin’s attempts at verbal sleight-of-hand regarding my posts, as well as your Guinastasia-like ‘me-too’ responses to them - at least for now - but I couldn’t let this little dishonest attempt to minimize what I said go unanswered.
Drugs, and the misery they cause, are hardly confined to the inner cities. They have pervaded American life in every strata and in every town. Even in small-town America drugs are pervasive not only in high-schools and the young, but in society at large as well.
And gang activity, while not quite as widespread as drugs, has still spread to a great many cities and towns thoughout the country.
I will now leave you and Svin to mangle and distort, and oh, I don’t know, lie about what I’ve said, but know that there are many, many millions out there just like me who see the results of liberal influence and permissiveness on this society and who not only resent it but recognize the harm that it’s done, and we’re determined to try to put a stop to the extraordinary amount of harm that you people have done to this country.