Slavery is a really exceptional (in a bad way) example of a political disagreement. In that particular disagreement, one side was clearly (in retrospect) right, the other was wrong. Nowadays we’re all on the right side, the wrong side looks obviously wrong, and there’s no real room for doubt.

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 an extreme example, for sure, but there are things out there that have right and wrong answers and where it's not all just some game.

The very reason other issues make for less incisive examples (than slavery, genocide) is that they are less clear-cut, and more beholden to complexities and tradeoffs.

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.

Slavery was very much an accepted practice by a lot of people then.

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.

“Trying to subvert democracy” isn’t really as clear as day, it’s the kind of vague accusation that people throw around about their political opponents.

Yeah, which is why you look at the receipts.

Yes, but the normal political process in wealthy democratic countries simply does not give much influence to the average individual. Obviously government policies can and do have huge consequences for many individuals, civil rights being a very notable example. But when's the last time you got to vote on a civil rights issue, and even if you did, how much effect did your research and vote have on the outcome?

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.

You can both be right, if we take the parent comment to mean “often” when they say always. A lot of political discussions I see are quick to point the finger at the other side without realizing the non-partisan nature of the problem.

Sure, there are absolutely people who treat, say, political parties like sports teams.

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.

Most people think they are sincere while promoting their own side good other side evil. All (not both!) sides do good and bad things both sides have evil people. However most people will overlook the bad someone on their side does because it is "a small thing", while jumping on the accusation bad thing someone on the other side does (often without any evidence, or minimal evidence that is played up).

At different points in history, different sides have been fairly objectively 'good' or 'bad' on various issues.

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.

Have you ever read a serious defense of slavery or of Nixon? If not, perhaps that's a good place to start trying to humanize the other side?

Slavery: Yes. And they're remarkably unconvincing unless you already believe north-western Europeans are God's chosen (literally) or non-whites are universally similar to children and unable to rule their own affairs.

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.

On the slavery point, I would recommend broadening the perspective from just the recent history of white owners of black slaves to the greater history of slavery. For example, the example of ancient Rome and Greece. At least, if you're interested in a defense of slavery -as such- as opposed to just how Americans/Europeans did it.

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...

I don't know the details in Rome, but in much of antiquity, slavery was what would be considered a war crime now. It didn't need defending, any more than the other elements of warfare.

> the other side is never Snidely Whiplash,

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.

Absolutely, I would likely have come to the same conclusions as my neighbors. But not because the arguments were convincing.

Also re: slavery I would agree with your characterization of most defenses of (American) slavery. The next natural question follows: what to do about it? Have you heard of the 1835 postcard campaign? https://www.econtalk.org/munger-on-slavery-and-racism/

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.

Yes I read it. It was still bad. I also seen Nazi propaganda movie and read their materials and guess what - it was still bad. I read communists articles aaaaand they were still bad. All those were humans, sure. But that does not mean I have to agree with them or see them as good.

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.

What is meant by a serious defense of slavery?

You don't even necessarily have to do this. Polemics against homosexuality and trans issues are still an extremely potent political issue today. You can still get fired from your job or kicked out of housing in many states for merely being openly gay.

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.

Wow, it's really messed up that you get downvoted for saying you are gay and people are quick to dimiss or fire people for being gay. And here people are dimissing you.

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.

If you were an employer, would you fire an employee who was against gay marriage? Should the state protect the continued employment of such an employee?

That depends on how they express it.

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.

And yet living in the south (US) in my LGBT circles I've run into some fairly right wing gay men.

You can be right wing, or conservative, while still not supporting the current Republican party. And if you look hard enough you might find any permutation of beliefs and support for various things in one person.

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.

You can believe that certain actions people do are wrong with demeaning them as subhuman evil beings. In fact, if you want them to stop doing those things you dislike without resorting to physical violence, acknowledging our shared humanity is the first step.

Well, you have to be careful there, because it very much depends on how acute the situation has become. If the situation is acute enough, you really shouldn't be talking at all, you have to move to action.

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.

Cynic here!

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.)

It's possible that the politics is so horrible precisely because the stakes are so small. There's nothing that makes Team A realize that there's something more important at stake than defeating Team B.

> Now what's funny about all of the animosity today, is that other than the problem of domestic terrorism, there are no acute issues.

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.

Did people take their stances for or against slavery as a result of careful consideration the issue, or did people mostly follow the example of those in their social group and choose to support their own "side"?

Unfortunately, I suspect it's mostly the later.

We don't need slavery today because we have machines. But in the past if an empire didn't practice slavery implied that other empires will conquer you and slave you. So slavery was required for survival. It's today that this debate is clear. In ancient times, the reverse was true.

I think you missed the point here - slavery over which the US fought a civil war was not in ancient times nor did it protect US from becoming enslaved.

Seems like a dramatic example, but you are technically correct.

counterexample: interventionism. An awful lot of people who were vocally against interventionism during the Bush administration became grudgingly accepting of it during the Obama era. I think that's the kind of politics GP is referring to.

> An awful lot of people who were vocally against interventionism during the Bush administration became grudgingly accepting of it...

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.

I think both of these things are true, actually. It does seem that some on the left are fine with war as long as it's a Democrat doing it. For example, look at Hillary Clinton's complicity during the Honduran coup, and how little criticism she received for it. Or deportation and drone strikes under Obama, as another example.

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.

To be fair, Obama didn't start a new war.

he did normalize CIA drone attacks, which required no declarations, no trials, no reporting, until he made reporting mandatory in 2016 (heh)

What about Libya? While France was the one that started it, he was responsible for the US joining it.

Only Congress can start a war, so Obama technically merely extended an existing war.

Only Congress can declare war. Just about anybody with authority in the military can start one. Regardless, Congress has effectively abnegated its authority to the president through the war powers resolution.

This technicality really shouldn't be brought up. War is war and several presidents have taken military action without a formal declaration of war in congress.

No, just helped overthrow governments in the middle east that led to the rise of the Islamic State that started a few wars...

Gosh, interventionism. So horrible.

> 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...

Please don't take HN threads further into political flamewar. Also, please don't be snarky in HN comments and especially not on inflammatory topics.

Well, when you dug yourself 60 feet into a hole, you can't dig up.

That's just not a true reflection of public opinion about the Afghanistan and Iraq wars. Support for the war in Afghanistan steadily fell from nearly 90% in 2002 to well under 50% during Obama's second term. Similarly, support for the Iraq war plummeted under Bush and remained effectively flat under Obama.

https://news.gallup.com/poll/183575/fewer-view-iraq-afghanis...