LCD talking and thinking

If I read you correctly, LCD talk also excludes the possibility of being swerved by those you're debating with, correct? It's an attitude of rock-steady determination in your opinions, without thought for alternatives.

As a religious person, I find that people (even my own friends) often expect me to act this way, refusing to look from a new perspective. However, while I won't tolerate outright blasphemy, I encourage and even enjoy challenges and new perspectives. It keeps things from becoming stagnant, and I know the Bible can take any argument I or they throw at it.

I hear a lot of political LCD talk from my own parents, who are loudly liberal and complain constantly about the things they read. Whenever I'm in the room, they aim it at me and start trying to get me to agree with them, rather than get my (conservative and much more optimistic) standpoint. So grounded are they in their opinions that they refuse to trust anything they've heard pigeonholed as 'conservative' or 'Republican' (which are practically vulgar words to them). It's a stagnant and oppressive atmosphere, so I avoid talking politics with them at all.

Fekket..

Refusing to talk politics with family members is probably a good idea.

One reader suggested that I had misstated the problem. The problem is that our LCD is too low. In other words, we must, as a group, increase our level of intellectual sophistication. We have the brain power but lack something that Emerson has written about, Self-Reliance. I suspect that we might gain some understanding of our situation if we were to read Emerson's essay "Self-Reliance".

We are creatures of our culture. We not only create our culture but we are also slaves of our culture. It takes a great effort of courage and confidence to drag the self out of the quick-sand which is our culture.


http://www.transcendentalists.com/self_reliance_analysis.htm

To be clear, I'm not saying it's bad to talk about politics (or anything) with family in general. I'm saying that my parents have very firm, pessimistic attitudes that I find unhealthy.

I also find it sort of ironic that I've been raised by them to believe that 'conservative bullshitters' only watch FOX News and refuse to hear any other points of view (way too many rhyming words in that sentence). Meanwhile, when they want politics, my parents watch nothing but Michael Moore mockumentaries (by contrast, I despise that fat jerk) and the commentary of James Carville, Bill Maher, and the admittedly hilarious Jon Stewart. My parents have become a stereotype. It's sort of sad.

On the subject of getting the news, I myself am in a stagnant period. My brother watches Newshour and BBC News, which are, respectively, too liberal and non-local for me. I don't quite trust the big-name sources like CNN, FOX, MSNBC, and so on. I listened to NPR news updates for a while, but they're rather dry and boring. For the past few months, I've read nothing but the WikiNews Scientology feed.

Can you suggest any trustworthy, bipartisan news sources with high LCD?

I had a convo recently with a friend of mine about the bias of Fox news. I let him know that he doesn't feel Fox has a bias because he agrees with their bias, lol. He only agreed once I let him have his day and told him I don't think CNN has a bias because my liberal views connect with theirs. I think this is the type of knowledge you're getting at, coberst, the ability to critically analyze the motivations behind a political statement.

Unfortunately, I don't even think that people who aren't part of this LCD are immune to the rhetoric. The more you know about rhetoric, the more you recognize stupid arguments and attempts to pull at our heartstrings. This probably means you make better decisions overall, I can agree. But I still think that we're stuck in our biases and we'll be convinced by an argument that sounds good even if we know the motivators.

Can you suggest any trustworthy, bipartisan news sources with high LCD?

-"FekketCantenel"

PBS News Hour is the only one I know that fits this description.

I had a convo recently with a friend of mine about the bias of Fox news. I let him know that he doesn't feel Fox has a bias because he agrees with their bias, lol. He only agreed once I let him have his day and told him I don't think CNN has a bias because my liberal views connect with theirs. I think this is the type of knowledge you're getting at, coberst, the ability to critically analyze the motivations behind a political statement.

Unfortunately, I don't even think that people who aren't part of this LCD are immune to the rhetoric. The more you know about rhetoric, the more you recognize stupid arguments and attempts to pull at our heartstrings. This probably means you make better decisions overall, I can agree. But I still think that we're stuck in our biases and we'll be convinced by an argument that sounds good even if we know the motivators.

-"sarasnee"

The problem as I see it is that a person who does not understand CT is rarely capable of recognizing ideological bias in them self or in others. A person who recognizes only them or us cannot recognize a neutral ground which is without bias, at least to the extent that any human can be unbiased in their judgment.

Two things. One, coberst: You only need one post to reply to two people. You don't need to dual-post.

Two: Like I said, I have the impression that Newshour has a liberal slant. I'll have to give it another chance in the future, though. Heck, Wikipedia says that people criticize it for being too conservative.