Why are conservative arguments so often irrational?

No, the problem with arguments from conservatives about Obama's record on civil liberties is that they ignore where that record originated from and that their own party continues to voice support, either tacitly or directly. Even if the argument is based in honest disgust at the policies, it represents such a miniscule portion of the anti-Obama conservative platform that it's basically not even represented in conservative circles.

If you are a conservative and you are upset with Obama due to civil liberty abuses or foreign policy, and you seek to rectify that by supporting the GOP, you are 100% screwed/nonsensical. It is decidedly irrational to think that a conservative president would be any less likely to employ Obama's tactics in these arenas. Indeed, I cannot think of any conservative politician/pundit who is actively decrying them (Ron Paul excluded as he is the very definition of "miniscule portion" aforementioned).

If these are your reasons for being upset with Obama, I salute you (he lost my vote over them a long time ago). But if you think Romney/GOP was the solution, you're beyond irrational and into "willfully ignorant".

Minor aside: I hate the use of "conserative" and "liberal". I think it dumbs down the argument considerably and has become a crutch for folks who do not want to actually debate the issues, but instead seek to avoid actively engaging in lieu of simplistic character attacks based on cliched talking points. More to the point, "conservative" and "liberal" in the USA represents the mother of all false dichotomies.

 

Thadeus,

There are plenty of people that cling to fallacy. There are plenty of low information voters on the left. Let's not pretend that the phenomenon is limited to Fox News junkies like everyone's uneducated southern grandma.

The kind of logic-impaired bias you are talking about often stems from a misplaced sense of identity, from religion to race to nationalism to favorite sports team. But also astrology, belief in ghosts, alien conspiracies, and other kinds of irrational belief that helps bring the stupid into many poor-formed arguments about any given subject. None of these things are confined to the faithful of the GOP.

I also don't think conservatives are the only ones that make everything personal, when a well-worded argument or maybe introducing facts into a discussion would make a better contribution. There's plenty of content-poor snark that passes for discourse in D&D, and most are guilty of it.

I appreciate a well thought-out argument, and there's few things I like better than finding nuances within my own position formed from a well-informed person with very contradicting opinions.

I can't think of a brand in a worse state than the GOP, but I have huge issues with the Democratic Party. It's full of it's own mythologies and logical fallacies and unresolved contradictions maintained for the sake of the "big tent" as well, and there are plenty of arguments made for things I support, with holes in the logic large enough to drive tanks through.

The best informed posters (and the best contributors, in my opinion) are inevitably going to be contrarians. I don't know about you, but when I find myself agreeing whole-heartedly with any lobby group or political party on any topic, my immediate reaction is to assume at worst that at some point I've been lied to, or at best, that I'm lacking enough primary sources to have formed a grown-up opinion.

I think part of the problem is that public discussion in the US is often about people trying to "win" rather than asking questions and increasing their knowledge of the facts before coming to a conclusion. People get their ideas on how to argue political ideas from watching television, and most of it is rubbish designed to stir people up and get ratings.

In short...don't be lazy. If you can't lay out a coherent argument with intellectual honesty that holds under scrutiny, please wait until you have the time to do it properly. I don't care if you are a Stalinist or a Monarchist or an Anarchist, your opinion will be respected if you make a real effort.

 

Eh...there's a lot of nutty liberals who get votes no matter what. Look at Rangel.

There's plenty of liberals who think anyone with lots of corporate money is evil and that all Republicans are racist. Who think we should never use American Military might.

 

The fact is that, lots of times, facts can conflict.... so which are you going to side with?

 

I will be bipartisan and say that Sheila Jackson Lee is the most apathetic and irrational person in Congress right now.

 

Because a) liberals don't think about the facts, they just want to "help people."
b) you hang around and listen to too many liberals and therefore all you hear about is the stupid conservatives and not the stupid liberals.

 

That's why so many American conservatives don't believe in evolution and climate change? Their reliance on the facts?

 

The problem is that people launch into discussions about these kinds of things without defining the terms.

Both have loaded meanings as options. Both have reasonable meanings as options.

 

Yes, define the terms. Pregnancy, fetus, abortion equals baby, person, murder. We know your game well, the whole redefining the terms to create your own paradigm.

 

So reasonable!?!

Are you denying that there are not natural cycles of global warming and cooling? If no, what rock are you living under?

Did you not see the thread a couple of weeks ago when the disparate views of what evolution entailed? Again, what rock are you living under?

Smartass.

 

so true

 

Those terms are terms that your side has RE-defined to suit your end. You have to create definitions and boldly assert them as FACTS to push through your agenda.

My argument is that that unborn child appears to be and always turns out to be a human child. It has a right to life so leave it alone....

Where is my lie... vs the one that says "humanity only begins with a brainwave!"

 

Actually, those terms are ones that your side has tried to push on others, boldly asserting them as FACTS to push through your agenda.

The reasonable argument is that, especially within the first few weeks of development, a zygote exists or not at the whim of the woman inside whose uterus it is developing. If she doesn't feel like bringing a fetus to term in her uterus, it is her body and the decisions regarding what happens in her body belong to her, with consultations from her doctor and her God.

You don't have any right to define a clump of cells in her uterus as "life," thereby forcing your opinion on her.

Your lie is that every woman must live by your definition of "life."

 

This piece belongs here.
http://www.cnn.com/2013/01/04/opinion/wolraich-gop-strategy/index.html

GOP's obstructionism is suicide strategy
By Michael Wolraich, Special to CNN
updated 7:57 AM EST, Fri January 4, 2013

Editor's note: Michael Wolraich is a founder of the political blog dagblog.com and the author of "Blowing Smoke: Why the Right Keeps Serving Up Whack-Job Fantasies about the Plot to Euthanize Grandma, Outlaw Christmas, and Turn Junior into a Raging Homosexual."

(CNN) -- A suicide bomber walks into a bar. He shouts at the bartender, "Gimme the money, or I blow this place to bits!" The worried bartender hands him a wad of cash, and the bomber departs.

The next day, the suicide bomber returns to the same bar. He shouts at the bartender, "Gimme the money, or I blow this place to bits!"

"Are you nuts?" answers the bartender. "If I give you money every day, I'll go out of business. Plus, you're scaring away the customers."

"I tell you what," replies the bomber, "Gimme the money, and I won't come back until the day after tomorrow."
Welcome to the art of negotiation, Republican style. Since the election of 2010, the United States has narrowly averted three Republican-built suicide bombs: one government shutdown, one debt default and one fiscal cliff. We have two more scheduled for February: across-the-board spending cuts and another debt ceiling expiration.

The Republicans' suicide strategy is a relatively new addition to American politics. Newt Gingrich pioneered the first government shutdown in 1995. It was so disastrous that no one tried it again for 16 years. In the meantime, Republicans pursued a more traditional method known as the democratic process. They campaigned for election and took control of the White House, Senate and House of Representatives. From 2001 to 2006, the dominant Republicans passed plenty of conservative legislation. (They did not, however, reduce spending or balance the budget.)

Borger: Fiscal cliff was bound to collapse

When their golden era came to an end, many Republicans refused to accept that the popular will had turned against them and resorted to obstructionist tactics. In the Senate, they have filibustered 391 Democratic bills in the past six years, culminating last month in Minority Leader Mitch McConnell's historic filibuster of his own bill. The Democrats are no strangers to the filibuster, of course, but they managed only 201 in their six years of minority status.
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Yet the Senate is a model of effective government compared with the House, now the only Republican-dominated branch of the federal government. Frustrated by their inability to get conservative legislation past the Democratic-controlled Senate and White House, congressional Republicans have revived the "suicide bomb."

The key to the suicide bomb strategy is to convince people that members of the conservative wing of the Republican Party are crazy enough to wreck the economy if they don't get their way. Democratic leaders seem to believe them. Like the hapless bartender, they keep tossing the Republicans wads of cash -- spending cuts and tax breaks -- in order to spare the country from a debt default, shutdown or recession.

But this bomber will not be satisfied by a few payoffs. The Republicans continue to use every opportunity to extract concessions by threatening to wreck the economy ... again. When Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner proposed a permanent debt ceiling extension during the last round of negotiations, McConnell reportedly laughed in his face. The suicide bomb has become the Republicans' most effective weapon. Why would they give that up?

President Obama was slow to see the pattern, but after three nail-biting suicide negotiations in two years, he seems to have finally realized that he cannot continue to encourage the bomb threats with concessions. As attention turned to the next debt ceiling battle, he declared, "While I will negotiate over many things, I will not have another debate with this Congress over whether or not they should pay the bills that they've already racked up through the laws that they passed."

Hopefully, he will maintain this resolve. The endless threats not only enable Republicans to subvert the democratic process, they hurt the country. Even if the Republicans never actually fulfill their ultimatums, the anxiety provoked by such threats damages the economy by creating uncertain business conditions. To extend the metaphor: The suicide bomber is scaring away the customers.

So what will happen when Obama finally says enough is enough? Is the country destined to go BOOM?
Fortunately not. The joke has a hidden punchline. It turns out that the suicide bomber is a part-owner of the bar. The folks who will lose the most if the bomb goes off are the investors, bankers and businesspeople who still retain large stakes in the Republican Party. When the Republicans threatened to let the government default in 2011, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and other industry advocates objected with growing concern. If the Democrats refuse to negotiate this time around, industry advocates will not sit idly while the party they finance deliberately ruins their businesses.

But what if the conservative Republicans are really that crazy? What if they are so committed to their agenda and dismissive of their constituents that they will allow unemployment to rise, interest rates to skyrocket, government services to disappear, seniors to lose their Social Security checks and other catastrophic consequences of debt defaults and government shutdowns?

If that is the case, however unlikely, than we will only have to survive until the next election, at which point the Republicans will discover that suicide bombings produce only one guaranteed casualty: the bomber himself.

 

Sigh...

One would think that the last election would show that science actually works. The statistical basis of election predictions is basically the same math as global climate predictions.

 

I don't think it's as suicidal as the article makes it sound. Many people will still vote Republican (no matter how obstructionist they are) and the Obama administration will shoulder blame for government shutdowns and defaults.

 

The question is how much change is due to natural cycles and how much is due to an overlapping human influence. Does your math calculate that, too?

Every age has thought that their scientific development knocked it out of the ballpark. I'm sure the margin of error is narrower however.

 

The SC decisison and the laws that sprung after have introduced terms and their definitions which are just self-fulfilling.

Life on a whim? I rest my case. The child has a body, too.

Forever and a day men and women have come together, had sexual relations and sometimes have found themselves to be "with child." It took some pretty fancy footwork to get around that....

Yet you have a right to impose your own definitions?

Tell me when a pregnant woman delivers a toaster or a chicken breast and then we'll talk about where the lie might be....

 

I don't see anyone asserting definitions that don't reflect reality WRT abortion outside the "pro-life" crowd who need for "life" to "begin at conception" as a matter of religious or moral dogma.

I agree, once it is a "child," it has its own body. Until it can viably exist outside the womb (my own personal "line" in this debate), it has no rights, deserves no consideration, and exists only as long as the woman in whom it is gestating wants it to.

No footwork at all, I just told the truth.

The beauty of my position is that it is the exact OPPOSITE of imposing anything on anyone. It is YOUR position that imposes its moral beliefs on other people, pro-choice people simply want to be free from your impositions. I don't need to impose anything on anyone, I am happy to let everyone else believe what they want.

What a maroon!

I won't participate in this thread, off-topic, about abortion with you any more, giddy. If you want to start an abortion thread, I will be happy to.

 

First off it's not my math, it is math. We can track previous climates through things like ice core samples, tree rings and etc.. A lot of evidence indicates that the Earth should be possibly entering a cooling phase, one reason why people thought there was going to be another ice age in the 1970's, but we are seeing a warming trend. Further the warming trend seems to correlate very well with increased industrialization.

All of this stuff has been discussed before on this very board.

True they do but this is hardly a sound argument against the science. It is an appeal to ignorance rather than an informed argument.