I read a lot. I read a lot about politics and government, in particular. I read factual reports filled with opinions and opinionated editorials supported by facts. I also have a habit of shooting my mouth off in comments sections and on Facebook posts. And I read the comments and remarks on those, too.

I may have mentioned before how much it bugs me that people spend a lot more time projecting their prejudiced expectations on others than they do calmly discussing issues and reaching some form of accord. If I had a dollar for every time a progressive friend of mine expressed a false stereotype of conservative policy, I’d be rich enough to have more liberal friends.

It doesn’t help to tell people how they think, or to tell people who agree with you how to debate those who don’t. Those sorts of guides always result in lots of preaching and no debate or discussion. So, conservative that I am. here’s my guide to the conservative take on a list of issues. Feel free to disagree with me. That’s how discussions happen.

“Conservative” doesn’t mean what you think it means

It may surprise you to learn that nearly every conservative position expressed by policy wonks on MSNBC and Fox News is utter bullshit (maybe not, who am I to judge?) This is partially because allegedly conservative media outlets use hilariously slanted polling methods and “balanced” media outlets like MSNBC have a bad habit of creating straw men. That’s not the whole of it, however.

We, as a people, err in thinking that political thought can be expressed along a single line, when it’s more accurate to express it in a matrix. Essentially (and I’m not the first person to say this) political thought breaks down along the lines of money and power, and opinions can be charted on that graph in the same way.

Click for slightly larger image.

The vertical axis is all about power and who has it. Liberals want people to have most of the power; Authoritarians want that power safely in the hands of government. The horizontal axis expresses money, and how the government should spend it. Progressives are all about social engineering and using tax money for (presumably positive) social change. Conservatives would like to keep their own money in their own pockets, thanks. Mind you, a political conservative may be socially progressive, the difference there is that he believes the funding for social change should be voluntary and not gained through taxation.

And that’s the thing. Saying “Conservatives oppose gay marriage,” is like saying “Red Sox fans hate the New York Jets.” Not only does it pigeonhole an entire school of thought behind a single issue, it draws that issue from a different game, entirely.

Moral issues are divisive among conservatives

People who identify as conservative are widely divided on the moral issues, even if we occasionally reach an accord for disparate reasons. I see myself as a liberal conservative (but not so far out either axis as to be Libertarian), so my first reaction to any moral debate is almost always, “I don’t have a dog in that fight.” If I’m pressed, my reaction will probably end up somewhere around, “Sure, why not?” More authoritarian conservatives will have highly developed opinions on such subjects, usually based on their religious beliefs.

I’m always amused at the number of people who call themselves conservative and complain about the government in their front yard, but have no problem putting the government in someone else’s bedroom. I am not amused by the laundry list of assumptions people make about me when they learn that I’m a conservative.

For instance, I would never eat this kitten.

Republican politicians aren’t conservatives

American politics is a popularity competition to see who gets to play with the money and power of the American People. This isn’t new. By extension, no professional politician is either liberal or conservative, because those philosophies are all about keeping power and money, respectively, out of the government’s hands.

So straight off the boat, any politician saying he supports “good conservative values” is lying to you (never mind that it’s a senseless phrase–there are no political values, only issues and concerns), because he wants your money and your power.

Telling us what we think just pisses us off and shuts down discussion

No conservative is “anti-immigration.” Many are sick and tired of giving illegal immigrants and those who enable them a free pass, but that’s not the same as being anti-immigration any more  than punishing your child for stealing money off your dresser makes you “anti-allowance.” Conservatives are not, as a group, racist, sexist, homophobic, luddite, or jingoist. Some are some of these things, a microscopic minority are all of them, but most are none of them.

If you talk to people, instead of flinging random accusations at them, you might find out that their concerns are as valid as your own.

I am, I have been told, an intellectual elitist. I am oddly okay with that, because my elitism comes from a reliance and insistence on facts. I like facts, because the more of them I have, the better I am able to shape an informed opinion. Unfortunately, it’s getting harder and harder to locate actual facts on the internet. Hence, the elitism.

Mind you, I don’t mind opinions. I love to hear other people’s opinions, and have not, to my knowledge, ever told anyone that their opinion was wrong. Your opinion is yours, and welcome to it. I won’t even say anything if your reason for your opinion is something visceral. “I don’t like gingers because I find red hair and pale skin monumentally creepy,” is a perfectly valid opinion. Just don’t throw out a rationale base on bullshit and expect me not to check your facts. “I don’t like gingers because 87% of red haired people must eat babies to survive,” is not something I will accept at face value. And neither should you.

She’s thinking of eating a baby right now!

Obviously, this was hyperbole to make a point. I’m sure fewer than half of all gingers regularly eat babies and fewer still have sold their souls to the dark gods that allow clowns to exist. The thing is, it’s only a joke in this one instance. I have had (and I am sure you have, too) more utter bullshit posted and shared to my Facebook timeline than…you know what, I can’t even think of a hyperbolic metaphor.

So, purely as a public service, I am going to share with you my tips for reading the Internet and discerning reliable facts.

Truth is malleable, Facts are absolute, Statistics are meaningless

If you try to live with an open mind, the first thing you discover is that there is no one single truth in anything. You can present any two people with the same set of facts, and both of them will derive completely different ideas that they consider the truth. This is why juries exist. The theory is that getting twelve people to all agree that the defendant committed the crime with knowledge and forethought is difficult enough to rely on a guilty verdict to determine someone’s need for punishment.

The best truths, like jury verdicts, rely mostly on facts, because facts are absolute. A fact is a fact, no matter how many times you look at it; this is called verifiability. However, facts are limited, and have to be stated precisely to be facts. When you say, “Mark Spitz won seven gold medals in swimming at the 1972 Olympics,” you are stating a fact. Here’s another: “At the 1972 Olympics, Mark Spitz won four gold medals for individual competition.”

So, what do these two facts have in common, other than that they are both about Mark Spitz? Well, to begin with, they are extremely specific. All facts have this in common. That specificity makes facts infinitely reliable. You cannot deny that Mark Spitz won seven gold medals in swimming at the 1972 Olympics without misinforming or at least temporizing.

That specificity, is what makes facts limited. Facts have to be universally verifiable. You can’t say, “Mark Spitz is a great athlete,” and call it a fact, because, while it may be true, it is not universally verifiable; in order to be universally verifiable, you would have to compare a 65-year-old man, not only to a wealth of other swimmers who are currently in their prime, but to runners, football and basketball players, skiers…a whole world of athletes who have skills and talents well outside of Mark Spitz’s wheel house.

That leads us to statistics. Used properly, statistics are a valuable tool for determining where research should be directed, but they are not, nor will they ever be, facts. By definition, statistics are measures of probability; they are ways to guess at what will happen. On a roll of a standard cubical die, you have a statistical probability of rolling a three 1 out of six times. That does not mean that, if you roll the die six times, that one of those rolls will definitely be a three. It doesn’t even mean that you will roll a three if you roll the die a thousand times, or a million. Probability isn’t guaranteed, nor is it universally verifiable.

Math, no matter what anyone tells you, is simply a language—one used to describe an infinite number of concepts and realities. Statistics are a specific dialect of that language, as separate and distinct from common usage as Middle English is from Facebook discussions. In fact, the rules of statistical language are so taxing that properly expressed statistics are almost impossible for the layman to understand.

Words like “median,” “mean,” and “standard deviation” that sound a little weaselly on their own are absolutely necessary when discussing statistics of any kind. Then you add in “sample size,” “external variables,” and other temporizing words, and you start to get the feeling that those who make their living analyzing and compiling statistics can’t ever just make a direct statement.

That’s all to the good, because statistics cannot provide any information beyond a starting point for further research. Statistics are excellent if you’re a bookie or a scientist looking for a new project, but they’re awful for making and kind of declarative statement. Expressing that “black men make up 38% of state prison populations in the US” doesn’t tell you anything except that almost 2/5’s of male prison inmates are black. It’s a basis to investigate further.

With all due respect to those who derive conclusions from that statistic, it does not mean that the American Justice System is inherently unfair any more than it means that American Blacks live in a culture of criminality. Further, it does nothing to explain how to fix any perceived unfairness or repair a culture that appears (from the outside) to glorify criminal activity. You have to look further for real answers, because statistics don’t give answers, they just point you at the right questions (and even then, they can be misinterpreted).

Everyone has an Agenda

So all of this jostling with truth, facts, and statistics means that, not only do you have to be careful what you read and listen to, but in how you read and listen. People speak, write, and share information for a reason. Usually that reason is that they want you to agree with them; sometimes, it’s that they want you to agree with them enough to give them money or power.

This is not a bad thing. Symbolic expression is designed to influence you. Whether it’s an artist manipulating the elements of the visual world to move your emotions or a cave man jumping up and down and gargling incoherently to get you to help him protect the village against the local giant sloth, people communicate to affect your thoughts and actions. It then becomes your responsibility to ensure that you want your thoughts and actions to respond the way they expect.

Never give a single source your full trust until you have verified what they have to say. Ideally, you look at what their opponent has to say and try to objectively assess their opinion. Be especially careful if someone states that you have to act to solve a problem without adequately describing the problem or supporting their reason for believing that the problem exists.

A good rule of thumb is this: If something you heard or read makes you outraged, check the language, check the facts, and analyze the statistics, because I can guarantee they said it in a way designed to make you feel that way.

Here’s the deal: If you’re a liberal (and, if you’re still talking to me after last Christmas, it’s almost certain that you are), everything you’ve said or thought about conservatives and climate change is probably a load of crap. There are exactly zero conservatives with IQs high enough to need two hands to count that believe the climate isn’t changing. Of course, the climate is changing, that’s the cost of living in a dynamic system…you know, the sort of system capable of supporting life.

We don’t know what we were thinking.

What many conservatives do question is the assertion that humans primarily (or humans alone) are responsible for all climate-change trends. It’s a gross over-simplification to say that we deny the evidence before our eyes, but it goes a long way to make conservatives look like dumbasses while doing nothing to support you assertion. And make no mistake, it is your assertion that must be supported, because the rules of debate say that, since you can’t prove a negative, the positive assertion is the argument that must self-verify.

But, of course, there’s 97% (or 85% or 162% depending on who you ask) consensus that climate change is real and it’s all our fault! Yeah, but that’s consensus among climatologists, people who have a vested interest in promoting the hypothesis of HCCC and developing means of countering it. If that is a valid and final statement of proof, then the fact that at least 90% of theologians agree that the Universe is shepherded by an omnipotent, omniscient god means that the debate is over; there is a god and he is pissed at all of the atheists out there. I mean, these guys are the recognized experts, right?

See the thing about climate change is that the climate is huge. The earth is huge. Think of the biggest thing you can. I have safe money that it is too small to see while you’re still in breathable atmosphere. By the time you’re far enough out to see the earth in a single view, all but the hugest parts of the landscape are rendered insignificant. Mount Everest? Part of a wrinkle in the spot where India is humping Asia. Manhattan Island? too small to see; that’s Long Island poking off the southeastern tip of New York (and even that disappears in deep space photos). Depending on your screen size and resolution, you probably can’t even see Hawaii.

“I can see my house from up here!
Wait…did I leave the back door open?”

When you have a huge system like the earth’s climate, you have multiple gigantic influences that must be calculated just to get an idea of what’s driving it. You have the sun’s radiation, the atmosphere’s ability to trap or release that energy, the oceans and their ability to trap various gases (and heat), the continents and their albedo, even the constantly-changing cloud-cover of the earth has an influence on how much radiation we absorb and retain, and, yes, to a certain extent, you have the influence of industrialized society. How big or how small that influence is, and how much it pertains to current changes has yet to be determined.

I can say it has yet to be determined because we still haven’t determined the full effect of the other influences. The sun heats the earth, but the sun is remarkably unreliable in its output, because it’s an explosion, one on so vast a scale that we can barely comprehend it, but yeah, 4 billion years ago a bunch of volatile gases collapsed on a point and we’re living in the ignition phase of the inevitable combustion of those gases.

The truth is, human influence on the climate is probably not all that great. We could have as much influence as the bug you ran over yesterday had on your driving, or it could be something insidious like a ridge in the pavement that, over time forces your car partially into another lane. The only thing that’s for sure is that constantly screaming, “The climate is changing! The climate is changing!” Isn’t even a little useful. Saying that the climate is changing is like telling a swimmer that water is wet. It’s true, but it does nothing to help him avoid drowning.