I've read what conservatives write about BLM. Saying they call it a "broken movement" is the understatement and mischaracterization of the century. It's racism, pure and simple. If you are a racist, you're a scumbag, full stop.
The vast majority of people who criticize BLM or any other leftist issue are not racists. They are people who see problems with a movement that has good intentions and terrible execution. Thats pretty much the standard conservative criticism of liberal politics: Good intentions, horrible execution that lots of times backfires.
You need to realize that for the most part everyone wants the same things. We just disagree about how to get there.
The vast majority of right-wing criticism of BLM is grounded in (sometimes quite overt) racism, as is, frankly, much of the left-wing criticism of BLM.
It's true that criticism of certain things on the left is not dominantly grounded in racism; e.g., while capitalism certainly has racial impacts, the defense by the right of capitalism against socialism and other post-capitalist alternatives isn't grounded primarily in racism, nor is the right-wing assault on feminism grounded in racism.
That's not to say that the dominant basis of those right-wing positions isn't as bad as racism, but it's certainly different from racism.
> You need to realize that for the most part everyone wants the same things.
It may be that most everyone has similar values, but the thought leaders crafting and selling positions (on the right or the left or anywhere else) aren't a representative sample of the population, but a fairly narrow elite, and I guarantee you that the thought leaders of the right and left do not want the same things and differ only on means.
But I also think that the idea that everyone for the most part wants the same things is, at best, inadequately supported and contrary to the readily available indications. There is every indication that there are, on many politically salient issues, fundamental conflicts of basic values and goals, not merely on optimal mechanisms for achieving shared goals.
Jonathan Haidt has done a lot of important work in this area, I recommend you check him out. Our moral foundations are based on: Harm/care, Fairness/reciprocity, Ingroup/loyalty, Authority/respect, and Purity/sanctity. Lefties really only care about the first two, conservatives care about all 5, and harm/care + fairness/reciprocity typically rank lower than the other values. Look at the FIRST comment on this thread. Then look at the list of values. It is really easy to see what our arguments are about once you know why people think the way they do.
I disagree strongly with your last point. Almost everyone wants to be happy, avoid suffering, have healthy and harmonious relationships, to live life as they choose, have a sense of purpose, etc. Our fights are typically about how to achieve that for every citizen. If you can find a LARGE population of people that does not want those things I will happily retract my statement.
This is less true when you get beyond platitudes to what each one of those means in substance.
There is a very significant disagreement over what “liberty”, for instance, means, and over what things are “basic human rights”, among people who agree that “liberty” and “basic human rights” are important goals.
> But beliefs are not the same as values.
Well, beliefs include both fact and value beliefs, but the ones you enumerate are, in fact, values.
> The divide comes in how we prioritize our values in achieving those goals.
Values are root goals, not means of achieving goals.
> I disagree strongly with your last point. Almost everyone wants to be happy, avoid suffering, have healthy and harmonious relationships, to live life as they choose, have a sense of purpose, etc.
Taking that as true, for the sake of argument, that's not wanting the same things, even if people might use the same words. It is a different thing for Alice to be happy, avoid suffering, have harmonious relationships, live as she chooses, and have a sense of purpose than it is for Bob to have those things; it may even—depending on, e.g., what makes Alice and Bob each happy—be mutually incompatible things.
I think you're sort of on the right track about values being root goals. Values come first, then we execute policy based on those values. One goal may come at the expense of another. And some lefties might not even recognize a trade off if statistically they don't value something that conservatives value very highly. Or vice versa.
Your last point is in alignment with everything I've said before. We have the same over arching goal (happiness), we just disagree about how to get there. The two paths to the goal are mutually incompatible, not the goal itself. The path is what is in question and conflict, not the goal. This is why it is so important that the path is discussed honestly and openly. Good intentions do not automatically lead to good outcomes, and if we as a society choose the wrong path we are f*. So to bring it full circle, this is EXACTLY why we need more conservatives on campus: to discuss the other paths and evaluate them objectively so that the best path may win.
No, I'm not.
> Substance can't be mapped onto reality without prioritizing values and deciding accordingly.
That is a syntactically-valid sentence but I have no clear idea what it is trying to communicate relevant to the discussion.
> The belief of individual liberty is shared throughout America
The idea that there is a thing called “individual liberty” that is to be valued is broadly shared. What that label actually means is not a product of such a broad consensus. This isn't a matter of “how to achieve individual liberty” being a matter of disagreement (that is true, too, but a different issue) but the fact of what it means to say “individual liberty” being a matter of disagreement, with mutually incompatible views as to what that means.
> Your last point is in alignment with everything I've said before
No, it's directly opposed to it.
> We have the same over arching goal (happiness), we just disagree about how to get there.
No, that's what you said. What I said is that Alice has the goal “Alice should be happy” and Bob has the goal “Bob should be happy”, and these are not the same goal, and may (depending on what actually concretely produces happiness for Alice and Bob, respectively) may be mutually incompatible goals. And when you scale up to hundreds of millions of people with goals of that style, absolutely are, in very many cases, mutually incompatible goals.
This is not at all a matter of dispute about ideal path to a shared goal, because the goal is not shared. The language Alice and Bob use to describe the goal might be shared (each might say “I want happiness”), but the actual goal is different, it's just the differences are elided in the casual description.
2. You can't define anything beyond a platitude without some sort of values prioritization. Real world definitions will inherently use a value hierarchy. This is where the conflation comes in.
3. Mostly agree, which is why I said real world execution will vary depending on the value system of the population in question. The vast majority of Americans have a fairly similar idea of individual liberty as a general idea/platitude. But again, the value system hierarchy will produce different real world definitions in different scenarios. In order to go from platitude to real world application you have to invoke your value system hierarchy. Which side of any given issue you fall on depends greatly on that hierarchy.
4. See below.
5. I think we're getting caught up in semantics and don't actually disagree on this point. What is shared by the two parties is they each have the same goal: Happiness for themselves. Bob's happiness may conflict with Alice's because of how they are trying to achieve it, but again, they need to talk and sort out why this is happening so that they can get on the optimal path. I think when you say "goal" you are including the means to achieve happiness. I am not. I am simply talking about the pure emotional state. Get more conservatives on campus and we can figure out more ways of achieving happiness that are mutually compatible.
Yes, you can. In fact, you can't have a value prioritization unless you can first define the things you are prioritizing, so this is precisely backwards.
And even if you were right, it wouldn't support—or even have any bearing on—your claim about confusing “values with real world policy execution”.
> Bob's happiness may conflict with Alice's because of how they are trying to achieve it
No. I mean, sure, that's possible, too, but beside the point.
The point is Bob’s happiness may inherently conflict with Alice’s; for an extreme example, Bob may derive happiness directly from Alice’s unhappiness. (More commonly, Bob’s happiness may defend on conditions which produce unhappiness for Alice.)
> I think when you say "goal" you are including the means to achieve happiness
No, I'm not. I'm talking about what in economics might be described as each individual’s personal utility function; the mapping from condition of the universe to the resulting happiness of the individual.
2. This is theoretically possible but not at all how most people in the real world function. Not a material impact here. If you believe many people’s happiness depends on many others unhappiness that is classic zero sum thinking.
3. Cool, so we weren’t talking about the same thing, hence the disagreement.
Regardless, colleges should deal with bad ideas by acknowledging and refuting them, not pretending they don't exist.
I have a theory that people born after about 1980 don't really understand bigotry they just know there are certain things they can't say and certain things they should say. That leaves them ignorant of the root causes and it can manifest in other forms and not be recognized as bigotry.
Much better to have open intellectual discussion than to pretend bad ideas don't exist.
Ah the decades-old conservative "political correctness" culture war strategy (successful I might add). You'd have to be a complete idiot to make it through school and not realize why these "certain things" are offensive - OR you could be making a disingenuous argument because you support bigotry (my vote is on the latter).
What would an "open intellectual discussion" about race/sex/religion/immigration, hosted by a conservative group look like exactly?
Liberal groups on the other hand, favor some sort of change, but the actual specifics vary from group to group. On something as simple as environmentalism, you will see a range between people who want laws to ensure pets are well treated, and people who think all animal domestication is slavery and every pet ought to be freed into the wild.
A conservative group on the other hand will trend to defend whatever law existed when they grew up. Sure it is not a very clever policy, but thats the essense of it.
So we need an intellectually-honest debate about what laws we want that we are actually willing to enforce.
Unenforced laws leaves many in a legal grey area which is not fair or just.
This is a perfect example of the problem, no intellectual capability to refute, resulting in a desperate resort to bigotry.
Instead, please follow the site guidelines, which include: "Comments should get more civil and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive."
Here is one: the natural hair movement, good or bad?
A liberal view is on favor of it, as straightening ones hair can be seen as trying to ape European hair type, and popularizing it as glamarous demeans people with naturally kinky hair forcing them to change to an unnatural state.
A conservative view holds that hair straightening is ok, as that is the culture which we grew up in, and to throw it away turns our backs on the decades of tradition and shared culture around it.
A hostile liberal would say a conservative is an “uncle tom” at best, or at worst someone who was brainwashed by racists and is a danger to society.
The hostility prevents further discussion.
.........
I am sure this is not what you expected but I chose a light topic intentionally to show it is the hostility and not the base principles that are at fault.
Also I wanted to show that the conservative / liberal divide is not one of race. Many blacks have conservative views if you look outside of race issues (e.g. topics of religion trend conservative within the black community).
Personally, I think that universities should be a place of debate, and intellectual broadening without hostility. As a conservative, I am well aware that conservative universities exist, and are often extremely hostile to liberal viewpoints (e.g. try suggesting cohabitation is okay at Liberty University, and see how fast you are reprimanded).
I think that is wrong, even though society seems to feel that by going to a conservative university, that treatment is okay because you knew what you were getting.
We can do better, on both sides. Don’t you agree?
Congratulations, you failed the ideological Turing Test: https://medium.com/the-polymath-project/the-ideological-turi...
The story becomes even funnier if we consider how many of these people support BDS, which is aligned with people that literally do want to exterminate the Jews, and some (like Rasmeah Odeh) actually did murder the Jews, and some others (like Linda Sarsour) are only one enthusiastic handshake removed from ones that did, and wholeheartedly support them.
Feminism had a time when it wall called equality feminism with the goal of promote the legal status of women as equal and undifferentiated from that of men. It was during this time many countries abolished and changed laws that distinguished between men and women, such as spousal support, divorce laws and custody of children, and more. Here in Sweden practically all such laws was abolished during this time, but then the 1980s and 1990s brought about a new focus in popular feminism called difference feminism and the idea of the gender being undifferentiated was abandoned. The feminist movement stopped working to remove such laws and is now considering that laws that favor women to be important to balance power between the sexes.
The common dismissed and ridiculed mens right movement is usually on "the other side" of the feminism movement. A common mens right argument is that the choice in pro-choice and planned parenthood should be applied to both men and women. Consent to parenting does not start from conception they say, and request that the choice given to women is made into a human right as far as possible. The feminist movement generally disagree.
Taking a look at other equal rights movements, laws that give special treatment to minorities based on religion has often a "other side" arguing that special treatment should be applied as a human rights or not at all. Such laws are never made into human rights, and thus we have members of Missionary Church of Kopimism and Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster trying to achieve this special status of equal rights among religions and rarely succeeding. As the side who is arguing for human rights they are sadly the "other side" to the more established equal rights for (popular) minority religions.
If you dislike the term "mens violence against women" and prefer to address the issue as domestic violence then you are sexist. Similar if you use the term "immigrants sexual violence against women" instead of talking about social economic status creating crime then you are a racist. They say that White Privilege is a good term while Black Crime is a bad term, and naturally this is what distinguish the correct political view and the wrong one.
Bring the laws and discussion back to be undifferentiated by gender, religion, race or ethnicity. Pure human rights. Such discussion should have no legitimate other side but for now most equal rights do not request this and thus the other side is very much legitimate.
When the fuck did equal rights for minorities, women, and GLBTQ become "politically lopsided". We're talking about human rights here. There is no legitimate "other side" to this argument, just hate.
This article is concern trolling 101.