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Politics : Evolution -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Brumar89 who wrote (18749)	12/26/2011 1:06:05 PM
From: Cautious_Optimist	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 69300

Liberal as religion is the biased spin of false equivalency. One of the great threats to rational and civil thought today is this fake equivalency game. In my Telco days we used it often as a PR tactic; we pressured news media to always capture "our side" of issues as if it were always at minimum 50-50; even when our case was nil. Things from abusive sales tactics, to predatory marketing to dubious cost accounting in rate cases. Very few could keep up with our ratepayer-funded PR and lawyer-lobbyist machines in courts, PUCs, FCCs, legislatures or public opinion. (Further digression: Its even easier when a guy like Murdoch puts incentives in place for willful blindness between advertising and the news/op-ed pages, think the new Wall Street Journal, or even FoxNews.) False equivalency tactics are much like criminal law lawyering as well; except that everyone knows it and weighs it in the jury box. In a business, it is because your obligation is to profit and owners, not to ethics or truth. Big business especially, is amoral. Sorry for the digression but my point is that with power and money you can create all this fog and manipulation with false dichotomies. If you have a compelling position, you don't need to resort to it. As far as liberalism is concerned, it is based on a search for dynamic truth (small t) and justice. As defined in the Declaration, Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, where IMO the word pursuit = constant improvement, not Perfection... The right starts from a point of Truth (big T, usually from The "Christian" Church and currently a strange marriage to athiest Ayn Rand) and fixed ends. The left is pragmatic, believes we can make a better future and have a job to do -- to bring heaven-to-earth so to speak rather than be consumed by the "afterlife." The birth of liberalism IMO was the scientific method and the Age of Reason. Comparing liberal and conservative roots are like comparing a flowing river to a fossil. Nothing personal, I like fossils............... in museums. Some of my best friends are conservatives and a wonderful people and I know plenty of lefty a-holes so don't think I am one of those who hates you because you have such beliefs. I just feel I have some responsibility to keep the light on the false arguments.