Lefties and Debate

I usually don't post much on Saturday, but I want to cover something today that I've touched on before. There's a discussion going on right now over at Spatula City BBS about the difference between liberals and conservatives in an argument. Here's an excerpt:

Conservatives seem to have no trouble with the very Jeffersonian idea that someone can disagree with you, and he can still be a good person with good motives who simply has reached different conclusions about a specific topic. To libs, OTOH, that sentence seems to be utterly inconceivable - and I chose that word with care because that's exactly what it is, they literally CANNOT conceive of it, the concept is unable to enter their consciousness.

I've been in very few debates with actual liberals (although I did know a self-proclaimed socialist in high school who liked to tell me that "conservatives eat babies"), but in the blogosphere and in news/editorials, etc., I've definitely noticed this difference. I've written about it a few times before in relation to elitism and the childish mental characteristic of not being able to recognize different beliefs. However, I realized something else about this yesterday, and I'll explain that here.

I was doing my usual blog surfing yesterday, and this post at Conservative English Major got my attention. Check out the end:

...I said that basically 100% of the faculty in our program: 1 - hate Bush, 2 - think socialism is a great idea, 3 - think religion is for unthinking dupes and 4 - want more affirmative action, not less. I was informed those last four positions were NOT opinions, but facts (or truisms) about the world.

THAT is the problem with liberal thought. To them, opinions=facts. If you disagree with them, you must be evil, because the truth should be so obvious that you don't actually need to debate. I've said this several times before.

For example, if a liberal is trying to promote affirmative action, it's usually because they KNOW that racism is rampant among caucasian males, and they have to do something to stop it. If you suggest that affirmative action is racist because it discriminates on the basis of race, all they can think about is the "fact" that white people are racists, so they call you a racist for wanting to hold back minorities. If you try to debate, you're an evil, racist bigot, because obviously, there's racism everywhere, and only a racist wouldn't be able to see it.

Socialism causes similar problems. To the liberal, most people are basically good and want to help out the group, but a small percentage of mean, greedy, evil people have always caused socialism to fail by taking the resources for themselves. If you try to explain that people generally are greedy and self-centered, you must BE one of the evil people, or else you would want to help out your fellow man like everyone else.

It also seems to work this way with same-sex marriage. Since gays should obviously have the right to marry, the only people who could possibly be against it are homophobic religious zealots who hate gay people. If you try to explain that marriage is meant to benefit children and give us a structure for society, they won't listen, because they know that "gay families" are 100% equal to normal ones.

I especially like how they always say that the "religious right" is single-handedly trying to stop gay marriage from happening. Never mind the fact that a decent percentage of non-religious people oppose it. They're just pretending not to be religious so they can continue their bigotry!!!

Anyway, back to my main point. I've talked about the above points before, but something else hit me yesterday: Why are liberals constantly accusing conservatives of "lying?"

Answer: Because disagreeing with them, in their minds, is the equivalent of lying! Think about it. Since they "know" or "feel" the truth, any opinion they have is truthful by default. For example, the things I mentioned above: White people are racists even if they don't know it, gay and straight marriages are perfectly equal, most people are altruists at heart, etc.

Therefore, they don't think that debate should be necessary, because any good, honest person would already know the "truth" like they do. Since liberal opinion=fact, conservative opinion=lies. I don't know why I never thought about this before, but it makes sense.

This can be applied to the War on Terror in particular. Why are we constantly hearing the "Bush lied, people died" meme? Because to the left, it's OBVIOUS that Bush lied. In fact, it's the TRUTH that Bush lied, and anyone who disagrees is either a VRWC operative or one of the many "sheeple" who were fooled into thinking that Iraq was a theat.

An IMMINENT threat, in fact. Remember that? Bush told us that Iraq was an imminent threat, right? Well, no. But since liberals believe it, it MUST be true, and if you try to explain what he said in the SOTU, you're a liar!

Bush also said that Iraq had WMD, but since he said that to convince us that war was necessary, he must have been lying! War is evil, so any honest person wouldn't want war! The only way you can convince people to go to war is LYING!!! Since liberals "know" that Iraq had no WMD, they also "know" that Bush lied, and he is therefore evil.

This can be applied to a lot of other things, but you probably get the point by now. To a lot of liberals, there is no difference between a fact and an opinion, and that's why they don't like debate. When you argue with them, you're not trying to explain why your opinion is better than theirs; You're trying to fool them into thinking that the truth isn't true!

Unfortunately, it's also "true" to a lot of them that conservatives are evil liars, so they use emotional arguments to try and change our minds, because they can't see any real value in our opinions. How can you argue for a lie?

Sad.