RedCelt69 wrote:If they were scientific, their own political tendencies would be irrelevant. Any result would have had scientific interest, surely?
Possibly. There are some things to which it's almost impossible to apply the holistic scientific process, and I wonder whether this is not one of them.
The list of papers published by the lead researcher seem to indicate a particular direction of thought. But I think that my reaction is primarily to the stink of the typical wanky tabloid puff-science piece. I'm not going to be uncritical of this one just because it appeals to my sensibilities more than whatever turds they were polishing last week.
wild_quinine wrote:I think it's reasonable to suggest that whilst Conservative arguments tend to appeal to safety, and security, left wing arguments tend to appeal to what is supposedly morally the correct path.
Supposedly?
Yeah, I didn't want to undermine myself by suggesting there was any such thing as a right answer.
In all seriousness, I think that liberalism is the only 'morality' we can safely push through politics.
Do you know anyone who is not sure that their views are correct?
Well, without wanting to get all 'no true scotsman': all true scientists.
And in the political sphere I think that it's fair to distinguish between how it is appropriate to govern, and the holding of ones own personal moral beliefs. I'm convinced that I have the right moral viewpoint on the world, in just the way that you describe. But I'm not so convinced (or at the very least not so convinced of the universality of that position) that I would impose it on others by duress, coercion or law.
That's not something that I see enough of in the politics of the far left - what I see there is lip service to the idea of freedom and liberal values, but an eternal one-upmanship in interpretation of the one true moral code, such that for many of these poor devils it's really just freedom to be part of whichever increasingly sectarian, bigoted and categorical clique they're most closely aligned by attrition.
Pre-judging people is surely a non left wing sentiment. What prejudices do lefties hold?
In an ideal world, or in my actual experience? We can talk about left wing positions, as written on paper, all day. Please let's not, though. It's the actual experience I'm worried about because that's where I've seen the worst examples of doublethink and associated prejudice.
whatever prejudices you might conjure, are they really as bad as judging someone by their sexuality or the colour of their skin? Whatever they attach their smugness to, it is a far more trivial position than the alternatives.
Well, there are ways of looking at this and ways of looking at this. It's not necessarily about the type of view, as it is about the type of ignorance.
When someone takes a position which is morally wrong, in as much as we'd ever say that anything is so, there is still always the hope that they will come to understand the holes in their argument. When someone is ignorant, there is always the hope that they will learn.
But when you see someone who will desperately plug any hole in their own opinion with something, anything, that fits - no matter how temporarily, or how badly, then what you have is someone who, the moment they stop being ridiculous, becomes really dangerous.
Put another way: Do you find Macgamers arguments so galling because they are at odds with
your perception of the world, or because they are so clearly at odds with
his own, and he won't see that?
We probably agree that it is worse to hate someone because they are black, than to hate them because they disagree with you on, say, a matter of public policy relating to social welfare. It is, if absolutely nothing else, a
worse error.
But if you are the kind of person who would disadvantage anyone and everyone who ends up on the wrong side of your worldview, no matter the reasons or the logic or the evidence to the contrary, then I think that you are probably a
worse person.
Note that the former mistake could be a matter of simple ignorance, wheras in the latter case there is almost always an effort involved. The latter group could very often include racists. They could be people who see themselves as morally impregnable, but who will happily consign a given ethnic minority to the dustbin simply because they're inconvenient, all the while spouting terms like 'committed antiracist'.
I know that may sound contraversial, but look at it this way: willful ignorance = worse moral error than accidental ignorance.
And
of course a lot of the real racists out there are absolutely willfully ignorant people who will ignore the evidence the world presents them in favour of their own derived views, ad infinitum. And yes, those people are really up there with the worst of the worst.
But I think we shouldn't take it for granted that these people are on the right exclusively. And I also think that the people on the left with such problems tend to wear an additional blanket of hypocrisy. That's my own personal speculation, I'll freely admit it, but my experiences have tended to bear this out.
Many of the people I've met with offensive right wing views have been able to admit errors in their viewpoints when presented with evidence. With people on the left,
I tend to get accused of being racist just for questioning their perfection.
I have to say that if, at the end of the day, there's any truth to the suggestion that left wing people are more intelligent than right wing people, then this reduces my respect for human intelligence.