I used to make a concerted effort to read Minnesota liberal blogs.  But it’s been a long time.

Part of it is that most of the good ones – and there were good ones – have moved on.  There are a few left that are worth reading, but I can count them on one hand hand have and have a couple fingers’ worth of change.

I’ve said for years that the biggest problem liberals communicating with non-believers – for the precious few that want to – is that very few of them have ever learned how to actually debate.  Oh, most of them may start out a “debate” with a round of factoids lifted from “Think” “Progress” or “Kos”.  But let those “arguments” be challenged, and the next round, almost without fail, will be either a logical fallacy – a strawman, a tu-quoque, an ad-hominem, a red herring – or it’ll be a personal attack.

And as Jeff Kolb found when he attended “Drinking Liberally” last week, that’s if you’re lucky:

I shook a few hands and only got one “fuck you,” and figured that ain’t too bad, so I sat back down to watch the show which had just kicked off.

While I’ve rarely encountered that level of hostiity, I won’t say I expect a whole lot better.    And that’s fine – anyone who needs to react to dissent, or a dissenter, that way deserves pity, not anger.

Kolb:

I tweeted at one point that I had the feeling some of the people in the room had never actually spoken to a real-life Republican. One guy asked me at the end of the night if Republicans cared about free speech. After I answered in the affirmative, and used the example of the recent Condoleezza Rice event to illustrate the point, he replied that we only care about free speech “if it wears a suit.” The only response I could muster to this was a blank stare.

And in a way, it’s hard to know how it could be much different:  Minnesota liberals come up through a K-12 system that indoctrinates kids to think the left is the baseline.  They mostly go through a university system that actively crushes dissent from “progressivism”.  They largely work in institutions – government, academia, big corporations – that can ignore dissent or minimize it at their pleasure.

It’s a lifelong path of least intellectual resistance.  Who could expect a cogent argument?  It’s the dissenters who have to develop the intellectual muscles you get from swimming against the tide.

And yes – it suspect it cuts both ways.   I’d imagine conservatives in Utah can be pretty smug and blinkered; I’d imagine liberals in eastern Montana have to either bring an A game or shut up.