My Blind Spot
 

In this thread I will describe the one area of my attitude towards life, my core beliefs if you will, that I suspect could be most affected by "cultural bias".

Once I am done, perhaps we can spark a discussion in which other people honestly attempt to see where their "Blind Spots" may lay.

Please avoid, if at all possible, commenting on other people's "blind spots".
Please write about your own "Blind Spot" - this open introspection is more interesting and takes more courage.

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My blind spot affects my views of capital punishment.

A majority of people in the U.S. support the death penalty. The percentage has been as high as 75% a decade ago. Support dropped down to 66% by 2001 and I believe the percentage is still waning but still high.

I am left of center on most social and political issues and that is probably due to my early formative years. Both my parents were involved in Democratic Party politics in the Mexican-American community of my home town in California. While I abhor violence and the taking of human life my personal blind spot allows me to support the death penalty for one class of criminal. I generally do not support the death penalty in all other cases. I don't believe in deterrance. I really don't believe that fear of the death penalty effectively deters people from committing capital crimes. Actually it does deter just one class of people; those that are executed.

That leads me to describe the one situation that allows me to justify the death penalty:

I'm thinking mainly here of murderous rapists and pedophiles, the repeat offender type, and their crimes against truely innocent victims. These are criminals, repeat offenders, that committ acts so heinous that they should be locked up in prison for life but it seems they rarely are. In the U.S. we seem to lack the will to incarcerate these monsters for the rest of their lives. Every month or so there is news of the release of one of these monsters even though there is evidence that they are habitual repeat offenders and many do repeat after release. So if we can't lock them up for life then I believe we should execute them.

I believe that I have a cultural bias inherited from being born and raised in a society that has always firmly supported capital punishment. Thus my "Blind Spot" allows me to justify the death penalty in certain situations.
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What is your "Blind Spot"?

For you its a blind spot that makes you feel less of a liberal.

For me its a happy place that fits nicely in my world view.

Do you feel guilty that you can't tow the official 'company' line that the death penalty is always bad?

Despite being perhaps the most vocal conservative on this board (all 5 of us left) there are many aspects of current conservatism I do not fully support or support at all but I don't think of them as a blind spot.

You have supported your reason for favoring the death penalty for some monsters, a blind spot would be where you can't justify it and just feel that way despite evidence to the contrary.

My guess is any true blind spot you would not be able to recognize in yourself in the first place.

I am going to stick with the Blind Spot analogy even though recognizing it would be a contradiction in terms according to you. My belief is that "cultural bias" is the cause as I stated in the first sentence of the thread and described further in the last sentence. Believe me that I am not worried about feeling less of a liberal, the once benevolent term that has been turned into a dirty word in our culture during the last ten years or so.

But I digress and I violate my own request that we not comment on each other's Blind Spots.

So fuck the typical commentary. Who has the courage to write introspectively about their own Blind Spot?

My own Blind Spot is related to literacy. I believe we are living in a post-literate society and it bothers me somewhat. It seems there are few people who know how to read and write beyond basic comprehension.

Book consumption has shifted to a largely best seller model, and many best sellers are poorly (okay, unexceptionally) written. It is becoming increasingly difficult for books that matter (e.g. in fiction, novels that don't lead the reader through a relatively safe story and aren't closed-ended and neat) to be financially viable as the marketing machines of big publishers cater to a finicky and distracted reading public. With indirect competition from movies, music, Internet, etc, what's a reader to do?

Is good literature dying from a fatal distraction, or am I just having trouble weeding through the mess?

Should I be looking upon commuters with scorn just because they're reading the Da Vinci Code or Sophie Kinsella or any pastel-coloured book or any book entitled as such: The [A] and/or [B]'s [C]?

A: Time, Bee, Memory, My, Her, etc.
B: Keeper, Sister, Daughter, Wife, Traveller, Senator, etc.
C: Wife, Daughter, Sister, Keeper, etc.

Am I being too harsh? Is this my Blind Spot?

"Potboilers" are nothing new, but are they more pervasive?

Great Baraka_Guru. That is exactly what I was hoping for.

why do you do this?

I'm a little uncertain what a blind spot is in this context. I'm ruthless, self-serving and utterly conditional. I think the nice way to say it is "complicated." I change a lot and thus whatever blind spots I have constantly change too.