Political & Elections

winchester · Guru

RE: Election results

winchester · Guru

Another member of this board, who goes by the name of hindoo, was a bit like DonnaL but not nearly as strident and stuck in her ways. i think she didn't like me either (but again, not as extremely as DonnaL doesn't like me). I think I rubbed her the wrong way like I do with DonnaL (and maybe with others here).

I finally called her out, much like I'm doing here with DonnaL. hindoo had the courage to click on the link and watch the entire ninety minute video. She said she enjoyed it, and even learned a few things. She was, and remains, open minded. Are you open minded, DonnaL?

hindoo is still as liberal as ever. Watching the video did not cause her to suddenly switch to conservatism. Nor did I ever expect it to. That's not how the human psyche works. But now, at least, we understand each other. We share some common ground. I consider her a friend.

Do you have that sort of courage DonnaL?

-- Edited by winchester on Thursday 8th of November 2012 07:42:42 AM

winchester · Guru

DonnaL,

Your response to my “are you man enough” comment made me laugh. You’re so steaming angry with me that you can’t even think straight. Your statement about disqualifying myself from a response only proves the notion that the definition of "bigot" or "racist" or "homophobe" etc., is anyone who is winning an argument with a liberal. I loved your response. It's so easy to push your buttons. Gotcha! Ha ha.

Seriously though, you must realize that "Are you man enough" is a figure of speech. It means put up or shut up.

If you really are as tolerant and open minded and inclusive as most liberals like to think they are then put your beliefs where your mouth is. Set aside your partisan preconceptions, if only for a moment, and make the effort to listen with an open mind and actually understand, at a fundamental level, where the other side is coming from. If you could do that then you would realize that the place they come from is real, and legitimate, and founded in qualities and values that are all positive.

Can you do that? Can you be the change that you desire? It’s a conscious choice that is up to you to make. Isn't that part of what liberalism stands for? Are you up to it? Are you "man" enough? If so, then watch the video I linked to earlier, or better yet, read the book.

If spending the ten or twelve hours it will take to read the book, or the ninety minutes it will take to watch the overview video are both too much for you, then try the twenty minute video in the following link. I hesitate to provide it because it is only a high level summary which may not get the message across fully, but it’s a start. The speaker has an easy, breezy, engaging style. You'll probably enjoy it.

The Moral Roots of Liberals and Conservatives

Here's another video, from CSPAN's BookTV, in which the author gives an overview of some of the main ideas of the book. It's of a little greater length, but it offers a little more depth than the twenty minute video.

The Righteous Mind, Why Good People Are Divided By Politics and Religion

If you can’t do any of those things; if it is just too much for you to entertain, even for twenty minutes, the possibility that somebody on the other side might actually have a valid point that is founded in facts and reason, then all you do is prove that it is you, and not I, who is truly the narrow, closed minded, bigot.

Prove to us that you are the open minded person you apparently claim to be. All it takes to get started is a simple click on one of the links I've provided. Can you do it? Show us. Show everyone here your true colors. Either embody the open mindedness and inclusiveness that liberals are so proud of and absorb the information I'm offering, or don't, and prove to all of us here that you're the true bigot. It's up to you. What's it gonna be?

For convenience, here are links to the book and the longer video.

Book: The Righteous Mind, Why Good People Are Divided By Politics and Religion

Long video: The Center for Compassion and Altruism Research and Education at Stanford University - When Compassion Leads to Sacrilege

By providing these links I've made it as easy as possible for you to make the effort to understand. It's up to you now. Can you rise to the challenge?

-- Edited by winchester on Thursday 8th of November 2012 09:09:49 AM

pima · Guru

DonnaL. what it it truly means is that when your son has a child and that child is of college age they will be a minority and college tuition won't be an issue!

You see it is cyclical in the end. We came here as white minorities and will be minorities again. I am not trying to be racist, I am trying to illustrate how the Native Americans must have felt centuries ago.

DonnaL · Senior Member

"Are you man enough for the former?"

Screw you, you disgusting bigot. You just disqualified yourself from any other response. If you think I'm a man, you're far more "delusional" than any liberal in history. What a creep.

winchester · Guru

If you want to talk about pseudo-science, here are some great examples.

The Republican Brain, The Science of Why They Deny Science - And Reality, by Chris Mooney

The God Delusion, by Richard Dawkins

Leter To A Christian Nation, by Sam Harris

And by the way, for the record, there's no such thing as a republican war on science as Chris Mooney claims there is in another of his books. Claims that there is are a misread of what's really going on; a misread that unfortunately follows from the three foundation cognitive tool kit of liberalism which sees its version of "reason" as "science" and "pragmatism," while at the same time failing to realize that reason in that sense, which is the same sense it is applied in the above listed books, is a subjective rationalization of a pre ordained ideology. The Republican "war," if there is one, is against scientism, and the use of it for purely political ends, as in the above listed books.

DonnaL · Senior Member

Does that mean that in 80 years or so there won't be any left? My son is a white male, and he would be 102 by then! (He did not vote for Romney.)

longprime · Guru

Well they "R" sure didn't make themselves liked. And every vote lost just made the task more difficult. A statistician for the NRC said that white males is a dying breed of -1.7% each election cycle.

DonnaL · Senior Member

Which is why it wouldn't surprise me if Rubio is nominated next time. Not that that will win the Republicans the Hispanic vote as long as they continue to be perceived as the anti-immigration party and talk about "self-deportation."

Yes, it was close in the popular vote -- a little over 2%, and a little under 3 million votes the last time I looked, although it continues to grow as more votes are counted, and will probably end up at about the Bush-Kerry level (which Bush described as a "mandate" afterwards) -- but not in the electoral college, and that's what counts, isn't it?

geeps20 · Senior Member

DonnaL....winning the major swing states by just a small margin means that this was indeed a very close election. It is not going to get any easier though for Reps as this country
becomes more Hispanic. This country is changing..wish I could say for the better.

longprime · Guru

Not everybody is a reactionary. Some of us are pretty nice. biggrin

DonnaL · Senior Member

l can see that being disastrously wrong about every single thing you predicted concerning this election ("win handily" comes to mind) hasn't made you any more humble.

longprime · Guru

Not, Karl Rove. hmm

geeps20 · Senior Member

I learned that Dick Morris is a total fool..and Karl Rove is not that far behind

winchester · Guru

Thank you for the ranking of poll reliability. I wish I'd had that from the get go. I have no problem with the Ziegler quote.

Have you read the book? Your reference to it as pseudo-science indicates not. If you had read it, you’d see that my major claims about liberal morality are founded in real science and they’re not wrong. I’m not the only one who interprets the scientific findings the way I do. For example R. R. Reno ( who Haidt likes and whose opinion he respects enough to post a link to the following on his own web site) said in the June 1, 2012 issue “First Things: A Monthly Journal of Religion and Public Life”,

Liberalism is blind in one eye--yet it insists on the superiority of its vision and its supreme right to rule. It cannot see half the things a governing philosophy must see, and claims that those who see both halves are thereby unqualified to govern.

Even Haidt says that the three-foundation liberal morality by itself cannot support civil society.

If you’d rather not spend the ten or twelve hours required to read the book, maybe you’ll find this ninety minute video palatable:

When Compassion leads to sacrilege: Why conservatives and liberals have such different beliefs about helping those in need.

Your opinion, which I notice you don’t caveat in any way, as you seem to think I should do, about my supposed double-talk about LGBT rights illustrates perfectly Reno's and my point, and Haidt's in the above linked video. You don’t understand what I’m saying because you can’t. And the reason you can’t is that you are afflicted with the malady R. R. Reno mentions, and which Haidt describes at length in the video. In one of Haidt's studies, for example, which he details in the book, conservatives did a good job of answering questions as if they were liberals, but liberals could not reliably answer questions as if they were conservatives, and the more liberal they were the worse were their answers. That's you. The reason for this is that conservatives perceive and think with all of the tools of social awareness that natural selection has provided to humans. Liberals perceive and think with half of them. Unless and until the veil of delusion is lifted from liberal eyes people like you will continue to fail to understand, and will continue to say it is everyone else who doesn't get it.

You have a choice. You can live up to the liberal ideal of open mindedness and get a clue by reading the book or at least watching the video, or you can continue your own small minded bloviating. Which will it be? Are you man enough for the former?

-- Edited by winchester on Wednesday 7th of November 2012 03:38:27 PM

pima · Guru

I didn't expect MR to win, I had always said PBO would win the electoral vote, but I thought MR would win the popular. Obviously PBO won the popular by 0.6%, which PBO now has to decide will he be like Clinton's 2nd term and reached across the aisle, or will he be PBO forced fed our country his plans because as President he knows what is best for us

I think if anyone believes come 2014 we are not going to see taxes raise more than anyone can ever expect I have a beautiful bridge that connects Brooklyn to Manhattan. I see financial pain for many of us starting in Jan., but come Jan. 2014 it will be the brunt.

We have a lame duck Hill now, and let's be honest where will their desires be when it comes to issues like sequestration that needs to be addressed by Jan. 1.? They will all come back for a few days, leave for T-Day, come back and leave for Xmas.

Our country was doomed whoever won. The parties are so entrenched neither side will give an inch. It has become even worse now because the R's did pick up Cong. seats, and they can legitimize their position since Obama only won 50.6%, less than in 08. The Dems will say our guy won, so shut up and color.

The one silver lining is Nancy might be gone because she promised that they would take back the house.

As I said many times, I don't see the President with the real power, I see it on the Hill. I would have been jumping for joy this a.m. if PBO won, but Reid lost. That was my true hope.

DonnaL · Senior Member

And all you do is make ridiculous attacks and character assassinations against liberals, clothed in the language of pseudo-science. (And I won't even get into your double-talk against LGBT rights.) I may not be a regular poster in this fundamentally right-wing echo chamber anymore, but I certainly am a regular reader and have been since this site opened, and said months ago that most of what was being said here about the election, by you and others, constituted whistling in the graveyard. This isn't me simply coming in after the fact. I admit that I was wondering if you would bother to acknowledge that you were so completely wrong about this election. And you still haven't, it seems. Of course you put in a caveat about your predictions possibly not coming true, but that's basically one comment stacked against dozens -- if not hundreds -- of posts asserting that you thought Romney was going to win. Even the statement you quote, of course, was accompanied by your "gut" feeling about a Romney victory, and your conclusion that "If I had to bet, however, I'd bet with my gut."

By the way, Obama did not win by a "whisker"; his electoral college margin will probably be close to what it was four years ago, and greater than Bush's margin in 2004; assuming the result stays the same in Florida, he won every swing state except North Carolina, which nobody predicted he would win. Throughout the election, you cherry-picked results from polls that supported you, usually Rasmussen or Gallup, and in one recent post, cited a poll showing Romney close or ahead in Ohio on the same day that several other polls showed him considerably behind. You seemed to buy the nonsense about the polls being "skewed" by oversampling Democrats, even though those samples proved to be almost exactly correct. Perhaps, in the future, you should keep in mind that a Fordham University study out today ranked 28 polling firms on how their pre-election national surveys compared to the results on Election Day. The ranking:

1. PPP (D)
1. Daily Kos/SEIU/PPP
3. YouGov
4. Ipsos/Reuters
5. Purple Strategies
6. NBC/WSJ
6. CBS/NYT
6. YouGov/Economist
9. UPI/CVOTER
10. IBD/TIPP
11. Angus-Reid
12. ABC/WP
13. Pew Research
13. Hartford Courant/UConn
15. CNN/ORC
15. Monmouth/SurveyUSA
15. Politico/GWU/Battleground
15. FOX News
15. Washington Times/JZ Analytics
15. Newsmax/JZ Analytics
15. American Research Group
15. Gravis Marketing
23. Democracy Corps (D)
24. Rasmussen
24. Gallup
26. NPR
27. National Journal
28. AP/GfK

Nate Silver is not, of course, a pollster himself, but his predictions look like they'll turn out -- for the third straight two-year election cycle -- to be the most accurate of all. The worst seem to be those of the various Republican pundits, from Dick Morris (who's never been right about anything so far as I know) to Karl Rove to Peggy Noonan to Bill Kristol and so on, all of whom appeared convinced that the result was going to be an electoral college landslide for Romney. Needless to say, they were all wrong. As with you, what I object to is not the fact that their prediction was wrong, but the fact that the assumptions on which the predictions were based were so evidently out of touch with any kind of reality. John Ziegler, a conservative himself, has what I find a very interesting column entitled "Why the Conservative Media Got it So Wrong." See http://www.huffingtonpost.com/john-ziegler/romney-loss-conservative-media_b_2084911.html. Here's an excerpt:

So why did the conservative media get it so wrong? Because I am a conservative who was confident that Obama would win a tight race, I think that I may be in unique position to explain why this happened.

First, while you would think that the advent of modern technology and the explosion of polling data which now exists (it is truly staggering how much more information there is today than there was, say, in 1980) would help in making political predictions, it actually does the opposite. This is because having access to so many numbers allows political partisans to cherry-pick which data points they like in order to fit their agenda and preferred outcome.

As Mark Twain is alleged to have said, there are lies, damned lies, and statistics.

For conservatives, this natural human inclination to embrace the data that they like and discard the rest is greatly enhanced, and essentially injected with steroids. This is because they have a very understandable and highly justified distrust of a news media which has been showing open hostility to the prospects of our candidates for as long as any of us can remember.

While I am not the very first person to question the credibility of everything I hear in the news media, having once worked for a polling institute and having commissioned several high profile national polls myself, I understand that polls, while hardly perfect, should not generally be thought of as part of the biased news propaganda machine (which is why, ironically, the Fox News poll is often not at all favorable to conservatives).

But because conservatives are understandably so distrustful of everything they are told by the media, it becomes easy for them to fall into the trap of assuming that polls showing Obama winning are inherently flawed. They are even able to come up with enough real numbers to make arguments which appear to be based in intellect, even though they are really being driven by emotion and self interest.

This phenomenon was made even more pervasive because to the conservative political junkies who spend their lives absorbing every possible news item with the assumption that it is simply not possible to comprehend how anyone would vote to reelect Obama. This fed into their fervent belief that the polls must simply be wrong (as did their forgetting that, when nearly everyone votes in a swing state, it really doesn't matter how much more enthusiastic one side is than the other).

I think a lot of this is true of some of the regular right-wing posters here, including you. And I actually like and respect a number of the more conservative posters here, whether or not they still post at CC. You, however, are a classic bloviator. And your idiotic analogy comparing the victors in this election to the Nazis invading France not only proves inadvertently that you see Democrats and liberals as some sort of foreign invaders rather than actual Americans, but is as offensive as anything you've ever written. I actually had a number of family members living in France at the time who suffered the consequences of that invasion with particular severity (what with being Jews and all); in fact, a photo of the graffiti which my mother's Uncle Gustav scratched on the wall at Drancy before he was deported to his death can be seen on the Yad Vashem website. There is nothing you could possibly tell me that has anything to do with the subject of France during the Second World War.

-- Edited by DonnaL on Wednesday 7th of November 2012 01:53:41 PM

-- Edited by DonnaL on Wednesday 7th of November 2012 01:55:32 PM

-- Edited by DonnaL on Wednesday 7th of November 2012 01:58:47 PM

-- Edited by DonnaL on Wednesday 7th of November 2012 02:46:31 PM

-- Edited by DonnaL on Wednesday 7th of November 2012 02:47:24 PM

hayden · Senior Member

I came back this morning to see how you all were doing. Obviously I'm happy because the people I voted for won. However, I know how it feels to be on the other side. I was devastated by the Kerry loss in 2004. I empathize with how some of you may be feeling right now, and all I wanted to say is that our country and our people have a way of surviving anything. We can grieve what we think is a bad outcome, but as a country we will prevail, and at the end of the day we'll be okay regardless of the results of any one election. Take care, everyone.

winchester · Guru

DonnaL you and your selective memory are pathetic.

Was I also disastrously wrong when I said “my experince, having watched the polls in previous elections and found that they're pretty on target, my head tells me that this will be close. Either man could take it by a whisker,” or when I said about my predictions that "I could end up being totally wrong and the polls totally right. And maybe it's just wishful thinking on my part."?

You bring nothing to the table but personal attacks. I bet you just could not wait to throw that one cherry picked comment back in my face. You're not a regular participant here. All you do is swoop in every once in a while like a troll, drop a personal insult, and disappear. You contribute nothing positive, at all.

Everything I said in my post is in this thread is supported by the facts of history and by the latest findings about how the human mind really works. I back up my major claims with quotes and links or bibliographical information for the original sources.

Winning an election does not mean the winners are right any more than the initial conquering of France by the Nazis meant they were right. By your logic (sic) I suppose you think the French should have been humble and accepting of the Nazis?

Liberals are supposedly open to new ideas. Democrats like to think their party is a big tent that is diverse and inclusive to all. Have you read "The Righteous Mind'? You should. To an open minded big tenter it would be enlightening and that person would be a little more accepting of ideas which don't happen to fit their personal world view, to a liberal who is not so open it would be an inconvenient truth. Which are you?

-- Edited by winchester on Wednesday 7th of November 2012 01:00:29 PM

winchester · Guru

The short sighted, small minded, self serving, three-foundation liberal bees have elected to further the destruction of the hive of social capital which is the birthplace, the nurturer, and the defender of "the between," * and the source of American greatness and good.

Moral foundations and election results like this prove that Hume, Burke, and Hayek were right, and Rousseau, Rawls, and Keynes were dead wrong. Jonathan Haidt’s work represents the tip of the spear of an ongoing revolution in social science research which is proving this to be true. (See the final chapters of "Coming Apart" by Charles Murray). I fear it is too little too late.

The liberal blindness to the half of human nature which creates, nourishes, and protects the "between" of the hive of social capital, and the small mindedness which results from that blindness, creates the self serving mindset which convinces itself over and over again that the main reason for society’s troubles IS the between, and that we have not been able to solve those troubles only because we haven't kicked the can far enough down the road to serfdom through ever more entitlements, stimuli, bailouts, and nanny statism. This election represents another kick of the can, and another step toward the erosion of the bedrock upon this once great nation was built.

The tragedy of it is that ALL of us will suffer the consequences, will reap the “rewards,” that the HALF of us who support the three foundation morality sow. Those "rewards" are nothing short of the destruction of the between and of our once great American culture.

It is neither hyperbole nor even exaggeration to say that this nation is quite literally killing itself through the pathological altruism of liberal "care."

* See the book “The Happiness Hypothesis,” by Jonathan Haidt, and particularly Chapter 10, entitled “Happiness Comes from Between.” Happiness does not come exclusively from within one’s self, nor does it come exclusively from things outside one’s self. Happiness and human flourishing come from the synchronicity of the relationships between the two; namely the relationships between one’s self and one’s family, friends, vocations, and avocations, and the feeling of being part of something larger than one’s self and the sense of fulfillment which results.

In other words, human happiness and flourishing comes from a balance between the individualizing foundations and the binding foundations. But the three foundation morality of liberalism eschews and demonizes the binding foundations, and thus the “between,” and thus the source of human happiness.

The Declaration of Independence says “all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed.” The last four years and the results of this election have proven this to be true. We’ve become so accustomed to the malaise and anomie that result from liberalism they have become the new normal. This country has lost it's sprit; it's sense of exceptionalism and greatness, and instead has accepted normlessness and aimlessness as just the way things are. And in this election we’ve sought to relieve that malaise and anomie by asking, “Please sir, may I have some more.”

-- Edited by winchester on Wednesday 7th of November 2012 10:29:23 AM