Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
However, I agree with the OP'S premise. Just look at the political affiliation of the climate change deniers vs all of the science that backs it.
Conservatives are more "emotionally motivated" by far. They are against things such as abortion and welfare "on principle," even though almost all studies show that these things reduce crime which is something that both parties should care about.
All studies also show that the death penalty does not deter crime, yet the right still feels that certain people should be dead.
The emotion of "paranoia" is also high on the right. Conservatives often express that liberals are "coming for their guns" and 'freedoms," when in reality, it's a very small number of liberals who really care strongly about guns either way.
Conservatives aren't denying climate change, the senate admitted climate change is real in the keystone pipeline XL senate bill 1.
That so called "paranoia" is called reality! The unemployment numbers are an absolute lie according to dailyjobcuts.com Hey the stock market is doing well, so everything else is! That is what left wing media says. The fed is dumping money into the stock markets keeping it propped up. The stock market doesn't reflect how well anything is doing, because it is not a reality based stock market until the fed stops throwing money in to it.
The very example you used is emotional on the right wing side more so than Liberals.
No, it isn't. There is no emotion involved in reading what the 2nd amendment says. It is written in plain English.
What is emotion driven is your left wing misrepresentation of gun stats. People such as yourself take statistics about gun deaths that involve no violence and then use them to drum up support from people by playing on their fear for their safety. That is the very definition of using emotion rather than fact.
Quote:
Less guns equate to less gun deaths, thats a fact, not an emotional opinion.
Since there is no evidence proving this to be the case, it absolutely is an opinion. The way gun control liars attempt to prove their case is by doing things like including suicide deaths and accidents as "gun violence." As for gun control laws making people safer living their lives, there is no evidence showing this to be the case and never has been. You dishonestly lump all gun deaths together into one category to fearmonger people into supporting your policies by implying that these "gun deaths" are criminal violence rather than accidents and suicides.
Quote:
But arguing that you have a right to guns is an opinion, mind you that most people agree with it, but its still an opinion.
Arguing that you have a right to guns is not an opinion. It is stated unequivocally in the bill of rights that the government shall not restrict the people from bearing arms. That's not an opinion. It is a fact.
In terms of the foundations of writing, thought, and theory each faction we're discussing here has, this is far and away the best piece I've found, perhaps because it's just about the only good piece that even asks the question "why don't liberals have a movement culture with a canon of writers and thinkers?" .
I believe the reason, as this blog post from a Randian perspective suggests, is the intellectual-philosophical foundations of left-liberalism are currently quite weak and have been for a while now, and any ideology that doesn't have a solid theoretical foundation will not succeed in the long run. Most voters may not be into theory but they can tell the difference between a faction that makes sense and know what they're doing and a faction that doesn't. Marxism-Leninism's foundation weakened and it went extinct; sure, we still have a taste for state power and hatred of markets in some quarters, and while that is a hazard to the future it doesn't make for a viable political philosophy long-term. Notice that we had many suggesting the system be replaced by central planning that will provide prosperity for all in the 1930's and even in the 1970's but not in the 2010's.
This is an unusual approach. But I think any respectable "canon of writers and thinkers" leans more left than right.
Examples?
Contemporary thought:
Baptist: The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism
Piketty: Capital in the Twenty-First Century
Diamond: Guns, Germs, and Steel
Duras: L'Amant
Pollan: The Omnivore's Dilemma
Derrida: Of Grammatology
Breillat: Sex is Comedy
Foucault: Madness and Civilization
Bolano: 2666
Buzan: People, States, and Fear
Booth: Theory of World Security
Annan: We the Peoples
Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom
Quote:
Originally Posted by hoffdano
Do you have credible data to show fewer people have guns today?
What logic did I try to promote? All I said was that there is no data to show that fewer guns equals fewer deaths by guns.
Per capita gun ownership is clearly up. Per capita homicides and per capita gun deaths are down.
This is a failure of "empiricism." Remember the age-old fallacy that correlation does not equal causation. Even more fundamentally, note that the data set here is too incomplete to draw any conclusions and the experimental method is fundamentally unsound (e.g., there is no attempt to control for other factors). In effect, this logic is like having a blind man untrained in sailing attempt to navigate a sailboat and therefrom drawing conclusions about the ability of humans to traverse the Atlantic Ocean by sailboat.
It's actually more crazy than that, because the article to which you linked quite clearly states, in heading number 1, "We don't know the percentage of Americans who live in a house with a gun."
And then it has a chart using two different estimation methods, both of which actually show large declines in per capita gun ownership starting in the mid-1990s. In other words, showing the exact opposite of your claim that "per capita gun ownership is clearly up."
And then there is the concluding sentence: "The percentage of Americans who live in a household with a gun is probably near its lowest level in decades since the mid-1980s, but that rate has not dropped in the past 15 years."
Quote:
Originally Posted by kidkaos2
I think you're completely wrong. It is liberalism that is based on emotions and rhetoric rather than reality, not conservatism.
It's liberals who insist there is a gender wage gap when the BLS studies that show the gap say it is from seniority, travel, hours worked, etc and not from gender discrimination.
It's liberals who continually support government stimulus as a means of getting out of economic hard times, despite history showing that method has never worked.
It's liberals who insisted that single motherhood was noble and heroic, when the absence of a father has been shown to be the single largest factor in teenage pregnancy, drug abuse, school dropout, delinquency, etc.
It's liberals who blame racism for the problems in the black community, when history shows the problems in the black community have actually gotten worse since the passage of Civil Rights than they were before.
It's liberals who continually push gun control when none of the gun control laws that have been enacted have ever been shown to reduce gun violence.
It's liberals who insist that the rich should pay higher tax rates to pay their "fair share", when the laffner curve demonstrates that higher tax rates on the wealthy actually result in less government revenue being collected.
It's liberals who promote labor unions as being great for the working class, when the standard of living in right to work states is actually no worse than that in union states.
It's liberals who claim there is no bias in the media or education, when as many as 80% of educators are registered Democrats and comparisons of media coverage of Democrat versus Republican politicians have shown conclusively that Democrats get far more and far more positive coverage.
It's liberals who support amnesty and immigration reform as being healthy for the nation, when the CBO itself reported that illegal immigration has resulted in a significantly higher unemployment rate amongst the nation's poor.
It's liberals who rail against the rich exploiting the poor resulting in people not getting a living wage, which directly contradicts the law of supply and demand which shows that a business must pay a wage the market will bear or else they will not be able to attract competent employees.
It's liberals who continually want to "invest" in education, when the results of all past increases in education spending have ended up with American students getting worse test results, not better.
It's liberals who push and push for increased social spending, when the results of their great "War on Poverty" over the past few decades have not resulted in any drop in the poverty rate whatsoever.
It's liberals who refuse to allow school voucher programs to pass, when the trial runs of voucher programs have only shown positive results.
It's liberals who claim that voter ID laws are a racist attempt to disenfranchise minorities, when the actual reality is that states that have voter ID laws do not have any less minority turnout than states that don't.
It's liberals who advance the idea that welfare doesn't promote government dependency, when social workers have shown that multigenerational poverty is a significant problems and that they have trouble with children in homes where the parents are on government assistance and do not instill study habits or value for education in those children.
So I'm afraid that your assertion that liberals place value in empirical results does not stand up to scrutiny. Liberalism is based on theory, not empirical results. The empirical results are that their policies have been failures with no reduction in poverty rates, no increase in children's educational results, no discernable proof of any of the "rampant racism" that supposedly exists, etc. Yet they continue to push the same policies year after year and election after election.
Liberalism is about doing things that feel good. It feels good to increase funding for schools. It feels good to help the disadvantaged. It feels good to be against racism. But the real world results? Failure. So I'm afraid your observation about the value liberals place on empirical results is wrong.
This is exactly the kind of fallacious appeal to emotion without empirical support that you claim is the province of liberals. It's also chock-full of other fallacies.
rubbish pure and simple. we conservatives want REAL science, and REAL facts, and REAL evididence, not the crap that some come up with after they have doctored the information.
Unless you disagree with the conclusions, then it's obviously a liberal hoax.
I would say its liberals who are very theory-based, focusing on solutions that would be great in a perfect world but don't necessarily work in our world (gun control comes to mind). Conservatives base their viewpoints on tradition and religious faith with little regard for practicality and cultural change.
Something a professor told me in college sticks in my mind. Polls are slants to get results to back the opinion of the person or group who is doing the poll. The only poll that is fair is a election.. Well most are fair.. But do not trust a poll ever! See who did the poll and what they were looking to get out of the poll. It usually only takes a few seconds to figure it out.
Conservatives think with thier mind. Thats why liberals think conservatives are mean and why conservatives think liberals are dumb. But conservatives usually keep that thought to themselves while liberals speak it out before thinking about what they just said.
When I went to school, admittedly long ago, it was always my observation that people in numeric-oriented fields, whether engineering, economics, finance, or computers, tended to be conservative, while those in word and image-oriented fields, whether languages, arts, or history, tended to be liberal. Obviously it's not 100%, but it was a trend. I never ran into a Marxist in the economics department, but they were all over the history and English departments.
Please register to post and access all features of our very popular forum. It is free and quick. Over $68,000 in prizes has already been given out to active posters on our forum. Additional giveaways are planned.
Detailed information about all U.S. cities, counties, and zip codes on our site: City-data.com.
Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
.