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To: Still Thinking
I always felt that you had to be fairly intelligent to be a good tech, because technical issues are what they are and respond only to fact based approaches, and that you pretty much had to have a room temp IQ or less to be a liberal, so I would have expected those professions to be almost exclusively dominated by conservatives.

Now you're making the assumption that smart makes good. This is a very bad assumption. I remember being forced to watch a Bill Moyers special in an English Lit class and he was talking about how shocked he was that Nazis enjoyed classical music to the point that it would move them to tears--and then order the gassing of 1,000 Jews the next day. He called that a failure of "the liberal dream". I think "the liberal dream" as he described it could be stated that once one was "smart" or "cultured" enough, then they will be "good". It's a kind of perversion of religion so that there are no "god" elements left.

The real key to your pondering is that geeks like new, and liberal is considered "new" and conservative is considered "old". It fits into their worldview of progression and evolution over time. Whatever is old is "primitive" and "obsolete", and whatever is new is "advanced". Therefore any principles gleaned from the Bible are "primitive" and "obsolete" simply by virtue of the Bible's age. Also, a little more subtly, "change" by this worldview is always good, because "change" is a step from old to new.

How to fix this? Well one way is to repackage conservatism as being "new", which will probably fail. The second more difficult option is to educate people with this worldview that new ideas introduced throughout history have had the ability to destroy cultures, stall scientific advancement, and many times are not even new.

86 posted on 10/24/2008 3:18:12 PM PDT by dan1123 (If you want to find a person's true religion, ask them what makes them a "good person".)
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To: dan1123
The real key to your pondering is that geeks like new, and liberal is considered "new" and conservative is considered "old".

Seems reasonable, though I'm somewhat geeky myself (knowledgeable and competent with the stuff of geekdom, yet still semi-functional in society), and I don't automatically make the assumption that anything new is better than anything old. I realize that's a very small sample, and therefore doesn't really prove anything.

91 posted on 10/24/2008 3:26:32 PM PDT by Still Thinking (Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?)
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To: dan1123; imintrouble
The . . . more difficult option is to educate people with this worldview that new ideas introduced throughout history have had the ability to destroy cultures, stall scientific advancement, and many times are not even new.
I was sitting through an insufferable liberal Ben & Jerry spiel at a liberal college my daughter was considering, and found myself thinking about a story I had read in the Reader's Digest. The writer said that he had gotten the government to do a study on the battle damage of planes returning from combat against the Nazis during WWII. As the writer was documenting the damage to a particular plane, an enlisted man asked the writer what he was going to do with his findings. He replied that he expected to recommend that armor be installed where he found that airplanes had been hit the most.

The enlisted man replied, "Son, airplanes get hit everywhere - and you're only looking at the planes that got back. You find out where the planes you're looking at got hit - then you put your armor everywhere else!

And the reason that thought went through my mind when hearing the liberal gospel being preached is that I couldn't help thinking that the fancy liberal ideas probably were not new - but if they had been tried before, they would have failed so miserably that the society that tried to operate that way would have disappeared without a trace. Just like a warplane whose cockpit had been riddled with bullets . . .


107 posted on 10/24/2008 5:26:24 PM PDT by conservatism_IS_compassion (We come to FR to pool our skepticism.)
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