On one side are the computer scientists and engineers who understand the nature of the problem. On the other side are ignorant and/or dishonest actors out to avoid being embarrassed.
It's all on you if you pick the wrong one out of loyalty to a political party.
Besides, at the end of the day, how different are the two sides? One party wants to prosecute a reporter who found a site vulnerability, and the other party wants to prosecute the man who exposed the world to the dragnet surveillance being conducted by the NSA.
I'm pretty sure both parties want that. Any successful system will work to perpetuate itself.
Democrats and Republican leadership *want* the "good v evil" dichotomy of their party versus the other.
One side is trying to prosecute a journalist who clicked view source and embarrassed an incompetent IT department. There was never any law broken under any remotely plausible legal theory.
The other side is trying to prosecute someone who violated their NDA to not disclose classified info. Now, you might think what he did was a net positive (I certainly do), but on the other hand it is objectively illegal. The DOJ could use their discretion and drop it, but they don't have to.
FTFY, unless you think Rs have any interest in dropping charges against Snowden. So even in your own examples, one party clearly has the upper hand, and it's not R.
A two party system has basically set this up to occur.
I can’t see that it could ever be changed, but it’s utterly toxic.
There are a hell of a lot of computer scientists and engineers who vote republican, certainty not a majority but definitely a large enough minority you can't discount them. They just don't broadcast it for reasons that should be obvious to anyone reading these comments.
Up until about 5 years ago I would agree that being even-handed on political matters is appropriate. But when one political party has gone completely mad with lust for power and has given up on science and rationality, how you vote is no longer just a political matter. The threat the Republican Party poses to the country and the world is existential.
And yes, there are crazies on the left, but no, they are nowhere near the threat posed by the GOP. The difference is several orders of magnitude.
There needs to be another Forum that somewhere between Hacker News and reddit, moderated but with a relatively open set of subjects that include the impact technology has on society
Even now, the few who voted to impeach over Jan 6 are cowed and quiet. Mitt Romney just voted against the Manchin-approved compromise voting rights bill.
These cowards are all afraid of their shadows. It's an incredible, once-per-century show of absolute cowardice and submission to a strongman.
The US has a decent shot of going the way of Turkey, Hungary, and Venezuela. The elected GOP senators and congresspeople are 100% to blame. They are sad, sorry, craven and ineffectual people.
Conservatives tend to not speak up because the hyperbolic vitriol has gotten out of hand.
OTOH, tech conservatives tend to be more libertarian than socially conservative, so (massive generalization here) tend to prefer to work at work and do politics elsewhere.
"Celebrating" political positions is such a foreign concept to me that I dont even know where to begin with that. Left or right, I would probably avoid it.
Of course I have found that when pressed, those who hold this philosophy seem to picture themselves as the lords in this fantasy utopia. Maybe these are just power fantasies, but some of them seem very serious about it (Curtis Yarvin is probably the most notable of the bunch)
I would have called myself a libertarian back then but that was back when words meant things, or at least more than they do now. I stopped using the term when the fascists took it over.
It’s popular in some left leaning circles and particularly among people who did not live through that era to claim that libertarianism and cyberculture was always like this. It wasn’t. There was a mass conversion event around the early 20-teens that sort of coincided with Gamergate (not sure how important GG was but that was the era). I’d say a large proportion of an entire generation of younger “hacker” types were mass converted to fascism or neoreaction. Racism also made a massive comeback.
I still don’t fully understand it. The LessWrong orbit seems to be a major factor. I never found that whole circle particularly interesting, but a lot of people sure did.
See Peter Thiel: "I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible."
The freedom he desires is the freedom to use his privilege to oppress others.
Which includes Republicans: https://twitter.com/tonylovasco/status/1448672694065668105
If you want to make scientific ignorance a political issue, we can discuss nuclear power, GMOs, unreasonable COVID restrictions, and plenty more.
If you want to discuss those things, it's worth first pointing out that the US had the worst Covid death toll of the G7 countries[0] and that red states had higher case and death rates than blue states[1].
Also, it's possible to accept the science of nuclear power and GMOs while still not trusting large corporations to exercise sufficient care and restraint when given control over nuclear material and life itself, especially when the government agencies ultimately responsible for regulating those technologies are half the time appointed by a party that doesn't believe in regulations or government.
[0] https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/us-death-rate-worse-brita...
[1] https://edition.cnn.com/2021/03/10/politics/covid-cases-deat...
Kansas City native here.
I vote democratic and agree with the comment you are replying to.
there is one data point that this isnt a partisan issue, but a rather non-partisan one involving an elected official.
Go Tom Brady, give the Buccs another win and put some dirt in Maholmes' eye.
This is a strawman. The parent was saying that in order to have an effect and convince people, you shouldnt alienate them. You can do this without lying or ignoring things that are happening. In fact, the people you're most likely able to convince are people in the middle and by alienating them you're actually causing the trend that you're denouncing.
> What does it say about your own values that they are so loosely held that you'd sacrifice them out of contempt like this?
This is just a straight ad hominem. I thought we were supposed to be above these sorts of things on hn.
The "other side" has ZERO capacity/will/desire to ACTUALLY engage in meaningful dialog , but sole goal is to "win" no matter what the cost.
There is no logical appeal that can sway the state-level propaganda and brainwashing that billions have been spent on over the last 40 years.
1. Respond one single way to events
2. Ignore events
There are lots of ways to express concern that are less alienating.
There are plenty of trends happening on the "other side" which are also veritably nuts, so I don't find this to be a very compelling argument. The ad hominem doesn't help, either.
No one can have any nuanced opinion without all of their individuality being discarded and all weight being given to the party they vote for. It seems to me that the party they vote for is just an ephemeral label and really doesn't suffice in extrapolating much. We should stop contextualizing all conversations on the political affiliation of people.
It's simply a bad argument. I only brought up the "other side" to help analogize it, my apologies if it confused things.
To me it’s just painfully obvious you think very highly of yourself.
And now we’ve come full circle. Using “whataboutism” to avoid conversations about topics is a problem. Whether you’re using it to deflect to a different topic or using it as an excuse to avoid talking about a topic altogether. Someone could argue your comment is the latter and is just as harmful.
But I think most of that is a limitation of text/internet communication that people don’t consciously notice. It’s much easier to have nuance in an in-person conversation.
Well that’s certainly a dishonest premise.
You're alienating yourself by following reactionary impulses in response to true statements.
I'm also honesty not sure how true this theory of reaction is generally. I'm sure it's true for some, but in many cases it functions as a rhetorical strategy to put people on the defensive who are making legitimate criticisms.
>But none of this was anti-science, nor did it have anything to do with COVID, and you've brought up both.
It's anti-intellectual, and therefore a pertinent comparison, and they used the term anti intellectual and covered all the necessary bases. The cultural and social forces driving both are the same, and here, again, I feel like saying "don't talk about this because it alienates me" is just a rhetorical strategy to put people on the defensive without addressing the merits of what they are saying.
Republicans are fostering anti-intellectualism which is (in fact) anti-science. From my perspective you'd be alienating yourself out of spite. This goes for Democrats or any political party.
Which side is worse is a matter of opinion. Personally I think they are both dangerous and won’t identify myself with either party as a result.
The result is that there is no point in leveling this accusation as part of a debate about something substantive, unless you just want to derail the conversation into a meaningless partisan bashing match.
Flawed opinions are not all of equal import. Representatives of a political party are not all of equal import. You have to actually evaluate the evidence and act accordingly, even if this puts you on the outs with friends, family, and co-workers.
This all being said, I think the prime driver of partisanship is not analyses of truth or impact but social connections. People are afraid to be exiled from the community they depend on -- their friends, family, co-workers, co-religionists, doctor, grocer, plumber, etc. Just as you can tell a lie more convincingly if you believe it, you can simulate partisan allegiance best by enacting it. If you are going to be ridden out of town on a rail if you are thought to have voted for a Democrat/Republican, then it isn't sufficient to say you voted as the mob prefers; you have to do it. The mob knows this. That's what the Second Amendment has come to be about: having guns to scare your neighbors over to your side. Better to be with the bully than against him.
I am assuming you have to vote or abstain from voting. Then your choice is whether you are trying to achieve changes in the world or achieve a certain self image. If you are trying to achieve changes in the world, and the decision is close, you throw your weight behind the better side. If you are trying to achieve a certain self image, you vote for your ideal candidate whatever is at stake and whatever the balance between the two candidates that have an actual chance of gaining power. Or you abstain and remain unsullied by whatever evil taints each candidate.
As for ‘the lesser of two evils’:
> You have to decide which party is actually telling more damaging lies, taking more damaging actions, or doing more good, and act accordingly.
This is you telling us we have to make that choice.
The "more damaging lies" part is just trying not to be too rosy-eyed about any particular party. Your choices are imperfect, but that's the world we live in.
ETA In case it was unclear, I think political behavior aimed at your self image is vanity and thus self-defeating. Even if your chief goal is thinking better of yourself or getting others to think better of you, forsaking a choice to do good for the world at large in the interest of your own vanity will not achieve your goal. If you want a better image, you should still choose better over worse, not pretty and pointless over ugly and effective.
When you vote, you are forced to make a choice between parties. Nothing forces you to identify with a side when it comes to discussing who is anti-science or not.
What perspectives do you see coming from the Democrat side that have the same mortality rate as vaccine refusal? (Or are there indicators you give equal/greater significance than mortality?)
People commonly make this false equivalence, but as of 2021 it's fair to observe that it's just unequivocally false with respect to the question of respect for scientific consensus. If a lot of republicans disregard science (e.g. believe incorrect things about covid) and a few democrats do it (e.g. believing incorrect things about nuclear safety), people take these unequal examples and proceed claim it means both sides are the same, and believe that they are expressing a sophisticated position.
It's precisely this kind of illiteracy in the ability to assess the relative merits of differently weighted examples that makes the false equivalence possible. This which is why demands for substantiation are relevant and necessary.
I guess you’re arguing with ‘people’ then.
You might want to look into some of the other anti-science ideas strongly propagated by democrats. You don’t seem to have a good inventory. It’s not limited to minor false beliefs about nuclear safety. Consider the belief that there is no such thing as biological sex, for example.
I'm specifically and directly responding to your question of why we should be in the business of judging the relative merits of different claims, and I elaborated by explaining problems with false balance.
Edit, since I can't reply: parent commenter asked "What perspectives do you see coming from the Democrat side that have the same mortality rate as vaccine refusal? "and you replied "why is this question relevant" and I explained why. So I was indeed directly responding to you, despite your continued protestations to the contrary. Insisting that I wasn't being responsive to you is bordering on ridiculous.
> Consider the belief that there is no such thing as biological sex, for example.
I'm pretty comfortable dismissing this out of hand.
Edit: and I'm not missing the point, I understand the role you believe it plays in the logical structure of equating democrats to republicans. I understand that you're invoking the subject of gender and saying it's an example of Democrats being estranged from scientific consensus in a way that's comparable to Republicans being estranged from scientific consensus on covid. And it's at this point in the conversation where I'm no longer attempting to engage with you, and I instead direct my comments to others reading this thread on understanding what false equivalences look like.
I was initially focused on failures to accurately compare differently weighted examples. But there's a different category of false equivalence, where people confidently invoke a completely non-existent scientific consensus. The invocation of gender falls into that category.
That’s not a question I asked.
> and I elaborated by explaining problems with false balance.
Which is why this elaboration isn’t relevant.
>> Consider the belief that there is no such thing as biological sex, for example.
> I'm pretty comfortable dismissing this out of hand.
You seem to be missing the point that it is a common anti-science belief promoted by democrats.
As far as I can see you are just advocating for partisanship. That’s a common position to take, and you are welcome to it.
If you make that assertion, you can’t be upset when people ask for examples or evidence. It’s extremely relevant to the (as of yet) unsupported argument you made.
It really doesn’t seem clear what you think you are responding to.
You're saying "you must woo me to do the right thing" and it's complete garbage (you've already admitted OP is "probably right"). If you're going to vote out of spite because people aren't "taking a chill pill" you can go pound sand. I'm tired of this "you didn't tell me in the perfect way, so I'm right and you're wrong" reductive nonsense.
Once the goalposts are moved back to the point where you're practically begging, they'll turn around and try to assert dominance by calling you weak for trying to reason with them like a perosn.
It is a partisan issue though. Republicans across the United States are largely pushing to reject science and schooling and are increasingly pushing through laws and changes that make the populace dumber, and more easily controllable.
You know this is happening, yet you still voted for republicans in the past.
It's your own fault if you continue to do so even in the face of overwhelming evidence that this is destroying America.
Whether or not you feel alienated is no concern, your feelings don't matter here, and the fact that you are feeling alienated means you have the capacity to change, because the people that keep voting against intellectualism don't feel alienated, they feel emboldened when someone calls them out, they feel pride in knowing they are doing something "the left hates me for", even if that something is destroying America in the process.
Alienation is exactly the type of thing one should use to combat this. Rationally minded people in the (R) camp SHOULD feel alienated by their intellectual peers when they spew anti-intellectual rhetoric and pass/support anti-intellectual policies or willingly associate, without protest, with people or groups known for doing so. You can't flip the script and say you feel alienated by your intellectual peers (HN) for not jumping with you onto the anti-intellectual band-wagon and/or for calling systemic anti-intellectualism out for what it is. Doing so would be as ridiculous as arguing that you find same-sex couples alienating/offensive/triggering because they tread on your precious sensibilities as an anti-LGBT person. In that scenario, you should feel alienated, because that is the primary societal force that will pressure you into recanting being an anti-LGBT person. Intellectuals are alienating you because they want you to get rid of the rest of your bad opinions, not just the select few you have already shed, before you can take your place at the table.
1.) This is an attack against a type of security researcher. Attacks against researchers are always anti-science.
2.) You’ve admitted to feeling alienated by truth. You might want to think that over and ask yourself some questions. That’s genuinely sad.
3.) If the truth genuinely alienates you, I don’t care about you or your feelings.
that's blatantly untrue. If a researcher is malicious, attacking their person is not anti-science.
By the way: «voting [that thing] out» is not enough. That thing having held the office is a very horrible incident, and it must be made very clear to all those who were distracted.
Of course it's anti-science. You don't think this governor has advisors that told him the reporter looked at source code that anyone can look at it and it's not hacking?
He's grandstanding for his constituency. Why? Because he knows his constituency won't understand nuance and won't hold him accountable, because he's attacking science, not guns.
Every group of humans - indeed, thanks to the central limit theorem, every sufficiently large sampling - is going to be normally distributed and there are going to be folks on either side offset from the mean.
However, that doesn't indicate that the mean isn't interesting or worthwhile to discuss, and isn't representative of the group as a whole.
You're blaming other people for something that is 100% under your control. If you don't want to accept the truth because you don't like the types of people who share it, that's just spite on your part.
There are signs WAY before you need to "try to vote him out of office".
Throwing a temper tantrum when someone objectively mentions the ideology of a party - threatening to take your toys out of the sandbox - really doesn't help your case in the "superiority" department.
The reason things are so "partisan" is because of the political extremist actions and policies from your party.
Edit: it looks like you've been doing this quite a bit, as well as using HN primarily for political/ideological battle. That's against the guidelines and we ban accounts that do it. If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting here, we'd appreciate it.
Are we expected to just pretend like there's not this huge anti-science movement on the Right because your feelings might get hurt? Look at all the anti mask, anti vaccine rhetoric. This isn't ok.
Plenty of problems on the Left too, and we should talk about those too.
I really do not understand how it is possible to separate Parson from Republican Party in Missouri? They very very much the same.
It is like saying that Gavin Newsom is something different than Democrats in California.
(Actually, I always pegged Eric for a moderate/conservative Democrat, but wasn't surprised to see him play the game he played given that his defining characteristic was always his careerism/ambition. I even mentioned after one of those meals that he'd probably prefer to run as a Dem but will definitely be running on the GOP ticket because he cares more about power and prestige than anything else & anyone with a brain knew running as a Dem in any statewide race in Missouri was a dead end. Actually, totally independent of this conversation, Eric is actually a really interesting case study in coalition politics; his resignation was as much about him snubbing folks with appointments than his sex scandal per se. Anyways.)
My interactions with folks in MOGOP back then scared the hell out of me. I could see the party coalescing around a pretty dark sort of nihilism. And not even really in terms of policy per se. It's the individual people, divorced of their politics, that really made me scared. On a personal and individual level. The deeply concerning interactions and conversations I had with specific rising stars in MOGOP are actually one of the reasons I left the state.
I understand your attitude toward partisanship, I really do, and I've voted for Missouri Repbulicans in the past as well. But that state party is in a really dark place right now. A few good apples -- and they do exist -- don't really matter when party leadership are scary as fuck narcissistic nihilists.
(And, yeah, all politicians suck or whatever... but MOGOP is really something else. The rising stars from back then who are all either ascendant or in control now are not just gross politician types... they're genuinely just really scary human beings.)
this event is completely political and is made possible by the fact that one party alone has decided that facts don't matter - a whole team of said people rushed behind this governor to start a politcal campaign based on fact-free made up realities, which is now the common mode of action for the right wing. The GOP also happens to be a party that claims to be extremely upset about liberals supposedly trying to ban speech that "hurts their feelings". this is after all where the terms "snowflake" and "cancel culture" come from, and in fact was a campaign slogan by the Trump campaign called "fuck your feelings", which you would see emblazoned on shirts worn by what we would assume were previously congenial grandparents.
based on all of this, it would appear hypocritical for right wing voters to claim that speaking of these issues are "alientating". The grandparents wearing T shirts that said "fuck your feelings" was pretty alienating to see. Where were the right wing voices warning that liberals might feel "alienated" by that ? Does anyone on the right have the slightest concern for anyone not like them ? I've yet to see it.
If you’re not actively working to dismantle the current Republican Party, we cannot be on the same side. I don’t mind alienating you; the masters tools will never dismantle the master’s house.
I've never heard this phrase before, but it equally applies to the situation where one thinks only they can wield a weapon. We can't assume that because we are "right," we have nothing to fear from the people who are "wrong" using our worst tactics against us. This is wrong whether it's one side "lying for Jesus," or the other side "censoring for freedom."
In the context of this thread, rising opposition on one side prompts a higher rise on the other side, in a vicious cycle. As parents are often heard to say, "I don't care who started it, I care who finishes it!"
It's a bit cliche to refer to STTNG for life advice, but a minor plot point of this episode influenced me quite a bit when I was a kid: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hero_Worship_(Star_Trek:_The_N...
All the adults saw a problem, so they kept raising their shields higher and higher, but raising the shields was causing the problem in the first place. It took a kid to notice that the scale of the problem correlated with the scale of the adults' defensiveness. This was, obviously, a metaphor for any human interaction.
It's simply not possible to continually raise your defenses and offenses and end with a win-win, and when it comes to a roughly evenly divided society, win-lose is lose-lose.
This only works when both sides engage in good faith. That is not the case currently. We are better off excluding them than letting them abuse the process in bad faith like they always do.
The ones advancing this argument are always the ones with the least at stake.
There are hundreds of millions of nominally reasonable people who fall into opposite tribes just by happenstance. If you attack their tribe as a whole they'll stick to their tribes because of tribalism, but if you act reasonably, even if the tribal figureheads are acting in bad faith, the members of each tribe can be persuaded reasonably.
Every line in tribe B's media about how party A is destroying the world with its anti-X agenda is perfectly mirrored by a similar line in tribe A's media about how party B is destroying the world with its anti-Y agenda. "Excluding" doesn't cut off people you disagree with, it makes them stronger, by consolidating them further into their tribes and cementing their opinions ("fight makes right")! We can try to see things from the point of view of reasonable people on both sides, or we can fail as a pluralistic society.
I guess reality does have a well known liberal bias :)
But you see how harmful it is to the site to do explicit political flamewar. Yours was the only non-aggressive reply out of five.
not deescalating.
The aide said that guys like me were 'in what we call the reality-based community,' which he defined as people who 'believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.' [...] 'That's not the way the world really works anymore,' he continued. 'We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors...and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do'.
It's actually a poignant, forward-thinking point about the malleability of "reality" and "facts" under empire, but predictably the third-way neolibs that still dominate the party failed to grasp that and first made a joke out of it, and then out of themselves as it was realized.
Of course it was in an intellectual climate where those words were charged with political meaning that made them salient enough to set up the joke. But to say it didn't original with Colbert would be to say that phrase itself was coined by a different person, and if it was, you could say who it was, and when and where. Otherwise it's just a confused detour into the weeds that lost track of the original question of attribution.
This is a huge detour, so to tie it back to the original thread, I think talks of "bias" are poisoned by a false assumption sides are equally estranged from scientific truth. It feels fair to make a both-sides argument, but it really just doesn't hold water under any serious examination especially when it comes to which party affiliation more systematically aligns with, responds to, and believes in scientific consensus.
It should be possible to hold these two different thoughts in your head at the same time without descending into angry incredulity at anyone offering clarification.
Colbert really did coin the term and it really is that simple. You seem to just want to take a question about where a quote came from and turn it into a broader conversation about the history of the 2000s, which is all well and good but.... it's just not an answer to what was being asked.
About that sense of superiority, it is relative to a pretty low bar, when people prioritize whether a person is on their side even over whether the person is right.
The clustering of inane views amongst a particular identifiable group of people is fascinating. And inane views happen on both sides. I find it super interesting to see how each side chooses which bonkers views they do, and how they line up.
Especially interesting is when they are not self consistent. For example, "my body, my rules," which is adopted by both sides in different contexts (abortion and vaccinations) both of which arguably are issues that involve personal choice but that also (again, arguably) affect the well being of others.
Finding the partisan alignments amongst these things is super interesting and should not be a third rail (meaning an untouchable topic) in discussions, imho.
From a pure realpolitik standpoint, alienating voters who can be convinced to do the right thing is just foolishness.
In Virginia, more people voted for Biden in 2020 than Clinton in 2016, and for Trump in 2020 than Trump in 2016. Clearly higher turnout mattered, but whether the individual votes were switch-voters, new voters, voters who sat out 2016 showing up in 2020, voters who sat out in 2016 (but had a past history of voting one way) showing up for the other party's candidate in 2020 is much harder to assert.
Virginia currently has a Democrat legislature for the first time in two decades, and it's paired with a Democrat governor for the first time I can remember. Either there was a massive demographic churn or someone switched sides. (Anecdotally: I have family in Virginia, and a lot of lifelong GOP voters in my family looked at the party's double- and triple-down support of Trump and went "Whatever this party is, it's not my GOP").
put another way, I have a lot of republicans in my family. There is zero chance of any of them ever changing. It's absurd that we all would need to be concerned about speaking the truth of the GOP party for fear of "alienating" these people. This is a silencing tactic, plain and simple. The GOP takes no such steps to avoid losing potential D switchers.
If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting here, we'd appreciate it.
...and that moreover, you might consider you are intentionally fed biased information to help reinforce your political stances and hyper-emotional content, because emotional voters are more loyal than thinking voters.
Think for yourself. Recognize the good in your opposition. Denounce the bad in your own. No political party (nor their associated media outlets) are above lying and public manipulation.
Evolution: "This is the way."
So again - you are generalizing and stereotyping.
Invoking Godwins law, cause it seems apropos:
"As we say in Germany, if there's a Nazi at the table and 10 other people sitting there talking to him, you got a table with 11 Nazis"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McCarthyism
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smith_Act_trials_of_Communist_...
> Invoking Godwins law, cause it seems apropos:
> "As we say in Germany, if there's a Nazi at the table and 10 other people sitting there talking to him, you got a table with 11 Nazis"
Is this in jest? Or are you truly suggesting that even conversing with someone who holds an opinion that differs from yours somehow makes you of the same opinion?
Are you truly suggesting the correct action to take with Nazi's is a discussion? Because there is a certain British PM that tried that approach back in the day....
the irrational is showing reasons? Yes. Somebody with a non fully compromised mind may be eavesdropping (note: it's a metaphor).
Much of it likely comes down to (a) misinformation coming from news sources they trust, (b) lack of trust in institutions (perhaps for good reason), and perhaps most importantly (c) prioritizing moral values differently than you do.
I suspect (c) is at the root of much of the R-D split, with (a) and (b) being symptoms of it.
Many Republicans and Democrats have non-negotiable moral values they hold to, and they hold their noses as they elect leaders who give lip service to those values but have glaring problems elsewhere. Elections are more about who people don't want in office than who they do want.
I and almost all of my friends and family hold that "humans are created in the image of God, and thus their inalienable rights begin at conception. Therefore abortion at any stage is committing murder against the baby."
Not exactly context-dependent, unless I'm missing something. Perhaps you could elaborate?
The missing context is that your argument seek to protect the baby's life BEFORE birth , but after ... generally speaking the (R)/pro-life stance is pretty weak on social safety net, should the child have adequate (free!) health care, nutrition, etc.
Does that life "deserve" these things when they are only an infant? How about when they are 5-10 ... or 10-20 , or ANY age?
Passing laws to force women to give birth, but then systematically strip and reduce the social safety nets available seems highly context-dependent, and weakens greatly the belief that you "value life"
I don't know if I can generalize across Republicans, but as I understand it:
- humans naturally have both rights and responsibilities. Being human by itself grants inalienable rights, and as someone matures or is given positions of membership or authority they also incur further rights and responsibilities.
- Inalienable rights are to be protected by government. If it's not something that's naturally there and needs protecting, it's not an inalienable right. (Founding fathers summarized inalienable rights as "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" - those can't be given by a government but they must be protected by all governments).
- By making a woman pregnant, a man has incurred the responsibility to protect and provide for that woman and her baby. If he fails to do so, she has every right to seek redress -- and doing so ought to be easy for her, since she and her baby have a right to his protection and provision.
This is the ideal. I know it's not the reality, but protecting inalienable rights and holding people to their responsibilities when redress is sought ought to be the first priorities of government. While they are important, social safety nets don't even appear in my belief system. If they exist, they ought to be a last resort, only to be relied upon if the father, the mother, their family, their community (church or another organization), or local non-profits are not able to provide. But the government would do even better to be holding the responsible people accountable instead of giving them a way out.
Nothing in my belief system assigns responsibility to the government for taking care of people. That should be the people's job via healthy non-government institutions (especially marriage, family, and community organizations). If people aren't getting taken care of, that's not the government's job to fix. It's the people's. It's literally MY job, and yours too. If the government is ever involved, it ought to be holding people responsible for taking care of one another, especially within families -- instead of giving them an easy way out of their duty.
So when I vote against your Democratic party policy, I'm not voting against the heart behind it. I'm saying "great ideas, but that is not the government's job. Go form an NGO to do that (that doesn't also promote abortion) and I will donate!" In the mean time, stop taxing me so you can give people an easy way out of their responsibilities! I take care of my responsibilities (myself, my wife, my kids). No one else has to do that - it's my job and I do it. God forbid the government should do that for me. I also give to my parents, my wife's parents, my church, including those in my church who are poor, several non-profits that take care of the poor and spread the good news of God's love, and poor people I run into -- I give away more than 20% of my net income. Please don't hear me saying "look how good I am" (far from it, there are many people who make less and give far more) but to hopefully to share how much I believe taking care of people is my job and yours, not the government's.
People should take care of their own responsibilities to the extent they are able. When they don't, the government should hold them accountable. When they can't, it should make it easy for other institutions to do their job and help the poor. People love one another better through giving voluntarily, not paying taxes so the government can "love" people.
Finally, institutions are the engines through which human visions are carried out and sustained across generations. Different institutions have different responsibilities. The government should be one among many institutions. When the government is the only institution (or has control over the other institutions) we are in a totalitarian state -- and that is a horrible place to be for human well-being.
Abortion isn't the only topic that people make a "moral" stance about, and in some ways it's the least interesting. It hinges on an arbitrary "It's alive!" moment that's not really debatable, so much as a gut feeling.
On second thought, it does illustrate the difficulty most people have in thinking about continua rather than binary variables. Aliveness is, to me, clearly not binary. The fetus is minimally alive at conception and becomes alive at birth, but during the pregnancy is neither fully alive nor fully not alive. Similarly, an adult with brain damage, in a coma, isn't quite dead, but is also not fully alive.
I think that if we discussed specific situations, nearly everyone would wind up agreeing with the continua. It's only in the abstract that they insist on their binary labels. That's been my experience, anyway. Everyone's ethics are parsimonious, until it's their friends, family, or themselves that are in consideration.
First, how ever cruel and wrong doing so may be, letting nature take its course isn't murder - it's something else altogether (sometimes morally defensible, sometimes not).
Second, your hypothetical situation is a well-covered case in situational ethics -- "whose life to save when not all can be saved". I know in this case many Catholic hospitals would save the baby and let the woman die -- so they can baptize the baby and save its soul (so they believe... correct me if I'm wrong). I disagree.
In my ethical framework, the woman's life is the one worth saving. Between the two of them, it will be more devastating/hurtful overall for her to die than the baby... not to mention devastation/hurt to those who love her. Therefore it is more loving to save her. And if the baby dies, I believe he/she goes to heaven (that's not justification for infanticide or abortion, just that based on scripture, I don't agree with the Catholic belief that the baby has to be delivered and baptized for him/her to receive salvation).
> It hinges on an arbitrary "It's alive!" moment that's not really debatable, so much as a gut feeling.
... except that science has pretty much established when a new organism begins for every other species. It's well known. People just don't want to accept the moral ramifications for human babies.
Consider someone on a ventilator who is otherwise a vegetable -- yes they're alive, and stabbing them would be murder. However, it's not necessarily murder to let nature take its course -- to let them die by unplugging the machine that's keeping them artificially alive.
I think it's your ethics (or perhaps your gut feeling, as you put it) that doesn't allow for a binary "alive or dead" state. But biology is pretty clear on when an organism is alive or not.
Yes there are edge cases when tissue lines are kept alive for years, or organ transplants are done... but no one disagrees about how alive or dead someone is in those cases. The point is whether a human fetus is an alive person - that's where the rubber hits the road ethically. And biologically there's certainly no question in that case. He/she is a human and he/she is alive -- that's the moral starting point. Anyone who says otherwise is equivocating to avoid the moral ramifications.
We disagree on the definition of murder. I suppose the law might call it negligent homicide. That sounds like a type of murder.
> biology is pretty clear on when an organism is alive or not.
It is not clear at all. Are viruses alive, for example? A human body is comprised of a variety of things that might be considered individual organisms if they lived outside the body. Are they alive, separately from the human they're a part of? How about a fetus? If it's not viable outside the womb, then how can it be alive as distinct from the mother? Does technology change that decision? If so, does aliveness change depending on access to technology?
I hope no one is seriously advocating for that position, so obviously the issue of "consistency" is more complicated.
An adult is able to weigh for themselves the risks and benefits of receiving a vaccine. A child is not able to weigh those risks and benefits, and it reasonable in general to have that decision made by their parents.
I suppose someone could say, to be consistent, that we should allow parents to decide for the child in his or her mother's womb how to weigh the risks and benefits of being aborted versus being born, but at least for a healthy child we would never accept that being born is a worse outcome than being dead.
So I think that protecting adults from unwanted vaccinations and protecting pre-birth children from being aborted can be a consistent stance, even though, I accept, the problem is much more complicated than even that.
Conversely, if someone becomes pregnant they can put the child up for adoption, and the state should make the father pay for that child's needs for the rest of their life. If the father knew that the mother was under the influence of drugs, he should also spend a large portion of his life in prison learning to care about other people.
As for the pregnancy idea, sure, in a perfect place with great social support, little stigmatizing of sex & adoption, and a legal system that can impose on the father (from flight or responsibility). I don’t see that anywhere, so how would we get there?
I never was taught that cold sores are a virus transmitted via saliva contact, including sharing a glass, ditto for mono. I was just told kissing or engaging in sexual behavior led to terminal illness or pregnancy. Also if one becomes pregnant there is strong pressure from parents on both sides to marry and raise the child despite a total lack of maturity or social or romantic connection. This is the experience of many Americans.
How do you define proper support for adoption? How can you measure that on a scale of that vs a scale from outlawing abortion to proper abortion? Also what is proper abortion?
A strong factor of oppression is a restriction on mobility. For a 15 year old girl, how does she ask for a ride to the next state? When I was 15 I felt shady riding my bike ten miles. We are almost certainly going to talk past each other. Good day to you.
But after 2020? There's no plausible deniability left. That the loser of the last election used imagined fraud as a basis to launch a coup attempt, and the subsequent attempted memory-holing and normalization of that event by the Republican party have changed everything. It's clear what they are doing now. Namely:
1) take away independent control of state election processes and install a partisan election process that will "determine" whether any particular election result is "fraudulent". The result of the Arizona audit by the "Cyber Ninjas" reveals the playbook:
- use the audit to kick up a cloud of dust (we are investigating reports of paper ballots from china containing Bamboo!)
- muddy the waters (we are definitely going to find fraud, it's astounding)
- find no fraud (The results show Biden won, but we have a list of concerns we will focus on instead of the actual count)
- declare there was fraud anyway (Trump's statement on the result: "We won on the Arizona forensic audit yesterday at a level that you wouldn’t believe. They had headlines that Biden wins in Arizona when they know it’s not true. He didn’t win in Arizona. He lost in Arizona based on the forensic audit.")
2) Use these fabricated claims of fraud to send your own choice of electors to the Congress to select the next President.
3) The Democrats will object, because of the obvious fraud
4) The process, being contested, will follow the Constitution and eventually a vote will go before the House, where each state delegation has 1 vote
5) Because Republicans control more state houses than Democrats, they can just choose whoever they want as President
6) Any court challenges will end up at a court stacked with Republicans, 3 of whom were appointed by Trump, 5 of whom were appointed to the court by Republican Presidents who lost the popular vote their first term in office.
That's how Democracy ends in America, and Republicans are setting up that exact scenario in 2024. If you wake up in November of that year and the person elected (read: appointed) lost both the popular vote AND the electoral college, well don't be surprised. That's the literal end of elections in America, and it's not hyperbolic at all. That's their stated plan: see the Eastman memo.
If you are voting for Republicans post 2020, you are voting against democracy. I'm sorry, there's no other way to put it. This whole effort is anti-democratic and against the rule of law. I mean, it's fine if you don't believe in democracy and want an American dictator in the style of Putin (complete with the associated corruption of the rule of law and the neutering of elections as a method of self governance), but just be honest about it.
If people won't be reasoned with, don't waste your time trying. On the upside, Mother Nature doesn't care what you believe - as hundreds of Americans, disproportionately Republicans, are learning every day at the moment.
But in the US that's a tacit Republican party position. Most senior Republicans have of course actually been vaccinated, but watch so many of them carefully choose their words to avoid endorsing vaccination. And the more junior Republicans, hungry for voter enthusiasm and maybe less scared of dying themselves, will outright say it, e.g. Lauren Boebert.
Result: Dead Republicans.
And I really don't have a partisan point here, it's usually Kang versus Kodos, it's just that the Republicans decided to go, as they say "full retard". You don't need to have a partisan dog in the game to know that the point of Democracy isn't who wins an election but the fact of peaceful transitions of power, and who did we see trying to prevent that peaceful transition of power in the US? Exactly.
They're essentially incapable of reason at this point.
If you ignore facts it is impossible for a best solution to arise or for any answer to be accepted so a conversation cannot move on and has no end point, this drives a "You are the problem"/"You are attacking me" feeling.
What you're doing is called "pearl clutching", and is not adding in any constructive way to the conversation.
The way we got here is intentionally by using divisive rhetoric to ellicit "engagement". Traditionally, this has been used politically by identifying wedge issues with the explicit intention to divide people along belief borders.
This has been accelerated and amplified n-fold via social media. Engagement is a proxy for divisive rhetoric, as that is what algorithmically produces the most engagement, thereby triggering the reward function(s).
The cat's out of the bag. Its too late to go back and say "but what about the kids?" etc, (especially since there is so much overwhelming evidence that these themselves are simply rhetorical devices to push a particular argumnent or point of view).
We know these arguments are not in good faith, so why should we give them that due process and respect?
Cut the BS.
You can reply to that but I think I’ve said my part.
The person that replied to you showed you the gratitude of civilized disagreement and discussion. Then you got mad and unproductive.
I agree with every word of your first comment, but make no mistake about what happened here.
It pains me what's happened to discourse in the last 10 years. I suspect social media has played a role. Many liberals and conservatives frequent these online partisan bubbles where they are exposed to the crazies of the other side (and only the crazies) while dodging the controversies that would make them question their own beliefs.
Surely, if there are foreign propaganda peddlers on social media, then the strategy they follow is not to aid one party or the other, but to pull from both sides until we collapse in the middle.
[0] https://today.yougov.com/topics/politics/articles-reports/20...
>In 1995, then-Republican House Majority Leader Dick Armey famously referred to Frank as "Barney Fag" in a press interview.
Don't act like the past was some civil utopia.
In any grouping of humans, there are bad actors and good actors. Using the bad actors to characterize the entire group, when they're a minority of that population is how you create stereotypes that break-down discourse. Empowering and encouraging the moderates in your opponents camp is is diplomacy 101. Insulting them empowers your enemies.
That's the same logic used to say all young black men are criminals, all young arab men are terrorists, all white farmers are racist, etc...
There are 2A Democrats out there that have to tolerate the insane (to them) things their representatives support.
This was pretty well documented at the time if you would like to read about it[0].
[0]https://www.nybooks.com/articles/1995/09/21/to-keep-and-bear...
This sounds contradictory to my understanding, related to the Black Panthers in California back in the 60s.
The snowden leaks where in 2013 and the democratic administration and politicians definitely where not supportive of free press in that case. They were actively hostile against both domestic and foreign press.
It doesn't matter that you're probably right. It comes across as you posting this to make yourself feel good, and holy moly the sense of superiority from your camp needs a chill pill.
Parson is evil. I'll be doing my duty as a citizen and trying to vote him out of office. But none of this was anti-science, nor did it have anything to do with COVID, and you've brought up both.