y66, on 2016-November-15, 08:17, said:
For future reference, who can I pray to to get someone who can represent the conservative position here in the water cooler at a standard equal to what awm, kenberg, helene_t, cherdano, mikeh and others bring to the discussion? Right now it just feels like Lyoto Machida vs 4 five-year olds.
Let's see whether we can find a clue to this imbalance
Global warming, aka climate change. Hmm. Well over 90% of those with expertise in the area, qualified to express an expert opinion, think that global warming is real and that human activity (especially use of fossil fuels and large herds of livestock) are playing a major role. Most liberals accept the science. Most conservatives do not. Who will have the better reality-based argument?
Racial prejudice: afaik, and I admit to being no more than an interested layperson, with an eclectic but broad taste in reading, there are numerous studies demonstrating the pervasive effect of racial bias. Most of these studies are US based, but not all, and I think it fair to say that racism is not simply white v black. It occurs in other cultures and between other racial groups. I know of no study that suggests that racial bias is absent from any large, heterogeneous group. Liberals usually accept this and support efforts to reduce its existence and ameliorate its effects. Conservatives tend to deny its existence, and/or tend to argue that it is justified (see Kaitlyn's references to the inner cities, which is a code for 'blacks create their own problems', and almost uniformly claim that efforts to combat racism are themselves racist.
Same-sex marriage: conservatives generally oppose this, on the basis that their God has dictated that homosexuality is a sin and/or that God intended marriage to be heterosexual and/or that the purpose of marriage is to ensure procreation. Of course, many marriages are childless, so this latter point seems difficult to defend unless one wanted to assert that no marriage is valid unless the woman produces offspring. Ironically, it is liberals who tend to argue that the state has no business intruding into the private lives of citizens and that if two people of the same sex want to get married, more power to them. Given that there is no evidence that any god exists, and even less that any of the multitude of gods worshipped over the millennia exist, and no logical reason for thinking that an all-powerful, all-knowing creator would give a rat's ass about gay sex (especially since gay sex is part of its creation, and not only in humans), it seems to me that the anti-gay people have a tough time coming up with a defensible position, other than 'we don't like it'.
Abortion: here, I think it is possible to come up with some arguments, but the ones that most anti-abortionists advance are ludicrous. The Pope, for example, babbles about ensoulment, the utterly fictional notion that somehow a soul implants itself, or is implanted, in an egg the moment it is fertilized by a sperm. Why this happens with human eggs but not, say, the egg of a chimpanzee (which shares more than 97% of the human genome, and which few of us could distinguish from a human egg cell even under a powerful microscope) is left unexplained.....it's a miracle I say, a miracle! Life begins at conception? Well, the egg was 'alive' before conception and so was the sperm. The actual biochemistry is well understood. The process by which two cells combine and then divide and divide again and again, with increasing complexity, is pretty well understood, altho more and more details are being found with ongoing research. There is neither room nor need for a 'soul' to explain any of this. There is neither need nor biological justification for stating that a fertilized cell is a human being.
One could argue on moral grounds that we ought not lightly or at all deprive that cell of the opportunity to develop into a human, but that is an argument that is relatively easy to oppose. After all, a cell, or indeed fairly advanced fetuses, have no awareness, and no consciousness, so we are not creating pain or suffering. In addition, women spontaneously abort many fetuses so early in the pregnancy that they are unaware of being pregnant (at least, I have read that from biologists who seem to know what they are writing about), so it seems difficult to justify outrage at a woman who chooses to do deliberately what is so frequently happening naturally. In any event, once one starts arguing morality, one has to deal with issues such as rape, serious birtn defect, effect of the pregnancy on the woman's physical and mental health, the ability of the woman to provide a decent life for the child, and so on. On a more abstract level, we ought to be concerned about the seemingly inexorable rate of growth of the human population and the devastating effect of that on the environment, and the likely habitability of the world over the next several generations.
So even here, where I can come up with some plausible arguments, it seems to me that most conservatives choose, instead, to rely on dogma and allegedly holy writings rather than deal with reality.
I could go on, to speak of health care, access to clean air and water, policing practices, use of the military, and so on. On some topics, conservatives do appear to me to have some decent arguments, but as Helene noted, reality tends to have a liberal bias. More accurately, liberal thinking tends to be more reality based than does conservative thinking. Most people who really enjoy bridge, which is a very logical activity, will, I think, tend to recognize and prefer reality over fantasy. Thus most here will write, if they write, from what will appear to the Kaitlyns of the world as a liberal perspective.
'one of the great markers of the advance of human kindness is the howls you will hear from the Men of God' Johann Hari
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