![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
To all those people who lament the impression that colleges and universities are biased against them?
To all those people who lament the impression that human rights groups are biased against them?
To all those people who lament the impression that foreign countries are biased against them?
To all those people who lament the impression that the media is biased against them?
Have you ever considered the possibility that all or some of these people might actually be right and you're the one who's wrong?
1. If educated people are often liberal, is it simpler to assume a broad-sweeping brainwashing conspiracy, or to assume that upon exposure to other views and the facts behind them people don't seem to remain conservative? If liberals claimed that universities had a conservative bias, you know that conservatives would be claiming that it's not their fault educated people lean right. Why do you let them get away with the anti-intellectual bullshit when you would never allow it from liberals?
2. If human rights groups tend to be liberal, is this a sign that they're all secretly members of the anti-conservative conspiracy bent on eradicating an entire school of thought from the face of the earth? Or is it simpler to assume that the liberal philosophy places a higher emphasis on the well-being of individuals, from which it follows naturally they'd care more about human rights?
3. Maybe the fact that everyone thinks you're acting like an imperialist dick means that imperialism makes you a dick. Calling you a dick and treating you like you're a dick when you're being a dick isn't biased. It's called "self-preservation."
4. Media coverage of the election doesn't have a liberal bias... it has a bias in favor of McCain. Conservatives loved the guy doing this study when it said the opposite, but now that they're the bad guys, suddenly the methodology must be wrong. See, you gotta be skeptical about the media if you're a conservative. A good unbiased source will agree with you. Never trust a source that doesn't agree with you. It's just that damned liberal conspiracy acting up again, but thankfully they're easy to detect. They say crazy things like "pissing off other countries makes them hate us," and "voodoo economics doesn't work" or "abstinence-only sex ed doesn't work." They're always pushing this ideological bias, so it makes them easy to detect and ignore.
All in all, I'm getting tired of the "I hate your evidence! You elitist liberals are always pickin' on us simple salt o'the earth conservatives. Just because I don't have any credentials in the field we're talking about doesn't mean that my opinion isn't just as valid as yours!"
Well, I'm an elitist bastard and let me tell you something. If I hear one more time about how educated people can't be trusted (because too much exposure to the diversity and complexity of reality brainwashes you liberal, see), or about how educated people are out of touch with reality (at least compared to people who've only ever exposed themselves to their own way of life), or some other bullshit excuse to cover the bitterness and resentment of uneducated people that educated people always abandon their cause... I'm going to have some kind of episode.
I don't know how to say it more simply than this. If education is a danger to your worldview, your worldview needs examining. If studying other cultures is some kind of threat to your own, your own culture isn't worth your slavish loyalty. If entertaining other worldviews is a danger to your own, your worldview is a hell of a lot more fragile than you want to admit. If exposure to people who believe they can make the world better somehow erodes your reinforced sense of self-serving exploitative entitlement and privilege, perhaps that's a clue that you need to abandon that sense of entitlement.
There are too many people who resent educated people for learning a few new things and suddenly changing their minds. I didn't think I was a liberal. Sure, I thought that gays were human beings and so were women. Sure I thought that it'd sure be nice if college weren't a way to transform wealth into privilege so that the super-rich could claim they'd earned what they've got. Sure I'd love to have the first, last, and final say over when I carry a child. But I didn't think that made me liberal. I thought liberals were these frothing man-hating Communists out to create a man-free, gun-free Marxist paradise off the cost of California on a human-made island of singed bras.
I didn't realize what would happen to me. I didn't realize that once I left my town of 8,000 people I might really have a chance to learn how other cultures lived and what made them that way. I didn't realize that this would cause me to take a good hard look at my own culture. I didn't realize this was all part of the grand liberal mafia brainwashing conspiracy.
In short, reality turned out to have a liberal bias. Once exposed, I fell.
For all you conservatives out there... it could happen to you. I suggest you do what the Amish do. Drop out after eighth grade. Wouldn't want to start getting ideas and putting on airs. Wouldn't want to change your mind. Wouldn't want to become liberal or anything.
Drop out. Delete every news channel from your cable but Fox News. In fact, delete every channel but the televangelists. Burn every nonfiction book you own. Save yourselves before it's too late! Above all remember!
The liberals are sly. The liberals are stealthy. The liberals will find you.
YOU MAY ALREADY BE ONE.
To all those people who lament the impression that human rights groups are biased against them?
To all those people who lament the impression that foreign countries are biased against them?
To all those people who lament the impression that the media is biased against them?
Have you ever considered the possibility that all or some of these people might actually be right and you're the one who's wrong?
1. If educated people are often liberal, is it simpler to assume a broad-sweeping brainwashing conspiracy, or to assume that upon exposure to other views and the facts behind them people don't seem to remain conservative? If liberals claimed that universities had a conservative bias, you know that conservatives would be claiming that it's not their fault educated people lean right. Why do you let them get away with the anti-intellectual bullshit when you would never allow it from liberals?
2. If human rights groups tend to be liberal, is this a sign that they're all secretly members of the anti-conservative conspiracy bent on eradicating an entire school of thought from the face of the earth? Or is it simpler to assume that the liberal philosophy places a higher emphasis on the well-being of individuals, from which it follows naturally they'd care more about human rights?
3. Maybe the fact that everyone thinks you're acting like an imperialist dick means that imperialism makes you a dick. Calling you a dick and treating you like you're a dick when you're being a dick isn't biased. It's called "self-preservation."
4. Media coverage of the election doesn't have a liberal bias... it has a bias in favor of McCain. Conservatives loved the guy doing this study when it said the opposite, but now that they're the bad guys, suddenly the methodology must be wrong. See, you gotta be skeptical about the media if you're a conservative. A good unbiased source will agree with you. Never trust a source that doesn't agree with you. It's just that damned liberal conspiracy acting up again, but thankfully they're easy to detect. They say crazy things like "pissing off other countries makes them hate us," and "voodoo economics doesn't work" or "abstinence-only sex ed doesn't work." They're always pushing this ideological bias, so it makes them easy to detect and ignore.
All in all, I'm getting tired of the "I hate your evidence! You elitist liberals are always pickin' on us simple salt o'the earth conservatives. Just because I don't have any credentials in the field we're talking about doesn't mean that my opinion isn't just as valid as yours!"
Well, I'm an elitist bastard and let me tell you something. If I hear one more time about how educated people can't be trusted (because too much exposure to the diversity and complexity of reality brainwashes you liberal, see), or about how educated people are out of touch with reality (at least compared to people who've only ever exposed themselves to their own way of life), or some other bullshit excuse to cover the bitterness and resentment of uneducated people that educated people always abandon their cause... I'm going to have some kind of episode.
I don't know how to say it more simply than this. If education is a danger to your worldview, your worldview needs examining. If studying other cultures is some kind of threat to your own, your own culture isn't worth your slavish loyalty. If entertaining other worldviews is a danger to your own, your worldview is a hell of a lot more fragile than you want to admit. If exposure to people who believe they can make the world better somehow erodes your reinforced sense of self-serving exploitative entitlement and privilege, perhaps that's a clue that you need to abandon that sense of entitlement.
There are too many people who resent educated people for learning a few new things and suddenly changing their minds. I didn't think I was a liberal. Sure, I thought that gays were human beings and so were women. Sure I thought that it'd sure be nice if college weren't a way to transform wealth into privilege so that the super-rich could claim they'd earned what they've got. Sure I'd love to have the first, last, and final say over when I carry a child. But I didn't think that made me liberal. I thought liberals were these frothing man-hating Communists out to create a man-free, gun-free Marxist paradise off the cost of California on a human-made island of singed bras.
I didn't realize what would happen to me. I didn't realize that once I left my town of 8,000 people I might really have a chance to learn how other cultures lived and what made them that way. I didn't realize that this would cause me to take a good hard look at my own culture. I didn't realize this was all part of the grand liberal mafia brainwashing conspiracy.
In short, reality turned out to have a liberal bias. Once exposed, I fell.
For all you conservatives out there... it could happen to you. I suggest you do what the Amish do. Drop out after eighth grade. Wouldn't want to start getting ideas and putting on airs. Wouldn't want to change your mind. Wouldn't want to become liberal or anything.
Drop out. Delete every news channel from your cable but Fox News. In fact, delete every channel but the televangelists. Burn every nonfiction book you own. Save yourselves before it's too late! Above all remember!
The liberals are sly. The liberals are stealthy. The liberals will find you.
YOU MAY ALREADY BE ONE.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2008-08-18 11:38 am (UTC)From:Very nice. Although I will say this, Abstinence only sex-ed doesn't work well in our country now a days. Didn't work well in our parents days, and probably not as well as they'd like to think in our grandparents days either.
As it pertains to the rest - well hell - I agree. LoL
- Kyle
no subject
Date: 2008-08-18 07:15 pm (UTC)From:no subject
Date: 2008-08-19 09:17 am (UTC)From:As it pertains to morality - whose morality in question? ;)
By the way... did you know...
that...
Green puppies dance backwards?
That my dear, is the end result of my research. ;) LoL
no subject
Date: 2008-08-18 04:15 pm (UTC)From:Have my babies?
Seriously, that was amazing. Mind if I post that in other places?
no subject
Date: 2008-08-18 07:14 pm (UTC)From:no subject
Date: 2008-08-19 10:26 pm (UTC)From:Okay, so when two extremely different cultures meet for the first time, if they just throw their cultural backgrounds at one another right from the start, you'll get pretty bad culture shock. It might end up even threatening one or the other culture just by virtue of the encounter. Like the cargo cults that rose after WW2. While I agree with what you said about our own culture, I'd also say that this is something that should be avoided whenever possible for the sake of both cultures involved, since this seems a lot worse.
So, if I agree with the statement that "If studying other cultures is some kind of threat to your own, your own culture isn't worth your slavish loyalty", how can I reconcile this with my view that such a happening like this is somehow deeply wrong? So far as I know, that specific event wasn't the case of our culture specifically forcing the formation of cargo cults, it just ended up happening by virtue of the two cultures meeting each other without easing into one another culturally. I might be wrong about that specific event, admittedly, but I can't imagine that every instance of culture shock to such a level throughout the history of mankind has been intentional. And that being the case, then that means it's not merely a case of "don't force your culture on others" either, since those unintentional occurrences weren't caused by purposefully forcing one culture on another.
So how can these two views be reconciled with one another? Is there something I'm missing about culture shock that would clear things up, or is it merely a question of scale?
no subject
Date: 2008-08-20 06:36 am (UTC)From:no subject
Date: 2008-08-20 06:45 am (UTC)From:Okay. As you said there, and as I agree with, "If studying other cultures is some kind of threat to your own, your own culture isn't worth your slavish loyalty. If entertaining other worldviews is a danger to your own, your worldview is a hell of a lot more fragile than you want to admit." And yet, at least sometimes unintentionally, exactly this thing happens in culture shock. To use the cargo cult example I mentioned before, without any specific intent on our part, we really smashed the cultures of multiple South Pacific tribes by setting up our military bases there during WW2, leading them to change their belief systems in a way that incorporated the military bases into their spirituality, setting up faux bases in an attempt at bringing cargo to the island once more and all. Now, it's also my position that this was devastating to those cultures, and in the future, when two highly disparate cultures meet for the first time, interactions should be eased into in order that one side doesn't massively impact and, honestly, smash themselves into the culture of the other, breaking down what came before without any specific intent to harm that culture.
I'm just having trouble reconciling these two different views, and I thought I might have more success from an actual anthropologist's perspective. On one hand, people should avoid unintentionally harming the cultural viewpoints of others by easing their own culture into them when two cultures first interact with one another. But on the other hand, if our own cultural viewpoints can't survive when other cultures are introduced to us, we shouldn't steadfastly cling to those cultural viewpoints and instead accept the alternate views. These seem like two contradictory claims, possibly even hypocritical against one another. I'm not bringing this up as a critique, mind, but rather to ask how the contradiction can be resolved. Since on their own, both seem like perfectly reasonable claims, and ones that I'd personally agree with. But together, I can't figure out how both could possibly be true at once.
no subject
Date: 2008-08-20 06:23 pm (UTC)From:Now, if you want to apply this to other current cultural clashes, you can. Our presence in most areas of the Middle East right now betrays our uneducated view of the indiginous people and what's more it betrays our unconcern. Their culture is in danger, particularly in Iraq where the self-determination they were promised by us is turning out differently. They're beginning to realize that the United States cannot afford an independent Iraq, and that is a threat to their culture.
That's the difference between encountering, entertaining, or studying another culture and basically being conquered by it, having your own way of life completely tossed aside as irrelevant by people who want to replace it with their own (or at least people who toss it aside and don't care what it gets replaced with, in the case of the cargo cults).
no subject
Date: 2008-08-20 07:31 pm (UTC)From:So are you also saying that all examples of one culture being totally subsumed are universally caused by intentionality on the subsuming side? Is it entirely impossible for this to happen wholly unintentionally even when both sides aren't specifically trying to subsume one another? Because I was under the impression that this could happen whenever two entirely disparate cultures met for the first time when neither culture has any prior knowledge of one another, even when neither culture had any actual goals of breaking the other culture in this manner.