{"id":43928,"date":"2014-05-21T12:00:45","date_gmt":"2014-05-21T17:00:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=43928"},"modified":"2014-05-21T11:51:46","modified_gmt":"2014-05-21T16:51:46","slug":"drinking-symptomatically","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=43928","title":{"rendered":"Drinking Symptomatically"},"content":{"rendered":"

I used to make a concerted effort to read Minnesota liberal blogs.\u00a0 But it’s been a long time.<\/p>\n

Part of it is that most of the good ones – and there were good ones – have moved on.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n

I’ve said for years that the biggest problem liberals\u00a0communicating\u00a0with non-believers – for the precious few that want to – is that very few of them have ever learned how to actually debate.\u00a0 Oh, most of them may start out a “debate” with a round of factoids lifted from “Think” “Progress” or “Kos”.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n

And as Jeff Kolb found when he attended “Drinking Liberally” last week, that’s if you’re lucky<\/a>:<\/p>\n

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.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

While I’ve rarely encountered that level of hostiity, I won’t say I expect a whole lot better.\u00a0 \u00a0 And that’s fine – anyone who needs to react to dissent, or a dissenter, that way deserves pity, not anger.<\/p>\n

Kolb:<\/p>\n

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.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

And in a way, it’s hard to know how it could be much different:\u00a0 Minnesota liberals come up through a K-12 system that indoctrinates kids to think the left is <\/em>the baseline.\u00a0 They mostly go through a university system that actively crushes dissent from “progressivism”.\u00a0 They largely work in institutions – government, academia, big corporations – that can ignore dissent or minimize it at their pleasure.<\/p>\n

It’s a lifelong path of least intellectual resistance.\u00a0 Who could expect a cogent argument?\u00a0 It’s the dissenters who have to develop the intellectual muscles you get from swimming against the tide.<\/p>\n

And yes – it suspect it cuts both ways.\u00a0\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I used to make a concerted effort to read Minnesota liberal blogs.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 There are a few left that are worth reading, but I can count them on one hand […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[63],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-43928","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-lefty-alt-media"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43928","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=43928"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43928\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":44070,"href":"https:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43928\/revisions\/44070"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=43928"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=43928"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=43928"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}