It is, in fact, about partisan denial of facts.
Already dealt with.
Only about 54% of the American public pays federal income tax.
Also false.
Cite.
[QUOTE=Budget Player Cadet]
The problem with this is that once they were exposed as lies, liberals stopped telling them.
[/QUOTE]
As we see, no, they don’t.
Liberal spin is no more and no less true than any other kind. It just gets pushed on this messageboard a lot more stubbornly.
Regards,
Shodan
So the thesis is that some factions don’t care about metrics or success/fail benchmarks because they fundamentally disagree or support the goal in the first place. Well, duh.
Like Iraq, or Vietnam, or most wars, really. The anti-war and pro-war people haggled over all sorts of data and whether we’re winning or not. But the true anti-wars weren’t interested in winning. Winning would be an evil in and of itself from their POV. And on the other side, it doesn’t matter if we’re losing. That just means we have to try harder, or change tactics, or something. Not that it’s a bad idea.
Same thing for immigration, environmental regulation, gun laws, the drug war, abortion, the death penalty, abstinence only education…I’m having trouble thinking of issues where this isn’t the case and it can be solved with an examination of facts, actually. Really boring stuff that no one cares about maybe. Like traffic flow studies or something.
As I see it, the issue isn’t that there’s more fact-immune conservatives than fact-immune liberals (there’s certainly lots of the latter on my Facebook feed and some on this board), it’s that these days the fact-immune conservatives seem to be much more represented in the media and in the actual party leadership.
That’s a problem because most people (on both sides) aren’t fact-immune, they’re just fact-deprived. It’s not really reasonable for everyone to dig into the nitty-gritty of every little issue, so they trust the sources that go along with their particular worldview. You encounter a heck of a lot more conservatives who believe things that are flat-out wrong, but that’s not because they’re personally fact-immune, it’s that the person giving them their information is. It’s not that there aren’t equivalent biased-to-the-point-of-delusion liberal news sources, but they have vastly smaller followings.
(Now, granted, maybe seeing some of these sources proved wrong over and over again and still trusting them is a particular flavor of fact-immunity, but that’s certainly a somewhat less cognitively dissonant one.)
Partisans are always willing to tell lies about policies and organizations with which they disagree.
Another quote from your article:
Approximately 500 rounds of badly degraded munitions that could potentially, possibly, perhaps be repackaged and used in a terrorist attack. Is that what Bush, Cheney, and Blair were talking about as they tried to convince us to go to war? Is that why 1000s of Americans died, 1000s more wounded, 100,000s of Iraqis died, 100,000s more wounded, more than a trillion spent, etc., etc.?
When people say “no WMDs were found”, they are referring to the magnitude of the claims made as the war was promoted versus the pathetic reality. Don’t you know that?
(If you’re trying to make a point about liberal spin by showing classic examples of conservative spin then you’ve done a great job and I retract everything above this line.)
Not really, most of the discussions were related to the fraudulent “pimp” issue that allowed congress to prohibit any aid to ACORN.
As I see** Budget Player Cadet** has acknowledged that some ACORN members and activities did bad things, but as pointed out: the unraveling of the fraud committed by the right wing media is never acknowledged here.
And not very useful when we take into account the context,
I do remember that items like that one were dismissed for the reason that the weapons found were buried and in practice useless to Saddam and henchmen, the point was that the Bush administration claimed that Iraq was actively making **new **chemical weapons at a mass scale, that turned to be an exaggeration if not a fraud.
The overall point remains: going to war for old improperly disposed and in practice out of reach chemical munitions was not justification enough. particularly for a war that ended killing much more than 200,000 people. (A number closer to what the most conservative estimates are, but even dismissing the controversial Lancet report other surveys point that the number was close to a million people that has died thanks to out of date and useless munitions).
Thanks very much for the acknowledgement.
So… In a thread in which you felt strongly enough about an issue to raise this as an example, you were able to forget hearing an explicitly precise counter.
That’s not incredulity, I should hasten to point out: I absolutely know it happens.
Do you make room for the possibility it may also happen to people you’re arguing with, or to people you’re complaining about in this thread?
I didn’t bring it up; Shodan did. I just had the O’Keefe video in my head, and that’s what comes to mind immediately when I hear “ACORN”.
Yes, I do - to an extent, and I’m trying to increase that extent. But I’m not 100% sure where that comes into play here. The problem isn’t necessarily “those on the right are more likely to fabricate data because they’re dishonest”, but rather “those on the right aren’t as likely to care about data because they have already taken it as given that more government is bad”. Which I think is a lot less to do with mistakes and a lot more to do with ideology.
I think the basic premise of the OP is valid. Just look at global warming. On the right, facts and science are absolutely irrelevant. Mitigating global warming might cost corporations money, so the corporations tell their right wing shills to discredit the science and the great unwashed swallowed the lies hook, line, and sinker.
The ACA is another great example. Facts totally don’t matter. Death panels sounds so scary. Government takeover of healthcare. Socialism. All scary, all untrue. So when the enrollment figures come out, the enrollment figures are attacked. Once again, quantifiable facts are to be discredited if they don’t fit the right wing narrative.
Regarding ACORN- yes there were instances of individuals paying others per registration in violation of some states’ laws. That was wrong. But to use this crime, on a par with jaywalking, as proof of electoral fraud misses the point, and intentionally so. Zero fraudulent votes were cast because of ACORN.
Regarding the WMDs in Iraq. Yes there were some unusable weapons buried in the sand. If you think that exonerates Bush and his war sold with lies, you’re mistaken.
Yes, that’s true. Ideology trumps facts when it comes to global warming.
And genetically modified food.
And nuclear power.
The latter two, of course, are not examples of exclusively right-wing ideology.
The idea that liberals serve evidence while conservatives serve ideology is self serving claptrap. The problem is that while liberals claim they have no ideological attachment to big government they use it to solve every problem. The solution to global warming, income inequality, poor education, women’s pay, teenage pregnancy, unemployment, smoking, medical bills, etc is big government. Name one social ill and the solution is always higher taxes and a big government program.
If data really meant anything then they would try to end failed program but they don’t. Head Start has been a failure for 40 years and no liberal wants it defunded. The want more universal preschool. Federal spending on education has tripled since 1970 and test scores have not gone up at all, yet no liberal wants federal education money cut. They respond to failure by blaming lack or resources and doubling down.
Look at what happened during the welfare reform debate. Conservatives were decried as heartless monsters who wanted people to starve in the streets. Once implemented welfare reform cut the number of people receiving assistance fell 60% and the poverty rate declined. Yet despite this huge success liberals still say anyone who wants to cut welfare want poor people to starve and die, and liberals are always trying to introduce legislation to weaken work requirements in welfare.
We see here in this thread how liberals respond to evidence, “well ACORN did plenty of illegal stuff but since one accusation was not proven, we are still right”
Allsides have biases that affect the way they see the news. The difference is that conservatives are honest enough to admit the have an ideology, liberals are so blinding by their ideology they can’t even see their ideology.
ACORN did plenty of illegal stuff? I don’t think so. The violations that isolated members were guilty of were piddly shit. What shut them down was the audacity of getting minorities registered to vote. For this they were crucified, while the Ohio Secretary of State threw out valid registrations for being on the wrong weight paper and allocated voting machines so that Democratic leaning precincts would have intolerable lines. For this, he was lauded by Republicans.
The Republican solution to global warming is to deny the science.
Sigh.
I can put my point in less polemical terms if you want. The fundamental commitments, on both sides of the political divide, are that society should be the sort of society that they would prefer to live in. On both sides, “principles” that can be summed up in a short slogan like “big government is inherently wrong” are not “deep moral beliefs”, they are tactical positions that, in current (though not necessarily all) circumstances seem to serve the real aim of achieving or preserving the desired sort of society. See how conservatives flip-flop over federal power versus the (sometimes held to be sacred) “states rights” depending on what it is is the states or the feds are trying to do. (And yes, I am sure liberals are sometimes just as inconsistent about their principles -someone else can supply examples, I am sure - although they may be rather less inclined to proclaim such “principles” as though they were set in stone.)
Characterize the sorts of society either side wishes to see in as flattering or us unflattering terms as you like, that is what the disagreement is really all about. It is not really about whatever sloganified “principles” that either side finds it expedient to use in their rhetoric at the moment. The core of the OP was to suggest otherwise, that the sloganized principle that “big government is inherently wrong” is what really drives conservatism. I call bullshit. There may be a tiny minority, on each side, for whom “principles” will trump the interests of their social vision - there might be a very few self-professed “conservatives”, for instance, who would count it as a win if a huge reduction in the size of government turned out to lead to some sort of peaceful, egalitarian, anarchistic socialism* - but I will warrant that not only are there very few of them, but that they are fools to themselves.
And yes, I stand by my contention that if America had a “big” government, i.e., a strong one that regulated many areas of people’s lives, but in such a way as to promote the sort of society that conservatives want, most conservatives would be very happy with it, and it would be ‘liberals’ (i.e., the left) who would be decrying the evils of “big government.” Indeed, throughout most of history it has been conservatives who were usually most in favor of strong (not quite the same as “big”, but not so far off) government, and those to the left that were usually against it. It is only the rather historically peculiar situation now found in late-capitalist democracies, and post-New-Deal America particularly, that has led to the peculiar role-reversal on this issue that we see in America now.
¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬
*And of course there are, and have been, people on the left, although probably very few of them these days, who are strongly against big government because they think getting rid of it would have precisely that sort of outcome. By no stretch of the imagination are such people conservatives.
¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬
Yes, that is true.
But conservatives want a world that ‘liberals’, and others on the left, think would be nasty, and I guess ‘liberals’ want a world that conservatives think would be nasty.
It’s all right, they still won’t accept it.
I don’t disagree with the first sentence. Both sides certainly have an ideology. But the rest misses the point. There is no commitment on the left for a large government in and of itself. For us government is merely a tool. If we could ameliorate these problems without large government programs then that would be great. American conservatism however politicizes the size of government itself. This is the point. In some cases even if a program does work they will still oppose it because they see the program itself as an evil.
I have trouble believing preschool education isn’t a huge advantage and I don’t think this view is restricted to progressives. Wealthy conservatives send their kids to the top preschools, after all. If it’s strictly a case of the left being blinded by ideology then why are they throwing money away? I really need to pay more attention the next time this question comes up.
For myself it’s a matter of equality rather than effectiveness. Local school funding is wildly unjust. People in wealthy communities pay lower tax rates but have better schools. Since state and federal spending on education doesn’t have this inherent bias I support it. We all share the belief that kids should have good schools but conservatives also believe that a local tax dollar is more moral than a federal tax dollar. To me a dollar is a dollar and it looks like their ideology is blocking sensible reform.
I admit that I was wrong about this. I believed starvation would be widespread. But that doesn’t mean you aren’t wrong too. The poverty rate decreased during the Clinton economy but it’s back on the rise in the Bush and Obama economies. And now the programs are inelastic. With block grants when demand goes up in the bad times we have now there are no extra resources to deal with it. Welfare reform was a success only in that it reduced the amount the government spent. It’s a failure in the sense that it makes the lives of poor Americans more miserable. For myself, I care more about the suffering than I do about the money. Since conservatives tout the success and ignore the failure I have no problem with people assuming they feel the opposite.
Which facts are these? In the debate on labeling GM foods I didn’t hear many facts from either side. Plus, the issue was not party based, with the conservative head of Whole Foods one of the strongest advocates for labeling. (For obvious market reasons.) In fact, scientists who know something about genetics were for the most part against labeling. So, perhaps a bad example.
Perhaps the problem here is that the nuclear industry keeps on having impossible accidents. I’m against labeling and for nuclear power myself, though the latter position is harder to harder to justify as corners get cut. But I don’t think either side in either of these debates ignores the facts the way some people ignore the facts about WMDs, for example.
True, and both of them are supported by a succinctly non-data-driven ideology - something more to do with the naturalistic fallacy than anything else. And you can throw the same complaint at them. However, such attitudes are neither core to liberalism or the democratic party nor solely in the hands of liberals. It’s the same problem, really, and we can all see that that’s, by and large, what’s going on. They reject the data because their ideology gets in the way. I agree 100%. But the money question in this thread is, “is that what’s going on for politically powerful conservatives on a wide range of issues due to their innate hostility towards government?” That’s the issue here. That’s the question I’m trying to ask.
(I’d also object to whoever, upthread, said that republicans have a corporate-serving ideology - that’s unhelpful, untrue polemic and you need to cut that out.)
It’s also not something I said, or even the author of the article cited in the OP said.
By and large, the reason is because nothing else seems to work, and government programs seem to look promising. I mean, what’s the solution to, say, women’s pay that doesn’t come from the government? The free market hasn’t sorted that shit out yet. Or unemployment - what, exactly, are we supposed to do? What outside source is going to come in during a period of low demand and start offering jobs? The reason we turn to the government for solving these problems is because if we didn’t need the government, they wouldn’t be problems.
If the free market was solving global warming on its own, we wouldn’t need government intervention (hell, it just still might, although the delay is costly) and we probably wouldn’t want it either. If the free market was solving liquidity traps on its own, we wouldn’t be so worried about fiscal stimulus. But that’s not what happens.
And when it does come to issues where there is rational disagreement based on data, the left usually disagrees not because of a love of big government, but because we think the data points in one direction quite clearly. Provide solid data that school vouchers are better than what we do now and won’t lead to, as many fear, a serious deepening of the gulf between rich and poor performance at school, and you’ll get a lot of liberals on board. Hell, “Waiting For Superman” convinced quite a few people, despite the fact that its figures didn’t hold up to scrutiny at all.
Really? Not what I’ve heard. Cite please.
Right, because obviously cutting spending will produce the results we want. There are plenty of ways to improve education, and the democrats have not done a great job of capitalizing on them, but you can’t blame them for not doing something which definitely won’t help.
What are we talking about, again? You aren’t providing any citation for what you’re saying, and here, I’m not sure which reform you mean - the one 20 years ago?
Citation needed. This one was covered something like 10 times by politifact - guess how that turned out.
Okay, time for a little fact-check. Why did ACORN lose its funding? Two big reasons: first, the allegation that it was enabling widespread voter fraud; second, the O’Keefe video. Both claims were false, the latter was actually straight-up fraudulent. Yeah, there were problems. But the big reason why ACORN fell to pieces was because it was perceived as enabling fraud and prostitution.
The problem with the government is a tool argument is that government is the worlds only tool that does everything. If I had a pill I claimed could help fat people lose weight, skinny people gain weight, relieve diarrhea and constipation, made your skin tanner and your teeth whiter, you would probably be skeptical that I was shilling the pill and not just a disinterested scientist.
Here is a thought experiment, suppose there was a group called the church of big government, that for religious reasons wanted the government to grow in size and to provide the solution for any problem you could think of. How would the adherents to this faith act any differently than liberals do now? The only difference I can think of is that they would think of military spending differently.
It may be possible to conceive of a pre-school program that helps kids, but the one we have Head Start, does not. The Head Start Impact Study was run by the HHS from 2002-2010. Its findings "children’s attendance in Head Start has no demonstrable impact on their academic, socio-emotional, or health status at the end of first grade. " Since that report came out 25 billion dollars has been spent on Head Start.
It is a good first step that you are willing to admit your biases. But it does not get to the heart of the problem. Funding disparities would be unjust if funding was the same thing as education but it is not. Since 1970 per pupil spending has doubled while test scores have not increased. If increased funding makes education better that would be one thing but it does not. In 1985 a judge thought like you did and ordered the state of Missouri to spend more money on Kansas City school district. Over the next ten years the budget for Kansas City schools more than doubled, with 75% of the increase coming from the state. It was the best funded district in the country. The results were nothing. No increase in test scores and no decrease in the drop out rates. They spent 1.5 billion dollars testing whether funding alone could better education and accomplished nothing. Almost twenty years later we are still hearing liberals blame funding disparities for poor education.
Of course you don’t care about the money, it is not your money. If it was your money being spent, you would care. That is why government programs fail. The purpose is not bang for the buck like it would be when you spend your own money, but rather to show how much you care. No one ever said that welfare reform would end all poverty and recessions permanently. What was said was that it would encourage people to go to work instead of living on welfare. It was a success in that it got millions of people off the dole and without increasing poverty. Since they don’t object to not increasing poverty I have no problem with assuming that liberals wanted millions of people dependent on the government as an end in itself.
Let’s go with your diet pill example. As it happens, I’m hoping to lose about 10 pounds this summer. If I was an adherent of this faith you describe, I’d want the government to provide the solution to that problem. They could be developing crops that were lower in calories, issuing calorie ration cards that I would need in order to get food, mandating some sort of exercise program for me. The might of the federal government ought to be able to take on 10 pounds and win, no contest.
I’m not asking for that, and as far as I know, no liberal is. I’m okay with Michelle Obama encouraging people, especially kids, to be more active and healthy. I like that the government can investigate the claims made by pharmaceutical companies, so that any diet pills I buy don’t turn out to be snake oil. Somet hings can be handled at a public level, but I’m not asking the government to lose the weight for me.
There are a lot of problems that nobody asks the government to help with; flat tire on my bicycle, no date on a Saturday night, when I order a hamburger with no tomato and it comes with tomato anyway. You just chose your list from among those things that have been proposed for action by the government, and then claimed there were no exceptions to the rule.
Thank you for crystallizing the liberal view so plainly. You have a hammer so everything is a nail. If you really think that women’s pay is a problem, start a company offering above market pay for women. All the underpaid women will come work for you and you will take over the market. Women’s pay will be greater and you will get rich. Maybe you don’t like money but the problem will be solved.
It is like that over and over again, see a problem start a company, start a charity, start an informational campaign? No, call Uncle Sugar. He always know what to do. Surely passing yet another law to ban discrimination in salaries will work this time. All the other times the government has tried and failed make no difference.
Uh, no. The Civil Rights Act did make a difference. The Fair Housing Act did make a difference. Mandating equal pay for women would also make a difference. When you have a hammer, sometimes you actually run into a nail that needs to be pounded down.