Is Bud Light Right And I'm Wrong?

[Dill]

(06-08-2023, 08:17 PM)Sociopathicsteelerfan Wrote: I really wish I could agree with your point, but I applaud your attempt to be evenhanded.  Certainly much more so then most of the posters here.  How many left wing speakers have been attacked or prevented from speaking at college campuses?  Now, how many right leaning speakers has this happened to?  How many gay pride parades have been attacked by groups of violent protestors?  Now, how many right leaning events/protests have been attacked by groups of violent protestors?  I literally just provided the Glendale example.

The ultimate point is, and what many people here are desperate to avoid confronting, is there is extreme bullshit going on on both ends of the ideological spectrum today.  The only difference of substance is that one side is constantly excused by the mainstream and the other side is consistently demonized, see "domestic terrorist" parents at school board meetings again.  Seriously, at the end of the day I'm going to live my life and enjoy it as best I can.  But I abhor unfairness, and today's society is rife with it, and far too many people here appear to ok with it because it aligns with their personal preferences.

Probably everyone can agree that the liberal MSM are harder on illiberal causes/actions than liberal ones. If a group of parents, incited by Fox/Newsmax disinformation, disrupts a school board meeting to get CRT out of the curriculum and stop drag shows in grade schools, the liberal media will be less "fair" than Fox or Newsmax, which incited the parents in the first place. I think it rather likely that "leftists" have a much greater "free speech" risk on college campuses, and the threat goes all the way to hiring and firing. 

That said, it still seems to me that we hear a lot more in the MSM about right wing speakers being "silenced" than about left wing professors losing their jobs because the right wing speakers cancelled are usually the same group of provocateurs--including Ben Shapiro, Ann Coulter, and Milo Yiannapoulus--think of the latter's infamous "Dangerous ****** Tour." https://medium.com/informed-and-engaged/campus-speech-protests-dont-only-target-conservatives-though-they-frequently-target-the-same-few-bda3105ad347  So that's more an effect of deliberate trolling than substantive evidence that free speech is under siege on college campuses now more than it was in the 80s or 90s. What we do see is that minorities and others previously without voices finally have some say. 

As far as actual, ideologically motivated violence goes, there was an interesting study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences last year. I'm quoting a few paragraphs from the conclusion of the study, which does not present itself as definitive but working in an area in which there is still too little data for comfortable conclusions.

A comparison of political violence by left-wing, right-wing, and Islamist extremists in the United States and the world https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2122593119  July 18, 2022

First, data on extremists in the United States showed that left-wing radicals were less likely to use violence than right-wing and Islamist radicals. Second, using worldwide data we found that in comparison to right-wing and Islamist groups, attacks motivated by left-wing groups were less deadly. These substantive conclusions were not affected by the inclusion of a set of control variables. Thus, the main findings appear to be robust across levels of analysis (i.e., individuals, groups) and geographical scope of the data.

Our results are in line with past research showing that conservative ideology—represented in our datasets by both right-wing and Islamist causes—is positively related to violent political behavior. These results support the view that left-wing and right-wing extremists are not equivalent when it comes to the use of violence (48; see also [49] for related findings on the victims of hate crimes in the United States). Whereas our findings are not inconsistent with the idea that individuals espousing different ideologies may feel equally negative toward worldview-threatening others (50), they suggest that the social consequences of extreme right-wing hostility may be more harmful than those caused by the far left (see [50] for a similar point).

These findings do make sense though, if one agrees with this statement from their review of previous research. 

In comparison to left-wing supporters, right-wing individuals are more often characterized by closed-mindedness and dogmatism (9) and a heightened need for order, structure, and cognitive closure (5). Because such characteristics have been found to increase in-group bias and lead to greater out-group hostility (10), violence for a cause may be more likely among proponents of right-wing ideologies. In contrast, in comparison to their right-wing counterparts, left-wing individuals score higher on openness to new experiences, cognitive complexity, and tolerance of uncertainty (5). They are also less likely to support social dominance (11), which could lead to their overall lower likelihood to use violence against adversaries.