The "leader" of this cult, who our new House members have pledged loyalty to, is a pseudonymous poster on a message board that's otherwise used mainly for child pornography, who they believe is sent from a secret arm of the government and is also a time traveller and possibly an angel of God.
What common ground do you expect the Dems should find with them?
The conspiracy theory cult I'm talking about is qanon[2].
If you're asking me to prove that Democrats are not kidnapping children by the hundreds of thousands through a nationwide network of caves and tunnels, I don't really think I'm the person you need to talk to.
edit: yeah checked the post history and you're a qanon apologist. Find something better to do with your life.
[0]: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/nov/03/qanon-marjor...
[1]: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/jul/01/who-is-laure...
> We have at least two new Republican members of the House of Representatives who belong to a cult which believes that every Democrat is involved in a human trafficking operation that kidnaps nearly a million children a year, tortures them to death, and uses their bodies to generate a secret drug that they're all addicted to.
A cult is a collection of people, each of whom possesses their own brain. Can you explain how you seem to think you have insight into the contents of all of these brains? It is perhaps worth noting that racists also make claims similar to yours.
> The "leader" of this cult...is a pseudonymous poster on a message board...
This is a rumour. A conspiracy theory. Who the "leader" of QAnon is, is unknown to anyone except the individual or organization who started it.
> ...who our new House members have pledged loyalty to...
Do you have a citation for this, or is this more mind reading?
> ...on a message board that's otherwise used mainly for child pornography
Do you have a citation for this claim?
> ...who they believe is sent from a secret arm of the government and is also a time traveller and possibly an angel of God.
Again, how is it that you know the beliefs of other people?
> What common ground do you expect the Dems should find with them?
I'm quite a fan of the anti-war and anti-child-trafficking parts. There are likely others, I'm not overly familiar with the movement. The conspiracy communities I frequent tend to think QAnon is a joke, if not a psy op.
From your last comment...
> If you're asking me to prove that Democrats are not kidnapping children by the hundreds of thousands through a nationwide network of caves and tunnels, I don't really think I'm the person you need to talk to.
No, I am not asking you that. What I am asking you is contained within the text I wrote. What's interesting about conversations such as these is the irony - here you are mocking a group of people, basically on an epistemic basis. And yet, observe the quality of your epistemology...observe how easily you've fallen for the clever tricks that media persuasion + human consciousness plays on you:
- perceptions of ability to read minds (of people you've never met, or observed)
- general omniscience (knowing what something "is", without sufficient evidence, and being completely oblivious to it)
- an inability to skilfully distinguish between people's actual beliefs (contained within the text I wrote), and your imagination about their beliefs
- etc
The ironic part is that these are some of the very same shortcomings shared by the most gullible people in conspiracy communities, and yet you mock them.
> yeah checked the post history and you're a qanon apologist.
Again, there is a difference between perception of reality, and reality itself. On one hand this may seem like a trite observation, but I believe it plays a much bigger role in society than people perceive (in no small part because hardly anyone has ever really put any effort into understanding it in depth). At the very least, I think it's something that each person should have at least a basic understanding of, due to benefits like reduction of delusional thinking.
> Find something better to do with your life.
You have no way of knowing what I do with my life, or the relative or absolute value of it to myself or others. But let me take a wild guess: your perception of the situation is veeeeeery different, is it not? Do you not have a fairly high resolution perception of who I am, what I do, the impact of that on the world, etc? As a thought experiment, I encourage you to ponder how all of this knowledge (specific knowledge about me, but also of others) got into your mind. What is the lineage [1] of this information? I believe that if you are able to exert enough control over your mind to do perform this experiment with some decent skill, you may discover some interesting new ideas.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_lineage
EDIT: Also, I would appreciate it if you do not tell me or others what to do. Authoritarianism doesn't have a great track record, and it's also rather rude.
If you have the facts on your side, pound the facts. If you have the law on your side, pound the law. If you have neither on your side, pound the table.
That's fine, I suspect you read enough that a seed is now in your brain. Continue to hold strong beliefs for which you have no evidence just like conspiracy theorists, it's your life. :)
Look at Obamacare. Most health policy wonks see it as a pretty tame attempt to fix some issues with insurance and most people support mandatory coverage for preexisiting conditions. But it's been constantly on the defensive as government interference in free markets despite attempts in it to create a more transparent insurance market.
My wealthy suburb of Seattle attempted to block light rail despite desperate need for transit essentially because they basically don't like and don't want public transit. They don't see it as a social good.
People who want drug policy changes have tried to pass every reform you can think of and by and large it hasn't really mattered how minor or radical it is. The rhetoric against reform is the same whether we're talking about recreation marijuana, safe injection sites or decriminalization. There is a segment that believe using anything other than the boot of the law upon offenders is enabling and will degrade society. And there is a segment of society that believe drug abuse isn't a moral flaw but a health concern. Again, that's a belief stemming out of values and nothing else.
To your example, there are many places where public day care would be extremely controversial because people just don't believe in taxes nor the government taking care of kids. They are already often skeptical of public schools. Frankly, the main difference between Colorado in 2012 and 2018 is probably more to do with demographic shifts than how "radial" the policy is.
In a nutshell I'm saying, all of it, everything comes down to these basic beliefs. There can be no conversation about what the government do if one side believes the government should be trusted with nothing. There can be no conversation about what we should do with tax dollars if one side believes there should be no taxes. There can be no conversation about how to reform drug policy if one side only believes in strict punishment.
Net neutrality is far from a "technocratic" issue. In many countries, media companies like facebook or Netflix do partnerships with mobile phone operators where the two agree that use of Netflix doesn't count against a user's quota. Netflix wins because they get more customer use, the operator creates a more compelling offering, and the customer wins because they get a better deal. This is called zero-rating and it flies in the face of net neutrality. There's also the fundamental issue of ownership - if someone owns the cables, why can't they set the rules? Especially in situations where ISPs can compete? And really, do you want yet another set of regulations set in stone, by a body like the FCC, that's vulnerable to regulatory capture in how it interprets and enforces net neutrality? Can you even define "net neutrality" in terms clear enough for a regulator to enforce?
Point being, it's not just about basic beliefs. There are substantive policy disagreements that don't arise purely from social differences. Sure, there are some people who just don't like transit. Maybe others think it's wasteful. Did you see New York spent 2.5 billion dollars to build less than two miles of subway recently? Reasonable people can disagree on whether that was a good use of money.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/28/nyregion/new-york-subway-...
You can site examples that validate those basic beliefs and I'm sure someone could site some that invalidate them. But whether you think those examples are an exception or the rule largely comes down to your values.
Is this true of absolutely everyone, no. The Cato Institute produced a health plan similar to Obamacare after all. Yes, there is a small group of policy wonkish people that get off on this stuff but I don't think it's the majority.
Edit: btw if my point seems to dismiss people's opinions I mean exactly the opposite.
IMO posts like this say "if we could just sit down, we could see eye to eye and find compromise". But I think what they really think is, "if we could just talk, I could resolve their information deficit and they'd come my way a little". I think that's condescending honestly and underestimates how much people believe they have thought their beliefs through, how much evidence they believe thwy have observed and how invested they are in those beliefs.
> In a nutshell I'm saying, all of it, everything comes down to these basic beliefs. There can be no conversation about what the government do if one side believes the government should be trusted with nothing. There can be no conversation about what we should do with tax dollars if one side believes there should be no taxes. There can be no conversation about how to reform drug policy if one side only believes in strict punishment.
I wonder how true memes like this really are. Indeed, various statistics and observations of what people literally say can easily lead one to form this sort of conclusion, without being terribly unreasonable. However....if one had the means of sitting down with literally each individual in these groups for a very long, non-combative heart to heart discussion, would one find that the heuristic estimates of them are completely bang on, or might there be some noteworthy differential between how we perceive people to be, and how they really are (or could be after some high quality discussion)?
1 People know their party's policy positions more than any other time in modern history
2 Legislators vote more along their party lines than at any point in history
3 People split ticket and switch votes less than any time
One partially confounding fact to my thesis here is that
4 People "identify" less with a party than at any time in history
After all, many far more reasonable approaches (incremental improvements, at least) to many things are usually fairly obvious, and I suspect most people wouldn't really be opposed to it (if one was to sit down and have a serious conversation about it that truly addresses their nuanced concerns)...and yet, decade after decade we seem to make little forward progress (or at least, "not enough" - see: BLM), while a collective feeling of confident, "righteous" frustration and rage with those "on" "the other side" (on both sides) builds.
The whole thing seems rather paradoxical, which to me is suggestive that we may indeed be missing something important in our system analysis.
To be honest, it just seems like you personally value education funding over gun control, and you're assuming most other people feel the same way while ignoring the broader national context of what was happening to the Democratic party in 2012 and 2018.
Also, what does "ceasefire" mean? If most people were ok with the status quo, it wouldn't be a major issue.
A steady 70%+ agree our infrastructure needs a lot of work. We don't agree on how to get there yet, but at least we have a shared goal.
IMO the fact you can't think of an issue is a sign of how the wedge issues concentrate attention on themselves.
it just seems like you personally value education funding over gun control
https://co.chalkbeat.org/2020/11/3/21548349/proposition-ee-c...
68% Yes on EE, while only 55% went for Biden.
"Ceasefire" means nobody is really satisfied with the status quo, but you agree to suspend the fighting for a while.
Except you'll find it very hard to get elected in the first place, which is why we don't have many politicians like that. The candidate "appropriately" far enough left or right will get hit by criticisms over the large stuff the other side, and people that would vote for them will discount those criticisms. Candidates in the middle that claim they don't want to deal with those issues will be hit from both sides with criticisms, and their own side will consider them, and the other side will use it to exclude them.
If I run for office on a platform of avoiding abortion rights to instead focus on something else, my own side will say "He doesn't care about women's rights/the lives of children", and the other side will say "he says he's not interesting in doing this, but he's stated his believe here and there, and can you really trust him?"
All that's before you get to the fact that constituents are driven into a furor on these topics, and whether any change will really be made on them, they care about electing someone that will try, even if it's very unlikely anything will happen.
Finally, what do you do as a candidate that isn't focused on an issue when the other side tries to use that as a good time to push for change on that issue? Do you then devote time and effort to at least retaining the status quo? How different does that look (and how different is it) to focusing on that issue, allowing the other side to claim they were right that you were lying about not caring about the issue? Or if you do nothing, then your own side points out that you let this issue regress.
I think the whole adversarial nature of the two groups means that any candidate basically has to at least publicly present themselves as a crusader for the issues their respective groups favor. Anything else can and will be used against them aggressively. Candidates can only be as relaxed and aligned on an issue as their respective groups allow them to be, and lately that's not at all.
The key, as you pointed out, as did Buttigieg, is to identify areas where there are shared problems you can work together to solve. There's something about local government that seems to encourage this, in my opinion. Maybe you think gay people are awful and I go the pride march every year. Guess what, the water main is still leaking, and building permits take too long. Maybe we can just focus on working together to solve real problems, and accept that there are a range of social issues where we probably won't ever agree? And that's just fine?
I think we used to know how to do this in the United States, but something changed.
It's worth considering what changed. Demographics changed, but we've always had some kind of mixed cultures and ethnicities. The history of it has been an expansion of who gets to be the "majority". Like Rome redefining who is a citizen.
Maybe it's broadcast media, but there's been national publications since the founding of the US.
Looking back to Antiquity, our situation doesn't seem so abnormal. I think it's just the ebb and flow of how groups of people interact with each other.
- Who counts as a citizen
- Who has the land
- Who gets welfare/benefits
- Who is anathema
- Who mediates power (bureaucrats? nobility? monarch? people?)
It's like a laundry list of issues that bagged ancient Rome, enlightenment France and late Tsarist Russia.
EDIT: It blew my mind when I actually started to read up on the French Revolution and found that besides what to do with the Monarchy, the issue that really divided them was Universal Manhood Suffrage. For years I had been fed the vague notion that some quasi-social-utopian issues were at the heart of it. But they really just couldn't agree on whether all men should be allowed to vote.
- Me, not all that many years ago
- law enforcement
- public transit
- property taxes
- building permits (i.e. regulation)
- zoning
- public employee pay/benefits
All redound to these basic beliefs and have the added problem of affecting people personally too.
I point to Colorado 2013 and Colorado 2019.
- In 2012, the Democrats got full control & went after guns. They were recalled & lost control. Little was accomplished.
- In 2018, the Democrats took back full control. Polis went after instituting publicly-funded full-day kindergarten. This was a real accomplishment for everyone.
Basically, if I was a political candidate, my platform would be a ceasefire on the most high-profile wedge issues for the duration of my term!