Liberals and Conservatives Don’t Tell the Whole Story

George Rebane

“Read with Caution” is the warning label on the column of blogs to which RR is consigned on Nevada County Voices.  And so is the website of the non-partisan SESF (of which I am the Director of Research.)  Of continuing interest are the left-liberals who deny vehemently that self-declared progressives, who overwhelmingly make up the content providers in the mainstream media, can create an industry that has no political bias.  However, if a conservative or libertarian contributes a non-partisan piece to a non-partisan information outlet that by law must remain so, that outlet is still labeled right-wing regardless of the lack of any supporting evidence.  In short, the lefties can control themselves to be non-partisan.  But the righties, not similarly blessed, are condemned forever to spew forth only partisan output from which the unsuspecting readers must be protected with warnings and other proscriptions.

The actual political spectrum is a bit more complicated than the linear left-to-right or liberal-to-conservative.  The two major dimensions of socio-political thought involve personal freedom and economic freedom.  The modern left-liberals are thought to occupy the space where personal freedoms are high (moral relativism, et.al.) and economic freedoms are low (central control of wealth and its distribution).  The conservative right is ascribed a region near high economic freedoms and low personal freedoms (rules for bedroom and abortion).  People of the libertarian persuasion claim the area that maximizes both personal and economic freedoms.  Finally the manipulated populist is the citizen stupid (not ignorant) enough to be persuaded that s/he will do best under an appropriately configured authoritarian regime providing little personal and economic freedom.  The Nolan Chart here shows how these political belief systems relate to one another.  A short quiz here lets you place a dot at the coordinates of your socio-political orientation.

Comments

[Mike McD]

Great piece. Great Test. I will forward to my education friends to see if they can put this into their curriculum.

[Anna Haynes]

NCVoices proprietor here - confessing that I do need to tighten up the text in the "read with caution" preamble, and remove the "censorship alert" section since that's no longer occurring.

If Mike McD, your SESF host, is not a climate crisis denialist, perhaps he could share this news. If he is, it signals more about his credibility than any other metric.

Have you watched the Oreskes video yet? There's an interesting anecdote about her talk in a comment on another blog:
"After the lecture, I asked Dr. Oreskes if Scripps scientists were ever invited to appear on the local conservative talk-radio shows (i.e. Rick Roberts and Rodger Hedgecock). She laughed and replied with an emphatic “no”.
...
The fact that even an organization as prestigious as the Scripps Institution of Oceanography cannot get a fair hearing on its own home-town conservative talk-radio shows tells you all you need to know what conservatives think of scientific expertise these days…"

[George Rebane]

Anna, if the report about the conservative talk-radio not giving Scripps a fair hearing is true, then I join you in deploring it. I also see a new label - "climate crisis denialist" - in your comment. Your use of "denialist" continues to paint the situation black and white with no ground in between. It seems that if one does not sign up for the full course on AGW, then one is immediately cast into the common pool of philistines of all stripes. Pity, that your view continues to be so robustly simplistic.

[Anna Haynes]

George, have you had a chance to view the Oreskes talk yet? I'd be interested in hearing your views on it.

> Your use of "denialist" continues to paint the situation black and white with no ground in between.

Perhaps I'm confused because you haven't made your position clear - you seem to affiliate with, and not distinguish your views from, those who *are* out-and-out denialists.

If you want to make your position more clear, you might consider commenting & sharing your views on some of Russ's global warming posts. I don't think I've ever seen you disagree with him, and one of the hallmarks of independence is (at least occasionally) thinking differently.

It would also be helpful if you could briefly tell me(and your other readers) whether (or, if in parts, where) you agree or disagree with the overall IPCC consensus that global warming is real, that it can't be explained away by natural causes (i.e. that human-caused emissions of greenhouse gases is contributing to it), and that, if we don't tackle this problem, we run the risk of disaster.

(reminder - my understanding is that pretty much all the major scientific bodies in the world have endorsed this consensus, with the exception of the petroleum geologists)

(I'd also highly recommend the Kirsch page on this.)

Our house is burning.

[Douglas Keachie]

Hard to believe that al the mainstream media is so leftwing, considering who owns the media. Maybe there's a bunch of righty's who've figured out there's more money in left wing commentary and news than right wing commentary and news? The exception, RussCo and friends would be suppressed if the media were actually controlled by left wing politicos. Last time I looked these owners were all in it for the money?