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Location: northern Vermont - previously NM, WA, & MA
10,749 posts, read 23,822,981 times
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Why do so many people wear their politics on their sleeve? Black and white, liberal vs conservative, find some red herring or a scapegoat as bait to pit them against each other. I consider this the very cause of the demise of this country. Both parties are extremely flawed and hypocritical. If one only tows the line 100% of one party's mantra only, then I don't think they are very critical thinkers and many of them tend to have a big blue or red chip on their shoulder. There is so much more to life.
I'm looking the move to AZ, and politics is not at the forefront of my mind.
I woke up this morning to an email from Zillow, gleefully informing me that the house I paid $480k for in 1995 is now worth some millions of dollars.
You might think I would be happy about that. You would be wrong.
For one thing, who will be able to buy my house at that price? The middle class is being systematically crushed under the weight of astronomical housing prices in the Bay Area. Can you blame them for wanting to move to Arizona or Nevada? If the jobs are there, they'll move.
Two of the people DH volunteers with at CalFire have moved to Washington. Others, Oregon. We spoke to a couple last year who were leaving California to move permanently to their family's lakeshore cabin in Wisconsin. Consider that for a moment: Leaving perfect weather to live in chilly Wisconsin.
It's all around us. Only those friends who have surviving elderly parents here don't plan to move. But they're not reticent about expressing their dissatisfaction. One gets the sense they might just follow us to Arizona eventually.
One of the long laundry list of things I like about Arizona is that newcomers are welcome -- or at least tolerated until they make it clear they brought the CA insanity with them. Arizonans aren't opposed to Mexicans -- they just want the illegal immigration to stop. And unlike my home state of Oregon, Arizona doesn't have a culture of xenophobia. Long ago Governor Tom McCall used to joke he was going to put up a sign at the state line: "Welcome to Oregon. Now go home."
I know what the state flag is supposed to symbolize -- incredible sunsets, copper mining, the Colorado River -- but to me it has always signaled wide-open opportunity to those who would avail themselves of it.
I worked in media for 3 decades and can tell you the mass media (radio/tv specifically) tends to be very liberal. I know that's not new information however, why then do these media claim objectivity? Because they believe in their hearts they have no bias. Then again, a fish probably doesn't know it's wet.
In the mid-1980's a more conservative voice started sprouting among the thousands of media outlets. This voice was primarily on AM talk radio. Then a single tv network arrived in the late 1990's which gave some voice to conservative opinion. Until that time (and mostly since) the electronic media (certainly news print which still is) was completely dominated by the liberal perspective.
While we might take ATR information with that grain of salt I would hope that same skepticism is applied to almost every other source.
There's a grain of truth to this, but I've found the reality to be substantially more complex. I worked in media for 14 years and before that, I attended a prominent journalism school. It is true that the people who work in media are overwhelmingly liberal. This isn't due to some conspiracy, and there's no political litmus test when journalists are hired. It's because liberals are the types of people who are attracted to this type of work, which is difficult and time consuming, pays very little at first, may never pay much over the course of a career if you don't make it to the highest echelons, but offers the opportunity for public service on a wide scale. Similarly, there are careers where people tend to be conservative because they tend to be consistent with conservative principles.
However, in my experience, it's not true that liberal journalists "believe in their hearts they have no bias." They know very well that they're biased, and they work very hard to overcome that bias. This was hammered into me over and over and over again through four years of journalism school -- be impartial, be impartial, be impartial. As a principle, that was promoted second only to reporting the objective truth. We were also taught there was a time and a place for advocacy journalism, but the understand was that if you were working for a typical newspaper or TV station, it was unacceptable not to call it down the line.
Now, nobody's perfect, and that's why you can find examples of liberal media bias -- sometimes it creeps in despite the reporter's best efforts, or sometimes they just forget to try that hard. But just as often, you can find journalists sacrificing the first principle (objective truth) for the second one (impartiality) in an attempt not to be perceived as biased. I hate to go back 12 years for this, but the best example I can think of is the run-up to the Iraq War. As a liberal, it was plainly clear to me that there were no weapons of mass destruction and that the war was unjustified. Far from being a conspiracy, the whole lie was laid bare out in the open for people who were paying attention: the call from the right even before Bush's election that we had to invade Iraq, the subsequent suggestions from neoconservative think tanks and in the conservative media that maybe hypothetical WMDs would provide a justification for a war that the public would buy, and finally the unveiling of that justification on a wide scale. The media saw this happen just as I did, and yet they felt compelled to bend over backwards to take the Bush administration at their word. As a result, the Iraq invasion won wide mainstream popularity before things turned sour after the 2004 election.
Though media of all sorts are occasionally going to be wrong and are going to display bias, the key difference between the mainstream media and partisan sources (both conservative and liberal) is that the partisan sources are not practicing journalism; they've already reached the conclusion and then need to select (and sometimes fabricate) evidence to prove it. Even if liberal journalists are predisposed to interpret events in a particular way, that's a huge substantive distinction.
Why do so many people wear their politics on their sleeve? Black and white, liberal vs conservative, find some red herring or a scapegoat as bait to pit them against each other. I consider this the very cause of the demise of this country. Both parties are extremely flawed and hypocritical. If one only tows the line 100% of one party's mantra only, then I don't think they are very critical thinkers and many of them tend to have a big blue or red chip on their shoulder. There is so much more to life.
You are greatly mistaken.
Conservatism is not a political party. It is a set of guiding beliefs. The late great William F. Buckley Jr. is considered the father of modern conservatism. Politically, he was not so much a Republican as a Libertarian. But even if all political parties vanished from the face of the earth, he still would have been a conservative.
Don't start an argument about politics -- we're talking about Arizona in the Arizona forum.
...I hate to go back 12 years for this, but the best example I can think of is the run-up to the Iraq War. As a liberal, it was plainly clear to me that there were no weapons of mass destruction and that the war was unjustified. Far from being a conspiracy, the whole lie was laid bare out in the open for people who were paying attention: the call from the right even before Bush's election that we had to invade Iraq, the subsequent suggestions from neoconservative think tanks and in the conservative media that maybe hypothetical WMDs would provide a justification for a war that the public would buy, and finally the unveiling of that justification on a wide scale. The media saw this happen just as I did, and yet they felt compelled to bend over backwards to take the Bush administration at their word. As a result, the Iraq invasion won wide mainstream popularity before things turned sour after the 2004 election......
"Plainly clear...there was no weapons of mass destruction...."? You should have shared this knowledge with other liberals such as John Kerry, Joe Biden and Hillary Clinton. They could have perhaps used your expertise. They, like others, were probably dependent on the best intelligence information available at the time. I think it is a mischaracterization to classify incomplete or mistaken intelligence information as a "lie" (it is, however, great political rhetoric). There is also some evidence we are seeing some of that suspected weaponry showing up now in Syria.
Reference to "things turning sour....", Iraq was seen as a somewhat stable situation (as Joe Biden bragged) at the end of the very successful troop surge in 2008, that is, until the precipitous withdrawal of U.S. forces with the lack of a status of forces agreement. The retreat ended in 2011....That's the year of "turning sour"!
However, in my experience, it's not true that liberal journalists "believe in their hearts they have no bias." They know very well that they're biased, and they work very hard to overcome that bias. This was hammered into me over and over and over again through four years of journalism school -- be impartial, be impartial, be impartial. As a principle, that was promoted second only to reporting the objective truth. We were also taught there was a time and a place for advocacy journalism, but the understand was that if you were working for a typical newspaper or TV station, it was unacceptable not to call it down the line.
The bias is far more subtle than that. The bias starts with what the news directors decide to cover and what is swept under the rug. Compare the coverage of the use of the IRS for political purposes in 1973 with the same in 2008. Both deserved front page coverage.
At this point, the horse is out of the barn. Most news sources have the same level of credibility as the politicians that they cover.
Over 30% of California voters are Republicans. Those "fleeing" are not very likely to be progressive Democrats who, believe me, have everything their way in the Golden State.
Anyone who assumes Californian = liberal isn't thinking this through.
The sentiments of this California expatriate are shared by many:
Well at least you are balanced , and I like that about your post , you tell of both the positive and negative strong points of our glorious State of California. All that I can do is wish you and your family the best in your move to greener pastures.
Ruin the state with liberal politics and are attracted to conservative states only to want to make it more liberal as soon as they arrive.
I keep running from these states after the liberal invasions. Left Washington, Oregon, Idaho after the California invasions and hope Arizona isn't next.
I hope so too. I mean, there aren't many states left to move to!
We can expect a lot of growth over the next 10 years
You start with 'Arizona is one of the top 5 states liberals are moving to', then change it to 'Taxpayers Fleeing Democrat-Run States for Republican Ones' when these are clearly two different things with two different implications. You're using a source called Americans for Tax Reform and we're revering what they are finding?
You should get out more. But I just love seeing right wing transplants complaining that left wing transplants are ruining 'their' state. Pot, meet kettle.
As violence rips this country apart I wonder how many will move to AZ so they can have a gun to defend themselves from the race haters and cop haters, every time I read the news in the morning it seems that along with the difficult financial situations that may cause people to move here there is also a side benefit of moving to a state that has no history of rioting in the streets?
I personally take great comfort in the fact I have guns to protect me and my family.
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