Commissar

uh, you made a generalization and called it "fact" and i said bull****. then i backed it up with a very real case of a situation that does not fit your generalization. showing that not everyone gets "liberalized." that's the way proofs work. i should have stated Q.E.D. afterwards. my bad. taks <{POST_SNAPBACK}> It is a fact. It is a fact that higher education tends to be a liberalizing factor, which is what I said in the beginning and what I've said throughout. You're mistaken if you think I said every highly-educated individual is a liberal, since I gave the example of my father, who has more than a couple of degrees and is conservative. I still don't know what the hell you're arguing against.

Did you miss where I posted tha tbush just requested to raise the cap on the debt, the day after the election? O wait, that doesn't help at all. Look, bad things (in our opinion) are going to happen, we los tthe election. Just hope that the demos in the senate ban together to stop the really bad things. That and some of the justices can hang on for 4 more years... <{POST_SNAPBACK}> The trouble is, the Democrats now believe they're going to have to realign themselves in order to win anything in the future. That means pushing more towards the middle and doing the God-fearing no-taxes bit. But you hit on something that truly terrifies me; the Supreme Court. Bush could probably put anyone he wanted on the bench right now, and that's one of the worst possibilities I could imagine. Could you imagine someone like Ashcroft as a Supreme Court justice?

Wrong. You did not say the rule does not apply to everyone. You said it was bull****. Want me to go back and point it out? You could've done the logical thing and say it doesn't apply to everyone, but instead you chose to toss the whole statement out the window as baseless. So, I'll say it again: higher education tends to have a liberalizing effect on those who benefit from it. Tendency is not absolute. I repeatedly made allowances for folks such as yourself and the crowd you hang with. I never claimed everyone with a degree was a liberal because of it. I thought it was a wholly amiable discussion until you decided to go on 'n call a long-proven fact bull****, but hey...to each their own. Oh, out of curiosity, where does calling someone's assertion bull**** fit into your whole Socratic impression? Give me a moment, as I need to thumb through my Fallacies Handbook so I too can make use of Latin.

no, taks said most engineers are conservative, then followed it up with a statement that most he knows are actually libertarian... please read carefully before misquoting me. taks <{POST_SNAPBACK}> And I still say that's some pretty...well, we'll be generous and say "lacking" evidence to prove that higher education does not, in fact, tend to have more of a liberalizing effect on those who benefit from it.

But...but that's impossible! Taks proved it! Y'all are super-analytical and whatnot! And we all know that Democrats have a monopoly on stupidity! Lord knows, I've never met a local yokel with more fingers than teeth and more teeth than IQ points who was firmly committed to God, guns, and the fight against gays.

hit a nerve nothing... you directly implied that i was socially inept and lacking in a sex life as an argument against my case. that's an ad-hominem attack that was uncalled for, and nothing more than a flame. whether i'm socially inept (or any other engineer for that matter) is irrelevant to the discussion. you also tried (unconvincingly) to imply that i had poor grammar, lessening my argument, which i've still not figured out. that was ad-hominem attack #1. taks <{POST_SNAPBACK}> No, I implied that most engineers are socially inept. If you happen to be, my condolences. But I didn't make any observations about you, which is something you seem unable to avoid. Oops! That was my first. Guess I have to plant the flag of Jesus, trumpet my degrees from the University of Phoenix Online, and vote Republican now. Seriously, though, as much as I love your proper use of all the various terms for all the various logical fallacies, I took that class long before you did and I am aware of what I'm doing. Mostly, it's watching a conservative try and talk his way around thirty years of political trend-observing by suggesting the group of people he knows is contrary to the rule, and therefore the rule does not apply to anyone. It's funny. Finally, if you really want me to go back and take a red pen to all of your posts, I'll do it. Just not right now, since I'm actually (supposed to be) doing the exact same thing at work.

Churchill also said that any ideas about the benefits of democracy would be wiped out during a five minute conversation with the average voter. It's almost like he knew...

hardly making it a fact... you've still provided no evidence. curiously, how is my grammar deficient? besides some "spoken" language, it's actually better than yours. now you're flaming and i have thusly reported you. if you can't accept a dissenting opinion, perhaps you should post elsehwere? the status of my sex life, or any other engineer is beyond this discussion and irrelevant. by virtue of your inability to handle debate, you no longer interest me... oh, btw, JE, add three zeros to your number, $3,000,000,000 taks <{POST_SNAPBACK}> How was that flaming? Simply reporting anecdotal evidence. I know more than a few engineers. They're pretty bad. Sounds like I hit a nerve. And of course I can accept dissenting opinion, but that's all you're providing. You're disputing what has been taken as sociological fact for three decades and backing it up with the claim that of all the engineers you know, none of them are liberal. So what? I know a hell of a lot of people who can add the Doctor prefix to their name. Some are liberal, some are conservative. Most are liberal. By your own logic, I therefore carry my point, no?

I'll take career counseling only after you actually know my career and how many hours a week I work. I don't do eighty, and I'm doing just fine. And I think Churchill's old tag, "If you have to tell someone you're powerful, you aren't," is quite appropos here. I'm not keeping a degree tally, so quit bringing it up. It doesn't impress me. I know firsthand how ridiculously easy it is to get a doctorate. Europe also has a lower cost of living, which accounts for your specious poverty line argument. And my quality of life is pretty damn high, but it's nothing I couldn't get in Europe doing less work, by and large.

karl rove is citing anecdotal evidence, not facts. [quotje]Also, it's a generally known fact that higher education has a liberalizing effect on a person's views. Republicans would argue that being around degenerate, weed-smoking college professors is the cause. I'd argue that the more you learn about the world, the more you realize that maybe God doesn't pick presidents. <{POST_SNAPBACK}> bullsh*t. the phrase "generally known fact" is meaningless and in fact, has no basis in fact. i guarantee if you poll all of the engineers in the country you'll find they're mostly conservative. the crowd i work and hang-out with is incredibly more educated than 99.9% of the world, yet we're mostly conservative... maybe this is generally accepted as fact in liberal circles only? your argument that "the more you learn about the world" is ridiculous. liberal arts schools teach ideals. it's not because of pot smoking hippie type professors, it's because they're brought up on hopes and dreams of utopian societies... engineering (applied sciences) schools generally foster logical thought and reasoning abilities. we're hyper-analytical and it shows... god didn't pick our president, btw, 58 million people did. taks <{POST_SNAPBACK}> No, it does have a basis in fact. It's been in every high school civics textbook published since around 1980 or so. It's a long-studied and proven fact of the world; higher education tends to have a liberalizing effect on a person. I'm not suggesting it's true for everyone - my father has a couple of masters and he voted Republican - but by and large, that's just the way it goes. By the way, claims of superior intelligence generally have less impact when they're made without appearing to use a modicum of grammar. Like it or not, the manner in which a thought is conveyed has just as much influence on the response to the thought as the thought itself. That's another long-studied and basic fact that you might choose to believe is bull****. As far as the engineers go, I'd say overall their conservative values are brought on by the typical social ineptitude they exhibit rather than their education. They ain't getting any, and so neither should the rest of the world. Another exception to the general rule is the military. Officers are for the most part college-educated and highly Republican. I accredit that more to their view that Republicans will do better by them than Democrats will. But, I'll give up the whole line of argument if you can point to one instance in our history where social conservatism, the feeling that the status quo is good enough, has been for the best. I'll knock a few off right away; the liberation of slaves, female suffrage, and the civil rights movement of the 1960s. I'm sort of glad liberals carried their points on those issues, and as far as I can tell they haven't ruined the country yet.

Actually, I'll take the average European 32-hour work week over our average 80-hour anytime. Our productivity is more a result of the fact that we work ourselves to death and have states bigger than most European companies rather than any sort of drive. You think their quality of life and perks are lower than ours, go over there someday. It'll change your mind.

Could find a cure for Alzheimer's or cancer or something along those lines. Might end up being a bargain. Scientific enterprise shouldn't be thrown out because it costs.

What really chaps my ass is that religion won this election. Somehow, people managed to overlook the fact that while Kerry was in Vietnam, Bush was running for the hills in Texas, and yet still conclude that Bush was the tough guy, the moral, value-centric guy. Same thing happened in the 2000 Republican primaries, where a guy like John McCain, who spent the better part of a decade in a Vietnam POW camp and has been one of the few decent politicians in recent memory gets painted as the height of evil by Bush, who was drunk until he was forty and then decided to get into politics because he had screwed up everything else. How does he do it? Religion. He's born-again, and so the God-fearin' peoples of the country go, "That guy's my guy." I could turn this into a diatribe on the utter arrogance and short-sightedness of religion in general, but instead I'll simply say that I'm surprised we've let religion this far into the political arena. I'm all for people voting their values, and if they're influenced by religion, well and good; but having priests and pastors out there saying things like, "Who would Jesus vote for?" and "Remember, God has spoken through a bush before" is crossing a line, in my opinion. But it's what got Bush there yesterday.

I think Karl Rove saying it is pretty good evidence. Check out the Yahoo! news story on Democratic soul-searching. Also, it's a generally known fact that higher education has a liberalizing effect on a person's views. Republicans would argue that being around degenerate, weed-smoking college professors is the cause. I'd argue that the more you learn about the world, the more you realize that maybe God doesn't pick presidents.

great soundbite but hardly relevant to the "lie" comment that oddly you and deganawida both agree on... this is the emotional plea, actually (aka an appeal to emotion). taks <{POST_SNAPBACK}> Did you just get finished with the logical fallacy portion of your Philosophy 101 textbook or something?

I dunno. With all the blow Georgie did while somehow not managing to find oil in Texas, I imagine their relationship is probably what every evangelist would want it to be; passing acquaintance, no more. Though he's got plenty of ED drugs to choose from now, so who knows?

Personally speaking, I'm alternating between the ol' nature vs. nurture argument as it pertains to homosexuality, and a discussion on why Bush is an asshat. Probably won't let me say asshat, but oh, well.

It's a hypothetical argument you put forth, and not a very good one. It does not account for the hundreds of thousands of homosexuals who grew up in homes that were in every way the idyllic heterosexual breeding ground. It doesn't account for brothers who grew up together, one of whom turned out gay and the other straight. Mine's certainly flawed, too, though it was spoken more in jest than anything else. I don't believe you choose to be gay any more than you choose to be straight, and I doubt it's a nurture thing, either. Homosexuals have always existed in human society; in fact, it's only with the coming of 'modern' religions that they have been abused. Ancient Greece and Rome thought nothing of homosexuality; check out some of the poems they don't make you read in Latin classes, if you don't believe me. No, only with the coming of Christianity and Judaism and Islam did homosexuality begin to be stigmatized. I have hope, regardless, since the Christian church in particular has evolved so much from its inception that the authors of the New Testament would hardly recognize it. Its doctrines are usually at least several generations behind liberal society, but they catch up in the end, and I don't doubt it will be the same with homosexuality. Probably not in my lifetime, but c'est la vie.

Over 1,000 American soldiers dead is not "just" a mistake.

As far as I know that is so far unproven. <{POST_SNAPBACK}> Correct. They only provable results that have been reached in the multitude of studies regarding homosexuality is that there is a correlation between homosexuality and some abnormal brain structures. However, this is correlative, not causal, so no further conclusions can be safely made. <{POST_SNAPBACK}> So tell me, exactly, why someone would choose to be a homosexual? Especially someone in a state like Mississippi?

I'm curious what you think you're proving there, deganawida. That a lot of people, myself included, believed that Saddam was pursuing a weapons of mass destruction program? A lot of people believed that for a long time. Not everyone did, however. The State Department's intelligence analysis unit, for example, stated that there wasn't a threat from Saddam. Most of Europe agreed. And the more things fell apart just before the war - defectors who couldn't quite come up with all of the details, the inclusion of forged documents in a presentation to the UN Security Council, our inability to ever actually pinpoint any of these supposed stockpiles - the more a lot of people, myself included, thought that maybe we ought to wait and see. But we went in. I obviously don't think it was the right decision now, though I did support it at the time - you're talking to a guy who voted for Bush in 2000 - on the condition that a threat was proven to exist. I said then, back on the old boards, arguing with Yrkoon, that if we went in and found absolutely nothing, which is the case, then I would be pretty damn angry. And I am. I look at it this way; if I'm captain of a ship and I've got the majority of my guys telling me, "Hey, Captain, there's no reef up ahead. We can go full steam ahead with no problem," and I've got one or two other guys telling me, "You know, there could be a reef up there, we might want to verify that," and I decide to go full steam ahead and run my little ship aground, who takes the responsibility for it? I do, the captain. Bush is the captain of this particular ship, and he's done nothing but try and shirk responsibility or twist the issue around - we went into Iraq to free the liberty-loving Iraqi citizens, that's the line now. I don't think he lied, but I do think he made a horribly bad call, and I think at that level of decision-making, people ought to be held responsible for their bad calls. Kerry's not my first choice, but the more I hear from him and the more I learn about him, the more I respect him. He's changed position on issues, but then again, so have I. I've never had the astounding lack of humility to believe that I'm always right - I thought I was right in 2000, for instance, and I learned otherwise.

Well, crud. How do you get into that?

First, please stop saying, "R00fles!" or pretty soon I'm going to be obliged to drive a paper clip into my eyeball. The left one. Second, I don't necessarily advocate helping out every single nation in the world; however, letting what our own Secretary of State recognized as genocide go on without doing much in the way of trying to stop it does strike me as uncaring, yes.

Hate to bring up an apparently dead thread, but this post caught my eye...contract text work? What is that, 'zactly, and how'd you get into it? Sounds like something I could do, and would do, for that kind of money. I've been thinking about getting into editing for a while, since, not to toot my own horn too much, I've got a pretty good eye for grammar, continuity, common sense, and all those fun things. Also thought about going the technical writing route, since if you do that right you can end up hating your job all the way to the bank at the end of the day, but this contract text work (on games, I'm assuming) has intrigued me. Are you talking more about writing NPC dialogue and the like, or more along the lines of manual writing?

Refresh my memory on what we've done for the Sudan?