In reading my last post over I decided that in the unlikely event that anyone with a liberal bent ever reads this, they might get the wrong impression of my thoughts on liberals. I find that because of the bias of our media, we live in a looking glass world where many things are actually the opposite of what we are told.
We are often told that conservatives are touchy, judgmental, closed-minded haters that would be impossible to carry on a conversation with. Most conservatives I know enjoy a good conversation with a liberal whenever they get the chance, but typically it doesn't last long and the liberal leaves in a huff.
My sense is that the greatest reason for this is because liberals have tended to “do everything right” as far as they understood during their education at the hands of union teachers through grade and secondary schools, and then under the tutelage of tenured state employees (professors) that had spent 8 years or more themselves in a state institution studying under the same sort of folks.
They read the mass media, listened to popular music, read the books assigned to them, and were told over and over how open minded they were, and how far superior their views on most everything were over folks that had achieved less education, or just “didn't understand” as they had been taught.
They have come to believe that they have the solid truth, and when faced in a discussion with a view that they are CERTAIN is easily discredited (since it always has been in the classroom or in the media they have heard), they realize that they don’t really know how to defend what they believe, and that is disconcerting.
They believe that it is conservatives that are “orthodox”, but oddly conservatives are FORCED to be aware of liberal positions, since NBC, CBS, ABC, NPR, most major papers, and the popular culture are quick to present the liberal position. You can’t be awake in this country and not know the liberal position. While it is at least possible today to get some exposure to “the other side” via talk radio or Fox, very few liberals are willing to take that step. They enter a discussion with a conservative unaware that a reasonable, intelligent person could hold a view contrary to the liberal one ... and back it up with arguments that were hard to refute.
The issue between liberals and conservatives isn't “intelligence”, it is “models”. Liberals tend to confuse the utility of “intelligence”, and assume that the level of University degree obtained or type of job indicates intelligence. Jimmy Carter was way smart, he just didn’t know how to be President. The Unabomber was even smarter, but his “model” had some real problems. Liberals have always been told they are smarter, and thus they believe they are smarter. IQ is like MHZ on a computer running a broken program -- a fast computer just gives you a crash or a bad answer faster.
Our discussions ought to be about understanding our models, what results they create, and what works the best. Calling each other stupid is fun up through about grade school, but it doesn’t really accomplish all that much in adult discussion.
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