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No offense, but I think this is kind of a pointless idea. While it's an interesting phenomenon that the widespread use of the Internet has brought back a resurgence of chain letters and smug emails, the people who send them aren't looking for a political discussion. If somebody forwards poo poo like this to everybody in their contacts list, it isn't the initiation of a conversation, it's more like a declaration of ignorance. If you reply back with facts and figures, they will not accept it because they don't care about such things. They only care about hypothetical situations that reinforce their views and that they believe are witty or clever. For most of these people, I doubt it's even political, but rather a fear of Obama or generational differences or other forces beyond their control, so when they get one of these messages that reinforces those fears and seems to strike back at them, they forward them as an offensive against those forces. I think if you really want to bother the person who sent the forward, you shouldn't try to calmly and cooly respond with logic and opinion, but you should try to feed their fear.
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Aug 14, 2009 21:14
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During the debate about the Wisconsin teacher's union issues, I had a friend who posted a Facebook status message that tried to correlate SAT scores by state with union-involvement by state (higher scores in states with unions, lower scores in ones that didn't allow/mandate unions). I did some research and found that SAT scores was actually more correlated to SAT Participation rates by state (less than 10% of students take the SAT in Wisconsin) and posted a response saying so (while mentioning that I supported the teacher's union). She replied back thanking me for my post, and 'liked' my comment.
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Apr 19, 2011 23:29
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By its very nature, being 'conservative' means you want to avoid change or you want to regress back to a previous way of doing things. I think this naturally lends itself to scare tactics, folksy parables, and building up lots of negative evidence (real or imagined) for what's wrong with these new ideas. In comparison, being 'liberal' means wanting to change the way things work. I think it's harder to create chain emails for this because while you might be able to write about how much the current system sucks, its hard to write about what should replace it or what the new idea should be and what its impacts will be. It's really easy to say, "I'm mad and we should get rid of xxxxx (Obama, gay rights, [b]welfare[b], etc.)", but it's more difficult to say, "I'm mad and we should institute a new policy of xxxxx (a three step process to gradually reduce our dependence on foreign oil and fossil fuels that enacts a combination of renewable energy, more efficient energy utilization, and a modern power delivery system that will put us on par with other developed nations). It's kind of like a line from The American President, where the liberal president says that his conservative opponent, "is just shouting at the rain." It's easy to complain about bad weather and talk about when it wasn't raining, it's much more difficult to propose a plan forward, especially in a way that will result in 'FW:FW:FW:FW:FW:Thoughtful proposal on income disparities in urban areas.'
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Jan 24, 2012 22:55
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Cakeequals posted:So my grandpa posted this stupid rear end video about Obamacare: The idea that morality is not 'honest' if there is a benefit to it is horse poo poo. All religions coerce their followers to act according to their beliefs because of a threat of a less-than-perfect afterlife. People have made this argument to campaign against charity, because if you feel good after doing it then you weren't really being altruistic. I don't know what the gently caress the Socratic Club at Oregan State University is, but I'm pretty sure the socratic method doesn't involve somebody asking a question from the audience and then allowing 2 blowhards on stage to dodge the question in an intellectually dishonest way. Discospawn fucked around with this message at 03:51 on Nov 1, 2012 |
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Nov 1, 2012 03:46
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