Dear son of a right-winger...

[smileyeagle1021]

and you missed the entire point of it, people are *more* than their beliefs, they're people...

How so?
No honestly, that is a serious question.
We are the sum of our experiences and our beliefs come out of that. So strictly speaking people aren't their beliefs, but the correlation between what they believe and who they are is so intertwined it is nearly impossible to separate them.
That doesn't mean that they don't deserve a basic level of respect and courtesy as a person, but deserving of respect and being more than their beliefs aren't the same thing.

[s_stabeler]

you've missed the point, and actually make the same point. The point is that while you can say that republicans as a whole are rascist, sexist pigs, who want a return to how it was in the Victorian era, where people essentially worked for whatever food the company chose to sell them and lost everything if thye got fired, which could happen because you fell ill.( seriously, look up Company Towns sometime. They are almost a parody of abuse relaitonships.) You could also say that democrats want everyone to recieve anything they need from the state, with people that work ahving to fork over everything to te state to pay for it. Neither are nessecarily accurate for an individual.

In short, the issue is assuming his father is nothing but a hardline republican, rtahe than a person in his own right.

[D_Yeti_Esquire]

I'd keep in mind that specifically left and right are ideologies which have traditionally in the real world attacked the middle class in different ways. Conservatives do it in a variety of ways but generally attempt to loosen the economy so that money flows more quickly but as a result, into the pockets of the upper income demographic. Middle class real wages tend to stagnate and often edge downward because of inflation.

Liberal ideologies on the other hand tend to try to make the lower income demographic middle class which (because economies don't actually work that way because inflation is a thing) often mean real wages stay about the same but taxes increase and the price index increases at a rate outpacing wage growth. The middle class again takes less. Take programs I actually support like scholarships and getting kids that want to go college into college... in the real world it's meant colleges became more expensive and your earning power as a result of the degree actually went down.

So a lot of the economic debates we probably should be happening (especially with things like mechanization, or programming people out of job in general) is what kind of endgame do we actually see happening. Since the only times real wages tend to increase is a technology/land (see: capital) boom or a plague (see: labor), it's really going to be up to eventually make the debate what it's going to need to be: how do you keep capitalism as a viable system when it's really only designed to produce capital/labor efficiency. But the reality is because that's a true statement often conservative OR liberal ideas are often correct, but it just depends at what point economically/historically you're at.

The social crap? Meh... I think it's just two sports teams honestly. Conservatives will eventually give ground because the world does change. Liberals will continue to take ground even when it need not be taken. I never have a conversation with members of either side where their logic doesn't start to crumble in terms of egalitarianism. In general they do not like who they consider the enemy and it shows in terms of how little credence they give to understandable human emotions on the other side.

Take Ferguson. The specifics are what they are. However there are still only two ridiculously paper thin narratives that are fought about. The cops are an evil, racist occupying force that kill because they can which was proved by their attack on a protest of an african-american victim slain by a remorseless officer. Or there's the cops are upholding the law against an assembly of protesters that looted the community over the justified homicide of a kid who committed a crime, struggled with an officer, and was then shot in an effort to subdue a suspect guilty of the commission of a felony. No person that thinks or knows the first thing about human nature should buy either of those. But that's what liberals and conservatives do. They like Star Wars type black and white.

In reality, I have no idea why Brown was pulled over in the first place (jaywalking, really?), why Brown & Co. would want to antagonize an officer having recently committed a crime (that makes sense how?), why his Blood and evidence of a struggle existed in a car that contradicts the witnesses, why Wilson would attempt to execute somone in front of witnesses, why witnesses would want to lie in the first place, why an "innocent" police force would have so many officers caught on tape doing shitty police work, and I'm done now. My point is, sussing it out into a neat, clean narrative like most social issues and flashpoints is often done by people unwilling to give credit to the other side for having both the capacity for complex emotions and imperfect but basic rationality. And most liberals and conservatives do it. They don't want truth, they want to be right and they want to be on the winning team.