How Conservative Media Lost To The MSM And Failed The Rank And File
Connor Friedersdorf is right.
I might extend the point :
American liberals and conservatives have two different views of the world. Their respective views about yesterday's elections were a fairly small part of those respective theories...but were representative/characteristic of them in certain respects. For example, conservatives picked the conclusion they wanted, then dogmatically held onto it, cherry-picking evidence to support the conclusion when it was available, but happily believing without evidence when it wasn't. This is pretty much their current epistemic M.O. Their main argument against liberals who disagreed with them was: you are biased. This small part of the two respective theories of the world happened to be empirically testable. It turned out that the liberals were right and the conservatives were wrong. This is not decisive evidence about the rest of the two vast theories of the world...but it ain't nothing. It should--but probably won't--give conservatives pause.
I might extend the point :
American liberals and conservatives have two different views of the world. Their respective views about yesterday's elections were a fairly small part of those respective theories...but were representative/characteristic of them in certain respects. For example, conservatives picked the conclusion they wanted, then dogmatically held onto it, cherry-picking evidence to support the conclusion when it was available, but happily believing without evidence when it wasn't. This is pretty much their current epistemic M.O. Their main argument against liberals who disagreed with them was: you are biased. This small part of the two respective theories of the world happened to be empirically testable. It turned out that the liberals were right and the conservatives were wrong. This is not decisive evidence about the rest of the two vast theories of the world...but it ain't nothing. It should--but probably won't--give conservatives pause.
posted by Winston Smith at
10:48 AM
3 Comments:
One almost feels sad when you read the following from David Frum:
The key message I hope readers will understand: conservatism must modernize. Modernization is not an abandonment of the conservative message; modernization is the only way conservatism can survive.
The mind, it reels...
Frum is right, more or less, except he's confused conservatism with the Republican party. The GOP needs to modernize: the Southern Strategy is not only ommoral, it is also self-defeating in the long run.
The Republican party practices preposterism at a Leninist scale: that is, the ends justify the means. Any Republican (Frum, Christie) who goes against this trend should be welcomed with open arms into the reality-based community.
-mac
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