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Are liberals and conservatives equally likely to seek out opposing viewpoints?


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Posted

I was wondering which side of the political isle is more likely to seek out opposing viewpoints, if there is a difference at all. If we asked people who identify as liberals or conservatives how often they visit cnn.com vs. foxnews.com, which group would be more likely to equally visit both?

Posted

I think ignorance is the real factor here. I think ignorant people rely more on their emotions to help them decide, and when they do that, it's unlikely an intellectual opposing argument is going to influence them. 

As I mentioned in another thread of yours, I think liberal and conservative are too loosely defined to be meaningful measurements, and actually keep us talking past each other.

Posted

Every body should investigate opposing viewpoints.
Inform yourself, The alternative is ignorance, and as Phi points out, ignorance is easily manipulated.

From your thread on "Who to trust", I quote myself …
"If in doubt, don't rely on one person's opinion.
It is easy enough to get multiple opinions to guide your decisions."

Posted

What are "liberals" now? Liberals liberated peoples from slave oppression; they did not mean the freedom of homosexulists or even the emancipation of women and Jews.
This has long become a useless cliche, liberals liberalize nothing, and conservatives conserve nothing.
Bloody Bolsheviks were delighted with "liberal values"
Just a play

Such "liberalism" can defend the freedom of cannibals, why not?

Posted
8 hours ago, molbol2000 said:

What are "liberals" now?

I think modern liberalism is broadly interested in exploring ways cooperation can replace competition around the world. Evidence suggests that working together becomes more important as populations strain available resources, face large-scale disasters, and in general need more complex solutions to modern problems.

8 hours ago, molbol2000 said:

Such "liberalism" can defend the freedom of cannibals, why not?

Because it's important for humans to use the right tools, always. Our extraordinary human intelligence can defend us against such ignorance, our cooperative nature can show us the benefits of achieving something together, and our penchant for rich, deeply informative communications can help us spot when extremists are trying to remove that focus.

 

Posted

Everything is simpler. Scammers simply change the meaning of the terms and they become a simple tool for crowd manipulation.

in fact, no one now really knows whether he is a liberal or a conservative, moneybags now claim to be conservatism, although they were precisely the product of liberalization

At the beginning of the 20th century, the communists claimed to be liberal, although at that time in Eastern Europe there was already a liberal government that freed the peoples from slavery. When they came to power in Russia they actually revived slavery and even banned movement. So who are they, liberals or conservatives?

If we say that they are conservatives, we will come into conflict with the modern definition of liberalism, because they introduced the liberalization of marriage, complete emancipation, and even at first they defended homosexuals and prostitutes

the truth is that the swindler does not care what flags to sit under, he is on both sides

Someone might say that he sympathizes with liberalism, because he does not like to walk in formation, but why should he join those who want to free all  dirty instincts, why should he move to the pigsty?

Posted

It's possible that some people are deliberately avoiding fox news because they wish to be better informed

https://www.businessinsider.com/study-watching-fox-news-makes-you-less-informed-than-watching-no-news-at-all-2012-5?r=US&IR=T

 

No study demonstrates the same effect for CNN.

So there's a fundamental asymmetry in the OP's question.

It's commonly referred to as "Reality has a well known Left wing bias".

 

 

Posted

Personally, I subscribe to Bertrand Russel's version of liberalism.   It's not the views you hold, but how you hold them. Always cognizant of the possibility that they could change upon the discovery of new information.

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