A serious question for liberals/progressives/socialists/leftists

[MrFun]

And I can claim you have extreme bias if you, say, worship Robert E. Lee for example.

[Wiglaf]

Why do you do it, rtwinger? Were you a fan of "Dubya?" He and his buddy Cheny are paragons of rightist ideology (so I can only assume you see him in a favorable light), and one of the reasons you've seen such a resurgence in the left.

Seriously, learn what conservatism is. Bush and Cheney aren't the paragons of it. I don't think any recent U.S. president has even come close. Paragons of conservatism are less centralization (no No Child Left Behind, no Patriot Act), few wars (no making the world safe for democracy), little government intervention in the economy (no bailouts). Their religious initiatives are all about them that is remotely conservative.

Then learn what neoconservative is, and you're in the 21st century.

[Theben]

The conservatives threw the Eisenhower version of conservatism under the bus a long time ago, Wiggy.

[Theben]

My very generalized 2 @@...

Conservatives favor the individual since each person knows best what they need to succeed. The aggregate result is that society will benefit most as each person realizes their full potential.

Liberals view society as a whole 1st and seek to help those individuals or groups who are falling behind. By preventing these people from falling thru the cracks, they later become productive again and add their value to society as a whole. The result is that maximum social potential is achieved as everyone contributes.

My problem with the modern conservative movement is it points to a huge number of people and labels them 'outsiders' unless they agree with their ideology. I grew up with Reagan as president so I don't have personal experience with previous republicans, but Reagan and his followers initially steered me away from the GOP. I don't like the lockstep authoritarian groupthink most conservatives have, and what really turned me off was how angry most of their followers become when presented with "unsanctioned" ideas, and the Moral Majority and its influence in politics in the 80s-90s. Since then these issues have only gotten worse.

[KrazyHorse]

Slowwy, it's true. The most reliable predictor of party affiliation is years of education. It scales up with the years. The more years you are in school the more likely you are to come out a democrat.

No.

In fact, people with bachelor's degrees are more likely to vote Republican in national elections than are people with more advanced degrees OR without a college education. This is robust over the last few election cycles.

[KrazyHorse]

Ben, you're like a machine which can be consulted whenever you want an answer which is precisely opposite of the real answer.

Instead of constantly exposing your own ignorance, you should take the time to research crap before you say it. ****.

[KrazyHorse]

Interestingly, though, high income levels tend to correlate with voting Democratic

I have no idea where you got this. Only the quite rich (150k+?) significantly demonstrate a trend (aggregating on national level) of higher income = more Democrat. Through much of the income distribution (say, 60k-150k) there is virtually no correlation between changing income and voting patterns. At the lower end of the scale, there is a strong trend for the poor to vote Democratic.

When you go on a state-by-state basis (which disaggregates the effect that richer states tend to be more Democratic) the positive correlation between individual income and individual Republican voting is actually quite strong. See, e.g. http://redbluerichpoor.com/media/red...blue_state.pdf

[bc1871]

Universal Healthcare, or better known as "Socialized Medicine" is the first stop down the rocky road to socialism, and then Godless Communism. Good conservatives oppose any system, where I the taxpayer is forced to pay for someone else...after all, we are NOT our brother's keepers

[Q Classic]

Universal Healthcare, or better known as "Socialized Medicine" is the first stop down the rocky road to socialism, and then Godless Communism. Good conservatives oppose any system, where I the taxpayer is forced to pay for someone else...after all, we are NOT our brother's keepers

This is a joke troll, right? Seeing as it was the fairly Godly Bible that said something about being our brothers' keepers...

[Q Classic]

I consider myself a fairly pragmatic libertarian. I skew heavily towards civil liberties, though my economic beliefs are quite moderate: as in, I think that corporations and a largely unfettered free market are critical to economic growth, but some regulation is needed.

I'm not enthusiastic about unions, but that's largely on account of them having failed to be of any consistent major benefit to the average worker since the 1930's or so. I think Wall Street ****ed **** up bad, largely because nobody was actually looking over their shoulders to say, "Wait a minute, that equation doesn't look quite right..."

Ideally, I don't think we should have government-run healthcare. That said, the data's also in, and it suggests that almost every nation with government-subsidized health care has better average health for the citizens with lower per capita cost for that health care. This is where my pragmatism kicks in--if the data suggests that we would do better with a national program to help make health care affordable to all citizens, why not do it?


That said, there's a reason why I am an Independent, but voted Democratic in the last election, and it can be boiled, quite simply, down to the remains of the Republican Party and many of its more rabid supporters. For a party purportedly based on ideas, its recent ones have been either wrong or uninspiring, and when its coupled with noxious, nasty demagogues and hatemongers...

The party of a big tent is really a party with no tent.

[Zkribbler]

I'm not enthusiastic about unions, but that's largely on account of them having failed to be of any consistent major benefit to the average worker since the 1930's or so.

Actually, unions were just becoming legalized in the 30's. Unions started their downturn in the 60's, with Hoffa's entanglement with the Mafia, with corruption in the Longshoremen, and with the railway worker's insistance on featherbedding [the insistance of hiring people for jobs that no longer existed, e.g. hiring firemen to shovel coal on diesel locomotives ].

Unions are doing a lot of good today, which you don't hear. With the "corporatization" of the news media, you just don't hear pro-union stories.

For example, during the 2002 downturn, my court claimed it didn't have enough money to pay salaries and so we were scheduled to close down for eight days in order to save money. Management refused to consider any suggestions from the unions on how to save money. So, union folks got into the court's warehouses and snapped pictures of computer equipment stacked wall-to-wall, floor to ceiling. There was another $1.2 million on the way. We took the pics and the inventory to the State Senate, who made some...er...interesting phone calls and we stayed open to serve the public and we didn't miss the computer equipment at all.

The average chaplin-to-prisoner ratio in American prisons is 1:500. In California is was 1:1,200 and in some prisons were 1:2,000. If anyone needs spiritual guidance it's convicted felons, and many were begging for chaplins that just weren't available. The chaplins' union (yes, that's right) did some lobbying, and got badly needed chaplins added to the prisons.

Bush wanted to privatize Social Security in order to enrich his Wall Street buddies, never mind the fact that such a plan would have bankrupted Social Security within 1 year. The unions were the main opposition that saved Social Security. Can you imagine where Americans today would be if all we had to rely on for our retirement was our investments in the stock market??

[SlowwHand]

I'm for something, regarding health care. What we have now needs work.
Unions. They had their time. TODAY, there are union negotiations going on about pay increases. Let me tell you something, keeping your job is your raise. Read a paper. Damn.

[Thoth]

Unions. They had their time. TODAY, there are union negotiations going on about pay increases. Let me tell you something, keeping your job is your raise. Read a paper. Damn.

As there should be. Bank and brokerage execs are getting multi-million dollar bonuses for ****ing up massively. Why shouldn't the people who actually work for a living get a piece of the pie?

[Velociryx]

c'mon Thoth, you know that "those people" don't count. You're not a real American unless you can swindle at least a cool mil, and then not pay taxes on it!



-=Vel=-

[Kidlicious]

I did IB, so my experience is NOT typical.

We were taught that there are certain facts which are important to assessing reliability for a document.

1. When the article was written. If it is close to the date, the more reliable the source.

2. The number of copies, and the date of the oldest manuscript available. Again, the older, and the more copies, gives us greater confidence.

3. Primary/Secondary source. Is the author writing what he himself has said, or is he relying on other people. Primary sources can be more reliable for a particular event, secondary for a collation of evidence not available to a single source. Whenever possible, use primary sources.

4. Bias. Everyone has bias. Just because a source has bias doesn't mean that the source is inaccurate. If I want to study fashions in Nazi Germany, a prejudiced statement from someone can be accurate in saying this is what people wore back in the day. If you think a source doesn't have bias, read it again.

5. Truth. Historians cannot know what exactly happened. They can only assess whether something is more true or likely to have happened then something else.

6. Corroboration. Does the source corroborate with others? If it doesn't is there a good explanation, (ie, evidence that the others did not have access)?

We did this back at the start of grade 11. Fun class.

Ok. That's all good. I would add a couple more things. 1) The document has to be put into context. That is, you have to understand the person who wrote it and the culture that they lived in. 2) The meaning of words change over time. Some meaning is lost forever and can never be regained.

So maybe you really didn't learn enough in high school.