Why are Conservatives so credulous?

Great Debates
61

:rolleyes: back at you.

The fact was that the majority of posters at Kos condemned that diarist and the baby item was branded and tagged as an unfounded rumor, and it was never put in the vetoed front page or linked as recommended at Kos. Not knowing how a blog works does not give you any credit, but in the context of this discussion I have to say that I’m not expecting you or others that got taken to then go forth and denounce the conservative sources that gave you the impression that many Kos members or liberals swallowed that bit of “news”.

62

I’d actually be more impressed if she could field dress a mouse. That’s some fiddly work.

63

This is too easy. I have kittens that need more encouragement to come out of a corner with a ball of string.

So you immediately create strawmen that equate conservatism with stances on social issues such as same-sex marriage and abortion and equate conservatism with the George Bush administration.

Then Merijeek tries to be extra clever by somehow insinuating that I’ve been lured into proving the OP’s point when in fact, it’s the other way around. You two, with your reactionary and presumptive posts, actually are they.

Then I’ll bet you equate ‘progressivism’, or whatever you call the other side of the coin (the non-credulous side, or the ‘non-conservative’ side, according to the OP) with greater government intervention in trade, labor relations, regulation, redistribution of wealth, further involvement in the health care industry, picking winners and losers in new ‘important’ green industries, etc.

That’s my strawman, of course, because you never said that in this thread. But you can correct me if I’m wrong.

That sort of ‘progressivism’ is good, of course. It’s good to get the government involved in those things. We welcome the expansion of government.

Except in the places where we don’t. Like restricting same-sex marriage, a woman’s right to choose, wiretapping our phones, telling us what types of drugs we can ingest, freedom and censorship of speech, etc.

My post was pretty simple enough. All I was trying to say was that some conservatives call themselves such because they want to conserve their personal freedoms. In all areas. Not just the ones that need to be double-cordoned off because they are extra important (which seem to be social issues for you two, if I interpret your posts correctly).

That was it. And then we were off to the races. Who is the credulous one, here?

64

While there is no study, I have to mention that the Palin Baby case is a good example right here on who is more credulous. Not only regarding the original rumor, but also regarding the false belief that the managers at Daily Kos or most of their members swallowed the rumor. I do see the Daily Kos as one of the main left leaning sites. And IMHO it is a good example of what one would see in a shameless leftist newscast.

Mainstream liberal media, my ass!

65

Yeah, like such terrible interference as the government keeping them from beating up gays or firing people for being Jews or forcing children to pray to the “right” God.

The conservatives are only interested in keeping the government from interfering with Enron, not with keeping it from running people’s lives.

Because being less gullible isn’t the same as being not gullible at all. And the Democrats are still quite conservative as a group, anyway.

And what makes you think those are silly ? The war was, in part fought for oil - we bypassed armories in order to get to the Oil Ministry, for example. The CIA kidnaps and tortures people. Racism and sexism have a long history on keeping their respective targets down. And so on.

As opposed to Obama being a Muslim, Clinton assassinating people right and left, creationism, teaching sexual abstinence when it doesn’t work, and all the other outright wrong things you hear from the right. And not from the fringe, but as the norm.

66

I have lived in two very liberal areas (Boston and Seattle) and a very conservative area (Utah). I have found no difference in unfounded credulousness or reasoned logic. I think to paint either conservatives or liberals as more stupid than the other displays a bit of credulousness.

67

With all due respect, that’s the sort of thing that credulous liberals tend to believe.

68

Mainstream liberal media, your straw man. I explicitly said that there was no Left leaning outfit that corresponds to Fox and have noted in several threads that the MSM is much more concerned with chasing cash by way of sensationalist stories than pursuing any sort of ideology.

As to the Palin baby silliness; it was posted on KOS with lots of negatives, so it is not really analogous.

I would think that a fairer comparison would be the cases of claims for election theft, with segments of the Right wholly accepting that wholesale election fraud has been skewing the elections for years, despite fewer than 100 convictions of fraud (most of them technical violations) in the last eight years while segments of the Left are firmly committed to the idea that Ohio was delivered to Bush by Diebold in 2004 despite a complete absence of evidence that any sort of tampering occurred.

(For that matter, we can look at various Left leaning voters (and posters) who completely swallowed various charges emanating from different camps during the primaries.)

69

Uh, that was not directed at you but as a general complaint to the media that the poster that still believes that the Daily Kos was gullible regarding the Palin baby case, too bad that they only get the spin from the sources they have and the mainstream media does not help in cases like this.

But the doper posting here is undeniably giving credence to the factoid that several other conservatives here still think is true, that most posters or that the Kos management believed that the Palin baby was not hers.

I did not give much credence to that, but it does still bug me that many investigations (if they are any) of those complaints are made by the fox guarding the hen house. Let me say that I do think that an independent investigation would still not find any serious shenanigans, but I do think that many problems, like the calibration errors and fewer voting machines in poor areas, that are being noticed in early voting today, would have been taken care of if independent investigations had been made then.

70

Related recent thread.

71

Wasn’t meant to be.

It’s just that when I get such forwards as a shark leaping to bite a helicopter, a ‘shark’ (actually a dolphin) in a wave near a surfer, ‘amazing’ – but hoax – aviation photos, and yes, political screeds that have been repeatedly debunked, they are almost always from people I know to be Conservatives.

72

Unfortunately, a lot of people, regardless of Ideology, tend to think of their own rights first, without regard for the rights of others. They regard any attempts at stopping them from being dicks to others as being dicks to them.

“Firing people for being Jews/Black/Homosexual/Pagans/Funny Looking” comes under the heading “telling me what to do” because well, “It’s my company and I can hire and fire who I want. Why does the Gubment have any right to tell me how to run my company?”

But the same applies to Pollution as well as a lot of other things. “Who the fuck is the government to tell me that I can’t dump those 57 barrels of bio-toxin in the crick behind my factory? They’re interfering with my business, dammit! This is costing me money!”

This is a path that starts with selfishness at one end and ends with “socio” or “psycho” at the other extreme.

73

And we have a winner.

74

The Palin baby story had no legs because it seemed ridiculous on its face. It was a quick whisper and then gone. I know no one who actually argued it. But Wright and Ayers persist. They should have held short shelf life too, but do not. The right wing media have been pounding those non stories for months. it may be because they have so little to hang onto. The lefties have left much Palin dirt under the carpet. McCain barely had Keating mentioned.

75

There are several reasons why those on the left think that the right is credulous and vice versa.

First, you are measuring credulousness against the backdrop of your own biases. If you’re on the left, you’re much more likely to believe, or perhaps not even pay attention to, conspiracy theories regarding Halliburton, Big Oil, the military, big business manipulating society, etc. Even a crazy conspiracy might not get much notice, because it’s still in the realm of things that confirm what you want to believe in the first place. So if someone tells you that, say, Blackwater gets its contracts because it’s an evil mercenary company that ‘disappears’ its rivals, you might think, “Hmm… I don’t know about that, but Blackwater is certainly an evil company that employs mercenaries, so I guess it’s possible.”

But you probably won’t think the person who told you that is a raving loon. You might think perhaps they’re going a little to far, but understandably so.

But if someone on the right comes up with a conspiracy theory that gores one of your oxen, not only are you more likely to take notice of it, but the fact that it is so far away from your own preconceived notions means you’re going to see it as completely crackpot.

This is basically a long-winded way of saying that confirmation bias plays a big part here.

There’s an example in this very thread - a poster earlier up made the flat-out statement that Republicans are less well educated than are Democrats. You probably didn’t even take notice of it, or if you did you might have just went, “Well, duh. Of course they are.” On the other hand, if I had popped in here and said, “Republicans aren’t credulous, because they have better educations than Democrats,” a lot of you probably would have jumped on me for it, or at least made note of yet another wacky Republican who believes things that aren’t true.

Except it’s true. Republicans tend to have better educations than Democrats - this is true at all levels - high school grads, 2 year college, 4 year college, and masters programs. The only place where Democrats have an advantage is at the Ph.D level, and that’s a very small sample of the population. In 2004, if you were a high school dropout, you’re more likely to vote for Kerry than Bush. If you had a college degree, you were more likely to vote for Bush. And it’s not a small gap, either. According to this table at Wikipedia, while comes from the American National Election Study, in 2004 21.9% of Democrats had college degrees, while 35% of Republicans did.

Does that suggest that Republicans are more credulous than Democrats?

76

Ben Stein should be proof that you can have several college degrees and be an absolute idiot. Obviously, having an education isn’t a bulwark against raving stupidity. (And, in Stein’s case he’s an idiot not because of his politics, but his anti-evolution stance.)

77

:dubious:

http://www.cnn.com/ELECTION/2004/pages/results/states/US/P/00/epolls.0.html

78

No, “ironic” is not the word I would use to describe it either.:rolleyes:

79

If it makes you feel any better, I know some incredibly stupid liberals, including at least one who avers that Governor Palin secured her nomination by the Lewinsky method.

80

Even though I’m a liberal, and will be voting whole-heartedly for Obama, I have to say that living in the Bay Area I’ve seen my share of credulous left-wingers.

There are a huge number of Bush-related consipiracy theories going around those circles.

Ed