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Terry_Baxter
Registered Member
Date Joined Jan 2002
Total Posts : 187
| Posted 6/5/2003 5:49 AM (GMT -6) |   | In my typically annoying, pontificating way, I've argued on this board that conservatives and liberals tend to argue differently. That's not news. However, in our culture, given the entertainment and news media tend to be politically liberal, the foibles of Conservative arguers are fairly well known while Liberal arguers have gotten a free pass.
The presumptions of nuanced morality and intellectual sophistication that are such hallmarks of liberal argument--and form the foundations of Political Correctness--are starting to be explored and challenged more.
Some Christians, depending on they circles they run in, may have the opposite experience. That is, everyone assumes Christians are political conservatives and if they find out you're liberal, you're insulted and treated with suspicion.
In the broader culture, I think its much more likely to go the other way.
For those who are interested in this phenomenon (or who thought I was making it up when I challenged it on this board), here's a link to some interesting personal stories about interpersonal bias against conservatives. It reveals the same qualities I've been worried about when I see them on this board.
http://www.realclearpolitics.com/Commentary/bigotry.html
-Terry
"Be God's"
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Christian
Registered Member
Date Joined May 2003
Total Posts : 78
| Posted 6/5/2003 8:09 AM (GMT -6) | | Terry, Interesting link. Clearly, there is persecution of a person due to his political inclinations. The comments directed at those Republicans were ignorant, bigoted, and downright cruel. You mentioned you have seen this phenomenon on this board. How so? I believe I have also seen it but would be interested in your view. My blood was boiling when I read some of the testimonies on that link. Good grief!
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Terry_Baxter
Registered Member
Date Joined Jan 2002
Total Posts : 187
| Posted 6/5/2003 9:22 AM (GMT -6) | | Honestly, I'm not interested in beating up anyone over what I perceive they did.
My main motive is trying to improve the quality of argument (light versus heat, and so forth). Most of us recognize the bad manners of Conservative arguers who, for instance, like to use the Bible to hammer opponents for lack of morality or orthodoxy. We roll our eyes, take a grain of salt, and go on.
But most Liberals are so convinced that their nuanced, sophisticated views are unfathomable by the great unwashed, they (1) don't see alternatives to their views, (2) talk down to those who disagree as those who 'just don't get it' or who 'need to read article X through Z to really understand an issue, and (3) are immune to criticism because everyone they know either thinks the same way or is just...stupid.
Rather than having me say it again, I included stories of those who've been affected by this attitude.
Terry
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honorman
Registered Member
Date Joined Oct 2002
Total Posts : 1137
| Posted 6/5/2003 12:19 PM (GMT -6) | | Try taking a stand against gun control on this board, or for affirmative action. Most won't even argue with you. They just believe you should know you are wrong...and don't even go in for the whole race issue.
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DLW
Registered Member
Date Joined Apr 2003
Total Posts : 2457
| Posted 6/6/2003 6:54 AM (GMT -6) | | I think its misleading to conflate liberal and conservative into just two categories.
I am a social conservative and an economic liberal(Does that make me a moderate?). I treat political parties neutrally oppose the use of manicheistic language in describing them, both are trying to maintain and increase the power they have over the US gov't. That is why I have stressed the need for Evangelicals to develop more autonomy in their politics, not just switch to become Democrats. That is also why I support switching to a viable three-party system in the US.
I also stress fallibilism. I.e., even if I share some common goals with economic liberals, I often disagree with the tactics they have used in the past and there proposals for the future. I do not support reshaping the US into a European-style Socialism, as it has been shown well these systems don't tend to work very well.
dlw
Prayer from Kenya
From the Cowardice that dare not face new truth,
From the Laziness that is contented with half-truth,
From the Arrogance that thinks it knows all truth,
Lord Deliver Me.
Edited by - DLW on 06/06/2003 12:17:59 PM | | Back to Top | | |
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DLW
Registered Member
Date Joined Apr 2003
Total Posts : 2457
| Posted 6/15/2003 1:50 PM (GMT -6) | | This is a fun article that shows how many "liberals" in the Cape Cod area are opposing the setting up of wind-power generators, which will reduce oil and coal dependence in the New England area.
The manicheistic, better than thou rhetoric of many liberals certainly sets them up easily for accusations of hypocripsy...
dlw
A Mighty Wind
June 15, 2003
By ELINOR BURKETT
The buzz on Cape Cod is grim as summer approaches. There is
little talk about beach permits or Kennedy sightings and
much talk about dead birds littering beaches, jellyfish
clogging waterways and tourism collapsing. Even Walter
Cronkite, America's éminence grise, has issued a dire
warning from his second home on Martha's Vineyard. ''I'm
very concerned about a private developer's plan to build an
industrial energy complex across 24 square miles of
publicly owned land,'' Cronkite intoned in a radio and
television ad recently broadcast across the Cape.
The industrial energy complex in question is a wind farm.
And the publicly owned land is really water -- Nantucket
Sound, which separates the Cape from Martha's Vineyard and
Nantucket. That is where a Boston-based company called Cape
Wind Associates hopes to build America's first offshore
wind farm. At a cost in excess of $700 million, Cape Wind
plans to spread 130 windmills, spaced a third to a half of
a mile apart, across a shoal less than seven miles off the
coast of Hyannis. Embedded in the ocean floor, each turbine
would tower higher than the top of the Statue of Liberty's
torch, its three 161-foot blades churning at 16 revolutions
per minute. The wind forest promises to provide Cape
Codders, on average, with 75 percent of their electricity,
1.8 percent of the total electrical needs of New England,
without emitting a single microgram of greenhouse gases,
carbon dioxide, nitrous oxide or mercury and without
burning a single barrel of Middle Eastern oil.
The nation's leading environmental groups can barely
control their enthusiasm. ''We're bullish on wind,'' says
Kert Davies, research director of Greenpeace USA.
''Everybody has to ante up in the fight.''
But like residents of dozens of communities where other
wind-farm projects have been proposed, many Cape Codders
have put aside their larger environmental sensitivities and
are demanding that their home be exempt from such projects.
As Cronkite puts it, ''Our national treasures should be off
limits to industrialization.''
Wind is the world's fastest-growing energy resource, and
after a decade of federal and state subsidies kick-starting
the industry, creating enough power for more than a million
American families in 27 states to tap into the breeze when
they flick on their light switches. The country's oldest
turbines have been part of the landscape on the Altamont
Pass, east of San Francisco, for two decades. And Texans
zooming along I-10 west to El Paso top a slight rise to the
sight of a vast field of turbines stretching across the
mesa. But energy providers in the Northeast, with its lack
of wide open spaces, have long been consigned to dependence
on oil, coal and natural gas, with only the occasional
small-scale wind project.
Then Jim Gordon got restless. The president of Cape Wind,
Gordon is a quixotic sort of energy executive. At the age
of 22, he put aside his dream of becoming Francis Ford
Coppola and instead started a small company that designed
and installed heat-recovery systems for hospitals and
factories. Ten years later, after a change in regulatory
law opened a niche for independent power producers, he
pioneered the building of natural-gas-generated electric
plants in New England, a region long captive to highly
polluting coal and oil.
Gordon eventually developed seven power plants throughout
New England and became a very wealthy man. But with too
much ''creative juice,'' as he puts it, to rest on what he
had already done, he went looking for the next challenge.
Wind became his fixation.
''Imagine tapping into this inexhaustible supply of energy
right here in our own state, lowering the cost of
electricity, decreasing pollution, reducing reliance on
foreign fuel,'' Gordon said recently as he paced his
company's boardroom in downtown Boston. ''We're feeding oil
cartels whose whims move our economy and our armies. With
wind, we can free ourselves from that.''
In 1999, Gordon sold off his power plants. With a
Department of Energy wind map in hand, he and his team
began searching for a place to build dozens of
technologically advanced turbines that would plug directly
into the region's energy grid. If he had been building in
the West, Gordon would have looked to the plains, what
those in the wind industry call ''the Saudi Arabia of
wind.'' It being New England, he naturally looked to the
mountains. But while the ridges of northern Maine offered
plenty of gusts, he says, the transmission lines out of
such underpopulated areas were already clogged. His eyes
then fell on the sea.
Europeans had been constructing offshore wind farms for
more than a decade. Just two miles outside of Copenhagen
harbor, 20 turbines provide enough electricity for 32,000
homes. The British are developing more than a dozen wind
projects in the Irish and North Seas. And a wind farm south
of Dublin is expected to produce 10 percent of Ireland's
electricity, reducing greenhouse gas emissions by 13
million tons per year.
''The Europeans are years ahead of us because they have had
a consistent national policy to support wind power,''
Gordon said. Undaunted by the federal government's
ambivalence toward alternative energy, Gordon sent his
engineers out to find the perfect locale for a water-based
wind farm. What they needed were fairly shallow waters,
protection from the Atlantic's perfect storms, isolation
from main shipping channels, easy access to the electrical
grid and, of course, wind -- an annual average of 18 miles
per hour. The ideal spot, it turned out, is smack in the
middle of Nantucket Sound, in the federal waters of
Horseshoe Shoal, less than seven miles from the Kennedy
compound.
Cape codders tend to be vain about their environmental
sensitivities, so you would think they'd cheer the coming
of alternative energy. But supporting the construction of
dozens of towering turbines visible from their beaches,
boats and waterfront homes is a very different thing from
avoiding tern nesting grounds or attending a lecture on
shoreline erosion. Even before Gordon finished his analysis
of the shoal's sands, a forceful and well-connected army of
opposition had formed.
Wayne Kurker, the owner of Hyannis Marina, set about
issuing dire warnings of the ''industrial park'' being
planned for the sound. When his neighbors ignored him,
Kurker asked a graphic artist to create a mock-up of the
proposed wind project and mailed it to thousands of
boaters. His mantra was simple: ''Windmills are probably
great for the environment, but we shouldn't have to
sacrifice the environment to build renewable energy.''
Soon, the Alliance to Protect Nantucket Sound was filing
lawsuits, mounting political pressure in Boston and
Washington and, to bolster its legal case and maximize
public anxiety, generating volumes of doomsaying critiques:
The turbines will break up and the oil inside will spill
into the sound, in a repeat of the Exxon Valdez disaster.
Birds will be torn apart in ''pole-mounted Cuisinarts.''
Whales will bump their heads. The annual Figawi race, the
Memorial Day weekend Hyannis-to-Nantucket regatta, will
have to be canceled. The pristine sound will become the
world's 11th largest skyline, flashing 520 red and amber
lights.
Representative William Delahunt spearheaded an effort to
protect the sound by advocating that it be declared a
national marine sanctuary. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. offered
his name and voice to the struggle, despite the fact that
the Natural Resources Defense Council, the environmental
organization for which he is a senior attorney, is a strong
advocate of offshore wind development. And the yacht-club
set opened its checkbooks, donating money and stock to
cover the $100,000-a-month bills for rent, three full-time
salaries, television and radio time, two lobbyists and
three law firms.
The alliance's legal strategists are basing their
opposition to Cape Wind's proposal on what they say they
believe is the absence of sufficient regulation of the
private use of federal waters. ''A for-profit company is
taking advantage of a loophole in federal law,'' says Isaac
Rosen, the Woody Allen-ish executive director of the
alliance. ''Developers cannot be allowed to swoop down,
stick their shovels in the ground and claim a piece of the
public waters for themselves. If they're allowed to do so,
pretty soon we'll have liquid natural gas processing
platforms in the sound, offshore casinos. It will be like
the gold rush.''
To bolster the legal struggle, Rosen also set about
amassing a kind of Cape Cod-style Rainbow Coalition. He
brought aboard commercial fishermen to decry the despoiling
of their fishing grounds, motel owners worried about an
eyesore that would send beachgoers north to Maine and
boaters afraid that their small craft could crash up
against the massive structures.
Environmentalists across the country chafe at what they see
as the hypocrisy of those supposed Greens on the Cape who
oppose the windmills. ''The opponents of Cape Wind say they
support renewable energy, but exactly what do they
support?'' asks Seth Kaplan of the Conservation Law
Foundation, who admits he is more comfortable suing
corporations than siding with them. ''One or two turbines
at town landfills? That's not going to solve global
warming.''
Kaplan, like many other environmental advocates, also
challenges the alliance's penchant for overstatement:
whales will not be harmed, because their sonar allows them
to avoid large objects; birds might be killed in the
turbines, but at the rate of one or two per year; the
turbines contain little oil, so a Valdez replay is
impossible.
But nowhere has the alliance been more bitterly accused of
peddling half-truths than in local environmental circles.
''The sound is not pristine,'' says Matt Patrick, a member
of the State Legislature whose support for the plan greatly
compromised his re-election campaign. ''You can't get to
shore because it is lined with memorials to bad taste.
Motorboats race around it, and if you go offshore in the
summer, you look back and see yellow brown haze hanging
over the mainland. And they make it sound as if Nantucket
Sound will look like downtown New York, but the wind farm
will be only a thumbnail on the horizon.''
Dick Elrick, a Barnstable councilman who has been a
ferryboat captain for two decades, is even angrier. ''It's
tough to listen to the same fishermen who have hurt the
habitat by overdragging the bottom of the sound waving the
flag of environmentalism,'' he says. ''This isn't
environmentalism; it's the not-in-my-backyard syndrome.''
Walter Cronkite squirmed a bit at this characterization.
''The problem really is Nimbyism,'' he admitted when I
reached him by phone not long ago, ''and it bothers me a
great deal that I find myself in this position. I'm all for
these factories, but there must be areas that are far less
valuable than this place is.'' With prodding, he suggested
the deserts of California. Then, perhaps realizing that
might be a tad remote to serve New England's energy needs,
he added, ''Inland New England would substitute just as
well.''
As we talked, his discomfort was so keen that he
interrupted his thought and pleaded, ''Be kind to an old
man,'' before summing up. ''We have a lot of interesting
wildlife, like porpoises and whales,'' he said. ''It's a
very important commercial fishing ground, and it's a
marvelous boating area for recreational fishermen, for
sailors. Last -- but this is not inconsequential -- it will
be most unsightly for what is now open bay. Everybody will
see it, anyone who wanders on the water, who has a home
that faces the water.''
This is a familiar refrain from wind-farm opponents across
the country who insist on the intrinsic value of their
neighborhoods. Activists in the mountains of Tennessee
blocked the Tennessee Valley Authority from building 13 to
16 windmills on the ridgeline of Stone Mountain, despite
the 33 metric tons of bomb-grade uranium that have been
trucked in to nearby Erwin to power nuclear reactors. Their
complaints? Up to 120 birds would be sucked into the
turbines annually, and Weller's salamanders might be
bombarded by spare electrons.
In Rosalia, Kan., residents pleaded the potential damage to
native tall grass and the possible harm to the nesting
grounds of prairie chickens. In Maine, hikers feared
turbines would be within sight of a stretch of the
Appalachian Trail. In rural Illinois, one farmer complained
that it was ''very annoying, seeing all this spinning
around.''
No matter how baseless the fears, everywhere the polemic is
identical: we're not opposed to wind power, but this is not
the right place.
''Traditionally, power plants were built in poor
neighborhoods, so people living in nice neighborhoods
weren't forced to confront the human cost of using
electricity,'' said Greg Watson of the Massachusetts
Technology Collaborative, an agency that administers
Massachusetts's renewable energy trust. ''But unlike coal,
oil or natural gas, which you can truck, pipe or barge,
Mother Nature dictates where you can locate a wind farm.''
This is not, like most anticorporate sagas, a David and
Goliath tale. Despite the alliance's portrayal of Cape Wind
as an ''energy giant,'' nothing about Jim Gordon suggests
evil capitalist or environmental rapist. During his 25
years in the energy business, he has never fallen afoul of
the Environmental Protection Agency and has even won the
admiration of notoriously feisty Greens. ''Jim Gordon is
the real thing,'' says Kert Davies of Greenpeace. ''There
aren't many entrepreneurs out there willing to take risks
to clean up the environment.''
The members of the alliance's board are similarly miscast
in their self-assigned roles as small-town folk fighting
corporate greed. Over the past several years, Wayne Kurker
infuriated many Cape environmentalists when he expanded his
Hyannis Marina by erecting corrugated metal hangars along
the harbor. And the group's president, Doug Yearley, is a
former C.E.O. of Phelps Dodge, one of the world's leading
copper-mining companies. The alliance's lobbyist, John
O'Brien, is a principal in a Boston firm that represents
Exelon Generation, one of the largest fossil-fuel
generating companies in the United States. Its Washington
attorney is Guy Martin, a former assistant secretary of the
interior. And, of course, there is the high-profile support
of Robert Kennedy Jr.
''I am all for wind power,'' Kennedy insisted in a debate
with Gordon on Boston's NPR affiliate. ''The costs . . . on
the people of this region are so huge, . . . the
diminishment to property values, the diminishment to
marinas, to businesses. . . . People go to the Cape because
they want to connect themselves with the history and the
culture. They want to see the same scenes the Pilgrims saw
when they landed at Plymouth Rock.'' (It should be pointed
out that the Pilgrims never saw Nantucket Sound, and if
they had, they wouldn't have spied the Kennedy compound.)
Ultimately, though, the Kennedy that the alliance most
wants on its side is Ted, but to date he has made only
halting efforts on its behalf. It has managed to garner the
support of Gov. Mitt Romney, and the state's attorney
general, Tom Reilly, has also joined the antiwind brigade.
But since Horseshoal Shoal is in federal waters, the state
has little control, and opponents hold out scant hope that
their junior senator, John Kerry, will lend them his aid.
''Kerry's in a box,'' says Cliff Schechtman, editor of The
Cape Cod Times. ''He owns a house on Nantucket, but he's
running for the presidency on a strong alternative energy
platform.'' So they wait for Teddy to swoop in and
introduce legislation that will bring Cape Wind's plans to
a stop.
Like many serious environmentalists, Deborah Donovan of the
Union of Concerned Scientists worries that the alliance's
wish will come true and that Kennedy will intervene on its
behalf. ''Legislative intervention could go on and on every
time there's a wind project that politically influential
people don't like,'' she says. ''I don't see how anybody
would be willing to spend money on this industry.''
Greenpeace's Davies suspects that might well be the
alliance's real intention. ''My gut reaction when I heard
about them was that it was a front for the coal industry or
some other power-industry sector that didn't want wind
power to do well,'' he says. ''And when I see who's on
their board, I'm still not entirely sure. But I'm certain
they're feeding the forces who want to discredit such
technologies.''
This sort of stance drives alliance supporters to
distraction. ''The others believe in green power above
all,'' Yearley despairs. ''I'm for trying to jump-start
alternative energy, but we need to look at the costs. I
don't know what the rush is. We're not going to solve
global warming overnight.''
The wind supporters at least agree with Yearley on one
point: the struggle is ultimately about costs -- it is
about the costs of scattering turbines along ridgelines and
sounds versus the costs of not doing so. To them, the
national illusion that you can have electricity, clean air,
a stable climate and independence from foreign oil without
paying a steep price is ludicrous.
In fact, in late April, part of the price Cape Cod is
already paying began washing up on its shores. En route to
a power plant in Sandwich, on the northwest corner of the
Cape, a leaking barge spilled 98,000 gallons of oil into
Buzzards Bay. Shellfish beds were closed for a month. At
least 370 birds died; 93 miles of coastline were tainted by
thick globs of black oil.
''This is all about trade-offs,'' says Kaplan of the
Conservation Law Foundation. ''How much weight do you give
aesthetics against the weight I give the reduction in co2?
How heavily do you count yachting against the number of
people who die from particulate matter? The opponents say
they support renewable energy. But it's not acceptable to
say that you're in favor of renewable energy only as long
as you can't see it.''
Kert Davies agrees. ''It feels strange for Greenpeace to be
fighting a grass-roots group,'' he says. ''And it's sad for
me to be arguing against the Kennedys, the only liberals
left, and Cronkite, who is everybody's grandfather. But we,
as environmental advocates, have to be consistent, and that
includes the Kennedys and Cronkite. It's not fair to stump
about how scary global warming is one week, then oppose
this the next. It's not fair, in terms of environmental
justice, for communities with cash to demand that projects
they don't want be built somewhere else.''
Elinor Burkett is the author of the coming book, ''So Many
Enemies, So Little Time: An American Woman in All the Wrong
Places.''
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/06/15/magazine/15WIND.html?ex=1056719938&ei=1&en=3326a7108965862a
Prayer from Kenya
From the Cowardice that dare not face new truth,
From the Laziness that is contented with half-truth,
From the Arrogance that thinks it knows all truth,
Lord Deliver Me. | | Back to Top | | |
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