Rules of Engagement ..Part IV Find a dissident and you find a goldmine

Rules of Engagement Part IV
 To better know your opponents, venture into their camp to find the dissident who has crossed over to your side. He will tell you all you need to know and knowing is life-blood to the pen in your hands. You can now throw away your sword and let your pen show its might.

 Emphasis mine.

 "Why are liberals such as Paul Krugman, Michael Moore, and Howard Dean so angry and aggressive? I like to think that I have insight into this matter, since I was a liberal for a long time. If you haven't been a liberal, you may be puzzled by what you hear and read from them. They may seem -- dare I say it? -- insane, or at least discombobulated." says Keith Burgess-Jackson who is Associate Professor of Philosophy, The University of Texas.
 Here are some quotes from his many, many articles published in various periodicals:
 1) As the philosopher John Kekes has pointed out so eloquently (see here ), liberals disregard or discount concepts that loom large in the thinking of most of us, such as personal responsibility and desert. Most of us believe that responsibility and desert should play a role in the distribution of benefits and burdens. Liberals disagree. Deep down, liberals deny that anyone is responsible for anything. What we are, in terms of personal character, is a function of circumstances beyond our control. How we behave depends solely on our environment. Our very choices are determined, not free. Liberalism dissolves the person. To the liberal, we are loci of movement rather than initiators of action, patients rather than agents, heteronomous rather than autonomous beings. Liberals will deny this, of course, but look at their beliefs and policy prescriptions.
 2) Deep down, liberals know that conservatives are no less intelligent than they are. It just makes them feel good to say as much. So they attribute the pervasive belief in responsibility and desert to greed. Opponents of the liberal program are greedy. They won't admit the truth because they don't want to share the wealth. They take the positions they do, on matters such as affirmative action and welfare, to solidify their social position. Greed is bad, of course, so if you reject the liberal program, you're evil. You put self-interest ahead of justice.
 3) Here, in one neat package, we have all the liberal platitudes. Conservatives are ignorant, stupid, and evil, or some combination of the three. Either they don't grasp the obvious truth or they're incapable of thinking clearly or they don't give a damn about anyone but themselves. Liberals, of course, are the opposite of all these. They're knowledgeable, intelligent, and good. Note that if you believe your opponents to be stupid or evil, you don't try to reason with them. Stupid people, like animals and children, need guidance by their superiors. Evil people need suppression. It's often been remarked that liberals are less adept than conservatives at arguing for their views. Now you see why. They don't practice.
 4) Two things have happened to me as I've aged, and I'm not talking about the deplorable decreases in my bicycling and running speeds. First, I've become better at spotting ideology. Second, I've become less tolerant of it. By "ideology," I mean a hermetically sealed worldview, one that filters out all and only disconfirming data. Ideologues, by definition, are closed-minded and dogmatic. They have no reality-testing mechanism. Evidence and argument of the sort philosophers and scientists take for granted have no effect on them. Indeed, the very standards of evidence and argument they employ are calculated to reduce their cognitive dissonance and (as a result) reinforce their worldview. Nothing is allowed to count against doctrine.
 5) Another despicable misrepresentation, propounded and perpetrated even in the supposedly truth-seeking halls of academia, is that there are no races. The idea seems to be that if there are races, there will be racism (or, more particularly, white supremacism). This is a non sequitur. That something is the case is never, by itself, a reason that it ought to be the case. We have known this since Hume, but somehow we keep forgetting it. Why not disabuse people of the fallacy rather than denying the facts? Explain that evaluative propositions cannot validly be derived from factual propositions. Explain that might is not necessarily right, that difference is not necessarily dominance.
6) I wonder sometimes what explains whether a given individual is liberal or conservative. Actually, I want to focus on mature individuals, for I believe conservatism increases with age, as experience broadens and deepens. As we age, we see connections better. We grasp cause and effect (in part because we have engaged in trial and error). We understand the importance of tradition, which embodies compromises, bargains, and settlements. We come to value things like security, community, and stability as well as liberty. Young people yearn to be free. Their predominant value is liberty, understood as the absence of constraint. They care little about the past or the future. Like animals, they are riveted in the present, uninterested in what came before them and oblivious to what is to come. They think they're immortal. They do not yet have a stake in society. When they acquire a stake, as most do (some do not survive the turbulence of youth), their perspective changes. This -- an enlarged perspective -- is an important component of wisdom. Yes, I'm saying that conservatism and wisdom are directly correlated. You're wiser now than you were ten or twenty years ago, aren't you? Is that an accident?
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 Confucius quote for today: Study without thought is vain: thought without study is dangerous.