It's no secret to anyone who spends time on the internet that liberals talk a lot dirtier than conservatives. In public, anyway; I don't know whether this holds true in private conversation or not. Notwithstanding the fact that this is common knowledge, there has been a lot of buzz about this survey of liberal and conservative sites. It begins with the "seven words you can't say on television," and purports to count how many times those words appeared on 18 of the top liberal and 22 of the top conservative blogs. The result was striking: liberals used the "bad" words 18 times as often as conservatives.
That didn't really surprise me, but when I looked at the chart that set forth the results of the survey, I found that 68 instances of the "seven words" were recorded for Power Line. This struck me as obviously wrong. I'm certain that six of the seven words have never appeared on Power Line at all, and the seventh (a four-letter word that starts with "s") has appeared only a time or two when we were quoting someone else.
So I ran the search on Power Line the same way it was done for the survey. What I found was that virtually all of the references that came up were in "trackbacks." This means that the language appeared on someone else's site, not ours.
I conclude from this that the survey was pretty badly flawed. Not only did it fail to distinguish between blog entries and comments, which is at least defensible, it failed to distinguish between words used on the site in question, and words used on a different site, which is not defensible.
Having said that, I think the original point still stands, even if this survey does not precisely quantify it. There is no doubt that many liberals often use offensive language on the web, while conservatives rarely do. Some of this probably has to do with age; many liberals who write on the web are just kids, so immaturity is not surprising. I think some of it has to do with anger; liberalism, in today's political world, is closely associated with anger and, in far too many cases, hate. And I think that to some degree, it is symptomatic of the sloppy thinking that is common on so many liberal web sites. It is, after all, a great deal easier to string swear words together as an insult, than to string ideas together logically, as an argument.
UPDATE: This post generated a surprising number of comments, most of them from liberals who argued 1) that liberals cuss more on their web sites because they have more to be angry about, which confirms the point I made in the last paragraph of my post, or 2) that it is contradictory for me to say that this survey's methodology was flawed, but the conclusion that liberals use more bad language on their web sites is nevertheless true. The latter is a logical error of such stunning proportions that it tends to confirm my observation that sloppy thinking is common on the left.
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Reader Comments ( Page 1 of 3)
1. "I conclude from this that the survey was pretty badly flawed. Not only did it fail to distinguish between blog entries and comments, which is at least defensible, it failed to distinguish between words used on the site in question, and words used on a different site, which is not defensible.
Having said that, I think the original point still stands... And I think that to some degree, it is symptomatic of the sloppy thinking that is common on so many liberal web sites."
______________________________________
Let me get this straight: You have determined that the study which fed into your original point is flawed - in other words, it cannot be trusted to support your or any other contention - but you still believe that the central point of the study - without producing any evidence whatsoever - is true. And "liberal websites" are supposed to be guilty of "sloppy thinking"? Seriously? Or is this satire?
PBI at 12:11AM on Mar 2nd 2007
2. Yawn, as in "gaping."
*Crickets* at 12:33AM on Mar 2nd 2007
3. Typical conservative gas bag.
Reach your conclusion and ignore any and all evidence to the contrary.
Smithers at 12:51AM on Mar 2nd 2007
4. Or could it be that liberals don't assign some sort of magical/superstitious significance to certain combinations of sounds that conservatives do that somehow make words "dirty?" Long after we're dead, these dirty words will no longer be thought of as such, and a whole new set of words will have taken their place much in the same way that our great-grandmothers had to say white meat and dark meat when talking about the breast or legs of a chicken, and we can say poppycock and humbug, and the only raised eyebrows will be from those who wonder why we're talking so weird. When properly used, these dirty words sum up very succinctly what a person believes. Saying Bush is full of humbug would elicit gasps from Cary Nation much like saying he's full of shit might garner the same reaction in certain circles now. Both were or are considered vulgar language in their times, and both get across the same idea very well.
As for the hatred and anger that comes from liberal websites, you're damn right. We hate and are angered by what this country has become in 6 short years, and the majority of America agrees with us - not you. So you continue in your little la-la land of magical words and clinging to a political outlook that has put the country into the - ahem - shitter.
TlalocW at 1:00AM on Mar 2nd 2007
5. I think the above entries are right on point, but allow me to also draw your attention to the book "Conservatives without Conscience" by (republican) John Dean. He discusses how the current Republican Party (post 1994) got as powerful as it did, and it is partially by harnessing the anger, fear and hatred of the authoritarian personality types, who are drawn together by joint hatred of the "other" group, be it gays, women, Muslims or liberals.
In short, fear and hatred (and I would add misinformation) are the mortar which fuse the modern Right wing together.
Kudos to you Hinderaker, your intellect is as honed as your conscience...
Biff at 1:13AM on Mar 2nd 2007
6. blah blah blah. sloppy thinking on liberal websites? what of rush, billy o, and the scads of other right wing gasbags who routinely misquote and thoroughly mischaracterize democrats. and what, no mention of dick cheney saying 'go f*&*% yourself' in the halls of congress?
nick at 1:16AM on Mar 2nd 2007
7. "badly flawed"?
try "made up out of whole cloth"!
even though hinderaker says the survey is badly flawed
"badly flawed"?
try "made up out of whole cloth"!
before we clutch our collective pearls in collective disgust at the left, let's take a look at newsbuckit's actual process and data.
as i point out on skippy, while it was flattering to be labeled as one of the 18 biggest liberal blogs, there’s no traffic ranking in blogtopia and yes, i coined that phrase, that puts my blog anywhere above 500 in ranking.
even worse, i personally couldn’t believe skippy had 419 occurrences of swear words (because i have a pretty stringent approach to using swear words only for emphatic points or jokes, and usually substitute asterisks for vowels).
so i tried to reproduce his results, by using the same method he outlined in his piece.
my google search resuled in a mere 137 instances, less than 1/3 of what ishmael insists skippy had.
i also point out that he conveniently didn’t count protein wisdom written by jeff “slap your face with my c*ck” goldstein on the conservative side.
i would suggest that instead of defending the left’s usage of swear words, we start attack the right’s penchant for making sh*t up.
update: using the same method, my google search for little green footballs came up with twice as many swear words as ishmael did.
so, let’s review: under-reporting a conservative blog by half, and over-reporting my liberal blog by 300%. do we see a pattern here?
skippy at 1:40AM on Mar 2nd 2007
8. Which is obscene
shit or collateral damage
Fuck or treating service men with no respect
Cunt or lying
obscenity is often equated with a lack of intelligence, if that is true why did the right vote for bush an obscenity if I ever saw one. And lastly what the fuck kind of a subject is this anyhow-people are dying and you are worried about seven words..jesusmaryandjoseph you guys are a wonder to behold
maddy at 1:49AM on Mar 2nd 2007
9. "It's no secret to anyone who spends time on the internet that liberals talk a lot dirtier than conservatives. In public, anyway; I don't know whether this holds true in private conversation or not."
Let me enlighten you about the way conservatives talk in private (although you really ought to know, shouldn't you?). The Watergate tapes clearly showed that Nixon was a foul-mouthed son of a bitch, although in public he was prissiness personified. And we all know how the current vice president comports himself. I doubt that there is a big difference between the way liberals and conservatives talk in private, but it seems that conservatives are much more likely to be hypocritical when they clutch the pearls in shock over the use of naughty language.
Zeno at 2:16AM on Mar 2nd 2007
10. Oh, for heavens sakes. Our President has used the word "F***", as has our Vice President. These are documented instances. Let's try to be a little grown up, here, okay? This sort of thing really isn't relevant, does not matter. It signifies nothing.
Sarah Deere at 2:39AM on Mar 2nd 2007
11. Liberals are foul-mouthed but honest: we're willing to state that Bush made a fucking mess of Iraq. Meanwhile, conservatives mince their neat little words into neat little lies.
Albatross at 2:40AM on Mar 2nd 2007
12. The entire methodology is fatally flawed. The produced numbers are meaningless for the purpose of comparing the obscenity of the Left and the Right. Google indexes at least 1.23 million pages for Daily Kos ("site:dailykos.com +the"), ~150 thousand of which contain at least one of the offending words: 12%. In comparison, Google indexes at least 12,000 pages for Ace of Spades HQ ("site:ace.mu.nu +hq"), ~9,000 of which contain at least one of the offending words: 75%.
Of course, I'm not claiming that either of these numbers is significant. Trying to use Google for this sort of research is prone to introducing significant errors; it's not an appropriate or reliable tool for this purpose. For example, Google says there are ~8,000 hits for "site:ace.mu.nu +the" so by that measure Ace swears more than he uses the word "the"... which I find highly unlikely.
And this is ignoring all of the other problems (sites with and without comments, trackbacks).
dak at 2:55AM on Mar 2nd 2007
13. Oh, for heavens sakes. Our President has used the word "F***", as has our Vice President. These are documented instances. Let's try to be a little grown up, here, okay? This sort of thing really isn't relevant, does not matter. It signifies nothing.
Sarah Deere at 3:42AM on Mar 2nd 2007
14. And this proves what exactly?
I recently read that Bush said when he found Bin Laden he would "fuck him in the ass".
Isn't that the guy you think is like a misunderstood "artist" ?
Danny Guam at 5:14AM on Mar 2nd 2007
15. Time's blog of the year folks.
Kill real people and nothing. Say a naughty word and all h3ll to pay.
Powertools.
Danny Guam at 5:17AM on Mar 2nd 2007