But your own post makes clear the problem with your logic. This isn’t about convincing people. It’s about the fact that people’s political views are guided by gut, instinct and the bubbles they’re in instead of by critical thinking. These people believe abortion is killing an innocent baby. They don’t want their tax dollars spent on thing X. They believe the election was rigged — evidence doesn’t come into it. How do you change what people believe? I think we’ve tried rational debate. God knows I have. It’s frustrating to be told over and over, “well, if you just explained better...” when the people I’m trying to convince aren’t interested in learning. They’re happy with their beliefs, their beliefs work for them. And that’s a pity, because their beliefs are destructive and increasingly inhumane. That’s my belief, obviously, but I think it’s one supported by facts: abortion is wrong but you can cage Mexican children. The Jews control the government. Voter suppression is a reasonable response to higher turnout in urban centers. Chinese students shouldn’t be able to go to grad schools in the US. I could go on.

At a certain point, just take the hit. I’m sorry, but one side has more moral politics than the other. I don’t see how this is a debate at this point, and I’m honestly frustrated that people like you keep asking us to have the debate. If anything, it’s the right that keeps crying that they’ve been deplatformed when they’re doing it to themselves by having horrific opinions.

AND the right doesn’t even argue in good faith! Like they just make stuff up. For instance, about ANTIFA being behind the attempted coup on Wednesday. You want us to argue with that?

Just wanna add that the left seems to believe what institutions and the legacy media tell them, at face value.

Many on the right use critical thinking, however they seem to believe that numbers and “science” can be spun into any narrative the gatekeepers want (whoever they may be).

Most of the schism really seems to be based on trust. Left trusts by default, the right does not. The left trusts that the government knows best, the right does not. The right believes in personal responsibility for running your life (not trusting it to any other party), the left does not, requiring collectivism and social programs.

Yes, the left trusts “science”, broadly. That’s because when we see 99% of scientists in a field claiming something, we don’t pretend we know better than them. We respect science, we understand on some level the work that goes into good science, and so we aren’t arrogant arses.

> we understand on some level the work that goes into good science

Meanwhile people who are informed on the state of actual science say "50% of published research is false."

https://journals.plos.org/plosmedicine/article?id=10.1371/jo...

I mean, as the paper says:

> Second, most research questions are addressed by many teams, and it is misleading to emphasize the statistically significant findings of any single team. What matters is the totality of the evidence.

I think few people would refute this.

> What matters is the totality of the evidence.

If half of the evidence contradicts the other half would it be fair to conclude that we don’t know much about the things we have researched?

93% of surveyed geneticists and behavioral psychologists claim that the black-white IQ gap has a non-zero genetic component. Do you know better than them?

https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2016.0039...

I'm inclined to believe them, but not rule out the possibility it was their bias speaking. Historically doctors have believed a white woman's pelvis is better for child bearing, whereas a black woman's is better for hard labor. That has since been proven wrong. There is no discernable difference between the races in the pelvic area.

Regardless, the argument against discrimination is that one has no CHOICE what race they are born with. Because there is no choice, race does not reflect their invididual merits or lack thereof, and one should not be awarded or punished based on that factor alone. There is also significant variation within a race with regard to IQ or otherwise, that exceeds the difference of the mean value between races

> Many on the right use critical thinking [...] Left trusts by default, the right does not.

LOL. Only 4 percent of the nonreligious people who participated in the 2017 Baylor Religion Survey voted for Trump. 4 fucking percent.

https://www.baylor.edu/baylorreligionsurvey/index.php?id=942...

And what percentage of religious people voted for HRC?

> Nah, the right trusts everything the tv and radio hosts tell them.

I don't agree. The media, as a whole, leans left. Except for comparatively far fewer right leaning news outlets. I don't think I can name a single newspaper that doesn't have a left slant. LA Times, NY Times, WashPo are the giants, plus any of your local city newspapers. People on the right are not likely to trust any of those entities.

For news stations there's CNN, NBC, ABC, which all lean left. For the right, there's Fox and a couple a low-key bum ones like OANN and NewsMax. Again, right leaning people are likely to view most of tv media sources as untrustworthy.

The media leans neoliberal, not left. You never see leftist leaders painted in a good light by CNN, ABC, NBC, WashPo, NY Times or LA Times, as those leaders threaten the continued consolidation of wealth by the upper class.

Show me the hit pieces on AOC and the squad that weren’t op eds then?

From my experience, the right is terrible at judging who to trust (i mean most people are really). They mistrust the government for instance, and rightly so, for you should have a healthy distrust of the government. However, they then go and trust absolute quacks like anti-vaxxers, conspiracy theorists, Trump, etc. ???

I've seen some of the links shared in right wing forums (I used to frequent one a few years ago), and the sources they link scream "bullshit" to me, and not because I disagree with what they say. It's just that life experience of identifying what is BS and what is not necessarily BS. Some people just will not believe authority, but will believe the first thing they see that goes against mainstream.

Maybe unrelated, but there's actually largely even distribution of anti-vaxxers between left and right. It's not an issue split by political affiliation. You could say the same about conspiracy theorists, but it'd probably be more difficult to poll/test.

> trust absolute quacks like anti-vaxxers, conspiracy theorists, Trump, etc. ???

PR agencies send their love

All I see are people listening. Scores of legal professionals, attorneys, and judges have read through thousands of pages of serious arguments made by the right. Election officials have burned the midnight oil over and over again searching for issues after listening to complaints from the right. Journalists have spent countless hours chasing down people to listen to, only to find deception. After all of this listening, all we ever seem to find is deception. If the right doesn’t change their tune, then all the listeners can do is see them as a group he’ll bent on deception. You make your bed, and you sleep in it. Period.

And yet if we look at it objectively, the right is clearly overrepresnted in our political system. Republicans lost the popular vote in five of the last six presidential elections. In the next presidential election there will be many eligible voters who weren't even born last time they won. The Senate gives a seven point advantage to Republicans. So please, explain to me where you get this idea that the right is "treated unfairly," because it's getting very hard to see how this argument is being made in good faith.

> And yet if we look at it objectively, the right is clearly overrepresnted in our political system.

That isn't nearly as clear as it seems, because of the incentives the electoral college creates.

Republicans could pick up a lot more votes in places like California or New York if they had any reason to try, but none of those votes help them if they can't flip the state. Spending resources campaigning in California so that it goes to the Democrats by 54 to 46 instead 65 to 35 is a losing strategy, so they don't.

But then that's why the popular vote numbers come out the way they do. If you actually abolished the electoral college, suddenly the foregone conclusion states would matter, everybody's campaign strategy would change and so would all the numbers.

The people the electoral college actually underrepresents are the people of California and Massachusetts. But also Texas, Alabama, Mississippi, Kentucky, etc. The people it overrepresents are the people of Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, etc. The swing states. Because they're the only people whose vote can plausibly change the outcome, so they're the only people whose concerns politicians care to address.

Which means you can pretty easily end up in a situation where people from deep red states feel underrepresented, because in practice they are. The same as the people from deep blue states.

Thanks for your reply. Let me start by saying that I agree the numbers would look completely different if it weren't for the Electoral College. That is because the Republican platform has consistently failed to win over a majority of Americans: absent the EC, the Republican Party would have to recalibrate its platform in order to remain competitive. This feedback mechanism is essential to a functioning democracy, and it's currently broken, because Republicans still have a decent shot at winning nationally thanks to the bias in the EC.

With respect to your argument that the EC actually overrepresents swing states, you may be correct. However, the EC bias clearly favors Republicans over Democrats. In 2020, that bias was 3.9% in favor of Republicans, although it varies from election to election[0]. When the size of the bias exceeds the margin of victory for the winner of the popular vote, the popular vote loser takes the EC, as in 2016.

Furthermore, you didn't actually address the most antidemocratic institution of all: the Senate. The Senate is heavily biased towards small states; California (pop 39m) and Wyoming (pop < 1m) each have two senators. The average state is currently much more Republican than the average American, amounting to 6.6% bias[1]. That is to say, Democrats could win by five points nationally (a huge victory given current polarization levels) and still not control the Senate.

Finally, I'm sure that you can end up with a situation wherein conservatives "feel" underrepresented; my whole point is that they objectively are not, so this whole persecution complex evinced by some is completely ridiculous. People are entitled to their feelings; they should also be willing to look at facts and adjust their reactions accordingly.

[0] https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2020-11-22/republ...

[1] https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-senates-rural-skew-...

> absent the EC, the Republican Party would have to recalibrate its platform in order to remain competitive.

Absent the EC, both parties would have to recalibrate their platforms in order to remain competitive. It would completely upturn the map. You would see Republicans campaigning in New York and Democrats in Texas. Wall St. and Big Oil and Hollywood would gain influence, retirees in Florida and auto workers in the rust belt would lose it. It would redraw all the lines and fundamentally change both of the parties.

I think that's really where you're going wrong. Treating the members of each party as two different species, as though every voter for a given party has uniform shared interests with all the others. There is no such thing as "Republicans" being over-represented. Pennsylvanians are over-represented, which influences the party platforms of both the Republicans and the Democrats. Which allows them both to ignore California and Texas and New York, but also the entire dozen odd little deep red states that are supposed to be the most "over-represented" despite not being competitive at all and consequently being totally ignored by both parties.

> The average state is currently much more Republican than the average American, amounting to 6.6% bias

The obvious flaw in the party-based analysis being that we're currently going into a legislative session in which the Democrats control the Senate, which they do approximately half of the time. Because they adjust their policies to the map.

Also, the purpose of the Senate is to be this way, in the same way that Justices of the Supreme Court are not elected. Senators were not originally elected, they were appointed by the state legislatures. It's by design as a check on the populist tendencies of the House, and causing Senators to be directly elected has only made everything worse by depriving the states of their voice in the federal government and the destroying the restraint on federal power that once implied.

> Treating the members of each party as two different species, as though every voter for a given party has uniform shared interests with all the others. There is no such thing as "Republicans" being over-represented. Pennsylvanians are over-represented, which influences the party platforms of both the Republicans and the Democrats.

For the reasons I've outlined above, Republicans are overrepresented. To reiterate, it takes more Democratic votes to achieve a majority than it does Republican votes. This is a matter of fact.

> The obvious flaw in the party-based analysis being that we're currently going into a legislative session in which the Democrats control the Senate, which they do approximately half of the time.

But Republicans have controlled the Senate even when Democratic Senators have gotten more votes and represent more people. So Democrats are forced to adjust their policies while Republicans are under much less pressure to do so.

> Also, the purpose of the Senate is to be this way, in the same way that Justices of the Supreme Court are not elected.

When the Senate was created, the difference in population between the largest and smallest states was 12x. Today it is 68x. If you still think this is a feature rather than a bug, you and I have fundamentally different ideas about what democracy should be.

This will be my final comment as all those who keep telling me that it's my duty as a liberal to engage in dialog with the other side also seem to downvote my comments to oblivion when I try. Ciao.

7 of the last 8 elections. And yet they are the ones “out of touch”

Thanks for the correction!

Also, SCOTUS has had a conservative majority (except during a vacancy) since 1989.

The first time SCOTUS has had a conservative majority since the 50s was when Amy Barrett was confirmed last year.

Maybe your definition of conservative is not the same as most conservatives, but that’s just how it is.

How about instead we say, "appointed by a Republican president," so we don't get bogged down in semantics? Since Heller, Citizens United, Bush v Gore etc were clearly the products of partisan Republican justices.

Sorry to be blunt but this just goes to show how often your "feelings" diverge from objective reality.

One can be moderately conservative and still conservative. If you look at the court's decisions, the only time in the last one hundred years SCOTUS has had a sustained liberal streak was in the 1960s.