If you’ve got nothing, then you might not be that honest with yourself or your vote.

If you resort to name-calling or reversing accusations instead of answering challenges, then there’s definitely a problem.

MB…. Spot On.

http://whatilearnedthisweek.wordpress.com/

I was going to recommend people head over the Waldo Jacquith’s blog and read his blurb on “our morality, shared and unshared.” I think it provides an interesting starting point for helping us to identify why we adopt the biases we do.

http://waldo.jaquith.org/blog/2008/04/shared-morality/

It’s called intellectual honesty.

And we could use a whole lot more of it.

Ding. One of the things that can really turn me off of someone is realizing that they pick the reasoning to suit the team, and not the team that suits the reasoning. I understand the usefulness of my-guy-no-matter-what partisans, but I don’t respect them at all. (And we’re not short of these folks online.)

Summary… I believe that we’re way too driven by Modern Rhetoric that compels to Pick A Side. Then once there, we gather the information necessary to defend our rushed stance. The masters of Modern Rhetoric seem to ease our pain by offering Opinion-turned-Fact and too many take this information, and false empowerment, and defend the constantly challenged position.

I have now read it three times and I still don’t know what he or she means and I forgot what I was going to say about your post.

I’ll just go back to leveraging longstanding relationships with stuff in order to somethingorother the categorizing and compartmentalizing along one side or the other … or some junk.

Conservatives have mastered this technique by leveraging a long-standing relationship with religion, repetition, relativism, historical revisionism, and most important Christian Nationalism. As societies are always progressive (not ideologically, but ever-changing), Conservatives are well positioned to be successful during times of uncertainty and tumult, calling upon peoples to draw closer to yesterday.

Liberals, Democrats or Progressives are unfortunately left to hold the line between today and tomorrow, championing “Change” while respecting “Progress”.

With this foundation, Americans are challenged to “Take a Position” from those who have little regard for the consideration of all facts, but a sadly profound respect for “Stance”. Conservatives have done well to compel Americans to categorize & compartmentalize our beliefs along one side or the other, ignoring the facts that aren’t consistent with either ideology… i.e. Abortion against Capital Punishment, Capital Punishment against Collateral Damage, etc. So instead considering our positions we accept the notion that Opinion is Fact and that this New Fact justifies our actions….. either way….. quite sad.