It reminds me of this:
> And it is triple ultra forbidden to respond to criticism with violence. There are a very few injunctions in the human art of rationality that have no ifs, ands, buts, or escape clauses. This is one of them. Bad argument gets counterargument. Does not get bullet. Never. Never ever never for ever.
https://www.readthesequences.com/Uncritical-Supercriticality
But counterarguments, well, you might not always have one of those. It could be that actually you're wrong about something. And if you're wrong and you still have a big fat angry mob behind you who can shout down anybody who tries to point that out, isn't that better than losing?
No. It isn't. It's better to lose when you're wrong. Because it's the only thing that allows you to win when you're right.
But it still feels bad, and you still have an angry mob at your disposal, and if you're weak you do the wrong thing.
Too many people today are weak. And they, we, should feel bad about that.
To use vitality as an example, a healthy person can handle the odd cold or cut that could be fatal to someone with compromised immune system. Rightly then the vulnerable person will react quickly and intensely to perceived threats that the healthy person may shrug off (or even engage with, like volunteering in a hospital.
Historically, the mainstream news media would not even cover certain stories and would just spike them. People eventually go upset and found other ways to tell their story or force their opinion, e.g., social media and mobs.
Doing wrong is wrong even when you're angry.
And it's a short term gain for a long term loss. Every careless attack on a person who turns out to be innocent is an advertisement to join the opposition.
Worse than that, if you shout down dissent then you stay wrong. If you can't admit to a mistake then you can't stop making it.
Put two people long enough in the same room and they'll find a reason to kill each other. It reminds me of that podcast about tribalism: https://youarenotsosmart.com/transcripts/transcript-tribal-p...
It makes no lasting difference to the world if Team A wins against Team B in a sports event.
But public policy choices are absolutely fundamental to personal opportunity, personal safety, quality of life, and financial stability.
There are objectively right and wrong answers in politics. There's also a hierarchy of importance in policy, with some issues making far more of a difference to all of the above than others.
Misunderstanding policy cause and effect and picking and promoting the wrong answers will lead to objectively bad outcomes for at least some other people, and very probably for you personally.
The toxicity doesn't originate in social media. Social media simply amplifies the toxic effects of industries of dishonesty - from PR, astroturfing, and manipulated academic and media narratives, to calculated and deliberate hostile attempts to focus conversations on low-impact but high-emotion issues, and to split populations along tribal and narrative fault lines.
In politics, all sides are wrong about something big. And it isn't clear whose mistakes are bigger. More importantly, all parties promote narratives where we argue about inconsequential items to distract the public from bigger issues.
For example in the USA, Republicans argue against universal healthcare even though their own internal analyses show that, done right, we would save money and have better healthcare outcomes. Democrats argue for a level of micromanagement in regulation that creates bad outcomes for everyone. Republicans have politicized basic science and generally believe it to be propaganda. Democrats put political correctness above sanity. And so on and so forth.
But neither party wishes to discuss the fact that we have become a surveillance state, with an insane legal system, and a prison system that is one of the horrors of the world. They do not wish it discussed because party leaders have reasons to continue these policies, but according to polls a solid majority of Americans, across political parties, would prefer these policies discontinued. See, for example, https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/11/15/key-takeawa... and https://www.prisonlegalnews.org/news/2018/nov/6/polls-show-p... for evidence of that.
Therefore the fact that politics is about something that matters is an argument that team A vs team B rhetoric is itself actively destructive. The more important you believe the issues to be, the more that you should aim to depolarize the discussion.
I would say it just amplifies human traits.
If "There are objectively right and wrong answers in politics." and "In politics the opinions actually matter." we're fucked because surely after 6 million years of evolution we shouldn't be where we are now. We're just fancy apes with a way to shitpost world wide instantly and it's not helping anyone.
You're right that political opinions matter but I don't believe they matter for the right reason. It's still a "us vs them" problem all the way to the top, just that that one is more complex and out of reach to the average joe. So instead of informing people we throw them 5 min clips of clickbait video here and there and ask them in which "team" they are every few years, after a while the teams are naturally swaped because "nothing changed", rinse and repeat.
That’s genetic evolution.
Memetic evolution? We’re just getting started.
And you’re my instant hero! Saved, favorited, bookmarked, etc.
A normal individual has very little effect on the outcome of sporting competitions, but an individual sports fan does get satisfaction from choosing a team to cheer for.
Likewise, a normal individual has very little effect on the outcome of major government policies (e.g. federal policies in the USA), but an individual voter does get satisfaction from associating with a particular political group, following their events, researching their arguments and rebuttals to opponents' arguments, etc.
It's true that major government policies actually are extremely important, but that doesn't mean that individual political participation has much of an influence on outcomes. It is very common for people to have a strong association with some political group and act similarly to sports fans (e.g. "my group is great, your group are a bunch of hateful cheaters"). It's not as common for people to spend effort and resources attempting to increase their actual influence on political outcomes (things like having constructive discussions, organizing events, campaigning, or even running for office), because people correctly realize that most of the time the effort and resources spent would be larger than the resulting effect on the outcome.
The problem comes when I act as if I am certain that my policy proposals are better than yours - and, worse, that you are therefore evil for proposing such flawed policies as you do. We assign to policies a certainty that they don't deserve.
"In reality no political program can be more than probably correct." - C. S. Lewis.
Even then, there is generally agreement that murder is wrong, and that murder means killing innocent people. The disagreement is generally over what constitutes "innocent" and "people". Similarly, pretty much everyone agrees that stealing is wrong, the differences are just in the details of what constitutes property and associated rights.
"I believe I have a moral responsibility not to wantonly slaughter my neighbors."
It's a short sentence, but the amount of waffling in it is amazing.
I tend to think that sentiments like these are perfect arguments for a one-party authoritarian technocracy.
> policy cause and effect
Something that sounds so trivial yet notoriously difficult to establish.
Usually not; policy goals are a matter of subjective preference. What policies maximize goals may be matters of objective fact, but most political debate is (sometimes under the surface of the rhetoric) disagreement about goals, not mechanisms.
What would be considered objectively right or wrong?
2? Sure, nice and compact.
4? Hipster but OK I can handle it.
Tabs? Well you're probably the most technically correct even if I don't like it.
3? I'll cut you man. I can get along with most people, but everyone has limits.
That's a rather negative perspective. Sometimes they'll become inseparable friends to the very end.
In my course on the EU the instructor asked why the American colonies formed into a cohesive nation while the EU is still largely fragmented. Of course, there are a lot of answers to that, but I pointed out the colonies had to unite to stand against Britain. The EU hasn't had any external entity to unite against, thus the focus remains on the differences between the member states rather than the goals they share.
It's basic human nature, which we should all try to rise above.
Maybe the new thing is that political tribe is now our primary identification. Nation, race and class used to be the big ones.
The tenor of the conversation changed almost instantly. It's forced me to be hyper specific when approaching certain topics, but that hasn't come without it's own uncomfortable externalities of conversation.
https://mobile.twitter.com/mrjamesob/status/1153560242908794...
We don't say everyone should make up their mind on whether somebody is guilty of a crime -- we say a few specially informed jurors should make that determination.
This makes me wonder whether demarchy / sortition / Athenian democracy (rule by the randomly selected; similar to juries) is superior to elective democracy.
Variations of this quote are often banded about to apologise for and defend the imperfections of given democracies. It shuts down questions of electoral reform with the straw-man of autocracy. Not all democracies are equal.
There are minor variations of republics and how they elect people with resulting variations. However they are all better than alternatives (including democracy).
I don't know about every single country on the list, but at least the one I am somewhat informed about (North Korea) is a republic only in name, as it is pretty much an authoritarian dictatorship state controlled by the military class.
"I think it's the party engaging in voter fraud [1] throughout the country, and the one that tried to impeach the president when someone from the other side won [2], and the one that literally fled the state so that the legislature didn't have quorum and couldn't pass legislation [3], even though they were a clear minority. Or the one that falsely accused a supreme court nominee of rape [4], in an unprecedented move. I could go on."
It's evident to me that people of all political bents in this country are extremely tribalistic, and none of the tribes count many saints among their numbers.
Citations added simply to highlight that I'm not pulling any of this out of thin air:
[1] https://www.heritage.org/voterfraud
[2] https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2019/politics/impeac...
[3] https://www.npr.org/2011/02/17/133847336/wis-democratic-lawm...
[4] https://reason.com/2018/11/05/brett-kavanaugh-due-process-fa...
I almost said exactly the same thing you just did. I have absolutely no clue which "side" he's talking about.
Both parties have started and engaged in needless wars, both parties spread falsehoods and start witch hunts, both parties are corrupt and suck down tax payer dollars without providing value in return.
Do you really think not a single Republican has critical thinking skills? That of course is incorrect, just as the opposite statement about Democrats would be.
That's not even touching hot button issues that are legitimately subjective or at least have no clear answer (like abortion).
It's best not to dehumanize those you don't agree with and instead realize that organizations as large and powerful as the DNC/GOP are almost inherently corrupt.
Seems like that's not at all what he said. He said you'd have to lack critical thinking ability to equate the two parties.
> The Republicans are blatantly criminal and far far more obstructive and disruptive.
Ironically, perhaps, I think you've misread his comment, and mine, and overextended your own argument.
"Criminal" is less subjective, but I just don't think it's true. I'm unaware of any kind of criminal behavior that Republicans get accused of but Democrats don't.
Nixon telling South Vietnam he would give them a better deal if they dragged their feet during a peace negotiation with his political rival.
Trump withholding military aid from Ukraine unless they made a public statement about an investigation into his political rival.
What are the comparable accusations against the Democrats?
As a rule of thumb: if your source is New York Post, you should try looking elsewhere.
It documents far beyond any doubt massive corruption and treason.
The Chinese deal was having Kerry approve a deal where China got access to restricted US military technology.
Articles documenting the Biden kid's shady "equity fund", which is partially owned by the Chinese government, have been ongoing for many years in a variety of media. They were particularly popular in 2015-16 when the media was trashing the Bidens because they wanted Hillary to get the nomination.
> The company website in 2016 reported that Bohai Capital managed the 20 Billion RMB ($2.8 billion) fund. [..] business registration filings in China list Hunter Biden and James Bulger as key officials at Bohai Harvest https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BHR_Partners
So he is a 'key official' at a fund with billions of dollars of Chinese investment. But you find that claim 'false' because his lawyer states that they only raised $4.2 million, during some unspecified period of time, from unspecified sources, and explicitly declined to give any details. Being a lawyer, I'm sure his statement is technically correct. Given all the other sources, I'm also sure it's utterly misleading.
Of course, the available information allows one to believe, not believe, or assign significantly differing severity to these, and I do, but I wasn't aware of this before, so thanks.
[1] https://www.politifact.com/punditfact/statements/2017/jul/18...
Manofstick incorrectly suggested that the Politifact article applied to your post, but it looks to me like Politifact itself did an exemplary job. They evaluated the specific claim that a meeting happened, which was made by a conservative pundit, and found it false, which is consistent with the evidence they present and all other evidence I found in my brief poke through google.
That party has ~100 million voters/sympathizers in this country.
Surely you can see that it would be controversial among them?
If you hang out in online forums, for either side, it can be eerie how they both describe the other side like you just described Republicans.
The topic we are discussing is moral grandstanding on social media. The comment I replied to suggested that only one "side" is guilty of this behavior. I'm interpreting a "side" as the supporters of particular party and their actions on social media, and not the policies and actions of the party's politicians. I believe there are people on both sides of the spectrum that routinely cringe at the behavior of those they agree with. There are many staunch Republicans that wish to distance themselves from the social policies of their constituents. Likewise, there are Democrats that are unfairly given stigmatizing labels from their peers for having fiscally conservative views. Both "sides" are guilty of tribal tendencies, ignoring any possibility of nuance, and pigeon-holing "centrists" into Team Red or Blue. And I'm not distancing myself to relish in my own smug either, I've been guilty of this as well.
Just like with football, neither side likes the guy that supports both teams when it's convenient.
But as for you, you seem to be playing language lawyer with the GP's words, to try to find a sliver of a way to accuse him/her of lying. Why?
See https://www.cnbc.com/2019/11/19/apollo-15-astronaut-anti-tru...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_High-Speed_Rail#Leg...
Your Wiki citation doesn't mention any link of a connection between Pelosi and the HSR, nor does a Google or DDG search turn up any mention, outside of anonymous blog posts all citing each other.
The genesis of Anti-Trumpism was the Nopublicans. It was the official party line of the GOP during the Obama era to simply vote "no" on everything he tried to pass, even when he was trying to implement GOP policies, because they wanted to (a) make him a 1-term president, and (b) when that failed to limit his successes. In contrast, the Democrats actually worked with Bush and Bush Sr before him on domestic and foreign policy, and have worked with their GOP counterparts on such during Trump's presidency.
My friend, 2 wrongs don’t make a right. I admire(d) Democrats for their pragmatism and I loathe Republicans for their lack of it. I’m not defending Republicans or Conservatives, only pointing out that what we need is fresh blood.
We can simultaneously see that partisan politics isn't completely rational and also observe that one side, for various reasons, is working that irrationality harder than the other.
As another reply to you has shown, it's very easy to find specific differences and elevate them to an all-encompassing explanation, if that's how you decide you want to look at things.
My anecdotal evidence bears this out. Progressives tend to be far more intolerant of opposing viewpoints than conservatives.
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/majority-of-democrats-at-...
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_Rights_Act_of_1964#By_...
Yes, in all votes, by percentage, more democrats opposed the civil rights act than did republicans.
Earlier, the progressive movement was founded on, among other things, eugenics (sterilization and abortion) of undesirable people, such as minorities and disabled. The progressive movement has since changed its tune.
Minority groups clearly aren't using history to pick roommates they would feel comfortable with.
Yes I'm sure that's why all those Democrats are upset at tearing down Confederate/traitor statues...
Definitely the same party.
I was responding to the idea that minorities were using history to choose their roommates, and how if that were the case, it would not be so clear cut.
The Progressive party had followers in its own right, as well as those in both the Democratic and Republican party, at least until Theodore Roosevelt left the Republican party in 1912.
Among the progressive movements goals were getting women the right to vote, and disenfranchising black voters. The philosophies of eugenics, and obsession with purity, were in fact an inspiration for those people who would eventually attempt to purify Germany during the Nazi reign.
Although much has changed in the progressive movement in the years since, the application of eugenics through abortion to eliminate undesirables has not (from my other comment, see Iceland).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Progressivism
> As a philosophy, it is based on the idea of progress, which asserts that advancements in science, technology, economic development and social organization are vital to the improvement of the human condition.
That is pretty much the antithesis of conservative, to be sure. However, keep in mind that none of that could have described the Republican party of old. The abolitionist movement and civil rights movement had a lot of support from conservatives for religious reasons. Martin Luther King Jr's message of unity was heard on multiple levels.
That definition of progressivism does still tie fairly closely to what a lot of Democrats would identify with, I think. Unfortunately, eugenics is still alive and well within the progressive movement- consider, for example, Iceland's attempt at eradicating Down's Syndrom by aborting babies. If you were to ask most people with Down's syndrom whether their condition would have been improved had they been aborted, they would disagree.
[1] https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/support-for-same-sex-ma...
Is the takeaway from this that holocaust deniers are more accepting people?
Also, instead of whining, consider critiquing the substance of anything I said.
This is hardcoded in us.
I keep hearing this argument that the tone and style of political arguments are getting more vicious and causing harm to society, but nobody can give me concrete examples of what they mean.
One opinion piece says that Antifa is too violent. Another argues that threats of violence can be harmful.
I don’t see any example of someone saying that “speech merits a violent response”, which is what I was requesting.
If you don't know anything about the survey, read the survey. I intentionally linked the results because I didn't want to present a biased synthesis as fact.
Antifa holds that opinion, and believes violence is justified in return.
From the Atlantic piece previously linked:
> the parade’s organizers received an anonymous email warning that if “Trump supporters” and others who promote “hateful rhetoric” marched, “we will have two hundred or more people rush into the parade … and drag and push those people out.”
> An article in The Nation argued that “to call Trumpism fascist” is to realize that it is “not well combated or contained by standard liberal appeals to reason.” The radical left, it said, offers “practical and serious responses in this political moment.”
> Antifascists call such actions defensive. Hate speech against vulnerable minorities, they argue, leads to violence against vulnerable minorities. But Trump supporters and white nationalists see antifa’s attacks as an assault on their right to freely assemble, which they in turn seek to reassert. The result is a level of sustained political street warfare not seen in the U.S. since the 1960s. A few weeks after the attacks in San Jose, for instance, a white-supremacist leader announced that he would host a march in Sacramento to protest the attacks at Trump rallies. Anti-Fascist Action Sacramento called for a counterdemonstration; in the end, at least 10 people were stabbed.
> A similar cycle has played out at UC Berkeley. In February, masked antifascists broke store windows and hurled Molotov cocktails and rocks at police during a rally against the planned speech by Yiannopoulos. After the university canceled the speech out of what it called “concern for public safety,” white nationalists announced a “March on Berkeley” in support of “free speech.” At that rally, a 41-year-old man named Kyle Chapman, who was wearing a baseball helmet, ski goggles, shin guards, and a mask, smashed an antifa activist over the head with a wooden post. Suddenly, Trump supporters had a viral video of their own. A far-right crowdfunding site soon raised more than $80,000 for Chapman’s legal defense. (In January, the same site had offered a substantial reward for the identity of the antifascist who had punched Spencer.) A politicized fight culture is emerging, fueled by cheerleaders on both sides. As James Anderson, an editor at It’s Going Down, told Vice, “This shit is fun.”
Did you read all of those pieces in the eight minutes between my comment and yours? Your arguments suggest you don't. You can't ask for examples and dismiss them, refusing to read the things I link.
I did not.
> You can't ask for examples and dismiss them, refusing to read the things I link.
If your goal was to answer my question (ignoring the fact that you misread my question in the first place), then a more effective approach would have been to write an answer. That answer could have included quotes from your material. It is customary to include links to the raw material backing up your quotes, as a footnote.
Instead you just dumped links with no explanation or context. After a few minutes of skimming your material, a coherent point failed to magically appear.
So no, sorry, I’m not going to invest an hour of my time doing research on your own material to produce an answer you couldn’t be bothered to articulate yourself.
Silencing an opposing political opinion through violence is a definition of fascism.
Correct we call that terrorism when it is to further your own political, religious, social, racial, or environmental views.
Domestic terrorism: Violent, criminal acts committed by individuals and/or groups to further ideological goals stemming from domestic influences, such as those of a political, religious, social, racial, or environmental nature.
How correct they are about what they’re fighting is a separate question. As you have demonstrated, there are many different definitions of fascism. The Berlin Wall was described as the “anti-fascism protection wall” by the DDR. And, of course, “my opponent is literally Hitler” is widely dismissed as a melodramatic overstatement.
However, if we presuppose that they are correct about who they are targeting — sadly plausible, given how many genocides followed the one in WW2 — then to say that Antifa as a movement is itself “fascist” is like saying that the Allied powers in WW2 were “fascist” for violently opposing the “political opinion” of Herr Adolf H. and Signore Benito M.
A quick timeline:
* Jan. 1933 Hitler took power
* Feb. 1933 civil liberties of Jews "temporarily" curtailed. This is a key step.
* Mar. 1933 Dachau created
* May 1933 Books nazis disliked burned
* Sept. 1935 Nuremberg Laws; gypsies and others sent to concentration camps
* July 1938 Hitler tries to sell German Jews to the rest of the world at $250/head
* Nov. 1938 Kristallnacht; Jewish kids kicked out of public schools
* Dec. 1938 nazis seize Jewish businesses
* Sept. 1939 Germany invades Poland
* Oct. 1939 "euthanasia" starts
* Dec. 1940 Mass murders at Treblinka
Look at the timeline and tell me where you think we are. Then please point to the currently-elected American politician who is "calmly suggest[ing] killing Jews as a way to fix what ails the country". I get fed up with the argument that current leadership is "literally hitler". It's intentionally dis-ingenuous, put forth in bad faith, and designed to incite unrest with no reasonable backing of the points.
"The historian Ian Kershaw points out that several passages in Mein Kampf are undeniably of a genocidal nature. Hitler wrote "the nationalization of our masses will succeed only when, aside from all the positive struggle for the soul of our people, their international poisoners are exterminated", and he suggested that, "If at the beginning of the war and during the war twelve or fifteen thousand of these Hebrew corrupters of the nation had been subjected to poison gas, such as had to be endured in the field by hundreds of thousands of our very best German workers of all classes and professions, then the sacrifice of millions at the front would not have been in vain."
"The racial laws to which Hitler referred resonate directly with his ideas in Mein Kampf. In the first edition of Mein Kampf, Hitler stated that the destruction of the weak and sick is far more humane than their protection. Apart from this allusion to humane treatment, Hitler saw a purpose in destroying "the weak" in order to provide the proper space and purity for the "strong"."
Note that this was in a book for popular publication, that Hitler "hopes the book will run into many editions, thus enabling him to fulfill his financial obligations and to defray the expenses incurred at the time of his trial". Announcing that when you rise to power, you intend to kill a significant fraction of the population is probably a bit much to expect.
The "temporary curtailment" was not really the first step.
Scroll to Brooklyn NY. Trump enjoyed 93% support in an all Hasidic Jewish neighborhood (ocean parkway district.) and 80%+ support across most hasidic Jewish districts.
1933 is when Hitler gained all the power and Germany was pretty much at point of no return. The time to stop Hitler was before. Your timeline literally starts when experienced and possible opposition is about to go to Dachau. It is too late at that point.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/sep/24/detained-us-... ?
(As the article points out, this did not begin with Trump; the illiberalisation of America dates at least to 2001 and the permanent war footing thereafter.)
> Why would you recommend forbidding anyone from making this comparison?
This is a blatant mis-representation of what I have said. I responded to your comment claiming that we ought to punch people who hold certain positions. I don't believe we ought to restrict anyone from saying anything that's not defamatory; if something defamatory is said, it can be fought out in court. The fact that I disagree with your position doesn't mean I advocate restricting your right to express it.
No. I believe I used the term “analogy” which is the opposite of what you’re implying.
> How have the civil liberties of American citizens been curtailed by legislative actions?
I didn’t mention legislative actions. There’s an overwhelming consensus among experts on authoritarianism (not just US experts, in case you were hoping to dismiss those experts as partisan hacks) that the US is currently in a transition from democracy to authoritarianism. I won’t argue this point with you for the same reason I won’t argue the reality of the climate crisis.
> > Would you recommend forbidding anyone from making this comparison?
> Why would you recommend forbidding anyone from making this comparison?
You are misquoting me: my question does not start with “why”. You added that word out of thin air, completely changing the meaning of my question.
> I responded to your comment claiming that we ought to punch people who hold certain positions.
I never said that either. You must be confusing my post with another.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17763554
> people aren't actually interested in the plight of the Uighurs. Rather, it's convenient ammunition for justifying pre-existing political and national feelings.
Hardly anyone would say that to the face of someone who gets tortured, and nobody would say it while they get tortured.
For every Nazi who actually laid hand on anyone, there were hundreds or thousands of Nazis who "merely" looked the other way, with oh so flowery language.
https://www.reddit.com/r/HongKong/comments/dx8rn0/absolutely...
Can't talk about that here, it all gets flagged like a brick, because hey, anyone who cares is just "virtue signalling". I mean, how the fuck could totalitarianism be important for any intellectuals? Just like no intellectuals wrote about the Nazis or Stalin, why would they, it was all just partisan dick waving contests.
https://twitter.com/arslan_hidayat/status/118550371514021478...
Imagine being in bed with something so horrible, you don't even dare to lift the covers. Congratulations, to all whom it may concern. May you live a long life, see interesting times, and all that jazz. All of it.
Honestly abortion is one of the messiest, no easy answer issues out there and yet the vitriol and extreme rhetoric is completely over the top.
I don't know if it's significantly worse than the situation 50 or 100 years ago, but it does get on my nerves.
Arguments over abortion rights commonly frame the opposition as condoning infanticide on one side or violating bodily autonomy on the other. Each framing creates a morally bankrupt opposition.
Both those for and against socialism / redistribution of wealth see their opposition as wanting to take unearned wealth.
Just visit twitter and search for "muslim" or "jew" or "african american" and you'll find plenty of vicious and dehumanizing rhetoric. In any hour-long surfing session, you'll see accounts calling for all sorts of ethnic cleansing.
The consequence can be an angry social media mob that demands your employer fire you.
Such an opinion could get accused as being a defense of horrible people, as opposed to a defense of everyone's universal rights.
And some people believe that if you even think that people who are engaging in offensive behavior should have rights, then that makes you just as bad as the offensive people, and therefore deserve to be the target of violence.
Even arguing in favor of free speech, solely in support of these rights, can get you accused of being a terrible person, and therefore a deserving target of violence.
Not everyone is a knee-jerk go reds/blues/yellows/whatever supporter.
Those skilled at propaganda certainly appear to use the idea that everyone is in two camps as a primary tool in their arsenal however.
That's a pretty superficial view of things.
There are a lot of very real issues that matter in real life to a lot of people.
To pick an extremely important one from the past: slavery.
One side thought it was ok to enslave other human beings. The other did not.
Most political disagreements are nothing like this. Most political disagreements come down to some combination of (a) a trade-off between two reasonable values or (b) differing predictions about the consequences of a particular policy in the future.
If “slavery vs not slavery” is your go-to example of what a political disagreement looks like, then you’re likely to fall victim to the sorts of bad thought habits (other side evil!) that lead to dumb polarisation and tribalism.
It's a rhetorical trick to invoke slavery/genocide, and then group all the other controversial positions held by my political opponents as being in the same category of clear right/wrong.
But if they really were so clear-cut, they'd be invoked as broadly indisputable, standalone examples just as much as slavery and genocide are.
There are tons of issues that are not clear cut, like, say, the optimal rate of taxation. It's healthy to argue about those things and try different approaches.
Other things, like trying to subvert democracy, are clear as day.
The reason people tend to just choose a political "team" and root for that team is that there is individual value to that process. If feels good to be part of a team, to cheer with your team's victories, and to complain about your team's losses. That's a big part of what is so fun about sports fandom. It doesn't depend on your actual individual influence on the outcome, which everyone correctly realizes is nearly negligible.
But there are a lot of sincere people trying to right wrongs or improve our world out there too.
And there are genuinely evil people who seek only to further their own self interest, or power, or both.
Slavery was bad.
Nixon was a crook.
Of course people are complicated and you have to look at the entirety of things, which makes it complicated, but still, I don't buy the "both sides" stuff either.
Nixon: Well, no, actually, but as far as I know, his foreign policy was reasonably decent and somewhat effective. The problem was his attempt to subvert the American democratic process and, primarily, his use of presidential power to conceal that attempt.
But you have a good point: the other side is never Snidely Whiplash, twirling his mustache. On the other hand, the road to hell is paved with good intentions.
Of course, Roman slavery still had plenty of problems but it's significantly easier to find examples of humane and (relatively) equitable treatment of slaves (who could be well-educated and own their own property) in Rome than in Europe/early America. And then there was the prostitution/torture/slave soldiers...
Well put. But take it a step further - had you been raised in the antebellum South, or had you been Nixon's friend - would have arrived at the same moral conclusions? For the same reasons? It's easy to condemn "the alien other" - it's much harder to reflect on one's own beliefs and the peers that hold them.
In that case, loudly and publicly condemning groups of people tends to cause them to circle the wagons and double down on their positions. I think there's a lesson for today there as well.
Just because I see them as humans does not mean I have to ignore what they caused to other humans. Or that every human actions must be necessary been seen as good by me.
As a gay man it would be completely unconsciable to support Republicanism as it exists today, because the overwhelming majority of people in the party are somewhere between apathetic and enthusiastic about denying my rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
I agree with you, US Republicanism is completely incompatible with the healthy existence of gay and queer people as understood by the communities in for example San Francisco (where I am from). There must be gay republican communities in other areas, but I'm sure more west coast queer communities would consider those republican gay (prob not queer) communities to be repressive and unhealthy.
It's a shame people cannot relate to what you are saying, and plenty of evidence that even liberal Silicon Valley (assuming it has an outsized influence on this comment thread) has a lot of growth needed before queer people can really be appreciated in tech circles.
In general, having opinions and keeping them to yourself is fine. Being shitty to your colleagues because of it is generally not. And publicly threatening or attacking others is not. It's not about your beliefs, but what you do with them.
A fairly prominent LGBT person, Latrice Royale, at one point did not support gay marriage. That doesn't mean that I agree with that position, nor does that mean the majority of gay people do or should.
For less important issues, sure, talk it out. Like most domestic political issues, those are just little things. No one's dying, no one's being enslaved. So talking it out is actually not only the preferable choice, but the correct choice.
But for acute issues, say something like slavery, or Germany processing thousands of Jews through death camps weekly, or even domestically if some guy goes to shoot up a Walmart, the time for talk has past. I suppose we could ask them to stop, just as a formality, but any answer other than "We'll stop immediately and unconditionally" has to be met with force. That's the whole reason we have police, because sometimes, it's just not practical to "talk it out" in the hopes that the bad actor stops doing what they're doing.
Certainly with slavery we probably waited far too long to stop the behavior, and that hesitation made forcing an end to the problem worse than it otherwise would have been. It's a good reminder that in life, as a general rule, it's always best to handle acute issues as soon as possible.
Now what's funny about all of the animosity today, is that other than the problem of domestic terrorism, there are no acute issues. So there is nothing really worth fighting over. (Again, stopping mass shooters excepted. And I'm not sure anyone is arguing against that idea anyway?) So it's kind of perplexing to me that people get so mad over issues these days? As most of the issues seem so petty in a historic or even cultural sense.
I'd just like to point out that "Germany processing thousands of Jews through death camps weekly" didn't matter to anyone until after the war was over. (Well, anyone outside Germany. And there were people who knew what was going on and tried to show it to the world, but there are cranks everywhere.)
I was with you the whole paragraph until this. Unless you're living in a nice Suburb and haven't been paying attention to news, we (well, the US, but some are global) face a lot of very serious issues that do demand an urgency of action, since talking hasn't been very useful in resolving them:
* Climate Change and decarbonization * Social Media destabilizing and undermining democracies all over the world leading to violence against minorities worldwide * [US] Police brutality and general incarceration of African Americans * [US] Rising healthcare expenses potentially putting reasonable healthcare out of the reach of most Americans, especially the most vulnerable * [US] Inequal economic development completely devastating most regions of the US leading to social instabilities * [US] Massive student load debts, trapping an entire generation under the weight of unpayable debt
And those are just a few things I thought about right away.
There are a variety of issues that need urgent action to tackle them.
Unfortunately, I suspect it's mostly the later.
You'd think that. It was amazing to see the mass protests while W was president that simply evaporated as soon as Obama was in office.
But I disagree that people changed their minds. People were still protesting while Obama was president, and anti-war writers like Greenwald kept up a consistent position.
What went on is the press, really a handful of editors, simply spiked stories about the wars and the protests, and by starving them of media coverage, they didn't weigh on people's minds so heavily.
The higher-ups in a news office have to make judgement calls about what a news program is going to focus on, and to them some stuff feels more or less newsworthy depending on who's in office. It could be some shadowy conspiracy, or, more likely, just their personal unconcious biases.
However, it's also true that the anti-war movement died off partly due to failure essentially, as the Iraq War proceeded with essentially no resistance from elected officials, and no coverage from the mainstream media. I think this, more than partisanship, explains why it's basically dead in the water now. If the movement fails to achieve its goals, people will eventually go home. This all happened within W's term.
Protest altogether didn't die out under Obama, however, Occupy Wall Street started in 2011, and was heavily critical of Obama's coziness with the finance industry. Within left movements that exist now, many seem to see a through-line from Occupy Wall Street.
Overall, this speaks to the narrative about tribalism, because there's a tendency to see the opposing group as one mass, when in reality, there are different groups within each side that may disagree with each other as much as they do the nominally-opposed groups. This tendency is also exacerbated by the two-party system in the US that smushes what would really be 3-6 parties together into two.
> Goes back to watching impeachment proceedings wherein our current President is being proven to have been extorting _another country_ for personal gain while his party fully stands behind him...
https://news.gallup.com/poll/183575/fewer-view-iraq-afghanis...
More seriously, your comment screams of tribalism. I think that you will find that most people, across all political aisles, are decent humans who genuinely mean no ill-will towards others. I would be surprised if any political comment posted online has ever changed the mind of someone else. What does change the minds of others, though, is face-to-face, compassionate, honest dialogue.
Posts like GP I think are likely to have the opposite effect. Bad faith argument tends to let people dismiss any valid content and reinforce existing views and groups.
I find the key is to be respectful and to make an effort to understand where the other person is coming from. This unfornately appears to be a less and less common tactic.
I have been in plenty of arguments about abortion rights, rights of asylum seekers, rights of minorities, etc. The list goes on. A point being partisan doesn't mean it is untrue or necessarily biased to bend the truth.
>The way partisans exaggerate the crimes of the other team while ignoring those perpetrated by their own is not so far from the way people talk about sports teams.
It is your untrue assessment that anyone criticizing a party like the US Republican party automatically would not criticize their opposition. This assertion - without any context whatsoever here - is pretty tribal in itself.
I also never made the generalization that anyone making a partisan point would never criticise their own team. But the post in question, and many posts like it, define an all-or-nothing, good-vs-evil struggle that leaves no room for that nuance, and hinders an empathetic discourse with anyone on the "evil" team. It's not limited to any specific flavor of partisan, and the polarization this engenders has had some significant consequences.
To me, your argument kinda feels like a #NotAllMen or "You are racist for pointing out I benefit from and perpetuate racism." I am challenging a specific type of discourse, and you are inventing generalized, absolute extrapolations to declare untrue. Exaggerating to make your opponents position seem untenable doesn't change minds, it entrenches existing positions.
I am very confused how you think my comment is in any way an example of this type of line of thinking.
>I also never made the generalization that anyone making a partisan point would never criticise their own team. But the post in question, and many posts like it, define an all-or-nothing, good-vs-evil struggle that leaves no room for that nuance, and hinders an empathetic discourse with anyone on the "evil" team.
You absolutely did make such an assertion just a comment ago. And the whole discussion here started off through a very vague "all sides are the same" calendar motto. They're obviously not.
The behavior of exaggerating a claim to knock it down is not unique to to any flavor of partisan. Just as one might respond to criticism of common sexist male behaviors by crying reverse-sexism, one can respond to a criticism of common tribal behaviors with claims of reverse-tribalism. While the behaviors are ultimately different, the structures of responses to criticism tend to be rather similar.
No one said "all sides" are the same. Just that the political discourse is deteriorating. This is well documented by decades of research. It's actually a lot less likely to happen in systems were more than two sides are allowed to exist at once.
[1]: https://www.latimes.com/business/hiltzik/la-fi-hiltzik-repea...
Treating people with respect is a good thing.
Helping those in need is a good thing.
Ensuring a fair chance whenever possible is a good thing.
I could go on and on, but I think you know which side of the aisle I stand on.
I hate sports for the very reason you describe, but my objection to people who hold opposing views to me is grounded in an understanding of an intrinsic respect and value of humanity, not some ra-ra us vs. them mentality. I'm more than happy to welcome someone with opposing views if it seems they genuinely wish the best for others in their views. But on asking how they might right the wrongs of this world, their answers usually come down to "tough shit."
Honestly, the way people have been dehumanizing each other over politics kind of scares me. It reminds me of the way propaganda dehumanizes 'the enemy' in war time. It's not a good way to look at other people, especially not over which political party they voted for.