I had a good friend/startup founder once say anyone who supported Trump deserved to be fired and blacklisted.
At least, that's my story. I'm exaggerating for effect, and in the spirit of fun. But I was literally publicly berated at work once on the company forum for not being liberal enough, not having views consistent with California democrats, and not contributing enough money to the party.
I never feared for my job though, that's awful. I could have actually been a conservative and I wouldn't have had to worry. There were conservatives in the company, though they did keep rather quiet about their views.
Someone who makes a blanket statement about firing anyone with impure thoughts... it happens, but let's hope it was only a moment of weakness or anger on your friend's part.
I do agree with some of trumps policies. I don't agree with his behaviours though.
The simplistic tax reform makes sense. A bigger deductible would mean poor people would have middle class would have a larger net gain.
I support infrastructure investment.
I support stricter high skilled immigration.
It's interesting to note that the word "fired" in an employment context is the same word used to describe what occurs when a gun is operated.
That's just a silly line of reasoning
However incompetent I think he is, I doubt that was deliberate though, and is besides the point.
Every president will inevitably make military decisions that will lead to civilian casualties. It's never nice, and it's never "okay", but it's also extremely difficult to avoid, in a conflict.
Repealing ACA is purely political, with very real effects on tens of millions of Americans losing coverage, benefitting only rich people.
It's not an unavoidable side effect. Just fucking don't do it. Your comparison is ludicrous.
Your trying to claim your statement is equivalent to mine is silly.
Syria is a conflict zone where the government has lost control and the USA along with 50 countries from the NATO is trying to help get the situation back under control. Nobody involved there is actually intending to hurt any civilians. In fact, the USA pulling out would likely cause a lot more deaths. (I'd like to remind you of the syrian government attacking their own civilians with chemical weapons.) Further, under no other candidate would substantially less deaths happen in that area, and particularly with Pence being a noted hawk there'll likely be more involvement there than under Clinton.
PS: Bernie would've been the sane choice for your country. But hey, what can you do in a two party system.
There's a wide gulf between deaths caused despite one's best intentions, and deaths caused directly by one's intentions. I believe US laws put such deaths in two distinct categories.
E: I also answered the syria question in a post further up.
It doesn't seem to be as bad even in other equally-liberal tech areas outside SV.
The fact that people didn't seem to grasp the hypocrisy and danger of their actions made it even more chilling.
It's disheartening, really.
Maybe people haven't seen it in America before, but this happens all the time.
Radicalism begets radical responses over enough of a time line.
People in this thread keep feeling disheartened or calling out liberals enclaves - but they completely forget that this is only 3 weeks into Trumps presidency.
As a candidate he was frightening to liberals, in a way no American presidential candidate has been in a long time.
And now he is president. He scares and disturbs people around the world. I can't imagine how liberal groups feel.
On top of that he won and is supported by people who argue that hate speech is free speech.
(Conservatives are not acting conservatively, either...)
Human actions ultimately find their motivation in emotions, not in rationality.
Besides- that's a belief unmoored from reality.
There's a fight going on, and one side has been using techniques to dismantle every institution and source of strength of the other. Youll have reached the point that even facts itself are under question.
The period of following ideals died a while back. Either liberals learn from the political play book of the conservatives, or they disappear.
"Those who can make you believe absurdities, can make you commit atrocities" -- Voltaire
59% of Trump supporters believe the last president of the United states was not a citizen of the US, and therefore ineligible to be president.
66% believe that Obama is lying about his religion and is secretly a muslim.
Put together, that is some real "Protocals of the Elders of Zion" stuff. No wonder they want to ban muslims, they actually believe the country has already been secretly taken over by them. There's multiple bestseller books that claim exactly that. People pushing this conspiracy are all over the Republican establishment and Trump and other public figures drop blatant dog-whistles that just sound like stupidity to normal people, but confirm these paranoid fantasies for believers.
Trump actually said on television that Obama actively helped the Orlando shooting. And people in this thread are like "well, I like his tax policies" and "people are so rude to supporters of Fascism, that's the real fascism!".
The question I ask myself is where does being "rude" end and oppression of your opposition start. I'm thinking about this in the broader context of multiple elections happening here in Europe this year and what is the appropriate response.
On one hand I'm strictly in the camp that if you say shit people should be fully allowed to critize you for it. On the other hand I'm not sure this is a helpful strategy to further the wanted end.
That aside, this sub-thread is about the fine line where the power relations change and those who weren't in power before now start to abuse that power themselves. I've seen multiple calls to legally oppress people that voted for Trump. That's as wrong to me as legal oppression of women and minorities. I don't know if there's such a thing as "good oppression", but I have a feeling the answer is no.
Maybe one day we'll need to worry about women and minorities suppressing white men, but we're not there yet.
Do you think we should wait until we are there, so we can again react to problems instead of preventing them? People stated that they want to do this.
Does this make the things the other side did any less horrible? No, multiple things can be horrible at the same time.
With state power and ownership of material resources, duh. Being a dick to someone isn't oppression. Making them homeless is oppression. Rounding them up and putting them into a camp is oppression. Shooting them is oppression.
Do people not realize that these things happen today?
[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2014/06/yes-pol...
[2] https://cdn.theatlantic.com/assets/media/img/posts/2014/06/n...
Trump was the last straw for me. I voted McCain and Romney but Trump was just too far into the deep end (that and Mitch McConnell has been one of the most obstructionist politicians in American history).
Eich used his capital to deny rights to our friends. They did nothing to his rights.
I haven't been ostracized, I haven't been "silenced" or "oppressed". I have had my ass handed to me about uninformed opinions I held, though. And that hurts your pride, but eventually makes you a better person.
Serious question: are you white?
San Francisco is generally more accepting of almost everything, and I love that, but when it comes to political ideology I ironically find it intense, unaccepting and extreme. It feels like anything goes in SF, so long as you're not on the right politically. (I don't even consider myself super duper on the right, just not allll the way on the left)
Growing up in the south, as a non-white, it's not if you've been mistreated, but how many times PER DAY. Your identity is that of an outsider. You're not part of the white culture.
It's so common that it just becomes the usual part of life, and you deal with it from there.
You are definitely lacking any idea of the experience of other races.
Mormons, they go around house-to-house trying to convert people.
Try doing the same thing as a Muslim, with a long beard, in the deep south, and then let me know if you still think you'd be more comfortable expressing your views in the deep south. =^D
I'm a white Jewish-atheist male with... certain political views, and I honestly expect that if I open my mouth in the Deep Red zones it will lead to violence.
>It's not "people have different ways of viewing things, and boy do I think you're wrong," it's "if you think that _____ or voted for _____ you are my enemy."
Well, fascism is not just another way of looking at things. It's a way of killing people. Fascists are the enemy of every sane, decent human being on this planet.
Now, folks at work or in government may or may not be fascists, but if someone brings up the concern that they are, the right thing to do is to contest the factual question. You really shouldn't just dismiss it by saying, "Whether or not so-and-so is a fascist, it's only fair to tolerate fascism!"
No, what's fair is "never again". Totalitarianism in general and fascism in specific are the worst ideas in the world.
I'm not saying that's what you're doing, but it's a frequent tactic.
I'm sure I'd feel comfortable sharing liberal viewpoints in a small, deeply-red town as well, but I'm also a straight white male.
You're worry about being ostracized. People in Kansas have to worry that radical christian terrorists are going to murder them [1].
[1]: http://www.pbs.org/newshour/rundown/kansas-crusaders-arreste...
By far the most internally racist populations I've ever lived in were those where any recognition of ethno-cultural differences was explicitly verboten. If you make a joke about Mexican culture in SF (even if you're Mexican), there's a good chance you're getting fired, so internal thoughts about ethnic differences are suppressed and allowed to fester, and then people cover it up psychologically with a huge dose of self-loathing and, externally, doing the exact opposite of whatever is thought to be racist. The result is a modern version of "white man's burden"; a lot of the people in SF are absolutely convinced that without their help the poor, trod-upon people of color (replacement for "minorities" after that phrase starter to apply to white people in many US regions) would surely starve.
The point being, being a straight white male has nothing to do with it. For the record, I'm neither straight nor white, and I agree with the GP that I felt safer expressing disagreement in conservative environments than I do in very liberal cities like SF and NY.
I've always found it really funny that extremely disfunctional racist places like Chicago feel like they should define the cultural behaviors to fix racism.
Having lived for >2 years in 6 different US states (NY, CA, TX, MA, NV, MT)
and cities with populations ranging from 2,000 to 20,000,000, I can
absolutely guarantee you that rural white areas have the least internalized
racism of anywhere in the US.
Secondly, are you yourself white? I only ask because I am not, and I have had the experience of going into a store in a rural, conservative area, hearing conversations stop and heads turn as everyone stopped to look at the different-looking person walking in.
I believe that when you are referring to rural, conservative areas anyone that is a stranger or strange looking (clothes, hair etc.) would have a similar experience.
That's pretty threatening I think?
You are worried that a private organization that someone no right to be a part of might not want to have anything to do with the alt-right?
The link you posted doesn't support that. “These charges are based on eight months of investigation by the FBI that is alleged to have taken the investigators deep into a hidden culture of hatred and violence,” said Acting U.S. Attorney Beall. “Many Kansans may find it as startling as I do that such things could happen here.”
A hidden culture, not an open one, and open surprise and bewilderment from people don't really work with the idea that people are actually worried about being murdered by christian terrorists. It sounds like people didn't even know this existed.
You are worried about problems in America?
- Some white guy in 1955.
Regardless, if said white guy from 1955 said he was uncomfortable about something, or otherwise felt bad, telling him why other people have it worse seems counter productive. Someone always has it worse.
Honestly, the level of discourse in this country is an absolute joke. It doesn't matter what side you are on.
I know that vaccines are critical and that there is nothing wrong with them. But to not even admit the possibility that there might be a link between vaccines and some health problems is, to me, very anti-science.
My understanding for science has always been to question all assumptions, even ones you think are your sacred cows.
The problem is that you're agreeing that there is no link but then trying to argue that maybe there really is a link and everyone should think really hard about it. This is not a logical or factual argument but you expect that people should act as if it is. If you have facts or even logical arguments to put forth, then do so. But don't claim that everyone is being anti-science when they dismiss your baseless speculation as baseless speculation.
The mechanism are known, I've studied it in basic biology classes, and all doctors have studied it in detail - you can too.
The process by which our body deals with a vaccine is based on the same processes it uses to deal with any invader (and then building a repository of responses to handle such cases in future).
If you don't have the time to look into it yourself, you can consider what every other doctor and medical researcher in the world has studied and supported.
Otherwise this is a kind of unscientific "keeping an open mind" mantra. The point of an open mind is to not just be a weather vane With no fixed position.
It is to keep an open mind in order to study the facts and draw an inference based on it.
That's science. Keeping an open mind for the sake of an open mind is philosophy at best.
Furthermore, you can consider the fact that anti vaccers are not making the limited case you are. The response of people to anti vaccine, is not based on your claims of possible possibilities, but to anti vaccer claims and statements
Here is an interesting example. In the 60s a vaccine against chlamydia was developed and then tested in one of "developing" countries. Vaccinated people showed high titers of antibodies in their blood (this is, by the way, how efficacy of vaccines is judged, not by the actual clinical studies, read the inserts, you'd be surprised). Despite the high titers vaccinated people were much more likely to get the disease and the course of the disease was more severe. The vaccine was pulled, and the reason for the failure was not known at the time.
http://www.smithsonianmag.com/smartnews-science/why-1960s-ch...
If you follow the links in that article you will see how the process of how the body deals with a vaccine is not necessarily the same as the process of dealing with the disease directly.
Human immune system is complicated and is not fully understood. Infant immune system differs from the one of the adults, which further complicates the matters. Saying that the science there is settled is just not true.
Nobody is arguing that the basic functionality of vaccines doesn't work - this is a strawman argument that those who wish to dismiss any criticism of the vaccine industry use.
Understanding infectious diseases and taking proper personal hygiene measures along with having clean drinking water and plumbing/sewage had much more to do with the decline in infectious diseases than vaccines ever did. The effectiveness of vaccines is highly overstated.
Many doctors have spoken out about the vaccine issue. They are typically threatened and punished after doing so.
Pharma companies have billions if not trillions of dollars in profits at stake on this issue. To dismiss any concern as being "anti science" is the height of ignorance. Any academic institution is simply a collection of fallible human beings. These institutions can, and have, become corrupted just as easily as any other.
There is a very long list of vaccines that have been developed that were later found to have been causing horrible medical problems. The idea that a vaccine could cause medical problems is not at all a controversial one.
There is convincing evidence from scientists like a certain CDC whistleblower that there is indeed data showing that there are major problems with the current vaccine schedule.
Asking questions like, why has the vaccine schedule for babies exploded to dozens of shots in rapid succession, when there's not been an equivalent explosion in those infectious diseases? Why should gigantic pharma companies, who every year make billions in profits, be not held liable for any harm that is caused, nor are they required to perform rigorous testing with double blind human trials for vaccines (like they are for other drugs)?
But I guess since you once studied it in a basic biology class, all those questions are just "dumb anti vaxers".
Clean water keeps you from getting bacterial dysentery. It doesn't do much to stop you from getting polio. Vaccination and herd immunity are what keep you from getting polio, and smallpox, and measles, and a couple dozen other diseases that used to regularly kill people. The effectiveness of vaccines is not overstated. It's clearly established and it's only because we're fortunate enough to have lived with widespread vaccinations for decades that we've lost sight of the impact they have.
> ...There is convincing evidence from scientists like a certain CDC whistleblower that there is indeed data showing that there are major problems with the current vaccine schedule...
You made a whole bunch of scary claims with zero evidence. This is not science. This is fear mongering.
> Asking questions like, why has the vaccine schedule for babies exploded to dozens of shots in rapid succession, when there's not been an equivalent explosion in those infectious diseases?
The reduction in infectious disease somehow indicates that vaccines are low-value to you? The widespread availability and use of vaccination is a huge part of why those infectious diseases aren't common now. How many people do you know who've died of smallpox or polio or tetanus?
Also babies don't get "dozens of shots in rapid succession". This is a fear-mongering lie. In the US, before 12 months a child should get a minimum of 14 vaccinations and a maximum of about 22 depending on if some vaccination are taken early, 3-shot vaccine series are chosen over 2-shot vaccine series, and whether the child is considered high risk for certain diseases. Less than two dozen spread across a full year and typically barely more than a dozen.
https://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/schedules/hcp/imz/child-adolesc...
> Why should gigantic pharma companies, who every year make billions in profits, be not held liable for any harm that is caused
Essentially no one holds this position. You're making up strawmen.
> nor are they required to perform rigorous testing with double blind human trials for vaccines (like they are for other drugs
Citation? What vaccines are we giving our children that are not rigorously tested?
As for the effectiveness, it is absolutely must be questioned, and here is a case in point: http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/lawrence-solomon/merck-whistleb...
Fair enough, but "In the U.S, following a mass immunization campaign promoted by the March of Dimes, the annual number of polio cases fell from 35,000 in 1953 to 5,600 by 1957. By 1961 only 161 cases were recorded in the United States."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polio_vaccine#Jonas_Salk
This isn't a result of a major hygiene change. So far as I know, hygiene in the US did not drastically change in this time period, while polio cases dropped by orders of magnitude. This is the result of consistent and systematic vaccination.
> As for the effectiveness, it is absolutely must be questioned, and here is a case in point
This is very interesting and very relevant to whether specific vaccines are effective. It does not in any way dispute that in general vaccines can be extremely effective.
For the record, I'm totally in favor anyone putting forth evidence that certain vaccines are ineffective, or dangerous, or even cause autism. So long as there's actual evidence to discuss and debate.
Here is a recent case that could have been labeled polio just a few decades ago: http://abc7chicago.com/health/6-year-old-boys-death-linked-t...
I cannot find stats right now but I saw numbers of AFM in India where true polio cases keep going down YoY but the overall numbers of AFM have recently skyrocketed.
Also let's keep things in perspective. The absolute number of people getting infected by polio or other enteroviruses do not actually show any symptoms. It is quite rare for the virus to invade the nervous system which leads to the symptoms we all fear.
Here is a curious link to an article from 1961 with memories still fresh from the polio outbreaks of the middle of the 20th century and shortly after the polio vaccines were introduced.
Note the reserved tone which is so at odds with the current day thinking about the success of the polio vaccine. The whole article is worth a read, I will just provide a quote here that is pertinent to our discussion.
"Evaluating the true effectiveness of the Salk vaccine and the new oral vaccines has been difficult for several reasons. Polio is a relatovely rare disease in the United States. Because so few persons get it in its paralyzing form, success of an immunizing agent is hard to determine. The definition of polio also has changed in the last six or seven years. Several diseases which were often diagnosed as polio are now classified as aseptic meningitis or illnesses caused by one of the Coxsackie or Echo viruses. The number of polio cases in 1961 cannot accurately be compared with those in, say 1952, because the criteria for diagnoses have changed."
http://archives.chicagotribune.com/1961/03/05/page/62/articl...
Perhaps this is a misreading on my part. I was equating AFM with the "worst case" paralytic polio, which is fairly rare at ~1%. It's unclear to me what percentage of polio cases result in muscle weakness (which AFM seems to correspond to more closely) that doesn't qualify as paralytic.
> I just obliquely wanted to address the issue that polio is often brought up as an absolutely devastating and dangerous disease, and yet generally speaking it is not so.
This is the case for almost every disease. Paralysis in ~1% of victims is still pretty terrible.
> Note the reserved tone which is so at odds with the current day thinking about the success of the polio vaccine. The whole article is worth a read, I will just provide a quote here that is pertinent to our discussion.
It's an interesting article, but doesn't change the fact that polio vaccines have a huge body of supporting evidence. Ignoring the question of 1952 vs 1961 polio counts, what about 1988 to 2016? It's dropped from 350000 cases to 42 in that time. What about all the trials that have shown the effectiveness of polio vaccines? What about the fact that wild polio is eradicated in North America?
No one says vaccines are perfect. No one claims that drug trials are perfect either. But the overall evidence still seems overwhelming, and nitpicking how polio used to be categorized and pointing to some upswings due to the cyclic nature of infectious diseases is not evidence against the efficacy of vaccines.
This is my problem with anti-vaccine lobbying. There's a distinct lack of evidence in their favor, so they resort mostly to nitpicking minor concerns while ignoring the bigger picture. Meanwhile they'll happily jump on weak and even fraudulent studies that support their claims and ignore their deficiencies.
"Hey, Polio is eradicated in the US and reduced by almost 4 orders of magnitude worldwide. That looks pretty effective."
"Yeah, but we haven't always counted polio cases exactly the same, and there was a brief upswing in polio a few years after the vaccine as introduced. Also vaccines cause autism."
"Uh, so we still managed to eradicate polio after the upswing. And the vaccine-autism link was literally fraud."
"But what if you're wrong?"
"??"
There we go, the usual methods to discredit science at play again.
Firstly, no you are absolutely wrong, in that people directly claim that vaccines are a scam and that they kill babies/children.
Next, you are doing the usual spread of FUD, inadvertently or intentionally, which isn't my concern. Either way you are a vector for memes that harm humanity and so are culpable.
> Understanding infectious diseases and taking proper personal hygiene measures along with having clean drinking water and plumbing/sewage had much more to do with the decline in infectious diseases than vaccines ever did. The effectiveness of vaccines is highly overstated.
What?
The only way its overstated is if you don't know what you are talking about.
Firstly : Small pox is not cured by clean hands.
Secondly: No one is giving vaccines anything more than their due. Well until anti vaxxers showed up, and once you have a radical voice shouting about something, the only signal you get is high contrast and caricratured. Before vaxxers showed up, vaccines were generally a part of a larger series of protections to help human beings. They were pretty awesome, and awesome in their own right.
This didnt mean that people stopped valuing hygiene or its place in healthcare. One of the most famous recent examples going around in literary articles has been about how doctor hygiene standards have gone up after they saw what kinds of germs they were carrying.
> Pharma companies have billions if not
Do you think pharma companies, doctors and scientists exist in a vaccum?
They are governed by medical bodies, malpractice laws, and by the larger will of the people.
And Doctors have their licenses and their liberty at risk if they poison you.
If a drug or technique was found to be dangerous, the people who pushed it on the population while knowing the consequences get fined in billions, and more.
> there is a very long list
Please share this list, I would like to see it.
> There is convincing evidence from scientists like a certain CDC whistleblower
Please go ahead and share the papers and peer reviewed articles showing this to be true.
> when there's not been an equivalent explosion in those infectious diseases
What?
They've changed the method and medium to give people their doses. As kids in India we used to have to get several painful injections, which often left scars. Theyve found other ways to get it done today.
> double blind trials
What? I'm going to test a vaccine on an infant by giving another infant the fucking black death!??!?
What the heck are you on?
------------
Look if you believe this stuff, and actually are fair and credulous - spend the exact same amount of effort and time research WHY vaccines work instead of the brain manipulative stuff left out by anti vaxxers.
Given enough N number of an event, something weird will happen.
But given that outside of America's bizarre discussion - billions of people have been vaccinated, over generations, to no known trends or losses, I'd say that vaccines are worth using.
----
This kind of debate is how Fox News and the rest of them made global warming into a debateable issue.
This is how creationism became credible to the general public.
You can ask these "reasonable" questions, and over fit on edge cases for anything. You can then present it to normal people and make it seem like that there is some issue.
Expert positions are discredited by saying there's a vast conspiracy, and that experts have a financial stake in the matter.
-------
Please stop doing this shit as a country.
You'll have perfected the art of making falsehoods credible forces in public discourse.
I could understand if this happened in some country where education was not widely available. But if it's happening in America, the first of the first world, and its deeply troubling.
These things are designed, planned and unleashed. America ends up acting as a massive proof of concept.
If you'll can't stop these kind of manufactured debates from spreading, then I don't know what the rest of the world will do.
It's not about your body. It's about the society you're a part of and herd immunity. If you choose not to vaccinate, you are putting everyone else at risk.
So yeah, you can choose not to vaccinate, but you need to understand that if you do so, the rest of society has a right (and in many cases an obligation) to say "we don't want you here, if you're not vaccinated (for any reason other than medically unfit to be vaccinated) then you don't get to participate in our society, you don't get to put our members at risk, and you need to stay the hell away from us".
If the premise is that you are responsible for your own body, then shouldn't you also be responsible for any consequences that occur as a result of your choice to opt-out?
As a non-vaccinated person, carrying a disease that would normally be vaccinated against, can you be held responsible in the event that the disease you carry infects, for instance, a child that is not yet old enough to be vaccinated against that particular disease, or infects someone who was unable to be vaccinated due to other medical reasons? Should you be fined or prosecuted in the event that your choice to opt-out can be directly linked to a significant health event?
It's hard to talk about disease on an individual basis. A person's choices with respect to their own health has an impact on the individuals around them, and I do think that people should be mindful of the community when making lifestyle choices. I'm not saying a person shouldn't make their own choices, but should accept that those choices aren't just going to affect their own individual health in many cases.
>Maybe, but there's probably something to be said for social cost that make that argument somewhat less valid. Herd immunity. Seat belt and helmet laws, etc. Note that I am not taking a position here on vaccinations or anything else, just that it's not the best point one could make (other than for some casual amusement at cognitive gear grinding and confusion). It'd be the same as making fun of someone with anti-abortion views by saying "but death penalty lol isn't all life valuable!?" - which I am certain many have said and heard, but this type of arguing doesn't actually approach the reality behind issues and beliefs and positions.
The purpose isn't to be a jerk. The purpose is to cause anyone to pause and think through their position more thoroughly. What rules should apply, when and when not. Without searching more deeply for a more principled position it will come down to "because that's how I feel". But that's not how someone else feels. And what makes one person's feelings more important or superior to another's?
So, when does society get more say than you over your body?
Personally I don't think we should use and rely on the law to try to legislate away stupidity. We should use compassionate education. Yeah, I know, it sucks we have to be patient and not everyone will get on board. The only other option is to imprison and kill all the people that don't agree with you.
I understand that it's not maybe intended to be a jerk or has the deeper purpose of getting someone to rethink their position more carefully. But it's just a bit of a jerk-ish way to do so (in my view) - one that may be perceived as an attack on someone's intelligence and critical thinking abilities. It sets people on the defensive.
I try to take a more-flies-with-honey method myself - challenge the person to go through this process positively, and having demonstrated that you have tried to understand their viewpoint. It may make them more likely to understand yours, too.
As others have said and I hinted at, there are some things where societal benefit may and should outweigh individual belief. Laws are not always the most effective, or only way, to achieve these ends. Education is valuable.
Note that I am not taking a position here on vaccinations or anything else, just that it's not the best point one could make (other than for some casual amusement at cognitive gear grinding and confusion).
It'd be the same as making fun of someone with anti-abortion views by saying "but death penalty lol isn't all life valuable!?" - which I am certain many have said and heard, but this type of arguing doesn't actually approach the reality behind issues and beliefs and positions.
This is the main reason I'm thankful for HN and the mods. Reading and participating in the discussions has challenged me to work on my discourse technique. Particularly with reigning in my level of emotional investment in my positions, which for me is and has been difficult.
That incident really has stuck in my mind, in that even on topics of passion, a calm more detached approach can eek out information and points of view we wouldn't otherwise get.
That's a hard but important lesson for even the best of us to learn. Especially for myself being a combat vet type of alpha male who learned the contrarian and abrasive style of debate from Christopher Hitchens. (Though I think that method still has a time in place, I think there are less situations where it's appropriate)
Maybe if you are intellectually honest and discuss topics instead of talking points, you might get a different response. I've had some pleasant discussions with Trump supporters when we actually talked about real problems (not imagined terrorizing hordes, which is a manifestation of the right's own 'hysteria') and Trump's proposed solutions would or would not fix them. The ones that come straight away with "THE MEDIA IS MAKING EVERYTHING UP!!!"... not so much.
The following day they presented me a framed photo of Joseph Stalin.
It's not just liberals that can be closed minded.
2. Was the picture frame any good? Worst case, free frame!
3. OK, serious this time, who brought up politics at work - you or the bosses? I work at a big company and people generally avoid politics and religion, and people do seem to actively pretend they don't hear it when someone tries to go there. At a smaller shop, who went there?
2. They took the frame back.
3. They did. I was working at the store as an hourly employee. The customers were generally middle to upper middle class.
2. That's the real crime here. That frame was a gift.
3. OK, seriously again, that's very lame. If management brings up politics, they damn well better be receptive to the response. I know small businesses can be "different" but it has little bearing on you working in their store.
Keep in mind, giving a framed photo of Stalin is totally different than screaming "You're effing Stalin!" (which he didn't do).
If someone is outraged by your support for social programs and calls you a Stalinist, it's way harder to feel threatened when you're looking at a framed photo of Stalin your boss gave to you. Similarly libertarianism/Somalia or whatever other over-the-top pairing applies. It's part of why I tend to defend this sort of humor as not inherently wrong - when it's well-meant it helps ensure that people don't feel threatened or ostracized. The sting has been taken out of the attack, so there's more room to get along.
What meaning did it have to you or them?
To him a racist, bigoted, misogynist, misanthrope, with a complete lack of taste, wild delusions about his place in the world, a gaudy tower with his name on it, and the idea that (despite his wife being foreign) that immigrants are not dangerous was exactly what lots of Americans aspired to be. The American Dream of a quiet wife stuck at home making pie, while you are out in the woods with a 12 gauge in your pickup truck. Like the twitter comments last week on the video where some guy takes his belt off to whip a young child, and people are saying 'if more liberals had been beaten like that, then perhaps they wouldn't be so out of control'. Add to that the 'I don't believe in experts crowd', an almost Homer Simsonesque desire not to think too deeply.
Then there is the alt-right, particularly the channers. They seem to confuse their right to say repugnant things with some kind of right to be listened to. Yes on 4chan you can say the most appalling slurs to each other, but why should society listen?
Maybe the US elected a hateful president because there are a lot of repugnant people there?
Maybe the liberals are right to defend their patch from this creeping menace with zero tolerance? Maybe that is just society pushing out those that don't fit.
Personally I wonder if this is America becoming the next superpower to destroy itself. The inflated idea about its own importance may lead to it losing site of its place in the world by becoming more insular. Another empire consigned to history?
And I think (if you read the original article) this is what frustrates so many across the country. Whether all, or some, or none of what you attribute the motivations of Trump voters to exist.... you're completely unaware of soooo much more that guides them.
For example: https://www.commentarymagazine.com/articles/our-miserable-21...
Please take a minute to read it all. From the economic wasteland that much of middle America has become, to the massive addiction to prescription drugs & heroin, and widespread unemployment.... is it any wonder that people would want to try something completely new?
But no... keep throwing around your labels. Keep calling people racist bigot homophobe, sexist. That will surely convince the guy with no job prospects that it's all in his head, and his heart. Not the emptiness in his pocket.
"Maybe the liberals are right to defend their patch from this creeping menace with zero tolerance?" -- And this last election was a line in the sand, for many defending there patch from the "intolerance" of the far left.
I suggest you read the original post at the top, and take some of the comments to heart.
>People start throwing link after link of facts
You get upset when people present you with links to facts to respond to your proposed ideas?
I can sympathize that it is definitely no fun if you feel like your ideas aren't getting the attention they deserve, but if you have trouble defending the ideas in the face of factual sources, maybe it's possible that one could reconsider those ideas in the face of new evidence?
After all, that's the basis of scientific thinking.
There's no good fix for this, of course. Sometimes an idea has been rebutted so often that people aren't willing to digest and summarize the links (like "people didn't come from monkeys so evolution is false!") Sometimes the answer is genuinely subtle and there is a reading list to have useful views (lots of monetary economics, or relatively subtle biology like "how could eyes arise by chance?") Sometimes a person is just so wrong it's a category error and their claim can't be rebutted because it's meaningless.
But it's also a real problem. There absolutely are people who stonewall valid points (or easily answered questions) by handing out endless obligations. And it's not particularly clear which one you're getting until you've done all the work - it's not even guaranteed that the other person is right about whether their content is relevant!
So having been handed useless books as "required reading", I hugely sympathize with the complaint. But I don't really know a good answer except "stop debating people who pull this".
There is definitely a tendency (on both sides) to collect links to "approved" viewpoints and push them as fact without being able to back them up with valid argumentation.
No it isn't. Scientific thinking isn't just like how a film photograph is taken, i.e. you expose a fresh blank film with no impressions of its own to light and it captures an image.
The unique thing about our minds is that we can analyze our own minds, we can analyze the interpretation of the input from the external world. Look at our own thought process and the way we perceive the world is known as Philosophy, and my main problem with the 'pro-scientific thinking' camp is that they have outright hostility towards philosophy.
Take for example evolution vs creationism debate. Just to be clear, I believe that evolution is the correct explanation of how the world came into being. But it is mindblowing to me how much the pro-evolution side (technically the creationist side too, but I don't care about them) insists on evolution being true and how much they have betted on this.
If tomorrow aliens land and they claim that earth is their landfill, dinosaur bones are their trash, and we are the equivalent of maggots living on their trash who came up with a consistent theory explaining how all the trash fits into our story. My point is that in that case, even though creationists aren't proven to be correct, scientific thinking would take a huge hit.
I can promise you if I go out and post to 100 scientific communities "I don't believe that the theory of evolution is true" and post some clearly non-religious argument against it, nearly all of them will wanna know if I believe in God, whether I believe vaccines cause autism etc.
Once I prove my credibility, then it's followed by link throwing. Remember the point I raised is philosophical, like could an alien life form have created us, can radiometric dating be wrong because we simply haven't observed any aging method to be correct over a million years. But it will be followed by link throwing, not even related to the topic I raised.
These things have nothing to do with whether my argument has merit or not, which is why no amount of link throwing forces me to change my opinion. Changing my opinion relies upon hearing a rational argument, and link throwing does not always mean a rational argument.
Yes, no amount of link throwing can change your opinion if it is based on your values which cannot be changed by any new facts.
I read that comment as: "people overload me with facts before giving me a chance to communicate what I'm actually thinking". It's not fun for anyone to have a complicated set of thoughts, get up the courage to share them, and then get cut off before what they've said out loud matches what they think in their head. It takes a really good listener to help people get through that.
The parent comment was referring to discussion of ideas, not one-off event X happened or didn't happen arguments.
> You get upset when people present you with links to facts to respond to your proposed ideas?
Facts do not make an argument. Most scientists agree that GMOs are safe for human consumption as currently regulated in the US, but if you try to say that, many people will respond with a bunch of facts:
* Some GMOs allow us to use more pesticides.
* Monsanto patents seeds.
* Government regulations are often skewed by corporate interests.
* Genetic engineering can have dangerous side-effects.
These are all facts. They're all true. They all should be considered when evaluating the safety of genetically modified foods.
But they're not used in conjunction with the rest of the facts to come up with a measured, thoughtful position. They're used to shut down the discussion and "win".
That's a problem. It's not just a problem for people who "have trouble defending the ideas in the face of factual sources". They're a problem for anyone interested in finding a truth or a reasonable position that extends beyond a collection of cherry-picked facts.
It's not a choice you'd make if you're truly interested in hearing out and understanding the other person's perspective. The comments to me look like they're more interested in winning the debate.
In that case, playing the contrarian is nothing more than trolling.
When doing this, make sure the opposite viewpoint is at least as valid as the one you're arguing against.
Not every "idea" is valuable to be heard. That said, you don't state what topics you argue.
"They talk about how diverse they are, and things like that, and it's fine if you're diverse like them."
[1] - http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-4053156/Sad-true-Met...
In the end, left and right are artificial divides anyway, with not a single leftist or right wing viewpoint being exclusively held on that side. Identity cannot be divided into two sides, it is more complex, and the same applies to solutions. The key to good solutions is understanding where people with different viewpoints come from, without vilifying them, and then injecting the best aspects of everyone's ideas into a shared lattice. There are subjects where people are never going to see eye to eye, like abortion, but in most subjects if you keep discussing and not demonizing you can figure out a common ground. I had this experience myself coming from a strong left background and then working with a far right conservative, who I ended up liking, understanding, arguing and finally agreeing with. Nowadays we're both somewhere in the middle. As long as people on both the left and right can remember that the others are not evil, just different, and ignore the media (who really cause the toxicity) then things can be fixed.
I think it is time for a new politics that addresses globalisation, technology and the internet, but I fear it will take a calamity, and the death of the current political dinosaurs before it is a reality
So, you take a contrarian view. People respond with facts. So, where's the problem? You don't like the facts? Don't want to hear them or what exactly?
And keep in mind that there is a difference between fact and "fact". It is a fact that a scientific instrument recorded a certain value or that a particular person voiced a particular opinion. Everything beyond that - that the instrument is working as intended, that the person's memory and reasoning and honesty can be trusted, that the data point is representative of similar situations, that it is at all relevant to the question at hand - has some amount of uncertainty associated with it.
Instead of:
1. I value A more than B. 2. Facts show that X tends to cause A and Y tends to cause B. 3. Therefore I prefer X to Y.
They do:
1. The facts show that Y causes B. 2. Therefore, how can you be against Y? 3. By arguing against Y, you are ignoring the facts of B.
... which is frankly a non-sequitur.
Arguing against a conclusion or policy is not the same as ignoring facts.
Spend a few hours investigating "facts" and arguments on all sides and smell where the bullshit is.
Generally speaking, the physical sciences produce highly peaked distributions (literally, in the case of particle physics) and the social sciences produce more of what I would call flat lines with a few lumps in them. That includes most political "facts". Quantitative accuracy requires extremely high quality data and statistical inference, which when applied to social issues is impractical for the foreseeable future.
I propose we roast you with some honey.
Your strenuous disagreement is a clear indication that you are intolerant of alternative viewpoints.
I'm a conservative (fiscally, mostly, but socially progressive) and often, but not always, vote for Republican candidates I like. However, I find that the conservative/Republican "world" is just as hostile to opposing viewpoints as the liberals are of opposing viewpoints of their own.
We're all guilty as charged in this regard.
I find two tricks to be useful:
Avoid statements, ask questions. Asking for summaries is good.
Play a little game: How little time can you spend getting the other person to spend the most time on their response? You win if you spend a minute and they spend an hour.
Note: Doesn't work in person, but in person, it's easier for everyone to stay calm.
Statements are used when you want to make a point.
Which one a person employes will tell you a lot about their intent.
I am generally pro-immigration but I like to challenge my own thoughts and biases to make sure I don't have any blind spots.
I listened one day to a pro-trump Tawainese immigrant (now a citizen) explain why he was pro-Trump -- one of his primary reasons was illegal immigration. He felt everyone should go through the same process.
Those who have had to make hard choices often cannot accept that their sacrifices are being undervalued when someone else can obtain that high hanging precious fruit so very easily and via shortcuts.
I certainly can understand where this immigrant friend of yours come from.. not easy to reconcile all those complicated feelings on the issue of immigration.
Yes - this happens. We still don't know how many Sherriff Joe and other officials in Arizona deported. It was basically a program here of "if you're brown enough, don't speak enough english, and can't produce any docs on the spot" you had a good chance of being rounded up, sent to an ICE facility, then deported. Even if you were a born-here American - just because you were of Mexican descent, and didn't learn english.
Similarly, if you're Hispanic, it would be hard for you to learn English if everyone else around you speaks a convenient language (i.e. Spanish), even if they could speak both the languages easily.
It's kind of a trap, you'd learn English more easily if you left Spanish speaking community, but because you don't know English, it's hard to leave that community.
That sounds exactly like a choice to me. You chose to take the easy route and communicate in a common language. I'm not saying it's right or wrong, but absolutely a choice.
Why did you choose that option?
I lived in Chile for a while. Although many people spoke English, I chose to learn their language and communicate that way.
Was it hard? Yes. Was it worth it? I believe so. Not only did I pick up a valuable new skill, I assimilated into their culture and learned the nuanced differences between us. It was highly rewarding.
English isn't our national language—the US doesn't have one.
Lots of people immigrate illegally, and many of them stay at length, work hard, and build lives. The government pretty explicitly turns a blind eye to their presence. Then we change leaders, and suddenly responsible residents of 30 years are kicked out to a country they haven't lived in since childhood. Meanwhile, a great many other people in the same situation aren't.
It's a bit like my reaction to marijuana laws. I think the law isn't very good, but that's just grounds for reform. What I think is immoral is seriously punishing 1% of people violating an unimportant law instead of lightly punishing lots of them. It's about limited or variable enforcement of the law, which encourages people to play a lottery where a handful of players get their lives ruined.
America is great at throwing tons of cash, our vast technical and industrial infrastructure, or military might at the problem. Not so much at utilizing the scientific method to determine a sensible course of action as other nations do.
The easiest example I see is the long list of policies which were assessed via some known value like inflation, but never pegged to it. As a result, they're grounds for new fights every couple of years when it comes time to re-assess them. I'm not even thinking about minimum wage here (which still sees fights over its existence) but inside-baseball funding for various executive branch positions and agencies. Similarly, the alarming number of laws with hard cutoffs (on salary, or employee count, or whatever) that create weird anti-growth, anti-work incentives.
I think it was in a recent discussion of cost explosion (e.g. in healthcare or infrastructure) that someone pointed out that the US isn't over- or under-regulated compared to similar nations; it's just worse regulated. A disturbing amount could be gained by going through the Federal Code and just fixing the bits that every expert agrees are stupid.
Just because something is set in law does not make it morally right.
There's still demand for those people, and so they'll keep coming (and especially if by various means we contribute to wrecking the Mexican economy!), but they'll be pushed further towards the margins of society, and will be easier to exploit.
Look at this, for instance: http://www.elpasotimes.com/story/news/2017/02/15/ice-detains... - woman takes domestic violence to the courts, but gets detained herself. What will the next woman to be beaten or raped do? Probably not go to the cops.
edit also: http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/02/mexico-immigr...
...at those wages. The whole point is that if your business can't survive by paying wages that american citizens will accept then you should welcome the creative destruction of capitalism. Your business shouldn't exist and more importantly you should get out of the way so that a business which can exist and pay wages that american citizens will accept can take your place. No more race to the bottom.
>Or, in some cases, pay a lot more for things.
I realize that, I'm just not opposed to it.
EDIT:
>and many of them are not easy/cheap to automate.
Many of them aren't easy to outsource either. An illegal worker in the United States is much more expensive than a child in Thailand. There's a reason those jobs still exist here.
They're illegal because what they are doing is against the law. Broken system or not, it's still illegal.
>Just because something is set in law does not make it morally right.
No, but it does make it the law, and breaking it is still illegal. Morals are grey, while law is much more often black and white.
No, it's not quite the same, but my point is that this is absolutely a case where the law is not working well, is not 'right' and ought to be fixed.
There are a lot of similarities with MJ legalization: by legalizing, regulating and taxing, states like mine (Oregon) have hurt criminal enterprises and taken in millions of dollars in revenue, and brought a lot of businesses out of the shadows. It's a win all around.
Really? Why does so much time get wasted in litigation if law is black and white? In the case of an immigration law, was the law made in accordance with the constitution? What about the Geneva convention? Should you obey a law that is unconstitutional? What if it was brought in without due process. Doesn't sound black and white to me. [Add your own black vs white joke about white law enforcement and black immigrants here]
> Just because something is set in law does not make it morally right.
...and neither does "the market."
Exhibit A: the "war on drugs".
To one with such a world view, 'illegal immigration' is illegal in the same way parking incorrectly, or crossing the street without an intersection is illegal----annoying but not worth arrest.
These statistics are hopelessly confounded by changes to the definition of "deportation" and are not to be viewed as reliable: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-cage/wp/2014/04/2...
"CORRECTION: The original post claimed that Obama had de-emphasized removals and concentrated on returns and that the ratio of his removals to returns was skewed toward returns compared to his predecessors. That claim is not correct because based on DHS’s data, (Table 39: Aliens Removed and Returned, FY 1892-2012) his cumulative numbers since taking office show Obama has removed a total of 1,974,688 people and returned 1,609,055 others. There have been more returns than removals only in FY 2009 and 2010. Moreover, comparing across administrations is not wise given the changes in law and counting procedures."
So even if you count removals only, they removed ~2mn people and this article was published in 2014. If you add returned, this swells to nearly 4mn
Our immigration process is severely broken especially for migrant workers. They are an integral part of our economy and would, in most cases, choose to come here legally if they were given the opportunity. What we should be doing is giving these people work visas with a path to citizenship. We have already seen the adverse effects of eliminating illegal immigrants from being able to work as farm labor, crops rot in the field [2], and when prices rise, it will present opportunities to importers to put farmers out of business for good.
I should also state that I have no issues with deporting, though I don't understand why we don't incarcerate, unauthorized immigrants who commit violent crime(s). These people should be removed from our society.
[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/plum-line/wp/2017/01/13...
[2] http://www.forbes.com/sites/realspin/2012/05/17/the-law-of-u...
I read the other day that this is an artifact of a change made under Bush that redefined deportation to include turning anyone away at the border.
http://johnhcochrane.blogspot.com/2014/06/the-optimal-number...
http://www.cnn.com/2016/08/29/opinions/making-legal-immigrat...
Because the current system is really broken: see what it's like to try and immigrate, legally, from Mexico if you just want to do manual labor.
See, this is what would be most interesting for me to discuss with my friends. There is obviously a demand for those services that Americans possibly don't want to do (I'm not completely clear on if they want to or not). What can we do to make this a more sane process for everybody involved? I thought there was some progress in the past and the Republicans were almost on board but it never got over the hump for whatever reason.
It probably doesn't involve starting from the premise that they're "bad people".
My answer would be more along the lines of "ok, you can come and work, just register and complete this background check, and you'll be good to go in a month". It might involve a longer wait for citizenship or no access to certain benefits, which is something that is, of course, already in place for legal immigrants, or other compromises, but making otherwise honest people 'illegal' isn't really working. Letting honest people go through an easy process also has the benefit of 'separating the wheat from the chaff' - if you see someone who is sneaking around or otherwise not documented, you have a much stronger reason to think they're up to no good, rather than simply washing dishes on the sly.
The "whatever reason" you're grasping at is the latent racism of the Republican base. As much as you want to believe the focus is on "illegal" immigration the Republican base understands this as a coded dog whistle for not liking Brown people.
It's not about a marketplace of ideas, it's about signaling which tribe you align with. The marketplace of ideas happens in the policy world, not the political world.
There are also a lot of people who are victims of zero sum thinking and the lump of labor fallacy.
No, but it is wrong if it breaks other laws in the attempt to enforce the law. Any realistic attempt to deport millions and millions of people will almost invariably run afoul of the 4th amendment because there would be no way to find that many people without unlawful searches.
I mean, I'd love to not be pro-illegal immigration, and if we significantly loosened our immigration laws (not to the point of genuine open borders, but to the point where a reasonable person had a path to permanent residency in the US without it being a lottery), then I'd be anti-illegal immigration. But with the status quo, I'm pro-illegal immigration.
Even if the sacred cows are all 100% correct, losing is a downside. There's no point in celebrating how correct we are about something while completely failing to act on that knowledge.
More broadly, this seems to be how most of politics (especially recent American politics) operates on either side. Anything is open to debate and discussion as long as it doesn't seriously threaten to make someone change their behavior. You can even persuade someone to change their views, as long as their new views can support the thing they want to keep doing. Humans (myself included) are amazing at rationalizing, and hate serious challenges to their deeply held positions.
But I do think it's a useful pattern to recognize. The best tool I know for genuinely well-intentioned debate is to open with "What would make you change your position on ${issue}?" Unless both people can consciously identify a point or set of points that would be sufficient to alter their belief/behavior, there's not much chance of progress.
So, I gamed this out with myself, because it's a good idea. I had a couple that I can't find serious answers to -
* Gay marriage - you'd need to show me that gay marriage actively destroys society. Show me relics of a village or civilization that went under because it had permissive LGBT rights.
* Abortion - as with LGBT rights, you'd have to show me that a God exists that will send me to hell for supporting the above. I could compromise on certain things, but only to preserve the bulk of it.
I can't figure out a good-faith tipping point for either of these social issues for me (fiscal/geopolitical I can find plenty) - and accordingly I can't really have a well-intentioned debate about it as it would quickly boil down to "yes, we disagree on the sacredness of life/marriage". So, what then?
I wonder how you would feel about partial evidence on those points? Like, if someone could show that societies with permissive LGBT rights are consistently (and causatively) less successful, even if they aren't destroyed? I've certainly never seen such evidence, but I'm not sure where on "no harm" to "destroyed like Rome" my tipping point would be. Or - is the abortion point about non-personhood (maybe not applicable at 8.75 months) or bodily autonomy (applicable right up till birth)?
More generally, though: I think those are just places where you save some time by citing a moral basis. It's like arguing contraception with Catholics - you can skip right past AIDS rates and single parenthood by conceding that they think it's a mortal sin, and without changing that they'll never budge. So if someone wants to talk about traditional marriage or fetal pain or whatever else, you can skip ahead with "seriously, address this one issue or I'm going nowhere".
I'd support this point of view if 99% of "alternative views" didn't end up being some form of "Immigrants are rapists", "Brown people are terrorists", and "Climate change is a Chinese conspiracy".
There is a difference between having an open mind and having a sieve for a brain.
Those are now unpopular, contrarian views at universities and what not.
As to free speech, I assume you are talking about people like Milo, to which I will say that he has never had his free speech violated. Free speech is not an entitlement to a forum, it is a right that guarantees that the government will not interfere with your speech, but even that has some limitations.
That's a pretty narrow and legalistic idea that's often deployed to excuse some pretty terrible behavior by private parties. Yes, it's accurate if you're talking legalistically about First Amendment free speech rights, but there's a more general principle of free exchange of ideas that's clearly violated when protesters try to shut down events they disagree with. It's that broader idea that I believe people are actually referring to when they talk about "free speech" in these contexts.
You may not agree with the protesters, but they too have rights and autonomy.
It should also be noted that the speaker was due to speak at a university, an organization that's supposed to be dedicated to the free exchange of ideas. The protesters are certainly free to not attend his speech and to express their disapproval of him in ways that don't silence or harass others.
But when a group has asked Milo to speak, then you have no rights to physically block someone from speaking or try and shut down their event by force. Feels like even when not violent, some of these protests were less complaining about the event and more trying to stop supporters getting to it. And I don't think that's right.
> Except that the contrarian views frequently turn out to be lies, and I can't spend all my time debating lies. Please suggest a contrarian view that's worth discussing.
You illustrated his point perfectly: you tried to shoot him down by equating "contrarian views" with "lies," without proof or even example; then turned around and demanded that he back up his assertions in a way you were unwilling to.
What do you mean by this?
Every analysis of "How the hell did he win?" that I've seen has basically been that no one else listened to the people outside the population centers, or outside mainstream thought. He did and crafted a campaign based on it.
So listen. Just because you disagree or think they are lies, or whatever, doesn't mean you won't learn something about why those people think the way they do. No one is saying you have to agree. Credit to the author for actually listening.
Regardless if Michael Jackson was the person characterized by tabloids, let's say he was, does that in any way affect his music?
Regardless of what you think of the Palmer Luckey media debacle, does it have any bearing on the Oculus product(s)?
Judge the man/person by his actions. But products aren't variable by their creator, they're just a product, either good or bad on only it's own merit.
Do you eat Kellogg's products? Do you care what person its founder was?
> “Silicon Valley is incredibly unwelcoming to alternative points of view. Your curiosity, if it is sincere, is the very rare exception to the rule.”
Substitute "Silicon Valley" for any major liberal enclaves, like universities and cities, and I think you see the same thing. I am skeptical by nature and try to take a scientific view of new ideas. However I feel like I get shouted down every time I merely bring up a contrarian view. People start throwing link after link of facts and don't want to even reason about ideas. It's hopeless and I end up keeping my mouth shut.