Some things that are surprisingly popular on DU

[Kurt_and_Hunter]

The key phrase is "surprisingly popular," not universal. These are some ideas/attitudes that one would expect to be almost non-existent here, but that are actually well represented, in terms of finding no shortage of vigorous defenders.

First Degree Murder (re: the Texas burglar shooter)
Torture (re: pedophiles)
Capital Punishment (re: pedophiles)
Censorship (re: sexual imagery of adults)
Sanctioned Prejudice (re: gay people)
Racism (re: modes of argument on immigration issues)
Nationalism (re: trade, immigration, security)
Appeasement (re: seeking compromise positions with Republicans and/or bigots)
Isolationism
RW Democrat hating (re: respect for media/internet voices who are long-standing Democrat haters)
LW Democrat hating (re: viewing the Democratic party as largely indistinguishable from the Republicans)

I attribute this to two causes. First, with each passing year there are more and more young people whose entire experience with presidential politics is the Bush era, which validates certain Republican assumptions as universal political realities rather than narrow republican tactics that sometimes work and sometimes don't.

Secondly, Iraq; the war is so outrageous that opposition to the war is a very "big tent," so the range of political opinion on DU has expanded steadily since 2003.

This is a sociological observation about an on-line community, not advocacy. Despite my obvious point of view on some of these issues, the under-lying observation that a view-point is more represented on DU than previously is valid or invalid, independent of what one thinks about any given issue.

[Basileus Basileon]

1. Distortion (most of the above)

Distortion here being the presenting of specific approval of a narrow case among some members of a population to imply a general support for all instances of like cases among the population.

[Kurt_and_Hunter]

6. Not sure if I'm reading you right, but

as a for instance, I am not suggesting that a person who supports torture in one instance supports torture categorically. The point is not OPPOSING torture categorically.

There's more in the way of ad hoc emotional approaches to issues, which I attribute to a less and less idealogical DU base.

Ideology is often a bad thing, but at least it gives you a guide for applying standards to unfamiliar circumstances, rather than relying on ones' emotional sense of a specific circumstance.

Capital punishment is a good example. Four years ago any proposal on DU of executing anyone, not matter how villainous the person, attracted dozens of "I oppose capital punishment in all cases" replies, with no qualification.

Today there is less STATED universal opposition. That doesn't mean the same people don't continue to hold the same attitudes, but they seem to have tired of weighing in on the topic... sensing a tipping point where there is no longer a critical mass of idealogical/moral opposition to capital punishment in all cases. What was once a matter of orthodoxy has become highly debatable.

(Orthodoxy is often wrong, and a bar to reasoned argument. It may be healthier that DU is less Orthodox. I'm just observing that it is... or seems to be.)

[Captain Hilts]

2. Sexist language. Right-wing conspiracy theories. nt

[LoZoccolo]

3. People are complex and contradictory and not always consistent to an outside observer.

And sometimes there is an unseen intervening variable in the way people think about things that makes their actions seem inconsistent when it's not taken into consideration. Sometimes they've not even figured it out themselves. Sometimes it's just the mood surrounding an issue which makes a person choose a coping mechanism based more on emotion.

[Poll_Blind]

5. Well-said and very, very true. n/t

PB

[Kurt_and_Hunter]

9. Very true. And the Bush years have punished liberal ideology

Bush is such a nightmare that emotional reactions have been validated on a daily basis for years.

If a person were a purely reactive, emotional Bush-hater they would have made all sorts of correct predictions over the years based on that gut impulse, because Bush always does the most offensive, wicked thing possible.

The most sophisticated political view to have held the last seven years is, "Bush is evil."

But that kind of simplicity (or reliance on gut-level reaction) does not yield equally reliable results in more ambiguous issues.

[texastoast]

4. Well,

"Secondly, Iraq; the war is so outrageous that opposition to the war is a very "big tent," so the range of political opinion on DU has expanded steadily since 2003."


Apparently, the war is not so outrageous that we would consider voting for president people who would fund it and have it continue. But we have had more folks join who oppose the war and tout the killing of neighborhood burglars. But they don't oppose the war to the point of refusing to vote for a candidate who will continue to fund the war.

[unpossibles]

7. I see this a few ways

1 - any group of people will ideally have a broad range of beliefs. Yes, there are some legitimately (in other words, Democrats) here who would cheer or worse the illegal vendetta killing of a criminal. Yes, there are some who are sexist/racist/homophobic, some of whom may not even realize it. Sucks, but there will be honest-to-goodness people who think that way for whatever reason.

They are mainly victims of bad information, imo, and frankly bad information abounds in the media. I am not making excuses so much as trying to understand why people act the way they do, and looking at things like the poll showing how many still believe that Saddam attacked us on 9/11 and had a WMD program, I have to conclude that bad information (including intentionally wrong information) is a major problem for us.

2 - any group as large as this, and as political will have infiltrators who are successful at hiding their true intent, which is to create dissent. We all know they exist despite rules otherwise. The motives for these folks are the bad information plus a bad intent: to stir things up here, but also to make us look more foolish than we sometimes already make ourselves look.

3 - often a loud minority will overshadow a quiet majority which can make a problem appear larger than it is. This group is composed of both 1 and 2 above.

Bottom line: it does suck to see these things expressed on a website which is progressive and liberal. It does. But do not take that as meaning that we all think that way, obviously.

[Kurt_and_Hunter]

11. 90% do not think that way, of course.

These are not majority views, or even plurality views.

But there are tipping points.

A minority of 4% might be very different than 2%, as it plays out in the dynamic of a large online community.

I support things playing out how they play out... that's the whole point of a community like this. But it's interesting to watch the shifting dynamics... it's a tiny simulation of political dynamics in a hypothetical country.

Maybe DU is like the entire political spectrum in the Netherlands?

[Perry Logan]

8. We may just have some outspoken people who favor these things. So we're hearing from them a lot.

[Kurt_and_Hunter]

10. I don't dispute that many of these are minority views with a few outspoken proponents

But the same views were hammered into the ground a few years ago. That kind of group-think or enforced orthodoxy is not a good thing, in the abstract. But there is a sociological change to be noted.

I find it interesting that Lou Dobbs has some core support here. That's the case that really fascinates me. His tone is so patterned after the rhetoric of anti civil rights southerners in the 1960s, but those code words and code arguments are not the universal turn-off they would have been a few years ago.

Maybe it's all generational.