Protocols of the Elders of Zion is an obvious forgery. In order to hate Jews one must believe things about them that are not only untrue, but preposterous, or one must resent things that are true and worthy of respect.
<nitpick>
Since the OP says RW it should be pointed out that it’s quite specific to the American RW.
Many of the positions listed are not intrinsically RW and skew differently outside the US (e.g. the LW is more anti-science in some countries).
Sir Cyril Burt’s results were fabricated too. It’d be a fallacy of association to claim any studies on racial differences in intelligence are thus invalidated or politically driven.
On the other hand, there have been numerous replications on studies of intergroup discrimination which have found powerful evidence that people will discriminate against outgroups based on arbitrary differences. Other studies having shown that people have a self-serving attribution bias (also referred to in the fundamental attribution error) where bad things happening to them are the result of a situation and bad things happening to others are a result of their disposition. Also relevant is research done into the “Other Race Effect” and deindividuation. These psychological concepts should inform us that others likely have similar motivations to us and that we should guard against our natural inclination to treat others by different standards than we apply to those within our Dunbar limits.
That said, I can sympathise with someone growing up with little exposure to individuals with other ethnicities, that may have been accustomed to bigoted views and is now bombarded with the opposite message. I think international solidarity will ultimately win out, but it is frustrating thinking that central aspects of one’s philosophy will never reenter the public conscious.
Edit:
I struggled to think of examples, but you’re quite correct. The Animal Liberation Front has been hostile to animal testing for instance. If that were a more important battleground than global warming or evolution, it is plausible that scientists may be disenfranchised. That said, there are soft positions on the topic of animal rights such as Dawkin’s own support for the Great Ape Project (not that he’s right wing, he wrote in the annotations to the Selfish Gene that he voted for the Socialist party int he elections). Then there was the quashing of genetics (especially, the execution of Nikolai Vavilov) by the Soviet Union. Informed out of left-wing authoritarian sentiments, which ultimately do not trump reality.
IIRC, you’d request a cite if you thought the facts were on your side. If you had the gumption to click OP’s link to the leftist blog Wikipedia, you’d find several links to peer-reviewed scientific studies.
Do you want one of the Wikipedia editors to add a note to that article? Something like “despite these studies, John Mace says they ‘might’ not be valid.”
There are many good examples on the Dope of me saying, “I was wrong.” (Kinda scary, actually, the frequency!!)
But on a change of political view, not purely acknowledging a factual error, but rather a series of factual assumptions that led to a fundamental political opinion… I can think of two for me: the “War on Christmas,” and same-sex marriage.
On the former, I was convinced that there’s simply no phenomenon worthy of that name, and on the latter, I became persuaded that legalized same-sex marriage was the correct state for marriage law.
I’d be very interested in hearing similar stories from the OP.
Have you conflated Conservapedia with Wikipedia? While the latter website allows any idiot, anarchist, Islamist or right-wing freak to edit its pages, Conservapedia, believe it or don’t, strictly screens the top-flight intellectuals permitted to edit its precious pages. :smack:
The refusal of right wingers to accept evolution and man made global warming as fact is not evidence of their brains being different. It’s evidence of a general human trait of being unwilling to accept evidence (sufficient to convince a disinterested party) that goes against deeply held beliefs. The same trait can be seen in the relatives of convicted criminals believing in their innocence. Right wingers differ in their deeply held beliefs, not in their ability to accept fact.
That said, it is still true that the general way of convincing for the right in current USA politics depends more on appeal to beliefs, and the general way of convincing for the left depends more on appeal to facts. I would say this is because the dividing line has moved right, so the current left is more centrist/neutral, so the facts are currently more on the side of the left. At times in the past, this has been less the case, hence the (above mentioned) examples of 60s era left wing refusal to acknowledge fact.
You can overcome this. I grew up in a very (VERY) rural area predominately White. Essentially 100% White.
We had an oil boom which brought in all sort of characters. Some of them were a wave of Hispanics. My dad was adamant the Hispanics were lazy. lazy lazy lazy.
This was hard to believe because as I was around playing (I was like 10) and I would see hordes of Hispanics roofing houses, working construction etc and they seem to be working HARD.
Even at 10 and in the 70’s I was questioning what I heard adults say about race. I wasn’t the only one either.
Like other posters have said…the children are not their parents…sometimes you just need to let the elders die off and you will see a change in opinions…
The only problem with that is some people look at issues before forming opinions. It’s laudable that you will change your opinion once in a great while, but it would be better if you formed your opinions based on facts in evidence in the first place.
As an aside, I personally, was very anti-nuke when I was younger. But then I did research and understood I was basing my ideas on polemics, not reasoned debates.
I was curious about this, so I created an account there to check. Although it seems that a lot of the more contentious articles on Conservapedia are locked down (e.g. atheism), most aren’t, including the article on the theory of relativity. I made a tiny edit there — replacing straight quotes with curly quotes in one place — and it went through without issue.
… now why, exactly, relativistic physics is such a sore point for them baffles me, but there you go.
Relativistic physics —> moral relativism —> socialism —> communism —> the Obamachrist
The church of Obamachrist gives the Eucharist with an Oreo. Fact.
Glory to the twist, the lick, and the dunk. As it was in the beginning, is now, and forever shall be, fluff without end.
Point me at the baptismal font. I’m there.
Which is, of course, filled with milk.
I sit corrected. I tried a similar experiment several years ago and my account wasn’t approved. I don’t know if they’ve changed their policy, I was editing contentious article, or, perhaps, have confused Conservapedia with some other Rightwingapedia.
Well, I went in search of some evidence.
In the “Is GOP trying to sabotage economy to hurt Obama” thread, ralph124c dropped this gem:
Full of easily refuted talking points. So I went looking to see if Ralph had spouted these before and been shown the truth of the situation.
Green energy:
Ralph actually started a thread on this: http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=624343&highlight=Solyndra
In posts 5 & 7 it was shown that Bush started the program and it’s a non-story. However, here he is spouting the same talking point 8 months later. (Note: I stopped after posts 5&7 as they demonstrated that he has been acquainted with the facts of the situation. There may also be other threads in which this was discussed and he participated)
Unemployment:
In the “To all Obama apologists on the economy, You need to go fuck yourselves today” thread. We get this nice little gem from him at post 152
First, notice the part about solyndra, yet again, 7 months after he posted the one I mentioned above and a month before his latest posting.
Now, regarding unemployment, he was immediately schooled that the government has been doing unemployment this way for 70 years and that nobody is “concealing” anything. (see post 158 of that thread for a specific rebuttal)
New taxes:
I have to let this one go as he said “tax increase coming” (future tense). Obama does want to raise taxes. Enormous wouldn’t be my choice of adjectives, but whatever. At least he’s not saying Obama raised taxes enormously (past tense).
Tremendous expansion of national debt:
This was a bit tricker to track down. Ralph actually started two threads which I’ll cover. In “Obama Sets up Commission to ‘Fight’ the Deficit!” he states
. A lot of people tell him he’s an idiot and wrong, but nobody in the thread really detailed where the deficits came from, so I’m willing to pass on this one.
However, in another thread of his, “Was the ‘Stimulus’ worth it?” he states
and by post 3 he was given a breakdown of the deficit.
So here we have clear cut proof of at least one conservative being disabused of his incorrect facts and either completely ignoring the corrections made to him, or just plain not caring about what the facts of the situation are.
I can grant you that acceptance of evolution might go against deeply held beliefs. But global warming? Opposition to the fact of global warming seems to come from those whose businesses might be damaged by having to pay for the damage they do. Some of the media naturally support what business wants, some get funded by business to produce disinformation, and the masses who buy into this despite the evidence are doing so out of other motives. It might be that whatever the “liberals” say is wrong, it might be that Fox News is always right, it might be from lack of critical thinking. But I doubt any church has man cannot make the world warmer at the center of its belief system.
Ah, but a lot of the opposition to global warming is religious. It basically goes along the lines of “only God can destroy the world, so nothing man does can.” They essentially believe that man is incapable of causing catastrophic damage to Earth because they won’t be allowed to.