True dat.
Now, now. The plural of anecdote is not data.
To the OP :
That’s the funniest thing I’ve read all day.
Liberals need online community more than conservatives do because conservatives have more communities in real life. Churches, civic organizations, military organizations, all provide community and are heavily conservative. Likewise conservatives are more likely to be married with kids and have less need to consort with strangers on the internet.
Conservatives and Liberals also have different approaches to politics. The average liberal seems more emotional about politics than conservatives. So when a topic is debated the conservative says we believe what we do because of x, y, and z. The liberal says conservatives believe what they do because they are evil, greedy, hateful, bigoted, crazy, etc. This thread is an example **Oakminster **has a list of reasons, and Slimy Tove had a profane unreasoning hostility. I understand it, since if liberals could reason like conservatives do, they would no longer be liberals, but all the name calling can get tiresome and cause conservatives to leave the board.
It’s truly rare that I get to enjoy this much irony and cognitive dissonance in the span of merely one sentence. Thank you for this.
One of the reasons the boards lean Democratic is that comments like the above are just part of the background noise. There is no equivalent from the conservative side, either in number or in vehemence.
As well as stuff like this. samclem knows perfectly well what Bricker is talking about, but wants to nitpick it to death.
[QUOTE=Oakminster]
Not only that, but all of the mods are shamelessly liberal, and moderate according to that bias.
[/QUOTE]
This is part of the self-reinforcing nature of the boards mentioned elsewhere. manhattan used to moderate here, and left explicitly because of the efforts to make conservatives feel unwelcome here. One of the mods actually caused the servers to crash because he requested the help of the other (liberal) members of the Dope to hunt down instances of a conservative Doper trolling, and the number of searches overwhelmed the resources available.
All this crap about how much better liberals are is self-serving nonsense.
Regards,
Shodan
Wrong.
Before you put Rand Rover up on that cross, go read the ATMB thread explaining his suspension. He repeatedly insulted liberals on this board. Had he kept his drivel aimed at liberals in general, he wouldn’t have been suspended.
Alternate theory: the liberal lean commenced because of The Straight Dope’s origins in alternative print media. The out-group hostility was present, but muted, from the start, and grew as the lean became more pronounced.
I took no IQ exam in order to become a member/guest of this board.
The assertion that “this board” is smarter than the average internet is, IMO, unproven at best. I think that having an active group of moderators (which the SDMB does) with a clear set of rules keeps a board from sounding like the darker side of the Internet, not IQ of the membership.
The assertion that this board skews liberal because conservatives are old (and therefore, I presume, not tech savy?) seems to ignore, what appears to me, the fact that a lot of the dominant posters (at least in GD) seem to be no spring chickens themselves. Including the mods, who can most greatly impact the “tone” of a board.
The assertion that “reality skews liberal”, I think, only reinforces my belief that Humans seem to have a wonderously powerful ability to mentally reject information that runs counter to those beliefs that have already taken root. Look at some people’s reaction to Dzhokhar Tsarnaev being fingered as one of the Boston bombers. It appears to me that they refuse to accept that he may be guilty because it doesn’t fit the impression they got of him (maybe from a face to face relationship), or that he has a pleasant photo on his Facebook page. (This doesn’t even cover the people who seem to be attracted to conspiracy theories…) Another example would be those who are religious. In the end, it (their religois beliefs) all boils down to faith. I don’t think Liberals are more immune to this mental bias filter than Conservatives. [These example are not meant to show Liberal bias. I don’t want to derail the thread.]
The problem is, in my view, that your definition of “selfish, intolerant bullshit,” seems to match a great many ideas.
Is the opposition to immigration amnesty, tax hikes for the wealthy, universal background checks for gun purchases, and abortion ALL “selfish, intolerant bullshit?”
As a working definition, I’ll propose: "persons who score solidly in the “Authoritarian Right” quadrant of the Political Compass and who engage in board discussion defending those beliefs.
Painting with a broad brush, left-leaning people tend to be ‘bottom-up’ organizers.
Right-leaning people tend to be ‘top-down.’
In bumper sticker phrasing ‘Democrats fall in love; Republicans fall in line.’
Left-leaning thinking (not just the US, not just Democrats, not just right now) tends to be about collecting all contributions from everywhere and filtering the good ones toward the top. The wisdom dictating our best course, in that model, is the sifted wisdom of the collected society.
Right-leaning thinking (not just the US, not just Republicans, not just right now) tends to be about accepting authority, and trusting the best among us. The wisdom dictating our best course, in that model, is the wisdom of the best and brightest.
A message board is more appealing to those who sift wisdom. If you are pre-wired to listen to the best and brightest, you’re more attracted to a medium that is one-way communication - like radio.
A lot of people get unfairly labelled with a “Conservative” sticker that are really just concerned with single-issues. From my perspective, the big 4 polarizing issues are gun control, abortion, gay rights, and illegal immigration. If someone has a strong conservative opinion about any of those issues, it usually doesn’t even matter what they feel about any other issue, because people will call them conservative.
The reason there aren’t many conservatives here is because there are already big, strong communities online dedicated to people who feel strongly about a particular issue. Why would they go here, a message board where their particular issue isn’t the focus of most of the discussion?
Liberals get polarized by single issues like that, but I don’t think it’s to the same degree. It’s easy to imagine a poor, white, middle aged working man who’s a union member and thinks the tax code ought to be more progressive, but who votes republican because he’s concerned about gun rights. It’s not so easy to imagine a self-made multi-millionaire who thinks he already pays enough taxes and the middle class aren’t paying enough, who thinks abortion is murder, but who votes democrat anyway because he’s concerned about gay rights. The “liberal” side of most issues are typically not something people feel are important enough to put all of their focus on, and completely ignore everything else.
Leaving aside your phrasing of these issues, I’d generally say there are significant elements of selfishness, intolerance, and bullshit in many of the positions most conservatives - including you - espouse on these matters. Just my opinion, of course.
I agree, assuming what you’re saying there is that it’s the perception that conservatives aren’t welcome that counts, even if it’s not actually true.
I think a lot of the unwelcome feeling is that there are some regular posters on political topics who do come in and say hostile things about the group as a whole, not the idea, and this turns off a lot of Republican posters or conservative-leaning posters.
I mean, if you’re a person who votes Republican and is conservative, but not a Tea Partier or member of any arch-Conservative group, I can totally see how coming on here and seeing your political party equated with being retarded, sociopathic, stupid, rustic and ignorant might turn you right off.
I mostly don’t post on political threads because I don’t want to deal with the bum-rush of people who will tell me that I’m stupid, ignorant, sociopathic, etc… just because I happen to not agree with them. Dinsdale’s post above is a perfect example of what I’m talking about- Republicans are described as "selfish, bullshit and intolerant. Which isn’t fact, it’s opinion, as he states. But it’s widely accepted here, and it turns people who do think that way right off.
Personally, I feel that it’s a moderation failure; they’ve let it get very one-sided for reasons unknown to me. We’d have much better political discourse if both sides were represented more equally, but right now, the board leans very Democrat, and is very vocal and condescending about it, and unless there’s some protective moderation, all we’re going to have is Bricker and some of the other conservative posters to represent the other side.
Yes. How is that even debatable?
Procrustus’ post is example #2 of what I was saying.
Especially the second sentence. There is a contingent that takes it for granted that no one can possibly dissent from the Democratic party line in good faith. It has to be because we are selfish, intolerant, evil, ignorant, bad, etc., etc.
Regards,
Shodan
Thanks for illustrating the point nicely.
OP, do you have any further questions about why this board leans left? The answer is that responses like the one above are legion, and largely tend to be ignored by the board’s liberal majority – if indeed not not echoed and cheered on.
In fact, each of the those propositions is debatable. People may, in good faith, reach opposite conclusions on any of those topics.
I disagree with the need for universal background checks for gun purchases, but I recognize that others may hold a different view. Neither conclusion is bullshit, to say nothing of selfish or intolerant. That’s the conservative view I bring to the board.
And procrustus feels perfectly safe answering as he did, even in a thread like this one…because he knows that responding as he did is perfectly acceptable to the board’s liberal culture and the majority of active, posting members.
So you wonder why the boards leans left? This is your answer.
This.
Well for what it is worth, I value the opinions of both Democrats and GOP regardless of my moderate position. I suppose that Bricker, Oakminster, and others can take comfort in the notion that it is quality, not quantity that matters.