This will catch hell...(from both sides)

[Moneyguy1]

Man, trying to stay in the middle of the road can be hazardous to your health...Traffic comes in both directions!!

From reading the posts on both sides, it occured to me that the so called "liberal left" tends to question power and leadership while those on the "conservative right" are more likely to believe what they are told more often. Both tend to get emotional about their positions, but the extreme right seems to be more likely (and successful) in using that emotional approach in their arguments.

Of course, this BB is just a microcosm of the larger outside world, and probably members are a bit more "intellectual" than the general populace.

I do not ascribe that either is "better", both extremes are dangerous.

Is my observation wrong somehow?

Set me straight, guys....

"That light you see at the end of the tunnel is simply a semi approaching you at top speed, and there is no escape lane...."

[techweenie]

I've seen a couple of accusations of 'emotional posts', but damned if I can find many from the left.

At least not among those who've been around here for a while.

A couple of new guys seem to be getting very emotional, but maybe that'll taper off when they find cyberspace to be sufficiently large to contain both their egos.

[nostatic]

living in a black and white world is much easier. Shades of gray make people's brain hurt...

[Moneyguy1]

You're right...

OUCH!!!!

[CarreraS2]

Originally posted by Moneyguy1


From reading the posts on both sides, it occured to me that the so called "liberal left" tends to question power and leadership while those on the "conservative right" are more likely to believe what they are told more often.

I think that only is true when there is a Repub president.

When there is a Dem president, it is flipped the opposite way.

[singpilot]

Yep, agreed. Does the opposite work then?

If I go wacko instead of middle, my head will stop hurting? Will I start hearing voices then?

There are some pretty good arguments for going wacko. They are happy all the time, they have someone to talk to even after they have been banned from the ricer sites, AND their heads don't hurt.

They are absolutely sure who they are going to vote for AND no amount of political ads are going to sway them.


Hmmmm.

[nostatic]

I've got some meds that will make you start hearing voices. Or is it make you stop hearing voices? Hmm...let me try one of the yellow ones and get back to you on that...

[singpilot]

I have to go do a SFO round trip. I'll be back on Earth later tonight to check up on you guys.

[techweenie]

singpilot: "There are some pretty good arguments for going wacko. They are happy all the time, they have someone to talk to even after they have been banned from the ricer sites, AND their heads don't hurt."

LOL!

Plus, they will never care if their points are ignored or dicsounted, because their opponents are The Spawn of Satan.

[Yankee911]

Sometimes whacko serves a useful purpose.

[djmcmath]

(deadpan)
Eat flaming death, you disgusting open-minded scum. Policy decisions should be purely based on emotion and what my party tells me is true. I'm way too busy watching Rush/MM to be bothered to think for myself; that's why I pay the Repubs/Dems to think for me.
(/deadpan)

Yeah, I'm good with the middle. I read posts from both extremes and go "Holy cow, are those people serious?" I'm definitely right of center, but way left of a lot of what I read here. Especially that business about tossing gnomes in the dark. I definitely think that a European gnome tossed into a dark room (unladen, of course) will travel very close to the speed of the medium he's in, ie, the darkness. (shrug) Or at least that's what my voices tell me.


Dan

[araine901]

I agree. I am amazed by the venom on both sides. Peope who "hate" Clinton or Bush blow my mind. Personly I have issues with both of them. Do I care if Clinton drove the pink skin bus into tuna town with a porky intern? No. Should he have lied about it? No, IMHO he should have said shut your pie hole its my business. I also think the Bush adminitation needs to get the masses in Gitmo and undisclosed locations on trial or back under the rock they came from. I do have mixed emotions on this as a family member helped to run an "undisclosed location" here in the states which housed several hundred rounded up after 9/11 from all over the world. he assured me they belong there and I trust him, but get it over with.

I just wish politics was more like the way Clinton and Bush interacted when the Clinton Portaits were being unveiled at the White House. We all know they may disagree on policy but damn it treat each other with
respect.

There are a few on the board here like me who are issue driven not just party driven. That makes a bit more sense considering there will never, ever be a candidite that meets my needs and reqirements exactly, unless I run for office, but that will cause all kinds of problems becuase I might try to make an IQ test for getting a licnese becuase there are way to many stupid people on the road.

Tech: Thanks for the props on the other post about trying to be fair. My brother in law might disagree beucse he thinks I am a right wing wacko beucse I dont belive everything Micheal Moore says and I have an arsonal. I am going to have him read that becuase he wont belive it. LOL

[pwd72s]

A popular leftie bumpersticker:
A MIND IS LIKE A PARACHUTE
IT DOESN'T WORK CLOSED

So, an "open mind" is one full of air?

[techweenie]

araine: "Thanks for the props on the other post about trying to be fair. My brother in law might disagree beucse he thinks I am a right wing wacko beucse I dont belive everything Micheal Moore says and I have an arsonal. I am going to have him read that becuase he wont belive it. "

Well, don't tell him, but I don't consider Michael Moore a "journalist" and I don't believe everything he puts in his movies. And I'm a gun owner. Shhhhhhhh!

[Moneyguy1]

In a way, that was to be expected. Cheney aside (who is in a "class" all by himself), most people treat each other with civility when face to face.

George Carlin once had a routine where he explained that the dictance the individual is away from you is in inverse proportion to the rant you display, or the further away, the bigger the *********........

[djmcmath]

lol, that's pretty good.

Of course, a real leader doesn't badmouth anyone behind their back, no matter what the distance. I have yet to see someone that clean, but I'm holding out hope.

Dan

[singpilot]

Originally posted by araine901
Do I care if Clinton drove the pink skin bus into tuna town with a porky intern?

Ariane.......

That had me spraying an adult beverage at the end of the day!

[Overpaid Slacker]

Moneyguy -- A few observations/opinions on your statement that are not necessarily directly resulting from this board, but from political dialogue throughout my life:

"From reading the posts on both sides, it occured to me that the so called "liberal left" tends to question power and leadership while those on the "conservative right" are more likely to believe what they are told more often. Both tend to get emotional about their positions, but the extreme right seems to be more likely (and successful) in using that emotional approach in their arguments."

I believe the Left questions "power" and "leadership" when it's Republican, and more especially when conservative (and Bush is not a "good conservative" IMHO and the HO of many conservatives). The Left was remarkably forgiving of "power" and "leadership" during the Clinton Interregnum. Not that there was much of the latter to forgive.

What the Left doesn't question with nearly the scrutiny the Right does is *government*. This is a fundamental rift between the aisles -- the degree of governmental intervention, its scope, its review and its funding. Not that this is news.

As far as likely to believe what they're told... well, I don't believe that I am, but I'm not going to extrapolate my self-image to other conservatives. What I'll offer is the observation that there seem to be innumerable hokey sources of "information" out there on the Left and pandering to their prejudices and intolerance -- Michael Moore being the current Chief Apostle. The Left seems to be more given to innuendo than analysis; one-line "zingers" that conflate issues or elide over fact gaps to make what they consider to be a point.

Which gets me to the JPFundamental Theory of All Politics (tm). The Left tends to emphasize Truth; the Right tends to focus on Fact. Pleasepleaseplease pay special attention to "tends to" in the foregoing sentence. There are *****bags on both sides of the aisle that will lie and cheat and kick puppies, but where the Truths and the Facts collide are where many of the political battles are fought and it's usually the Left in the Truth mantle and the Right in the Fact trunks.

For example, if for the purposes of this paragraph we can agree that Welfare is not just a scheme to buy votes and keep people perpetually dependent upon the State, you have a Truth behind the policy: The government, through redistribution policies should give some of the wealthy's money to the poor to help them. OK, that's not abhorrent to all but the most draconian conservatives. But Welfare as administered had its issues, which is where the Facts became inconvenient to the Truth: the Welfare system was not merely perpetuating itself but propagating and metastasizing, was fraught with waste and not a little corruption; not surprising given that the gov't was running it. We've now had welfare reform (thank God) but the debates for a decade and during the reform were very instructive. I paraphrase:

Truth: If we stop giving the poor money, we'll hurt them.
Fact: The manner in which we're giving it to them is hurting them, encouraging them not to work and to have more children who then go on the dole.
Truth: Well, then we don't need to give less, we need to give more money, to realize greater benefits.
Fact: We lose more than 50% of the budget to administrative expenses; more money won't make it through the mill to the poor.
Truth: This country was founded on the principles of taking care of the common man, the Statue of Liberty says "Give me your meek..." etc. We have an obligation to our citizens.
Fact: Fine, but not at such terrible expense to everyone else. Give me a system that is actually effective first, and efficient second, and we'll talk about funding it...
Etc. I probably didn't do the Truth crew justice there, but I tried to put forward legitimate points from a position I'm not particularly sympathetic towards.

There are other examples of this, and there may be better nomenclature, but Truth (in a philosophical, almost theoretical purity sense) and Fact (in the nitty-gritty rubber-meets-the-road sense) are the terms that struck me years ago.

As far as emotion, OK both sides can rant, but the Left has got a dead solid lock on hyperbole, hysteria and vapid propagandizing. The BUSH LIED!!!! crew and their convenient, almost Soviet, revisions of what Bush (or Wolfie or Cheney...) "said" and the maelstroms resulting -- c'mon, it's off the reservation. The "No Blood For Oil" silliness, exceeded only by "Bush=Nazi" deep thinkers is the coin of the Realm for the Lefties' "positions". The hard Left is insanely intolerant, escalating even ordinary course disagreements into unhinged paroxysms of bile and rage. There is a reason for Howard Dean's Angry Man shpiel, and for Gore's absolutely lunatic behavior lately (and I'll assume it's not b/c he's off his meds) -- it's what "sells" to much of the Left.

Having escalated current political "dialogue" into such stratospheric heights, honestly, what MORE could the Left say if Bush abolished Congress, shot the SCOTUS and invaded Argentina for its oil? He's already *that* bad according to the irrational, emtional fumings of the Left.

In my experience, the Right (by and large... we do have our odd Aunts in the attic) doesn't get emotional per se, but gets very very intense -- and the best of them do it in an dispassionate, devastating manner. Think: Scalia dissent. The *response* to that is frequently a visceral, emotional reaction, but the archetypal presentation is fact-as-first-principle driven.

JP

[Superman]

I'm buying some of that but not all of it. I'd assert, for instance, that it is possibly the Right that gloms onto a "truth" while the left focuses on fact. I notice that the Right seems to be leaning, these days, on stuff like messages from God and applying moral "truths" into statutes. But, I accept your assertions too, since these 'label' exercises often help us to dissect and understand stuff better.

I'd also like to make another point. I was a government worker once, and I still am serving a public agency, albeit for a private employer. I do believe in government, and call bull**** on anyone who says they do not. Everyone I know drinks water and uses roads. And a myriad of other services you all benefit from. The degree to which government impacts, and protects, and benefits your lives is astonishing and here's another thing....you cannot avoid it. Government is here to stay, and we must rely on it for some very important stuff. There is plenty of stuff that private business has NO business doing, cannot do and will never do, and could never to as well as a public agency. Someone's going to challenge me on this, so let's just throw out antitrust and other regulations that directly regulate business behavior. If you suggest we use private businesses to do this, you are a KOOK. And a naive and/or indoctrinated one to boot.

Okay, the thing I want to report here that is a view from the inside (inside goverment, inside liberal thinking), is some of the reason why liberals seem to blindly support government. You see, we know government is not perfect. We know humans make mistakes. We know that organizations take on a life of their own and spin out of control. We know about the shortfalls of government. But we vigorously protect her, sometimes refusing to discuss the administrative problems still to be solved. The reason? It's partly because when government comes under attack from the Right (this is the case constantly, particularly in the budget cycle since opposing a law or suggesting its repeal can and will get you booted from office but starving the office for funding works just as well and is less visible), the Right is not trying to make it work better. If the Right can eliminate a law or an office, it will. But it usually cannot. So it has to settle for a strategy of making that office run very poorly. If this goes on long enough, then that office will be ripe for elimination.

I've seen this happen many many many many many many many times. The republicans are seen my us liberals as anarchists. And they are very good at it. And government mandates and administrative tools are like freedoms and liberties. They are put in place through valiant effort, but it takes just a little mistake to eliminate them. You don't get them back. So, when the Right politicians come calling to a government office, they're not trying to make things better. Indeed, knowing that they cannot simply repeal a law, or eliminate an office (without serious voter backlash), their goal coming into an issue is to make the office ineffective. Usually by decreasing the resources (funding) that the office gets, or increasing the activities it is required to pursue. For example the conservative legislative committee will hear a horror story, and hold a hearing to ask the agency. It will feign surprize and indignation at some of what it hears. Then it will pass a new law mandating that the agency follow the following ADDITIONAL steps to ensure the horror story does not repeat. Nevermind that the agency has already eliminated that possiblity through simpler and less expensive means.

Okay, so now the workload of the agency has increased. The next step for those conservative legislators is to further vent their anger at the agency by cutting funding.

So no. There is no honest, respectful, cooperative dialogue across the "aisle" frequently. The liberals are not willing to come to that table. Because the liberals would assume it is a meal table, but in reality it is a guillotine table with sympathetic-looking executioners. That's the game, and we are not coming to play.

[Yankee911]

Superm:

The local police,coast guard, Border Patrol and others are still waiting for those promised funds for Homeland Security. I guess the check is still in the mail.