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Did you ever think (I know, thinking is probably a foreign concept to you) that maybe people vote for welfare and unemployment programs to make their COMMUNITIES better? I will never be poor and never have been, but I support social programs for the most part because they benefit me indirectly. I benefit from better schools even though I am done with school and have no kids because better schools mean better kids which means less crime and fewer teenaged mothers. I support planned parenthood because birth control benefits me by keeping the population down in the low-income segment. I support welfare (to an extent, I believe there needs to be restrictions and it needs to only be for housing, transportation and sustenance, not iPhones, Flat Screens and Xboxes) because without welfare a lot of those people would be on the streets or breaking into my condo to rob me.
You see how it works?
And this is coming from a person who has never voted for a Democrat. I'm a Libertarian through-and-through, but I prefer Democrats to Republicans (now, I was a GOP supporter when Bob Dole was the leader of the party) because of these opinions.
I look at this problem differently; I think welfare and handouts hurt more than they help. After decades of welfare and other assistance programs, we've done little to lessen the problems of poverty. Instead, we've made being poor and dependent too comfortable; why should someone work a low paying job when they can stay at home and let the government support them? We've created pockets of America where we've enabled people to do the bare minimum. We've lowered education standards so more people can graduate. In the long run, we're doing a disservice to these people by expecting the least from them.
While I'm not in support of doing away with these programs, as I believe they do serve a purpose for those who are truly down on their luck and need a helping hand, I think they need to be greatly overhauled to reduce dependency on them, which would encourage more self-reliance and lead to greater personal success.
Smart liberals think they know better how the "less fortunate" should live their lives. Therefore they think they deserve the right to tell them how to do so.
Rich liberals know that their wealth gets watered down if more people become wealthy and if the underclasses become self-sufficient. Therefore they do what they can to slow the movement from one economic stratum to another. Lock the poor and middle class into their strata, then get them dependent on government and the wealth of the rich is secure.... and their wealth then becomes POWER.
How then is it that you went on to respond to the rest of the post? As a rhetorical tactic, a first sentence that is both obviously and gratuitously untrue rarely gives a reader confidence in what is to follow.
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Originally Posted by itshim
..Academic Institutions can and do indoctrinate their students. This isn't a conservative notion or a liberal one; neither right leaning Universities and colleges are exempt from this.
As we used to say in Ranger school, "Nice attack. Wrong hill." I never even hinted that academic institutions can or do not indoctrinate. I asserted that "indoctrination" is not a legitimate excuse by conservatives for their demonstrated failure to compete in academia.
Not even close to the same thing.
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Originally Posted by itshim
So by your logic, right leaning jouranlists, "lean right" because reality "leans" right?
That wouldn't be logic at all, let alone "my logic." My statement was a generalization on journalism, not a statement rewarding any specific individual journalist. As such you have committed here a material fallacy of accident; The "Sweeping Generalization" fallacy. Since my discussion has been explicitly qualified, you are alone in that illogic. I decline to join you.
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Originally Posted by itshim
LOL Liberalism is not ubiquitous gathering of a "high tolerance of ambiguity and change."
Here again you commit the same logical fallacy. It is a specific fallacy that is often diagnostic of conservative thought. It goes hand in hand with the conservative aversion to ambiguity, resulting in the marked tendency to deny subtlety, oversimplify real complexity and paint in broad brush strokes. No... not all liberals possess "a high tolerance of ambiguity and change." And not all conservatives are theists, or outwardly heterosexual, or older white males.
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Originally Posted by itshim
Honeslty, I won't even entertain this rational, simply based on the idea that you are attempting to force anyone who questions or doubts your idea of "liberalism" to defend extreme conservatism when in fact both extremes are misleading and counterproductive.
Whatever floats your boat. The refusal to "even entertain" a rationale (note the spelling, it's a completely different word) is always an easier choice than arguing with it. But kudos at least for tacitly recognizing that even conservatism lays on a continuum and therefore "conservative" vs. "liberal" is as useless a false dichotomy as any other preferred stalking horse of the self declared "conservatives" that populate this forum.
One of the big reasons the Republican party is so quickly going the way of the Whigs is that it continues to forcefully shed its more moderate members (I was Republican for more than 30 years), and fails to notice that as in any normal distribution, there are no more votes to be gained on the far right.
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Originally Posted by itshim
lol! The problem historydude, is that your line thinking and beliefs aren't consistent or linear in their approach.
Again, that is because other than fundamental invariant natural law itself, nothing in reality is consistent or linear. Look at the universe... it is not a chain of causality, it is a web of causality. Order proceeds from chaos. Every event is statistical and every outcome is only as predictable as knowledge of the dependent variables is complete. Outside of mathematics, there is no such thing as "proof."
This essentially guarantees that any "line of thinking and beliefs" that is "consistent or linear" must be trivial. It must oversimplify and ignore most of what is true. And it sets entire political parties up for psychological shocks of the sort that Republicans experienced on the evening of November 6th.
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Originally Posted by itshim
Absolutely nothing of what you've written here is what defines "liberalism."
That would be more compelling a position were in not merely a bald unsupported assertion. Make a counter argument or don't, I really don't care. But if nothing else, please disabuse yourself of the notion that simply stamping your feet is a substitute.
Useless posts like this don't help your cause at all. This desperate flailing is why the right has lost credibility.
Want to regain credibility? Don't do this any more - just trying to help.
There is one thing I never did or will do. I never kiss anyone's ass nor will I pander to you.
It's pretty simple. Social liberalism to them trumps free market principles. Michael Barone would call these people "gentry liberals". Culture plays a role too. I would also add that many of these people benefit from government contracts,and Democrats are the party of government.
See? What did I tell you? The conservative aversion to ambiguity and compulsion to oversimplify creates here another egregiously false dichotomy.
Social liberalism and free market principles are not mutually exclusive.
As H.L. Mencken wrote, "For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong." And conservatives seem to have all of them.
Food for thought for you righties who continue to believe that only unemployed Obamaphone-receiving welfare mommas supported Obama.
Having academic smarts does not necessarily translate into having political smarts. First of all, we have no idea how much "influence" Google execs placed on its employees to get Obama re-elected. Remember, Google is omnipotent. Google sees all. Maybe most of those "smart" Google employees just wanted to keep their jobs.
That said, you're right, Romney's campaign apps stunk and crashed on Election Day. Gee, I wonder if the 93% or whatever amount of Obama supporting Google employees had anything to do with that?
As you can see I could go on but CD posters like to pull figures quickly and make asinine assumptions. I keep reading in this thread that conservatives tend not to understand complex issues but it seems the 'left' likes to over simplify issues.
None of what you posted changes the fact that seven out of ten of the highest median income counties in the United States had a majority that voted for President Barack Obama in the 2012 presidential elections.
Having academic smarts does not necessarily translate into having political smarts. First of all, we have no idea how much "influence" Google execs placed on its employees to get Obama re-elected. Remember, Google is omnipotent. Google sees all. Maybe most of those "smart" Google employees just wanted to keep their jobs.
That said, you're right, Romney's campaign apps stunk and crashed on Election Day. Gee, I wonder if the 93% or whatever amount of Obama supporting Google employees had anything to do with that?
More right wing excuses. It had to be voter fraud, or hacking, or undue influence... it can't possibly have been because American voters actually preferred Barack Obama and his policies to Mitt Romney and his.
As long as Republicans continue to default to peevish and puerile excuses like these they have no hope of figuring out what they are actually doing wrong and get back in the game.
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