Forsyth county ranked second most conservative county in US (Decatur: apartments, best school)

[netdragon]

Originally Posted by Bullbear

Are you serious with this comment? Because it makes you sound pretty much like a crazy person.

You forget I'm from CT, where S&B are from. Do you know anything about S&B? I walked in front of "the tomb" heading to the Yale stacks to do some research and snapped a photo even though you're not supposed to. Therefore, I know it's there. It's not what it's hyped up to be, but it is definately an old man gentleman's club with an awful lot of power, especially up until recently. Did you know that both Bush and Kerry were both S&B?

I'm not a conspiracy theorist because none of these groups have absolute control and they compete with each other. For instance, lobbyists and unions are another set of groups that have a lot of power. To ignore the fact that there are certain people who dominate things is absurd. In fact, I vaguely remember you mentioning lobbyists before.

Originally Posted by Bullbear

This is frankly absurd. TRUE conservatives, like our founding fathers, believed in freedom of religion. What /wethey dont believe in is religions that try and impose their value systems on others - ala religious extremists of any and all varieties.

I can't believe you are calling our founding fathers conservatives. They were a mix. Jefferson wasn't the only founding father and even all his views weren't conservative. For instance, Jefferson wouldn't have agreed with large corporate interests in the way conservatives do.

Originally Posted by Bullbear

Tell that to the millions of indians and chinese who have used out-sourcing to crawl up from desperate poverty. Or the average american whose standard of living has risen year after year after year.

If only it were for that reason. Instead it is to take advantage of a 3rd world country just to bail and move onto the next one when their standard of living gets too high. If there isn't a good place to move to, the CIA and IMF created one by destabilizing a country further. Look at what was done by private interests to Jamaica when they tried to create a banana and milk industry from IMF money. Then lobbyists for corporate interests shut off favorable trade they had with US and UK, which knocked Jamaica back to sustenance farming. Then Fruit of the Loom took advantage to create a sweat shop for cheap labor which was then shut down and moved to Mexico when salaries got too high. So Jamaica is really much worse off from our corporate involvement with them.

Now with China and India becoming powerhouse economies, I bet they are looking for the next place. However, what's quite ironic is now European nations are looking to us as cheap labor.

Originally Posted by Bullbear

A "few" others"? Perhaps you could name them??

Thomas J. Donahue and David Brier.

Originally Posted by Bullbear

You sound like a young person. I bet your views will moderate over time.

I'm slightly younger than Gen-Xers. Generation Y is known to have more liberal views. In my opinion, what will happen is instead of our views becoming more moderate, those older people who are holding us back will eventually retire from positions of leadership.

[Tdiddy0027]

so, hey, let's get back to Forsyth County

[Craziaskowboi]

Originally Posted by RoslynHolcomb

The "self-made" man/woman is largely a thing of the past. Overwhelmingly people who have money now have it because they inherited it. Not from the so-called rugged individualism and hard work.

BW Online | December 1, 2003 | Commentary: Waking Up From The American Dream

Ironically, many of those people tend to be liberal.

[Bullbear]

'Are you familiar with the phrase "correlation does not necessarily imply causation"? Its a good one and should be applied more often than it is.'

Originally Posted by netdragon

Silly. I can address this if you want but will just leave it with some colloquialisms lack logic.

Er, the phrase above is not a colloquialism. Its a valid statement about the nature of all statistical work. In fact, it is an extremely logical statement, as opposed to....

"The opposite belief, correlation proves causation, is a logical fallacy by which two events that occur together are claimed to have a cause-and-effect relationship. The fallacy is also known as *** hoc ergo propter hoc (Latin for "with this, therefore because of this") and false cause. By contrast, the fallacy post hoc ergo propter hoc requires that one event occur before the other and so may be considered a type of *** hoc." (from Wikipedia)

[bugaboo72]

Originally Posted by Tdiddy0027

so, hey, let's get back to Forsyth County

I agree!...and when/if this county get's to liberal for me, say in the next 10 to 15 years, it will be time to move up to the next county....Dawson. Rinse and repeat. The chase continues...

[netdragon]

Originally Posted by Bullbear

Er, the phrase above is not a colloquialism. Its a valid statement about the nature of all statistical work. In fact, it is an extremely logical statement, as opposed to....

I was referring to ""Show me a young conservative and I'll show you someone with no heart. Show me an old liberal and I'll show you someone with no brains." and got lazy and left the other one in there.

The first statement is just common sense and I don't know why you included it since it only weakened your arguments by being unnecessary. I don't see where I was implying any causality, and I think you may have just been trying to appear intelligent by including philosophical logic and threw in a little latin for good measure. I mean, sheesh, couldn't you have just said just because you see a correlation doesn't mean that it is the urban environment that creates wealth? Can you provide the full logic statements, in predicate/conclusion form? What you may not realize is that you made light use of philisophical logic which you may not attribute as such, however I could replace some of your statements with implications and Frege/Pierce style quantifiers (an improvement upon aristotlean logic). This could actually be a segway into a much larger argument about causality in general, which opens up a whole pandora's box of ontological discussions... Reductionism, holism, emergentism, downward causation... Or my personal favorite - where there are many layers, but none cause the others. So now you may see where I'm going -- I don't believe in causation from an absolute ontological perspective, period. Yes, in our every day lives we experience what appears to be causality. The old, "if Jon kills Mike, are you saying he didn't cause the death?" However, that ignores the revised Everett interpretation of Q.M. which argues that in another universe, a different association happens. A correlation, then, does not exist in the absolute sense in that case. If you followed the Copenhagen interpretation, then you would say that the "observer" collapsed a waveform and made it so. However, we all know that prior to that observation, all potentials existed with varying probabilities within this waveform, unequally expressed for that matter. So are we perpetually traveling from a completely indeterminate state to a more and more concretely defined reality to the point that all waveforms are collapsed into determinate states? I find that hard to believe for various reasons I won't go into for the sake of brevity. No, I like the revised Everrett interpretation more. In my perspective, there are at the absolute level only layers and groupings and loose associations made between them. To illustrate: a billiard ball hits another and appears to cause that billiard ball to move. What about in an alternate universe identical in every way but where time travels backwards from our perspective? Is the cause then reversed, or is it just a re-association? I would probably have had many arguments with Einstein since he believed in causality in a time when it was not conventional thinking to do so. However, it wouldn't be the first time Einstein was wrong since he believed in the hidden-variables interpretation of quantum mechanics when in fact it has been shown by the solution to the Bell Inequality that the hidden variables interpretation is not a possible explanation of the double-slit and other similar experiments. I wouldn't be alone. There was a time in recent history, pre-Einstein, when the concept of causality was very unpopular. Now science just ignores it and focuses on calculation and experimentation and leaves that line of thinking up to the philosophers (at least for now, until the omnecient universal consciousness is shown to exist scientifically within the next twenty or so years). Anyway, so to go back to what you were saying: I'll take your "correlation does not imply causation" and raise it a "causation does not exist, period." Why did I make you read this? It's really just taking adding unnecessary cruft to the ultimate extreme. So I apologize if you believe I wasted your time. I thought it was necessary since you did the same. And thus ends the argument about what conservatives are. Perhaps not Q.E.D (by the way, is "quod erat demonstrandum", which is latin for "that which was to be demonstrated") since I'm really just escalating that part of the discussion to the point of all ridiculousness and ending a discussion. The only intelligent response to what I just said above would be sarcasm, however since I already hinted about that, it'd be prudent to choose something else... Perhaps "I apologize for wasting your time on that one". Or perhaps just return the thread to the original discussion.

I think the OP was talking about Forsyth county...

[RainyRainyDay]

Originally Posted by netdragon

This could actually be a segway into a much larger argument about causality in general, which opens up a whole pandora's box of ontological discussions... Reductionism, holism, emergentism, downward causation...

The Segway is a personal transportation device, the name of which was likely devised as a clever homophone of segue, a smooth transition between topics.

Very erudite argument, otherwise.

[Bullbear]

Originally Posted by netdragon

I ...got lazy .

blah blah blah blah.

I think the OP was talking about Forsyth county...

You seem to have a great deal of time on your hands.

[GALiberal]

Originally Posted by Gnutella

Ironically, many of those people tend to be liberal.

Probably because they have experienced poverty and understand the "struggle" (for lack of a better word).

When I hear some conservative viewpoints..I often wonder if said person has ever stepped foot out of suburbia.

[wxjay]

Originally Posted by GALiberal

When I hear some conservative viewpoints..I often wonder if said person has ever stepped foot out of suburbia.

Funny, that's similar to how I feel about the under 30 crowd (particularly college students) when they go around spouting off liberal economic talking points and standing up for them and yet have never had a family or held a job or had to worry about income coming in and out of their pocket.

I am not saying that I agree with all conservative viewpoints, but this is a two-sided coin.