Probably because the word “conservative” has baggage on the Dope in a manner near identical to how the word “liberal” has been stigmatized in mainstream American culture.
As someone who self identifies as a political moderate, and as an atheist, I consider you to be wrong about as often as you’re right. Your positions that conservatives are willfully evil, that gun advocates value guns over the lives of humans, or that anyone with faith is insane are as demonstrably false as creationism. Those are all reasonably close characterizations of positions you’ve taken, right? I don’t see a lot to be smug about. I’m not sure what’s worse, the undeserved smugness or the unwarranted whining.
And the idea put forward earlier about this board being about TRUTH is also false. Sure, there are posters who are here to educate and learn. Some are here to show off. Some just want to talk about popular entertainment, how cute cats are, or why one brand of condiment is the best. The column is dedicated to interesting facts, the boards are not.
A claim that even if true would make me correct much more often than conservatives are.
You may have the facts right, but you have the reasons wrong. Consider the following questions:
Why do people believe in gods?
Why do many Americans wish to own guns for home protection?
Why do many Americans self identify as conservative?
If your answers are variants on “because they are stupid” and “because they are evil” you’re just as wrong as if you said “two plus two is four because I have four fingers on my left hand.”
I’m not aware of any studies on this, but it wouldn’t exactly be a shocker. The internet is a global system, with the English side being mostly the Western world where the conservatism described in the OP is a minority view. In my experience most of the internet is either liberal or, if apolitical, hostile to American conservative regressive social attitudes.
As for this board in particular, it doesn’t seem particularly liberal. Mostly the usual vanilla Democrat stuff. Most of the users seem to be middle aged men (including several prolific posters in their 70s) and it seems to lag behind the rest of the internet in general. Coming here is a good way to refresh one’s memory of three year old memes.
:rolleyes:
And so modest, too.
:rolleyes:
SD is mainly moderate with most extreme political viewpoints expressed here receiving criticism and debate. Extreme viewpoints are more likely to be freely expressed at forums such as AboveTopSecret and Hippyland.
That’s a silly argument. Whether you like it or not, it is stupid & irrational to buy into primitive myths with no evidence, it’s foolish to own something for “protection” that puts you into greater danger, and conservatives are consistently wrong. Of course, that’s why you bash me for my opinion rather than coming up with counterexamples to prove me wrong.
Hardly. Your insult assumes that it requires a special level of intelligence to be right more often than conservatives. Conservatives are malignant fools; it requires an active effort on their part to be as wrong and as nasty as they are. I’m not right more often than the conservatives because I’m especially smart; most people who aren’t conservatives are right more often than they are, including people quite a bit stupider than I am. Being proud of being right more often than conservatives would be like being proud of not believing in Santa Claus when you’re 40.
RWers, who like to call themselves “conservatives” brook very little tolerance from the key positions, so anyone who takes a non-RW stance on one of those is excommunicated from the “conservative” fold and ceremonially spit upon by Ann Coulter. Hence, breadth and nuance in one’s opinions makes one a “liberal” because, apparently, the RWers have no other way of imagining or dealing with people who present contrary ideals. The “conservatives” complain about stereotypes and pigeon-holing that they themselves try to enforce.
Exactly what views that are generally expressed here that are so right-wing compared to your family and friends?
Which is about as much borne about by evidence as a claim that liberals don’t use computers as much because it destroys the oneness with nature and because producing computers causes environmental damage.
I’d agree that this board is mostly liberal and that one of the bigger splits politically here is actually between the liberals/centrists (people such as Marley23, Little Nemo) and progressives/social democrats ( Evil Captor, BrainGlutton). But this is also the case with most other Internet forums of this type.
I don’t see how it is libertarian though except on social issues and perhaps guns (which this board is evenly split on)-Ayn Rand and Ron Paul get mocked and pitted just as often as Mitt Romney or George W Bush.
As for me personally, I’ve moved somewhat to the left, to the point that I ended up supporting Obama, but at the same time I’d personally say I’m a centrist (mild hawk like Obama on foreign policy, economically pro-free market, pro-free trade, pro-austerity, pro-fiscal restraint but also support a basic welfare state including UHC, socially libertarian on most issues except abortion, and culturally conservative) and would support the conservative parties in most other countries.
Yeah, that’s an odd thing to say about conservatives. If Facebook and stupid forwarded emails are anything to go by, conservatives are definitely out in force on the internet.
And then there’s Der Trihs, who’s like the vegan at Thanksgiving dinner. He’s family and we’re happy to have him around just as long as he’s not launching into another one of his ideological tirades.
Muahahaha. Give us time, and you will eventually come fully over to the dark side. (We used to have cookies, but I eated them.)
Any. Pick one. I don’t think I know a single person who even questions a woman’s right to abort a fetus. Every single person I know IRL thinks the US is a loony bin for people with guns, no exceptions. I can’t even imagine a person who doesn’t support cheap universal healthcare. Pick a US conservative position and I can pretty much guarantee you that where I live that isn’t even an issue.
Yet here is is possible to discuss these subjects. Even the fact that it can be a discussion makes it more conservative. There are people here who defend conservative positions, positions nobody I know would defend.
Beyond that the board is more culturally conservative than people I know. People here are positively hysterical about nudity. The majority of the board spank their children.
Yeah that would be great. Its that cheap part thats so troublesome.
I don’t see any reason to think that The Washington Post is any more conservative than The New York Times. They have somewhat different audiences since the Post more dominates its local market. Surprisingly, the Post is not more politically oriented than the Times. The Post tends to be more laid back than the Times. The Post is more willing to use funny headlines and informal writing. Surprisingly, the Post has better arts and cultural criticism, which is why it dominates the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism.
I don’t think looking at people’s self-described political position on a poll is very useful. Most people don’t actually place themselves well on such spectrums. A better way is to ask them their positions on individual issues and work out their overall position from that. If the American populace was actually 42% conservative and 35% moderate, why did Obama win? It’s because if you really ask people what they believe on individual issues, their political opinions are more liberal than what you get if you just asking them for their overall political opinion. And all of this is assuming that that poll you quoting is accurate or even that you accurately quoted it, which I doubt.
Cheap for the consumer, is what I mean. Having to pay a small amount in generally supported. A very small amount, like £7 for all medication in the UK, or whatever you can afford to your insurance in the Netherlands. It’s not like they don’t understand that the healthcare itself is expensive.
I have read those threads, which is why I mentioned them. The idea that you can be pro-gun and a liberal is exactly what a lot of people mean when they say American liberals would be conservatives in the rest of the developed world. I actually considwer these boards to be pretty centrist, it’s just that the GOP has become so radical that the middle seems leftist.
Your opinions are what make you wrong. There are countless counterexamples of rational people who are theists or agnostic, there are gun owners aware of the dangers of gun ownership, and wrong how, exactly? You use sweeping generalizations, which almost guarantee that you are factually correct. If this was a math test, you’d fail for not showing your work.
The Post, as I remember it, got a reputation for conservatism during the Clinton years. The American Spectator or another far right media outlet would publish a story about, say, how the Clintons killed Vince Foster. The Post and the Wall Street Journal would pick it up and from there it would spread into the mainstream. On the other hand, it endorsed Obama twice.
What gracer said, pretty much.
Another thing I’ve seen a lot of here is right-wing reality denial. That’s where some of us folks who live in countries where we have been living with things like universal health care all of our lives explain that, in fact, it really isn’t anything like the way it’s described by American right-wing nutjobs… and get ignored like what we’re saying is just lies. Or we actually get called liars by people who seem to have a great emotional need to believe that, for instance, UHC is Stalinism in action.
It ain’t the US liberals that are doing that here. US liberals, in my experience, do grasp that we non-Americans aren’t all lying commies. US liberals do seem to me to understand that Americans and non-Americans aren’t actually all that different and that there’s no reason that what works for me in Australia couldn’t work for an American in the US. It’s the US conservatives that I see denying that, here and elsewhere on the internet.
Yes I understand that. I also know that if my taxes go up a considerable amount it will greatly effect me and my family. That is the difficulty with instituting a change like that. In most coutries that have UHC it developed that way as the country developed. Mostly while they were rebuilding after WWII. I see the end result as a good thing. Its how to get there that is the problem.
Are you sure people aren’t confusing it with the Washington Times?