Unbiased Title About Conservatives

[sub]

Three things.

- If you go with the statistic that 90 percent of Americans believe in a god, then the vast majority of liberals are religious people.
- Just because someone is conservative doesn't mean their religious. Case and point, my father hates religion, is a republican / conservative.
- Considering these two points, I'm going to go ahead and say that this thread has nothing to do with religion.

If you'd like to debate anything about religion, I'd love to do that in a thread made for that purpose, but this isn't it.

 

[J-Dude]

Atheists don't convert people. Life does.

Mmm hmm.

Paul Giamatti: "Guns don't kill people; but they sure help... ^_^"

 

[sub]

This thread has nothing to do with religion. If you'd like to discuss how evil atheists are, by all means, make a thread about it, but this isn't the place.

 

[Deman]

Yes, cut the religion angle please.

 

[L]

Yes, cut the zealotry angle please.

Fixed.

I'm not into politics, but R. Paul was a libertarian, where are libertarians in all this?
I'm not sure what exactly "Left wing" or "Right wings" are but to me it seems "Left wing" views are more to my liking.

 

[Zeonix]

The fault is on you, Zeo, for posting the biased article before the study. You might want to rearrange that in the first post, or remove the biased piece altogether.

On the other hand I find J-dude to be doing more trolling than critiquing in this thread so far. Liberal media bias from the huffington post does not represent liberal media bias from media at large. Furthermore if you review the Ted conference that Sub posted it has some explanations for why religion and authoritarian belief systems are so fundamental to conservatives and are not as important to liberals.

Edit: I've been reminded that the huffington post is the huffington post, so here's the washington post link

I attempted to thwart attempts to throw the baby out with the bathwater by posting the original article which covers the study. It seems J-Dude has chosen to completely ignore the original article in favor of arguing about sheer nonsense and for that I can not be blamed. I'll admit that I should have gotten rid of the article I found altogether when I was reminded that the huffington post is frowned upon by people of opposing views, so I'll take responsibility for that.

As to the whole notion of conservatism being considered "fear of change", for me at least this isn't especially true. I like change, when it's taken in steady moderation, holds significant improvement to my, or others lives. Basically the kind of change I like is, to put it into computer terms an "update", an improvement to an already existing thing, or else a radical new way to do an existing thing. Not than I'm not open to new ideas, as long as they make sense to me.

*** marriage benefits homosexuals greatly, and doesn't affect you in the least. So tell me, why are you opposed to progress, especially when it comes to giving people equal treatment, freedoms and liberty?

The kind of change I fear and care about wanting to stop is the type that makes religious farts like myself look like the dumbest beasts ever to walk the Earth. I outright oppose the and want to stop the trend that makes religious people who've never done anything wrong look like they're somehow societal leeches, mainly because said religious farts don't like changes that we feel are morally bankrupt, particularly where religious texts are concerned.

You're not fooling anyone. Religious people aren't being made to look a certain way based on their views. Religious extremists, specifically evangelicals and those who share similar beliefs, including muslim extremists, who believe they are entitled to hijacking the government to suppress the rights of others in order to maintain their world view is what makes people upset. I'm not seeing "liberals" go after Hindus (or Hindis; I forget), moderate Christians, moderate Muslims, Polytheists or anyone else, really.

I'll say this right now. I don't dislike all liberals. There are some liberal views that I think make sense. The main reason I consider myself conservative and Republican is mainly because I want to be on whatever side the majority of atheists aren't. And perhaps not the calm, "loss of faith" atheists who just mind their own business like civilized men ought to, but the hard core, no-better-than-any-RELIGIOUS-fundamentalist atheists who in an almost supervillain manner plot the total destruction of religion at any opportunity because they don't believe in consequences beyond death and therefore think our cautious nature is cramping their style-

Whatever side the atheists aren't? That's incredibly close-minded. I'm about as fond of the concept of atheism as I am of the type of religion you and others adhere to, but I'm not about to go out of my way and dismiss a ridiculous number of people just because they share the same opinions as someone else. I'm not going to dismiss all conservatives just because they and Nazis (Godwin's Law strikes again) share similar views.

Pardon me, I lost my train of thought a moment, but you get what I'm saying. I was properly terrified by the old 1930s novel "Brave New World", and while I can proudly say I don't think most religious people can be so easily converted by atheists, I still want us to do all in our power to keep us from changing "Lord" to the proverbial "Ford", so to speak. And Since there's an apparent division what with the media taking the atheist/liberal view and belittling us, I chose the side who is the butt of the abuse. That's why I'm a conservative republican. Do I fear change? It really depends on the change you're talking about, but really who isn't afraid of change? I can say with total certainty that a liberal will see eye to eye with a conservative on the issue of whether or not a petition to allow the collision of a 3 kilometer asteroid onto our country should be passed. The problem is, as I see it, said cataclysm is in plain sight for conservatives, and the liberals are looking wildly around saying "what asteroid?" while blindfolded and waltzing right into oncoming traffic.

You're making a point that you don't seem to realize you're making. I don't want people worshiping Ford anymore than you do, but it's important that you realize these people were the left equivalent of the right, which is equally scary. Moderates are, surprise, moderate, and so they aren't for either extreme.

The question shouldn't be "Who isn't afraid of change?". It should be "Who's afraid of progress?", and more often than not, it's the people you're affiliated with.

The asteroid crashed 8 years ago. Let the people who didn't think the asteroid was God's Final Judgment take over for a bit and fix up the nation.

 

[harSens]

And yet another case of newspapers misinterpreting research. Or worse, bad science:

This doesn't prove **** other than the already known backfire effect if you don't test the same with liberals too.

The paper is 'approaching publication' could mean anything from it still being written, awaiting peer reviews or accepted for publication in a journal. Even if it's accepted, for the credibility of such a paper it kinda matters where.. Seems kinda premature for a newspaper article to me.

You can of course come up with several other explanations to the bigger backfire effect other than conservatives being impossible to argue with with some creativity:
- Conservatives ruled the US for like 8 years. Anything important liberals could possibly feel strong about is long in the past.
- Liberals change their views on a whim
- Conservatives are more distrustful to experts
- Conservatives are typically old and therefor stubborn
- Etc etc

Edit:
Oh wait, they actually tested with liberals:

Nyhan and Reifler did not see the same "backfire effect" when liberals were given misinformation and a refutation about the Bush administration's stance on stem cell research.

Still, it's hard to compare because you can never provide the two groups with the same information to test the effect on. Doesn't invalidate my above explanations either.

 

[J-Dude]

I'm not opposed to human rights. The coming out of two seperate close friends of mine has culminated in my acceptance for the homosexual community, and I really no longer care if they marry or not. However liberal THOSE feelings there are, there are far more pressing matters. And what other human rights issues are you reffering to exactly? I thought homosexuality was the only one...If there are others, I'm not aware of them. I've never taken offense to anyone of a different ethnicity. Hell, even back when I was in 8th grade, right after 9/11 I knew enough not to persecute all Muslims purely based off of what a few freakos had done.

 

[Zeonix]

I'm not opposed to human rights. The coming out of two seperate close friends of mine has culminated in my acceptance for the homosexual community, and I really no longer care if they marry or not. However liberal THOSE feelings there are, there are far more pressing matters. And what other human rights issues are you reffering to exactly? I thought homosexuality was the only one...If there are others, I'm not aware of them. I've never taken offense to anyone of a different ethnicity. Hell, even back when I was in 8th grade, right after 9/11 I knew enough not to persecute all Muslims purely based off of what a few freakos had done.

The right to choose is also a human rights issue, as women are, in fact, human.

I find it strange that you can only accept a thing once you're personally affected by it. I would have thought someone like yourself would have been able to empathize from the get-go, what with there being so many quotes within your holy text asking for tolerance.

@ Harsens: The Bush administration is still in power, and our little economic problem has had far reaching consequences. I wouldn't be so hasty to relegate our present day troubles to the past.

I'm not sure where you got "Liberals change their views on a whim" from, but if you're arguing against generalizations based on "faulty science", I don't see why you'd resort to generalizations based on nothing at all.

Conservatives got both pieces of information from "the experts", so I'm not sure why they'd buy the first piece of information, but when presented with new, verified, information, they'd turn it away and cling to the faulty outdated intel.

 

[J-Dude]

If you're talking about abortion, after giving some thought, I find I'm more opposed to the aborting of a fetus beyond the first trimester than a microscopic cluster of cells. Though I'd much prefer it hapenned as far from "labor day" as possible.

Really, you must understand I'd never even heard of homosexuality until I was in Junior High. It's difficult to understand something so foreign and seemingly perverse. I'll admit mostly I found the idea rather frightening, and I just wanted them to go away. But once I have to make a choice between my friends and this fear, one must go, and the one certainly won't be my friends.

 

[Zeonix]

If you're talking about abortion, after giving some thought, I find I'm more opposed to the aborting of a fetus beyond the first trimester than a microscopic cluster of cells. Though I'd much prefer it hapenned as far from "labor day" as possible.

Really, you must understand I'd never even heard of homosexuality until I was in Junior High. It's difficult to understand something so foreign and seemingly perverse. I'll admit mostly I found the idea rather frightening, and I just wanted them to go away. But once I have to make a choice between my friends and this fear, one must go, and the one certainly won't be my friends.

See, that's completely reasonable. Liberals don't want people to have abortions, and they'd rather people practiced safe sex and avoid the whole situation in the first place, but they also recognize that sometimes bad things happen, and sometimes accidents happen. I'm absolutely for a victim of rape or incest getting an abortion. Not to turn this into a political argument, but someone like Palin is against abortion regardless of the circumstances and regardless of whether or not the parent will be able to properly care for their child or whether or not the child will be placed in "a home". It's that kind of mentality that upsets both moderates and liberals, and when the vocal minority makes it seem like they represent the majority, it affects how people view them. This is true for all groups, really. It's up to the non-extremists to step up and say, "Uh...yeah, we're not crazy."

I'm not sure why it took you that long to come across homosexuality, but I'm happy to hear now that you've seen it and experienced it first hand, and you know they aren't deviants or evil, you can accept them for who they are, rather than believing you're simply being tolerant of them but they're still going to hell (I'm hoping I haven't jumped the gun with this one).

Good for you, J-Dude.

 

[harSens]

I'm not sure where you got "Liberals change their views on a whim" from, but if you're arguing against generalizations based on "faulty science", I don't see why you'd resort to generalizations based on nothing at all.

I was merely showing some other faulty generalizations you could reach from the same data.

 

[Zeonix]

I was merely showing some other faulty generalizations you could reach from the same data.

But, you know, they didn't .

 

[harSens]

No, but even if you prove that conservatives are more prone to the backfire effect, there are other explanations than that 'they have more rigid views'.

I'm very hesitant to even accept the 'being more prone to the backfire effect', because it's very hard to set up such an experiment and compare the groups:
- You need different questions and data for both groups
- You need a representative group of both conservatists and liberals
- You need to present the groups the data in a way that not influences their judgment. (what could potentially go wrong here is that the older conservatives do not want to be swayed from their views by young democratic researchers handing them data)
- You somehow need to insure that both groups know that the data that is given to them is reliable (they are in an experiment, so they might get the idea that they're being manipulated and react to that).
It's unpublished work, so I can't make sure if the research took all that into consideration.

I wonder what the motivation behind such a research is, other than to point and laugh. If the backfire effect is something you want to prevent, it might be more useful to measure how it relates to things like education.

The Bush administration is still in power, and our little economic problem has had far reaching consequences. I wouldn't be so hasty to relegate our present day troubles to the past.

I guess I used the wrong tense there. What I meant to say is that conservative misinformation in the last 8 years had a far greater effect than liberal misinformation, simply because they were in power. Because the effect of the misinformation was greater and it was more recent, conservationist might simply care more, and stick more to their ideas. The same research after 8 years of liberals in power might show the opposite effect (as in, liberals are more prone to the backfire effect). But that all boils down to my point above on selecting the right questions.

Edit:
The actual article can be found here: http://www.duke.edu/~bjn3/nyhan-reifler.pdf. As I already expected, the authors are way more careful with their claims:

"We also document several instances of a “backfire” effect in
which corrections actually increase misperceptions among the group in question."

I skimmed through the research methodology. The test subjects they used were 130 undergraduates from one Catholic university in the Midwest. I don't think that's a representative set of test subjects. You cannot generalize from there to all undergraduates, let alone all US citizens (where roughly 50% of the population is republican rather than the 25% reported in that university).

It couldn't find how they reported political preference. If it's self-report, some of the conservatives who were already let down by 8 years of republican reign or those with a more open mind might have switched camps. There were only 3 questions. As far as I could find, no effort was made to figure out how important these issues were to the subjects.