Abiola points to an astonishingly obtuse screed by Matt Young at Panda's Thumb, all 1400 or so words of which amount to saying that "Liberals*" are nice and "Conservatives" are nasty. You really need to read the whole lot to appreciate his incredible smugness and the range of unexamined assumptions Young holds but here's a little flavour:
What, then, is the difference between a liberal and a conservative? My educated guess is that one main difference is sympathy or lack of sympathy for people who are not close to them in some way. Thus, a liberal feels compassion for the poor, the underprivileged, the oppressed, whereas the conservative feels compassion primarily for those people like him or her, or close to him or her in some way.
A satirist who wanted to caricature "Liberals*" as intellectual narcissists concerned above all with asserting their own moral superiority and disinclined to consider any opposing point of view on its merits would be had pressed to come up with something better than this. Panda's Blog was originally set up to counter the insidious influence of the "Intelligent Design" movement which is a pseudoscientific brand of Creationism. Running pieces like Young's one, riddled with strawmen, non-sequiturs and extremely poorly argued - it is ultimately one big begged question - on a matter completely unrelated to the blog's theme does nothing for its intellectual credibility.
Take a "conservative" policy platform, let's say it consists of lower taxes, lower public spending, education vouchers and welfare reform. Now, a "Liberal" may disagree with this policy platform and point out the negative effects which might flow from such a platform, one by one. I would be happy to argue the point with her because this is a repectable, refutable argument. A "Liberal" such as Young who disagreed with this policy platform solely on the basis that "conservatives are just meanies" demonstrates no intellectual seriousness and is not worthy of respect.
[* again, contemporary oxymoronic usage]
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