Because learning the motivations of others can leadvyou to challenge your own. If other people believe it for this reason, maybe you do, too, but don’t realize it. It’s often easier to see motivations in others, as you make up excuses for yourself.
I remember figuring out that I held a lot of the opinions I decried as bigotry in others. I remember when I realized that my position on abortion did have something to do with punishing sex.
The more conservative arguments I see, the more I wonder how I ever could have been one.
My problem isn’t so much the motivations as the arguments. I think there are good cases to be made for some (allegedly) conservative ideas, like lowering the federal budget deficit; I’ve just never noticed any conservatives actually making them. It’s either no big deal, or such a crisis that they shut down the government (or was the shutdown just a bargaining chip to get rid of Obamacare, I can’t remember).
My own view of political discourse is that it’s become akin to trench warfare in WWI. Sides are dug in so deeply to their current positions that no power in the political world can shift them. I’ve been hoping for some new issue to arise that will come as a surprise, the parties won’t have their turf staked out yet, shake things up a bit. I thought the 2000 election might be just the thing. Surely both sides can agree that we want the most accurate election possible; there can’t be a partisan way to count votes, can there?
For the ridiculously small bit that it’s worth, there are several conservatives here that are IMO worth talking with:
-Bone
-Bricker
-Martin Hyde (not to be confused with magellan or martini_enfield, although I constantly do, to the point that martin may not even be the dude I’m thinking of, it might be martini, or even someone I’m forgetting except that their conservative username begins with m, so my apologies whoever you are)
-F-P seems to have gotten a lot more reasonable to me in the past few months, although maybe that’s just because I haven’t butted heads with him over something really IMO dumb in the last few months
-a few others I’m sure I’m forgetting.
Yeah, there are a lot of Clothahumps and billfishes and Shodans out there being poisonously dumb, and then there are the adahers and ITRs spreading very earnest ignorance. But I appreciate the SD as a place I can sincerely and respectfully discuss politics with people I disagree with.
One of them contributes nothing but brainless jabs, content-free idiocy, puerile jokes and laughable non-sequiturs, and the other is blue and drinks a lot.
I love all the Doper conservatives that seem to be giving a sincere effort rather than trolling, even when I disagree harshly. The only ones I don’t like (or the only times I don’t like them) is when they are obviously giving no effort (or only putting effort into trolling). It’s also very frustrating when they refuse to accept that I actually believe what I post, but I assume it’s just hard for some people to get into the heads of others, and imagine that there really are different ways to think about some things, so I try not to hold it against them.
As to the thread - a principled position that can be swayed by dismay with others who share your beliefs are not truly principled positions.
I support free speech. Wait, so does Fred Phelps. If Phelps’s position can sway my support, did I ever support free speech in principle? Those positions that can be flipped are conveniences, not principles.
HOWEVER, I know that the behavior of many radicals, way back in the mid-nineties, helped push me away from radical (read: socialist anarchist) politics. From watching people celebrate mass arrests as victory, to hearing people talk earnestly about how they planned to execute bankers and their families after the revolution, to listening to people glorify political graffiti as a strike against capitalism, to seeing people smash a television in a crowded downtown intersection and think they’d accomplished something–over time I became convinced that the radical leftist movement contained too many people who were lethal to any sort of success that I’d want to be part of. The laudable goals of radical leftism, I became convinced, were unattainable. Pushed me right toward the center, it did, turned me into the Bernie-Sanders-loving moderate you see before you today :).
Sorry I’ve been MIA–just made it back here from a marathon shoveling-out-the-elderly-neighbors workout…
Good point, Happy L. (post 2): It was this board and my fellow Libertarians and the gun lobby, and the Cheney administration, and the current GOP candidates…
My political slide has been complex, and the result of many factors. Details available, but I’d have to wax spiritual as well as philosophical, and I’m not sure anybody wants that…
Amen. And may I say it’s working. Hmm, I suppose I could have posted
[QUOTE=me, this morning, in a parallel universe]
The "conservatives’ on this board have pushed me into seeing both sides of many issues… Damn you to hell!
[/QUOTE]
You are aware that it is posts just like this one that make the OP’s point, aren’t you? A liberal couldn’t have written a parody post and made you look any worse than you have just made yourself look here.
And the OP has another point: This is now officially a No Speculating About Sex Between Posters thread.
Because we’re pretty sure some of those involved are just not that good at it…
(Well, I can think of one who’s a leeetle too drunky…)
