It seems a lot of people lately have been noticing a pattern of fundamental differences between liberal and conservative politics--that the conservative faction is far more often the one that, for example, cheats on polls and refuses interviews and debates, argues using fists, jams the Democratic "get out the vote" calls, harasses the opposition by eviscerating cats and hammering nails into tires, has hypocritical pundits, etc. Yet as individuals, certainly the conservatives I know are just as ethical as the liberals, so how does this imbalance emerge?
A few of us were talking about it in the bar Friday night while ingesting the usual epiphanogenic (merlot) and it came to us, it doesn't stem from ideology it stems from psychology, and ratchets, and discrimination or lack thereof. Conservatives seem to have, or need, certainty, absolutes--they're not the ones driving around town sporting the "I could be wrong" bumperstickers, they tend to expound rather than query. This is correlated with a tendency to see things in black and white--either you're with us or you're against us, either you're good or you're evil--there's no desire to see or weigh shades of gray. (For ex. I've been told by a (conservative) coworker that I have no business expressing the belief that driving an SUV is more harmful to the environment, because I also harm the environment by driving, period--in other words only those who are 100% pure should make judgements, everyone else shouldn't). Given that politics by its nature does not reward candid behavior, a certain amount of deception is inevitable, which leads black-and-whiters to say "all politicians are sleazy" and newspaper editorials to say "both sides are equally to blame". And if you can't/won't make distinctions, you won't be turned off by additional sleazy behavior on your side, so there's no force acting to restrain the flowering of sleaze in your faction.
I do not know how we could go about improving this situation--perhaps more merlot next week will reveal the solution...
(disclaimer: this is obviously a generalization, will not apply in all instances. "pattern" and "generalization" seem to be synonymous...)
No comments:
Post a Comment
Welcome, and thanks for caring enough to donate your time and thoughts toward greater collective wisdom...
Terms of engagement:
* Please be civil.
* * * * Please do not post anonymously * * * (I'd remove this choice if I could, and I may remove your comment if you do) - instead, do this:
Click on the 'Name/URL' radiobutton, then enter your real name (if you're brave) or a pseudonym (if you're not). (You can leave the "URL" field blank.)
Or go ahead and click "Anonymous", but put your name in your comment.
* The Management reserves the right to delete comments (Moderation Certificate can be found here). You can always post it on a blog of your own.
If you run into technical difficulties, please a) accept my apologies, then b) email your comment to aherror2011 at gmail.com with "Comment for [name of this blog]" in the Subject line.
New policy re climate contrarianism comments as of 11/11/2009:
Comments questioning the climate science community's understanding of climate change (97% of active climatologists now believe that the earth is currently warming and that it's human-caused - link) will be deleted unless the commenter:
a) is local
b) uses his real name
c) provides link(s) to substantiate his claim(s)/inference(s)
d) is willing to collaborate on constructing an argument tree, to get us past the usual sterile point-counterpoint-countercounterpoint.
(For people who can't read the above, a summary:
1) Be civil;
2) Don't post w/o giving at least a pseudonym;
3) Don't espouse climate-denial crankery unless you're local and willing to stand behind it.)
Caveats:
1. Comments could be delayed: they are being moderated, and I'm sometimes away from the computer for a day or more.
2. : Perfectly legitimate comments are sometimes miscategorized (by the blogging platform) as spam, & not published. If this happens to yours, please notify me, else I might not notice for a day or two.