The OP is a conservative.
Many US self-styled “conservatives” are not conservatives. They are radical reactionaries.
- A lot of people are jerks
- A lot of people are uninformed
- A lot of people are stubborn and irrational
- Many people are all of the above
- They exist in every religion, philosophical movement, or political party.
Just because a good idea exists, and a group of people supports that idea, that doesn’t mean that the group isn’t still made up of stubborn, irrational, uninformed jerks.
Those people just want to belong to a group, so they can be a jerk to someone else and then get socially accepted for it.
That’s the height of their actual political awareness- If I support X and be a jerk to Y, I am accepted by group Z.
It’s the equivalent of being a crack monkey.
Find the ideas that work best in the real world, and ignore the crack monkeys on both sides.
Yeah, if my views were formulated based on the jackassery of others, I’d hate everybody.
Wait a minute…:smack:.
I would agree, but I would also argue that most of politics does not involve principled positions. Running a government involves tedious decision after tedious decision, and I’m not equipped to have an opinion on 99% of it. There are a few things, sure – I think Gitmo should be shut down like yesterday because it’s a human rights violation, I think the death penalty should be abolished for the same reason, and I think the penny still being in circulation is an abomination upon mankind.
There’s a lot of things that I feel conservatives could certainly convince me on, though, things involved with spending tax money most wisely that I really don’t have much of an opinion on and probably never will. I’ve got a couple of examples for you.
One, I’m a skeptic, always have been, and I hate the leftist dogma towards climate change that you must agree because 98% of scientists say so, or whatever the number is. My default position on climate change was that models that predicted runaway warming due to CO2 were most likely extremely complicated and built upon plenty of assumptions that we should all be somewhat skeptical about. The sort of dire predictions that were being espoused required dire actions, and the idea of taking dire actions based on some computer models was a bit far fetched to me. I started arguing this to my liberal friends, who came back with cites and data, and when I went off to look for rebuttals, I found them. Seemed like a win, until I collected a whole bunch of rebuttals, took a step back, and looked at who I was getting my information from. This was not a case against climate change built from the ground up, it was a scattershot reinforcement of an existing idea, supported from the top down by people who just couldn’t stand to be wrong. I was in the wrong company, see, and I realized it. I’m still not passionate about climate change, it’s not one of my principled positions, but it’s an issue where I side with liberals mostly because the conservatives pushed me away.
The other example is Obamacare. I don’t particularly like it, I have serious doubts about whether or not it’s good legislation. I’d sit down and listen to anyone who argued why it would be bad, and I think a lot of them had good points. But when the 2010 election rolled around, my local conservative congressmen all campaigned on this notion that Obamacare was the worst thing ever to happen to this country, and they would make it priority #1 to repeal it, even if that meant defaulting on our debt, shutting the government down, and generally burning the house down around us all. Well, I don’t like Obamacare but that ain’t no way to deal with it, so guess who I didn’t vote for.
So 38% of the country is radical?
I am intrigued by your ideas and wish to subscribe to your newsletter.
Well, around 27% is crazy, so 38% radical wouldn’t shock me. But even then, he said many, so this gives us a pretty reasonable buffer zone. 
Ummmm… if you read the OP, you’ll see the answer is “Was a Libertarian. But not any more”. Still lean that way on a lot of issues. Like personal responsibility, some benefits of a free market, and not legalizing morality *(or weed, man). *
I don’t think the government should be running people’s lives, whereas those “conservative reactionaries” can’t wait to tell minorities where to go and women what they can and can’t do with their bodies. And apparently, found a theocracy.
The minute they get power, they can’t wait to wield it, and suddenly forget all their “limited government” campaign rhetoric. [/soapbox]
Applies in differing amounts to hypocrites of all ideologies, of course, so shut up with that “but they do it tooooo…”.
Or as Niven’s Laws put it, “There is no cause so right that one cannot find a fool following it.” Occasionally rephrased as “No cause is so noble that it won’t attract fuckheads” on the Niven mailing list and elsewhere.
The main general news site I check is the Yahoo news page. Sometimes I read the comments and it’s incredible how much that happens in the United States is Obama’s fault according to conservatives. Especially if the news story is about some black person doing something bad ---- then someone always blames Obama.
As you note, even on a movie/TV show site (as I post regularly on the IMDb pages about specific movies or shows) it happens on there too.
All it does is make the posters seem stupider though they’re too stupid to realize this.
I’ve seen the occasional liberal interject a comment political that’s totally irrelevant. But on Yahoo news it’s mostly conservatives doing it. And there’s a real element of racism with it.
I agree with BigT, but I would also add shitholes like Fox news and conservative talk radio. When one side pushes the fact that any disagreement is the WORST.THING.EVER, then of course there can be no softening of the language. This stuff festered for years before the internet brought it to the fingertips of every asshole and now whatever they think they type with no filter.
Its hard to decide if its the people who make our government like this, or the government and conservative media pushing these viewpoints on a wider audience. Its fact that the GOP congress has denied more Obama federal appointments than any other, its brought unprecedented standstill to government, used an unprecedented number of filibusters, and changed the rules of Congress to make them more partisan. At the same time, every president or nominee is the “most liberal!” we’ve ever had, and every scandal is the worst one ever, and now because we have a black president, racism and xenophobia has come back in a big way.
Conservatives started this shit, only they can stop it. They need to reverse course on their decades of demogoging. Admit Obama’s not the most liberal president, he’s actually quite moderate. Benghazi is not a big deal because it couldn’t have been prevented. Obama’s done great with killing terrorists and keeping us safe. The economy’s been saved by Democratic leadership. Tax cuts are good, but only sometimes, and not when it comes to the wealthy. We should have religious liberty but balanced with civil rights. Christians are not under attack. Immigration is a huge issue but most Mexicans just want to work and provide a better life for their children. Abortion should always be legal and accessible but if you don’t want it to happen, we need free health care, early comprehensive sex education, and teach kids how to use condoms and birth control.
Compared to the conservatives I have met in real life, the ones here tend to be very reasonable and informed. Spend some time in a rural area in a red state if you want to be pushed towards liberalism.
Got to be careful, get raised in a place like Texas, you could end up a total radical.
Because rational thought about actual principles and the policies that would flow from those principles isn’t what politics is about.
It is about turning one opponent into the most vile person on earth (regardless of how evil the person actually is) while making oneself feel virtuous for hating them. So, if you can convince someone that their ‘side’ is evil, well, then you have a potential convert.
Just read this board sometime, there are examples all over the place. The examples tend to be from the left. However, that is mainly due, I believe, to the general tenor of the board skewing harder left in the past 10 years or so. Both sides do it, the politicians love it and we all get a little more cynical every time we let it slide.
Slee