Tag Archives | Liberals

How Can Liberals and Conservatives Communicate?

By on November 18, 2012 in News 38

Picture: "Purple America" by Robert J. Vanderbei, Princeton.edu (CC)

There was a great article a couple weeks ago by Lynn Stuart Parramore, an AlterNet senior editor, titled What if Liberals and Progressives Could Learn to Talk to White Southern Men? in which she reminds us that for Southerners, being polite and reasonable are directly signs of their sense of honor and self-respect. Most of them, despite our political disagreements, don’t want to be seen as rash, close-minded and unreasonable. Lynn Parramore, also Director of AlterNet’s New Economic Dialogue Project, recounts stories of relating to these individuals on certain issues:

What liberals and progressives don’t seem to understand is that you don’t counter a myth with a pile of facts and statistics. You have to counter it with a more powerful story. And that’s what Obama and the Democrats have repeatedly failed to do. White Southern men want a story that makes them feel proud of America and what it can accomplish.

… Read the rest

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Sam Harris, Joe Rogan, Islam And The Future Of Liberalism

By on March 21, 2012 in News 10

Sam Harris writes about the fallout from a recent visit with Joe Rogan on his blog:

I recently had a very enjoyable three-hour conversation with Joe Rogan on his podcast, where the topics ranged from jihad to probability theory to psychedelics. But I subsequently received a fair amount of abuse online for a few things I said about Islam and our adventures in the war on terror.

For instance, I appear to have left many viewers with the impression that I believe we invaded Afghanistan for the purpose of rescuing its women from the Taliban. However, the points I was actually making were rather different…

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Why Facts No Longer Matter In The Media Discourse

By on May 1, 2011 in News 64

birthHow should we understand this latest and most troubling insight into the reality of our media ecology?

In the aftermath of the resolution of the Great Birther bash-up, even as President Obama tried to lay the issue at rest by producing the document that showed, proved, verified, documented, and validated his birth in one of the great states of our disunion, it was said that its release would only fuel more debate, and convince no one.

In other words, in the end, this long debated fact didn’t matter.

Facts no longer seem to matter on other issues, too, as articulated in the now infamous memo issued by retiring Senator Jon Kyle whose office, when confronted with evidence that he misspoke on the matter of how much money Planned Parenthood spent on abortions—he claimed 90%, the truth was but 3%—issued an advisory that said, “The statement was not meant to be factual.”

Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert had a lot of fun with that but one thing that’s not funny is that even when media coverage discredits or exposes some canard, public opinion is not necessarily impacted.… Read the rest

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“Liberals” Take Over The Media

By on March 31, 2011 in News 18

zine diagram-DAs far as memes go, “liberals control the media” seems pretty prevalent. People who long for the days of school spankings shriek it at the top of their lungs – actual liberals believe it if only so they can believe they control something. But as we slowly descend back to Earth we realize The Media is a business.

And the point has been made that you could look long and hard through the board of directors of any of the media giant(s) before you find an honest-to-God Liberal. Liberals are tolerated in the media to the extent that they can make their bosses money.

All these points became clear to me in light of a new propaganda film (made by Citizens Against Government Waste) making the rounds where we see a group of Chinese circa 2030 cackling over America’s demise. Maybe you’ve seen it too – where some communists attribute America’s immanent doom to our use of socialism.… Read the rest

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Chances Are, They’re Not Nazis

By on November 26, 2010 in News 4

Bush & Obama As HitlerAaron Cynic writes at Diatribe Media:

Back in the halcyon days following George W Bush’s inauguration, detractors and opponents of many stripes referred to W and his administration as Nazi’s. Even before the days of borderline fascist government policies like the PATRIOT ACT or warrantless wiretapping and torture apologists, lefties and others handed out poorly Xeroxed pamphlets featuring W’s face with a Hitler mustache.

Now, the jack boot is on the left foot, with hard line right wing conservatives dropping the Nazi card when referring to all things not Right as some form or another of Nazism. Most recently, Fox News chief Roger Ailes called the top brass at NPR “the left wing of Nazism” and said they have a “Nazi attitude.” Allies’ comments refer to the firing of NPR news analyst Juan Williams, after he told Bill O’Reilly that Muslims make him “nervous.”

It seems somewhere along the line the word “Nazi” devolved to something of a schoolyard insult like “dork” or “geek” on the political playground.… Read the rest

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Keith Olbermann Suspended by MSNBC

By on November 5, 2010 in News 40
Photo: kirstenlovesputi (CC)

Photo: kirstenlovesputi (CC)

Wow — Comcast (owners of NBC) didn’t waste any time coming to terms with the United States’ political shift to the right! The leading liberal television commentator Keith Olbermann is left in the dust… From the New York Times:

Keith Olbermann, the top anchor on MSNBC, was suspended on Friday after the channel discovered that he had made campaign contributions to three Democrats.

The MSNBC president, Phil Griffin, issued a statement saying, “I became aware of Keith’s political contributions late last night. Mindful of NBC News policy and standards, I have suspended him indefinitely without pay.”

No one at NBC News would speculate about what this might mean for Mr. Olbermann’s future, though one NBC executive suggested this was not a step toward firing him.

Politico had reported Friday morning that Mr. Olbermann’s contributions were in apparent violation of MSNBC policy.

Mr. Olbermann hosts the most popular program on MSNBC, “Countdown.” He worked at MSNBC in the late 1990s and re-joined the channel in 2003.

… Read the rest

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Why Aren’t There More Republicans in Hollywood?

By on November 1, 2010 in News 29

olivia wildeLeslie Gornstein a/k/a The Answer Bitch, E! Online’s resident question-and-answer columnist, asks disinformation author Ed Rampell for help with this question:

Just saw a new video with Olivia Wilde urging people to vote progressive, and it got me to thinking: Why is Hollywood so darned liberal?
—Brenda, San Antonio

You speak of the MoveOn.org video featuring Wilde as a hard-bitten activist from the future who berates you—you specifically, thanks to some Facebook-aided personalization—for not voting in the upcoming election.

It’s certainly not the kind of message you’d see from, say, Elisabeth Hasselbeck. Here’s why:

Indeed, Wilde and Romany Malco, he of The 40-Year-Old-Virgin, jokingly warn that without your vote, President Palin will, among other things, declare an “ultrawar” against the Pacific Ocean and “whatever country Björk is from.”

Now, I talked to Ed Rampell, author of Progressive Hollywood, about this. Rampell offers three very interesting reasons why the entertainment business is so full of non-Republicans.

… Read the rest

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Researchers Find a ‘Liberal Gene’

By on October 29, 2010 in News 17
Chemical structures of representative D4-preferring ligands.

Chemical structures of representative D4-preferring ligands.

From ScienceDaily:

Appearing in the latest edition of The Journal of Politics published by Cambridge University Press, the research focused on 2,000 subjects from The National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health. By matching genetic information with maps of the subjects’ social networks, the researchers were able to show that people with a specific variant of the DRD4 gene were more likely to be liberal as adults, but only if they had an active social life in adolescence.

Dopamine is a neurotransmitter affecting brain processes that control movement, emotional response, and ability to experience pleasure and pain. Previous research has identified a connection between a variant of this gene and novelty-seeking behavior, and this behavior has previously been associated with personality traits related to political liberalism.

Lead researcher James H. Fowler of UC San Diego and his colleagues hypothesized that people with the novelty-seeking gene variant would be more interested in learning about their friends’ points of view.

… Read the rest

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Peter Berkowitz: Why Liberals Don’t Get the Tea Party Movement

By on October 18, 2010 in News 60

Another take on this disinfo.com post. Peter Berkowitz writes in the Wall Street Journal:

Highly educated people say the darndest things, these days particularly about the tea party movement. Vast numbers of other highly educated people read and hear these dubious pronouncements, smile knowingly, and nod their heads in agreement. University educations and advanced degrees notwithstanding, they lack a basic understanding of the contours of American constitutional government.

New York Times columnist Paul Krugman got the ball rolling in April 2009, just ahead of the first major tea party rallies on April 15, by falsely asserting that “the tea parties don’t represent a spontaneous outpouring of public sentiment. They’re AstroTurf (fake grass-roots) events.”

Having learned next to nothing in the intervening 16 months about one of the most spectacular grass-roots political movements in American history, fellow Times columnist Frank Rich denied in August of this year that the tea party movement is “spontaneous and leaderless,” insisting instead that it is the instrument of billionaire brothers David and Charles Koch.

… Read the rest

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Notes Toward a New Political Taxonomy

By on September 6, 2010 in News 2

Noah Millman writes for the American Scene:

It has become clear to me over the years that one of the causes of persistent confusion in our political arguments is the interchangeable use of taxonomic terms that, while they may have a natural affinity, are not actually synonyms.

Three terms that tend to get used interchangeably are:

Left / Liberal / Progressive

Their counterparts on the other side of the political spectrum are treated similarly:

Right / Conservative / Reactionary

The shades of difference among the meanings of the words within the triads, however, are not minor. One can very well be extremely right-wing without being a reactionary in any meaningful sense — think of Ayn Rand. One can be extremely left-wing without being a liberal in any meaningful sense — think of Lenin.

I propose, therefore, to accentuate the differences between the words commonly lumped together, to clear up all ambiguities by assigning technical meanings to commonly-used terms, and thereby define a three-dimensional space within which political writers and thinkers could more clearly be pegged.

… Read the rest

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