[Phantom Hoover]

$1200 a month is poverty in the US today, and in some areas it's so bad the only solution is 'leave the area'.

You're repeatedly trying to tell him something that he said in the first place.

[Scotty]

$1200 a month is poverty in the US today, and in some areas it's so bad the only solution is 'leave the area'.

You're repeatedly trying to tell him something that he said in the first place.

And you're pointing something out to him that has already been mentioned.

are we talking past each other?

I think so.

[NGTM-1R]

Places where you can get a house for 60k happen to be places where there are no jobs to enable you to get the house.

[Mars]

The trouble with that is that most areas with houses that cheap are starved for employment.

EDIT: ninjaed

[Klaustrophobia]

I always remembered GenDisc as horribly liberally (reality) biased, which i like.  Conservatives trot out their crap arguments and Karajorma destroys them.  After that happens a few times, they stop posting about that stuff in gendisc.

I apologize in advance for what will be a drive-by posting, and digging up a post a few pages old that's been moved on from.  I was perusing this thread jussst in case something rational and worthwhile was happening in here that I could stomach the rest of it for (surprisingly yes).  But I couldn't let this go unanswered.

Don't mistake the conservative members' avoidance of the liberal circle jerk for victory in smashing us about the head with your ideals.  We didn't cave in, we simply gave up listening to the ridiculous flaming and bashing.  Ya know, the same sort of things that get locked, deleted, and people monkeyed/banned for saying with a conservative angle.

[Turambar]

Don't mistake the conservative members' avoidance of the liberal circle jerk for victory in smashing us about the head with your ideals.  We didn't cave in, we simply gave up listening to the ridiculous flaming and bashing.  Ya know, the same sort of things that get locked, deleted, and people monkeyed/banned for saying with a conservative angle.

Aww, and I always thought of Hard-Light being an example of how people can come around when they realize that none of their ideals actually hold up to scrutiny, or contact with the real world.

[zookeeper]

Aww, and I always thought of Hard-Light being an example of how people can come around when they realize that none of their ideals actually hold up to scrutiny, or contact with the real world.

That's the most confusingly and hilariously meta post in the whole thread! I can't even begin to dissect the various layers of irony in that.

[Luis Dias]

To have a progressive viewpoint and not constantly police it with a conservative thought reveals a very umbalanced mind. Of course, we all have our own different measures of what is "progressive" and "conservative", and they make us very different from each other, but I find this utter demonization of this one side of ours while praising the other side to be absolutely abhorrent from any good and thought out philosophical point of view.

It's good to want the world to change, but then again, it's also good to remember that most changes are, statistically inevitably for the worse, rather than for the better. For this reason we ought to be conservative in these changes. A tad of skepticism over novel ideas is not a bug, but a feature. OTOH, to simply lay on bad status quos because you disbelieve in every single solution out there without trying any of them, won't get us very far, read, anywhere at all.

TL DR: Don't be one sided. Both progressivism and conservativism are good forces to hold.

[General Battuta]

Yo Tura I don't think out and out taunting is going to convince anyone of anything.

[Turambar]

Yo Tura I don't think out and out taunting is going to convince anyone of anything.

We're in an abortion thread.  I was never going to convince anyone of anything.


As for my unbalance.  I'm not talking about conservatism in the "lets make sure that our fiber internet money that we gave the telecoms actually made its way into fiber internet" sense.  I'm talking about US Conservatism, where Global Warming isn't real, social conservatism doesn't alienate and harm people, and redistributing everyone's money to the people with the most money is sound economics.   The kind of conservatism that's willing to screw over generations of society because they refuse to understand the nuanced difference between a fetus and a baby.  The kind of conservatism that says that "regulation is bad"

If not having those voices in my head makes me unbalanced, well I've always been a bit weird.

[Bobboau]

being able to understand it and speak from it is a very helpful skill to have however. that is if you would like to change minds and have fewer people vote that way.
being willing to consider other points of view is also really important if you want to be actually right, that is if truth is valuable to you. you will not know if you are right if you never consider that you might be wrong.

[Luis Dias]

Turambar, you talk as if US progressivism isn't also out of its own mind. I'm Portuguese, so I kinda (1) have the privilege of watching all of this from an outsider's perspective,  and (2) get away with calling myself a lot more left-wing than 95% of americans do, but I think it's still pretty damned evident to me that american politics has been for the past decades only grown to become more and more polarized. And if you believe that this polarization is between the "reality based side" and the "deluded side", then you are believing that one half of america is "rational" while the other is "irrational". That is, indeed, a very deluded thought in itself. Both tribes are believers, and this belief is, first and foremost, metaphysical, emotional, irrational. It's a belief in a cause, whatever it might be.

[Bobboau]

so I kinda (1) have the privilege of watching all of this from an outsider's perspective

he admitted it! check that privilege cisscum!

[Luis Dias]

You know defeat has come your way when you start using the language of the enemy! But that wasn't an unaware usage of the term. Then again, I'm of the sarcastic / ironic tendency.

[Turambar]

Turambar, you talk as if US progressivism isn't also out of its own mind.

The looniest I see the progressives get is when they are being conservative.  The ones who are driven by fear to reject genetically modified organisms, nuclear power, or vaccines.

[Luis Dias]

You misunderstand progressivism then. You fail to realise that most of it stems from a very ancient hatred towards all things unequal and bourgeois (fraternité / egalité / etc). Progressivism appears to be rooted in a cool enlightenment ideal about how science and reason with a capital R will bring forth paradise on earth, but this has long been ideologically curtailed by both traditional fears of the market and a theory of exploitation (marxism) that has evolved into a mad berserk point of favoring the environment over mankind.

This in turn created this peculiar kind of conservativism that you refer to, from nuclear power, GMOS, vaccines, or any source of fossil power (http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-liberals-war-on-science/). One could also mention a certain tendency for conservative economics that seems to prefer egalitarianism over growth. But this because to fight these things is the necessary struggle in order to destroy the patriarchal capitalism that Progressivism was meant to fight in the first place. I.e., this all stems from progressivist thought. It's a "poison" embedded at its core. To call it "conservativism" is to miss the mark.

Is it paradoxical? Of course it is. Then again, the bigger the thing is, the more likely it's filled with paradoxes of this kind. I'm pretty sure a somewhat symmetrical story can be written regarding "Conservativism" and how it is especially fond of something so "progressive" in its own sake, i.e., Capitalism. The point of the tale is richer and more complex. To simply berate the other side because "Reality has a liberal bias" and other jokes of the sort becomes silly when you get the bigger picture into scale.

e:small typo

[Bobboau]

The looniest I see the progressives get is when they are being conservative.  The ones who are driven by fear to reject genetically modified organisms, nuclear power, or vaccines.

there are other dimensions of lunacy, have you seen anything like this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4r7cwWegXCU
no one in that video is conservative by any typical American understanding of the word.

I feel like shoehorning the phrase "tea party of the left" into this post somehow and I'm to lazy to do it creatively.

[Turambar]

I feel like shoehorning the phrase "tea party of the left" into this post somehow and I'm to lazy to do it creatively.

The difference here is that there isn't a huge monied interest trying to use these idiots to dismantle worker protections all over the US

[Bobboau]

I'm not sure that's true (not even the worker protection part), but it's harder to find evidence either way for that assertion, because the tea party is one large centralized group and their lefty counterpart is a large number of individually small overlapping groups.

[Luis Dias]

It is true. Both groups are used, structured and manipulated in very different ways. The whole ideological differences necessitate this brute fact. But I'm merely pleased that you concede that there's plenty of lunacy regardless of the side you look into, for then your claims above on how conservativism is a laughable thing, etc., become passé.