Are military\militant people mostly republican....

ok, this has been a quite an interesting read. my observations so far follow (but I want to review my notes again after I come back tonight before I chip in with my personal opinion etc.)


1. there has been a great deal of miscommunication. Firstly stemming from the definition of the word militant. Which (while Toasted correctly quoted the dictionary) has a quite different meaning to several people here. Its origin is actually from latin miles (soldier) and true meaning of militant would be "soldiery" or "combative". Its meaning has then been shifted to "aggressive" and then even further, and by some even (like AJ) interpreted as outright opposite to military, and as outright "terrorist" with anti establishment/ anarchistic views. Now this is QUITE the shift of the original meaning of the word, and in my view not a common understanding of the word, or certainly not in every country. So quite a lot of these posts were skewed or even lost on the difference in understanding how the other party uses the word.

2. the biggest disconnect seems to have been brought on with Homergreg linking to the study about prisoners  which seems to claim most of them register/vote as Democrats, certainly in some states (the article doesnt present a complete overview). While I tried very hard to be sure on his motivation for posting that link, I cannot narrow it down to just one possibility, few possibilities remain.


A) Homergreg wanted to show that after seeing only one study that shows us some results, we should not automatically jump to accepting its results without further research and verification. The result here seemingly being "most felons are democrats".

and/or

 B) Homergreg wanted to make a link between violent nature and democrats, which in my eyes could not have been established through the link as it did not say what crimes were the felons convicted of. They COULD have been all there for violent crimes, but the article didn't say or suggest that.

and/or

C) he wanted to see if we could extrapolate and somehow see convicts as having militant nature which (based on that article) would then show most of them are democrats. Against this would be a flawed use of the article. This was a very narrow group so we cannot say how that relates against a group of all militant or military people, or to all democrats etc.

and/or

D) he wanted to plant an article that shows something "bad" that is linked to democrats and see if Toasted Cheese would be willing to accept the results of this study as easily as he was ready to
accept  the results of the first link.


My GUESS is it was a combination of A and D. Am I correct @homergreg ? To be honest, this was not as clear as you may think it was. And I understand why Toasted Cheese was confused by you linking the article. Because if he perhaps had thought you were using it under the B or C motivation, he would have (rightly so) seen it as flawed or not really comprehensive or to the topic.

3. Throughout the 8 pages what was probably most frustrating was that we had here
        A) pure personal opinions without explanation if those were based on verifiable facts
        B) personal experiences (which usually relate to only the person talking about them or their very narrow circle)
        C) interpretations of opinions or experiences of others, where we had a few places where the communication deviated and then followed broken links, and
        D) conclusions based on mix of internally created opinions AND facts, but also conclusions based on just opinions or with very little facts. There has been an example of Toasted Cheese presenting         such opinion. To be fair, where Toasted Cheese presented such opinion without a verifiable fact behind it, he also made it clear (at least to me) he was simply stating his opinion as a possibility         and opening a discussion in hope to perhaps gather facts for/against it.

4. We had various bias and some minor mistakes that could have been misleading to others if undiscovered/accepted on ALL sides.

We certainly did not prove if the military (I would drop the use of militant from this for now since it really means very diff things to diff people) is mostly republican. We didnt prove otherwise either. Not yet anyway if you want to continue.

In the end I want to say that this was a great example of situation very well relating to my post "how much of your reality is real/correct". Without taking time to discover where the communication broke down, without ensuring both parties FULLY understand what the other one is saying (and there have been a quite a few point where this was clearly not happening) and without being able to interpret facts without bias (hardest thing to do) and also seek for various measurable sources before making a final conclusion, I think we can see that thinking that one understands anything else other than their own reality is more of a wishful thinking than… a reality



I have three pages of notes on this, and I want to tell you that for me this was a great example of my willingness to procrastinate with work