You make this claim time and again, and IMO it’s completely bogus. Why do you persist in assuming that anyone who happens to read this board believes that the highest word count or most clever backhanded insult wins the argument? Logic and fact talk and bullshit walks. If you have a sound argument in debate, you’ve not a thing to worry about. It doesn’t matter if ten, or hundred people, dispute it if your point has a factual and/or logical basis.
AFAIK no one, no one at all has ever stopped you from saying any thing you wanted to on this board. Please stop trying to claim you are being oppressed here. It’s repetitive, tedious, and has no basis in fact.
Here’s some anecdotal evidence in support. I’m a stone liberal, and in several years here, I don’t remember ever having commented one way or another about anything you’ve ever posted, until this very moment. And you’ll notice that I’ve said nothing about your political position, just your repeated characterizations of yourself as some sort of victim of repression. As far as I’m concerned you can say whatever you like. I can’t, however, control what anyone else happens to do around here.
If you object to hearing public criticisms of your views, you really shouldn’t be posting to a forum where anyone has the right to respond. Really, you ought to try just making your points, deal with the arguments that you feel are pertinent, ignore the rest, and most of all, grow a slightly thicker skin. It’s not life or death, it’s a frickin’ Internet message board.
I just hope I can remember that advice the next time one poster or another annoys the hell out of me.
I didn’t say I was oppressed. I said it’s hard work to keep up with all the arguments when you are outnumbered. That’s just the truth. It has nothing to do with oppression. It’s just work.
You realize that citing the Washington Times for an anti-liberal reference is like citing Michael Moore for an anti-Bush reference, right?
It’s also worth noting that Luntz Research Companies, the group conducting the survey in your cited report, is deep in bed with the GOP, as boasted on their web site. And David Horowitz’s track record as a conservative pundit is no state secret.
I learned of the Straight Dope through an independent paper, but I don’t think it’s very liberal. (I mean, do you folks consider the Portland Phoenix liberal? Oh hell, you probably think of Oregon when someone says Portland. I’m inclined to think a liberal paper wouldn’t have hated Angus King so much.) There’s generally a mix of liberals and conservatives doing articles and columns – in the portions of the paper that aren’t devoted to art, which most of it is. Focus on Arts and Music !=liberal, but they do = free press a lot of the time, and the Chicago Reader seems inclined to print SD in free papers.
Perhaps I am reading you wrong but the unwritten implication here seems to be that liberals who post to this forum are incapable of informed opinions using cites and other evidence to support their stance.
That is provably wrong. Indeed, I would claim Sam Stone’s continued presence on this forum speaks to the fact that excellent, well reasoned debate from the opposing side does exist. Certainly there is some dreck that has to be waded through but he does not strike me as a person who would stay here shouting at a wall of frothing at the mouth liberals who are lucky to string two words together to flame him.
The bottom line is good debate can and does exist on this forum and for that to happen all sides in an argument need to be well represented. As with anything public like this it can collect its share of of the clueless but such is the price of an open forum. SDMB has had loons of all stripes at one time or another.
Note I do not claim to know Sam Stone’s motivations and could be completely off base. This is just my impression but regardless of his motivations I believe it does not change the fact that good, substantive debate is still alive at the SDMB.
Of course it is. That’s the only reason most of us are here.
It’d be a lot more pleasant for me to hang out on FreeRepublic, where my messages would get attaboys and you-tell-em’s. But I wouldn’t learn a damned thing. Difficult though it may be sometimes, it’s important to stay out of the echo chambers on the right and left and engage the oppostion. That’s the only way you can even hope to understand each other and correct your own misconceptions. Or maybe even correct theirs.
Preaching to the choir may be more enjoyable, but it’s a waste of time and effort.
Thank the good Lord that someone finally said this. I’ve been trying to formulate a Pit thread titled something along the lines of “The Straight Dope Message Board Is NOT, Repeat NOT, Leftist” for quite some time.
Some of them, yes. For all my disagreement with Sam Stone, you’ll never hear me call him stupid. He most certainly is not.
There must be something missing in these sentences. Either that, or I just lost my English comprehension skills.
I’m a student now, but I worked fulltime for four years and paid my taxes. It never bothered me one bit. I’m also in Sweden, where we pay a lot more taxes than you guys do.
This is nice to hear, since the “SDMB is liberal” argument is usually put forward like some kind of vague conspiracy theory. What you’re saying here definitely makes sense and is undeniably true.
Christ. Do you not believe that college professors are slanted to the left or are you just trying to make me do more work? More importantly, unless you agree with what I’ve said in the previous post to be true, why would you consider it “anti-liberal” to cite the majority of college professors as being liberal? Here is another poll:
In the interests off getting to the truth rather than proving myself right, I’ll also cite the results of a Harvard Institute of Politics poll that shows the gap significantly smaller (32 vs. 36%) . I’m even doing your work for you!
Well, believe me, there is a lot of ignorance of economics on the conservative side too. Conservatives, for example, often act as if the “free market” is magic and can solve problems that it doesn’t even “know about” because the costs of the problem are being externalized. And they also often seem to think that the government somehow spends money in such a way that it provides no stimulus for the economy. (Of course, it is perfectly reasonable to hypothesize that the money could stimulate the economy more if spent in some other way…But, you it is something that can’t just be assumed.)
There is plenty of ignorance on economic matters to go around.
I’ll certainly agree that there is a lot of ignorance on the conservative side too. But I notice that in many GD’s that involve economics, the liberal side is debating whether the theory is true, while the conservatives are defending the morality of applying it. If you accept the theory to be true but disagree with the morality, you could always proffer increasing taxes for subsidies as a solution for inequity rather than controlling prices, restricting trade, etc… That way your letting the market work it’s “magic” but simply redirecting the output. I also agree with you that many radical libertarians don’t understand that markets aren’t typically transparent or efficient enough to withstand complete privatization. I think their errors, however, are at a significantly higher level of economic reasoning.
After thought: I think Liberal might have something to say about your calling prescribers of free markets “conservative.”
[QUOTE]
Some 48 percent identified themselves as either liberal or “far left,” compared with a mere 18 percent that considered themselves conservative or “far right.” [\QUOTE]
You started out in this thread claiming that the reason why the SDMB leans left is that all, or at least the greatest number, of left-leaning posters where college students or professors, a fact that’s contradicted by numerous “what’s you’re job” threads we’ve had on other forums. So all this arguing doesn’t bring you closer to proving your original hypothesis.
Of course I agree that academics are on average more liberal than the whole population, though it isn’t nearly as monolithic a difference as crackpots like Horowitz would tell you. But with statistics like the one above we see that less than half of professors describe themselves as liberals, it hardly accounts for every liberal out there, does it now? Also, it should be noted that the Ivy League contains just eight of America’s several thousand institutions of higher learning, so statistics about only the Ivy League don’t count for much.
Did you mean “were” college professors? If not, I’m not sure what you mean. In either case, I never said that the majority of posters were college students or professors.
That would be nice, as the cite you cite cites two actual organizations (and their respective spinoffs) instead of four, and their funding list is basically the Olin and Scaife foundations. Let’s just say that I find it REALLY hard to believe they want a balance.
What the hell is with all of this balance anyway? If I thought that the media, colleges, message boards, etc., were all biased, I’d strive to find unbiased replacements, not try and tip the scales in the other direction?
It’s just my provocative way of calling into question whether many American liberals are really liberals at all. I’m just positing no-guns as a litmus test for liberalism. I see so little difference between Republicans and Democrats, and between Kerry and Bush. The issues that divide the camps (abortion and homosexual marriage, for example) are important, it sometimes seems to me, because they appear to clearly differentiate the two sides. Their function has become largely iconic and symbolic in my view. They allow two very similar sets of people to engage with each other in what passes to the casual observer as angry debating. More like shadow boxing to me.
But when an American on these boards says (s)he opposes gun ownership (or more accurately supports a model like the British one, where shotguns are permitted for shooting the odd inedible pheasant) I sit up and take notive and think: “Aha! A radical! What else do you believe - you interest me.”
That someone lives in Berkeley, on the other hand, doesn’t by itself cut the mustard for me.
