On the contrary: when you don’t have to spend all your time defending your view, you can actually learn something new.
In my experience, as long as your post actually has merit and is supportable, anybody with a brain will respect your opinion.
None of which I said. But since you “tend not to get into pointless squabbles about politics” because you’ll “get piled on”, it would appear that affirmation is indeed important to you.
An obvious false premise. 
Please see post #13 and try not to paint with such a broad brush.
Um…
I’ve been called some pretty vile names on this board, and – if it’s not undue lack of modesty – I believe that, objectively, my posts tend to be well-reasoned and supportable.
The location of this thread prevents me from calling you a douchebag for this obviously poorly researched remark.
Yes, and no. There will be some posters who will take a post on its merits-even a highly socially conservative post- but you’d have to be delusional to think that there would not be additional reflexive comments by the usual suspects, oftentimes drowning out rational discourse.
Personalize posts much? I was not addressing you directly, I was commenting upon several posts from several individuals in this thread.
No, I do not need affirmation on my varied and often contradictory beliefs. If I did, I would find myself a site with posters so we could circle jerk. That doesn’t sound like much fun to me.
This is similar to my thoughts on the ignore feature. If you can’t handle the discourse of ideas, backgrounds and viewpoints contrary to your own, perhaps you need to re-evaluate.
Noone likes the priest until he’s gone.
I have a enormous amount of intellectual curiosity, yet am on the conservative side of the middle-both socially and politically. I can even get by in two languages, although fluency would be a major stretch. Am I the exception to the rule? Or just yours?
ETA-Now I wonder why I bothered to write out this post, Chefguy. I see you’ve went and called someone (well not *really *called them, because you were sooooo tricky with your sentence.) a douchebag for expressing their personal opinion.
Yeah, intellectual discourse at it’s finest.
I know you do not what to hear it, unfortunately the current Republican candidate claims to be proud of someone like Palin, that is a creationist, has attempted to ban books, disdains basic science research, etc. When conservative leaders are being proud of ignorance, it is a big deal when they attempt to ignore that among moderates such ideas are not being appreciated. This is particularly painful for common sense Conservatives that, if you are not noticing, are jumping ship nowadays and are being confused as liberals over here.
This is the current state of the conservative leadership in the USA. They decided to be saddled with an anti science candidate to excite a base that is not welcomed in the SDMB.
http://www.boston.com/news/local/articles_of_faith/2008/08/sarah_palin_on.html
I do think that when Obama (most likely) becomes president that many that you think are liberal in the SDMB will show up as conservative, one should not forget that calling Obama a liberal was not really accurate, he is a moderate that even though he will consider liberal solutions to the current problems, I expect him to get help from conservatives in his administration, I expect the SDMB then to sound very conservative as I thought it was when I found the Straight Dope in the last years of the Clinton presidency!
Sometimes your posts are well-reasoned and supportable, and sometimes not. The thing on VP being in charge of the Senate and the thing about voting for Obama were not your best moments. Usually your posts are enlightening and I look forward to them because they are like WF Buckley when he was at his best. But not on the mentioned occasions.
That being said, this is a board about curiosity, and curiosity is not a conservative trait in general.
[Official Moderator Warning]As far as I’m concerned, you did just call him a “douchebag”. Do not attempt to sidestep the rules again.[/Official Moderator Warning]
This is ridiculous. If anything, it’s people on the left who are not exposed to other ways of thought or living. I daresay that your average conservative or libertarian could describe the ideas of the left in an accurate manner far more so than could a liberal could accurately describe the ideas of the right, for the simple reason that the ideas of the left are ubiquitous and unavoidable. You get them in school, in the popular media, movies, television, the press, and in locations such as this.
As for intelligence - if you could measure the average intelligence of, say, the readers and writers of the National Review, I’ll bet it’s not much different than that of The New Republic*, and both are probably substantially higher than, say, The Daily Kos or Think Progress.
In other words, intelligence has nothing to do with it. Education has nothing to do with it, other than that if you go through four years of college you’re going to be subjected to an overwhelmingly liberal worldview for four years.
Here’s what I think is the actual reason: The board started left because of its association with the Chicago Reader. Then when it went to pay-to-post, the leftward tilt accelerated because people in the minority generally don’t feel like paying to be piled on. People on the right get less value out of a membership here than do people on the left, who see it more as ‘home’ and less as a hostile environment. So the right-leaning members slowly dropped away, leaving the board even more tilted to the left.
In addition, it has become increasingly hard for conservatives or libertarians to justify the actions of the current Republican Party, and therefore they have less desire to engage in its defense.
Now that you can post for free again, I’ve noticed a lot more conservatives showing up to post in Great Debates once again. And I predict that once Obama is coronated, the right will start growing in strength again - it’s always easier in politics to play offense rather than defense.
Has anyone noticed that there are a significant number of posters voting for McCain who have relatively low post counts compared to their duration of of membership ?
Tells me that they inform themselves of the liberal views but are reticent to express themselves in what they perceive as a somewhat hostile environment.
I don’t think intelligence is the problem right now with conservatives, but their clamping down on sincerity. When Christopher Buckley, son of the late William F. Buckley, wrote that he was voting for Barack Obama he was canned from the National Review.
Seeing regular smart members of the SDMB claiming that Palin was the beesknees only left then the option for me that either those supporters are misleading, or choose to willingly ignore the evidence that the current Republican ticket was a champion of ignorance (and I have not touched yet the un-ethical and other reprehensible positions of the Republican candidates)
While it is clearly not a deal breaker for some conservatives, the creeping light Lysenkoism coming from conservatives in power is bound to affect the future of America.
Jeez, forget ONE smiley face and the joke goes right over your head.
I want to know why university professors, scientists, librarians, journalists and the states with the highest educational levels all are more liberal than average, but I’m going to be offended if someone gives an answer that suggests it’s because they are more well-read/educated/smarter, so don’t anyone answer that way.
I also want to know who the main reoccurring characters in the Star Wars movies were, but it’s a serious question, so I don’t want anyone to mention anyone named Skywalker, Solo, Fett, Palpatine, Vader and so forth. Come up with some different answer please.
Exactly. Present day conservatism is heavily flavored with beliefs that are simply factually wrong, or are irrational, and fares poorly in places where people are allowed to and willing to point that out. Come in here spouting nonsense about creationism or Obama being Muslim, and people will actually point out that it’s nonsense and the mods won’t ban them for doing so.
Debate tends to be a lot more middle of the road on things like, oh, tax policy or “Is space travel worth it” or “Is a unipolar or multipolar world better”, because one side isn’t blatantly, factually wrong. There’s something there to debate, instead of a one sided attempt by posters to enlighten or mock someone who’s simply out-and-out wrong.
I’m even more left-leaning than most people on this board, I think, but I feel sorta similarly. It’s more, though, that I just HATE talking politics and religion. I have my opinions, you have yours, and neither of us is going to convince the other that they are wrong, so why bother? Bleah.
Joe
Sometimes, even a lot of the time, they are, but you’ve also written a lot of dickish stuff. Which is true of all of us, of course, but it stands out for you more because you’re prolific, and because that stuff is dickish in the opposite direction from most of the rest of the board, and because even when you write shit, it’s somewhat well supported.
My theory on this one is that libertarians are generally encouraged to be vocal about their views, and since we have vocal libertarians, other libertarians speak up, and so on. However, Social Conservatives and Marxists are worried about how they’ll be perceived (since others before them have been chased out), so they keep quiet.
I think the SDMB is liberal because it used to be liberal.
There was a guy on the radio the other day talking about the phenomenon of political polarisation in American (and Western) society. He presented it almost in terms of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. As we get more and more affluent and comfortable, we can start sweating the smaller stuff, which in this case is something like, “I don’t like this neighbourhood because my neighbours vote the other way to me”, and so folks up and move.
The result is that all the Democratic voters seem to wind up in hip neighbourhoods in hip cities, catching light rail to their hip coffee house, and all the Republican voters seek out open space, gun clubs, NASCAR tracks, etc. Well, this is an exaggeration, but the premise is that the Average American is less exposed to opposing political views in his or her local society than was the case a few decades ago. And this is a bad thing.
I’m a conservative (but not a religious one) who tends not to speak up on these boards, because of the futility of it, and the inevitable pile on. At its best, the SDMB provides a harsh test of my own political beliefs, and at its worst, it’s a liberal circle jerk. That said, I also don’t frequent conservative web sites (I’ve looked at Townhall.com but the religious side of it annoys me) because I don’t like the circle jerk nature of those either.
I agree with most of the stuff from above. The Internet in general skews liberal. But I also believe that there isn’t much for an intellectual conservative to grasp on to these days. There is no William F Buckley. The current Republican party has repeatedly in the past 8 years taken an anti-intellectual, anti-science stance. Conservatism doesn’t have to be linked with such philosophy but the Republican party is.
I think the main thing is that there is no current leader of thoughtful conservatives of any import at the moment. Sure you’ve got your George Wills and the like, but the main “heart and soul” of the party at the moment has an anti-intellectual streak.
So I don’t doubt that there are many people who would actively defend the Republican party if there were a strong leader with intellectually defensible ideas. But the truth is that there really aren’t any of these types these days. That’s why you won’t really see much of that here. When the Republican party gets their act together and manages to accept intellectuals, then maybe they will be equally represented here. The closest you could get to that would be the neoconservatives. They are actually intellectuals, but their ideology has suffered some pretty astounding blows.
All Republican leaders of late have really espoused anti-intellectual ideals. Everything about the Bush administration has been anti-intellectual (except for neocon foreign policy that is). When you guys get a candidate that can attack the Democrats on logical and intellectual points primarily, then you’ll see more people of the intellectual persuasion attracted to your position. But the truth is that half of the Republican arguments against Democrats begin with things about Obama being an Arab or Muslim etc. It’s hard for someone who values truth and reason to align themselves with such people.
Your average intellectual Republican these days has a hard time finding any company. How the Republican party emerges will have a big impact on what happens in the future.
I think it needs to be pointed out that the belief that modern day academia has an unacceptable bias to the left is not the same as a dislike of academia. This is not to say there aren’t conservatives who hold the latter view, but there is an important distinction that needs to be made here.
If I come out and say that the humanities departments of Australian universities are unacceptably biased left, and that students are expected to toe a certain liberal-left line in their papers in order to get good marks, I’m not saying they should bulldoze the humanities departments. That’d be like saying a corrupt police force should result in the abolition of the police. The “anti-intellectual” thing is played up a bit much, I think.