> The survey found that many Americans think a person’s private political donations should impact their employment. Nearly a quarter (22%) of Americans would support firing a business executive who personally donates to Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden’s campaign. Even more, 31% support firing a business executive who donates to Donald Trump’s re‐ election campaign.
Holy shit. Am I reading this right? 53% of Americans would support firing someone based on a donation to a presidential campaign? Later in the post it says this figure rises to 71% of people under 30.
I've always wondered how far this extends in the minds of people okay with this. If they found out in a year or two that someone donated to trump's campaign, does that justify firing too? I imagine this dystopia where someone gets fired for a donation, only for their new employer to find out about the donation and fire them too, and so on, leaving them either unemployable, or dividing employment along party lines.
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edit: Yes, it crossed my mind that we're assuming these are disjoint groups. We might be double counting the intersection of the two groups. The true total is the percent listed above minus the percent who support firing a Trump donor while also wanting to fire a Biden donor. I can't imagine the intersection being significant, so I left it out. I expect these figures are approximately accurate if the survey is accurate.
Hopefully some of those who support firing the executive have enough moral compass to support the firer regardless of what political views the firee expressed. It might be 31%, not 53%.
No, but I find "businesses should be allowed fire people they disagree with" a more tolerable position than "businesses should be allowed fire people I disagree with".
My conclusion above is independent of my own political views. Supposing I were a fervent Trump supporter, I should hope in that case that the Biden-firers are mostly non-partisan supporters of right-to-work laws rather than haters of my guy. Not saying I'd expect that to be true, just that I'd prefer it.
That's a libertarian moral compass, not a general moral compass. Though I think people should be imprisoned for murder, it doesn't make me a hypocrite if I don't think people should be imprisoned for jaywalking. I don't have to support prison no matter what crime is committed.
Well, I consider that for at least one of the candidates, donating to him is not abhorrent enough to meet my bar for "this political speech should be censored". I'd have trouble taking seriously anyone who thought that both candidates were abhorrent enough to favour firing their supporters on ideological grounds. Allowing businesses to fire people who don't agree with them is much more acceptable to me than that.
Palmer Luckey, the young founder of Oculus had his future career basically ruined for putting up a Pro-Trump billboard, if I recall. It’s terrifying, and there’s no winning stating any political opinions at work. It’s really sad because I feel like I can’t talk about anything of substance or interesting with coworkers aside from a few people whom I’ve known a long time and know they’re accepting of me even if they disagree.
the Left power structure has convinced 50% of America that Trump is on the verge of installing the Fourth Reich and opening the concentration camps.
the Right powerstructure has convinced 50% of Americans that Biden will be the re-animated corpse of Stalin, and that he will sieze all private property and throw us all in gulags.
the net effect of this hyperpartisan polarization driven by fake news filter bubbles is that none of us can have a plain old reasonable discussion with each other, and agree to disagree about certain fundamentals, while finding a practical compromise going foward. being forced into being an extremist foot soldier of either Party or risk being destroyed by the partisans of the other Party is the worst lose-lose outcome of Prisoner's Dilemma.
i think the Deep State wants us divided and at each other's throats so that we don't team up and topple them.
Hyper-politicization which mostly comes from the left, is a marxist tactic related to identifying and destroying all things/persons that are problematic. This tactic is designed to weaken societal bonds in general and to target people or institutions that may get in the way of installing communism.
You cannot add the percentages like that because they may overlap. Some percentage of people can support firing an executive who donates to either campaign.
I bought a Trump bumper sticker way back when he was
still considered a joke. I thought it would be a fun souvenir for later on. The idea I could be “cancelled” because of something like this is ridiculous. This is why courts of law you are deemed “innocent before proven guilty”. I can’t believe we as a society are going through the same mistakes hundreds of years later.
The US isn’t a first world country anymore, it is devolving into a political and cultural mess.
Oh god, I did the same thing with a shirt! I eventually threw it out, after I found it in a closet. Not cause I thought I'd get cancelled, just cause it was gross.
Brendan Eich was ousted at Mozilla (after considerable pressure) for donating to a congressional candidate and an associated proposition. And I think you'll find plenty of people here who support that ousting given that the proposition was in support of banning same-sex marriage.
Presumably there is some line that many of us would agree you can't cross but opinions will differ on where and what the line is.
It's troublesome, but I find it relatable if you boil things down to strong ideologies and hyperbole which is a lot of the problem with our current state of political discourse.
For example, it might be your stance that all Trump supporters are racist. Would I hire someone who was openly racist? Absolutely not.
Is the reality that all Trump supporters are racists? No, probably not.
A counter-example, you believe that abortion is murder. Would you hire someone who supports murder? absolutely not.
Is abortion murder? Not definitively. It depends on your personal outlook.
Hiring/firing is just not an objective process anywhere, and you're going to be subject to the personal biases of the boss... and we're in particularly biased times. On the bright side, I suspect historical numbers would be worse... and at least it's not a civil war.
> Holy shit. Am I reading this right? 53% of Americans would support firing someone based on a donation to a presidential campaign?
Are you against this in principle, for all possible presidential candidates regardless of how bad their views and policies and actions are (by your own definition of "bad")? Or do you just think that, right now, no major candidate is "bad enough" that you would advocate firing someone for supporting that candidate?
> Are you against this in principle, for all possible presidential candidates regardless of how bad their views and policies are
Not the GP, but of course yes. If someone is good enough for your political and legal system to advance his candidature at the elections and be voted by citizens, then who has the right to damage me for my legitimate political choice?
So even if someone is a literal neo-Nazi who supports killing all the Jews, imprisoning gay people, and enslaving black people, donating to such a person's candidacy isn't disqualifying in terms of the basic character one might expect (or at least hope for) of someone leading a company?
I don't see how an endorsement of a vile racist couldn't be seen as disqualifying for positions of authority.
I don't get it: if someone's ideas are so universally considered horrific and dangerous, why do you even allow that person to run for the elections?
The state defines a frame of things that are lawful and that every citizen should be able to perform in perfect safety. If you think that the laws of your country are not sufficient, then seek to change them; instead you seem to advocate for vigilante justice in the absence of shared and agreed upon rules.
Because of freedom of speech? The idea is that the state should not generally be in the business of determine what political speech should be legal, lest it always turn out that only the speech the benefits the powers that be, be allowed to remains standing.
Do you seriously not see the difference between, "this opinion should not get you thrown in jail" and "this opinion should not belong to someone in a position of power"?
If you think that the opinion should not belong to someone in a position of power, vote against that candidate. But if enough others vote for that candidate, then that's a strong democratic signal that this opinion reflects many people's will and needs consideration and representation.
In essence, the opinions of your opponents and enemies are just as valid as your opinions, no matter how much you dislike these opinions (it's plausible that they dislike your opinions just as much) and you should not get a veto to say that their opinions don't belong to someone in a position of power but your opinion can do so; people have the right to have their opinions represented in politics.
Fringe opinions deserve only trivial representation and that's what they get, but this article is about various mainstream opinions held by as much as 62% of people, it's obvious that most of these opinions should be allowed to belong to someone in a position of power.
What's sauce for goose is sauce for gander - if this justification is considered valid, it will be primarily used by those in power against the minorities they don't like; e.g. Trump reserving the right to suppress ideologies that are intolerant to "Blue lives matter" cause or conservative politicians reserving the right to suppress ideologies that threaten christian family values. You won't succeed in claims that your ideology is special and deserves protection that the opponents' ideology does not - that hypocrisy simply won't be accepted by everyone who doesn't already share your ideology. Your enemies have similar motivations as you do, they consider your political agenda as harmful and dangerous to society where it would be morally justified to ensure that the politions of power are cleansed from (for example) the liberal agenda.
A line in the sand of "we won't harass people because of their political views" generally works as protection against oppression, even if you have to include oppressive political views as well in that basket.
In essence, the choice in this matter is simply about escalation or living side by side with your political enemies by agreeing to specify where "the battlefield" is - IMHO, ideally, limited to debates and votes by elected representatives and discourse in media and social circles. If it's escalated to "let's fight our enemies" in the field of employment or providing services then it's not as bad as street fights (which were used in political 'discourse' a hundred years ago) but still going to lead to a lot of people harmed on both sides.
> What's sauce for goose is sauce for gander - if this justification is considered valid, it will be primarily used by those in power against the minorities they don't like;
All modes of justification can be invoked fraudulently. This does not invalidate my mode of justification any more than it invalidates very basic uncontroversial modes of justification such as "we should reserve the right to use force to suppress murder." Sure, those in power can and do invoke that mode of justification fraudulently by falsely claiming that people are murderers and thus using violence against them. We do not throw up our hands and say "well, we cannot ever use that mode of justification, because who can really say for sure what is and isn't murder?"
> Trump reserving the right to suppress ideologies that are intolerant to "Blue lives matter" cause or conservative politicians reserving the right to suppress ideologies that threaten christian family values.
Just like my even simpler example above, this is not a problem for my argument. I can and do claim two things: that we are justified using violence to suppress intolerance, and that it's bad when people use violence to suppress things that they falsely claim are intolerance.
> The idea is that the state should not generally be in the business of determine what political speech should be legal
I understand, but how can the same state allow mobs and employers to harass people and sometimes destroy their lives because they do what the state allows? The state doesn't just declare freedoms, it protects them. For example, if the state doesn't throw you in jail for your opinions, can someone else do it without the state intervening?
> Do you seriously not see the difference between, "this opinion should not get you thrown in jail" and "this opinion should not belong to someone in a position of power"?
I see that the first statement comes from the state and it is valid for everyone; the second is subjective and is made by a group of people who have taken on themselves the role of judge, jury and executioner. Granted, it's a statement that is in your right to make; but if you act on it you can become responsible of harassment, stalking, mobbing.
There are a lot of very fringe political parties; getting on the ballot in at least a few states isn't that big a hurdle. Without necessarily agreeing or disagreeing, if you're a CEO (and the context of the question was around business executives) is it necessarily unreasonable if a board decides that their CEO's support for some controversial fringe presidential candidate is a distraction? (This seems less clear with a rank and file worker but they're also more expendable if something is becoming an internal controversy.)
I understand that fringe political ideas can have a negative impact on the personal relationships in a work environment, especially for people in prominent roles.
However I guess the keyword is can. Tolerance should be exercised from all sides and political ideas should not be a motivation in and by themselves. However it's also true that the CEO of a company is in some cases him/herself a political figure, so I guess it depends on the case.
>However it's also true that the CEO of a company is in some cases him/herself a political figure
That's certainly the case. And, at some level, a political figure doesn't get to have a private life beyond some constraints. In principle, this doesn't apply to lower-level employees--although in many cases those employees are public faces to the company as well. And companies will much more quickly dismiss individuals who become a headache for whatever reason than they will their CEO.
That the solution to it- becoming intolerant towards intolerance- is an option that needs to be regulated. The default of society should be tolerance, and very well defined limits should be put on it, if the need arises. If any actor in society is free to decide what it is fine to to be intolerant to, then you have effectively given people license to be intolerant. Which is what is happening now.
So, to be clear: intolerance should be frowned upon by default. The community can decide to be intolerant towards some things, but those things must be agreed, shared and made clear once and for all. And at that point, that agreed-upon intolerance becomes a law and can be actually enforced by the state itself.
Like any other law. As it is done in other countries, where for example hate speech is a crime, and firing an employee for political or ideological reasons is illegal. In other words: actively protected freedom inside the boundaries of the law.
I'm not exactly sure what you mean, but it sounds similar Popper's standard response to the paradox: that we should reserve the right to use force to suppress intolerance, but it should be a last resort. And I agree.
However, I'm not sure what kind of "regulation" you're referring to, because if you mean that, say, only the government gets to decide when to use force to suppress intolerance, there's the obvious problem of "what happens if the government is intolerant?"
> there's the obvious problem of "what happens if the government is intolerant?"
Well, I guess that at some point you have to accept one risk or another. Any system can fail in one way or the other.
I personally don't like laws limiting freedom of speech; but I also don't like angry mobs that openly and proudly exercise intolerance of anything that falls into their own entirely subjective definition of intolerance.
I would like the state to protect me from those who try to set the limits of freedom of speech as it suits them; but I understand that if the state wants to take from the people the power to silence unacceptable speech, then it must provide some minimum guarantee by taking it upon itself. Best of all would be no laws, but education and common sense, and of course tolerance, from all parts: but again, what do you do if that fails?
I think my discomfort with the idea comes from my inability to know where to draw the line. If I think a person should be fired for a 2020 Trump donation in 2020, why would I think that person shouldn't be fired for a 2019 donation or a 2018 one? I don't think a donation should make someone completely unemployable, so I have trouble reconciling "should be fired from whatever their current job is for a thing they did in the last few years" with "shouldn't be excluded for a few years from the job market."
That and imagining it the other way around. I'm adamantly pro-choice and have donated to orgs supporting this. From the right wing perspective, I support literal murder. What better justification than that to fire me? The only reason I can think that I shouldn't be fired for being pro-choice is that, well, my worldview is the right one.
It doesn't strike me as much harder than drawing the line for more common reasons to fire someone, like incompetence or inappropriate workplace activity. Those are also continuums, and it's certainly not easy to know where to draw the line, and reasonable people will disagree about where to draw the line in each specific case. But we don't throw up our hands and say you can never be allowed to fire anyone for those reasons.
It seems like many people think that "political" actions should enjoy a special protection and that no such actions should ever draw any criticism or consequences. The same attitude is common for actions labelled as "religious." I reject that special status.
Yep and for the same reason free speech is protected. Because nobody can be trusted with being the arbiter of correct speech, or which candidate to support. Sure, it sounds good for extreme right-wing examples, but there's no guarantee you can limit it to the worst extremes once people have that arbitrary power. Might be your job the mob decides to go after some day, because you chose the wrong candidate to support, according to whatever criteria they're using.
Also because donating to a presidential campaign has nothing to do with their work performance.
Note that we’re talking about material support for a cause, not merely speech. You may conflate the two, and some legal systems do as well, but I don’t.
Not the parent commenter, but I'd consider that to be a key part of democracy, the right of political association. I'd consider firing someone for belonging to a particular political party the exact moral equivalent of firing someone for belonging to a particular religious denomination or ethnic group.
As far as I know, in USA the employment discrimination laws draw a distinction between these classes (ethnicity and religion are protected classes, politics is not), however, my local laws and my personal moral compass puts them in the same basket; I'd consider someone being fired because they're, for example, a card-carrying member of the local radical communist party to be equivalent of firing someone because they're Jehovah’s Witness or have sexual practices of which the local church disapproves. They should be able to run as a candidate for that party in some elections while not having their employment threatened for that - this is needed to prevent e.g. the owner of a town-dominating factory from suppressing political opposition to the current elected town officials.
> I'd consider firing someone for belonging to a particular political party the exact moral equivalent of firing someone for belonging to a particular religious denomination or ethnic group.
I support firing someone for supporting a harmful cause, and particularly from intolerant causes. If, for instance, you provide material support for stripping voting rights from a minority group, or denying hospital visitation rights to couples with a certain sexuality, I would support your employer firing you for that. That applies regardless of whether you’re providing that support via a political or religious group. Political and religious groups shouldn’t enjoy any special protection when they’re doing harmful and intolerant things.
Thinking about it this is not surprising. Most people dream about being at high-positioned jobs/top ranking politicians. Political views is just a noticable part of stuff. Along with perceived incompetency, clan component of relationships (can't find English term for свояченичество), etc. that number perfectly fits into the picture to explain how we justify that dream.
I wouldn't support firing somebody for supporting Trump, but I can definitely understand the sentiment. Trump has pretty well established himself as a racist, and I can imagine how that would not go over well with employees of color.
And right here, you've exposed yourself as a racist.
Are you a 'person of color'? You're presuming to speak for all of them and can't imagine anyone would not share your same political views. Worse, that based on their skin color they must act as some homogeneous group.
No, the question was about business executives. So among other things you can't say "53% of Americans would support firing someone based on a donation to a presidential campaign" since that wasn't the question, it was about business executives.
I'm not sure why it was phrased that way. It seems to be hinting at wealthy people controlling the outcome of elections.
I think it's more that business executives, to a greater degree than people in the trenches, are faces of the company. Being a known supporter of a political candidate who is vilified among the people who buy from you or who you otherwise depend upon for support and cooperation can be a problem.
Sure, I support the right of people to do both of those. I'll compress the moral argument:
A: Support for liberty means I don't want to restrict who works with whom.
B: Veil of Ignorance means I don't want circumstances out of someone's control to result in use of A to discriminate in hire/fire.
C: Individual freedom is important.
D: Societal success is important.
The nuance is not quick-expressible in text, but that's the short form. I believe principles are only useful if they lead to desirable outcomes, so I have no problem special-casing exemptions to these, but I don't think political opinion is worth making a protected hiring class. This is a point where I disagree with California employment law (which does make political affiliation a protected class) and agree with Federal employment law which is more circumspect in its.
On the other hand, I wouldn't fire a person for political affiliation, generally. If it would almost certainly sink my business, then I would.
Makes sense to me. No one wants to get burned at the social media stake. It feels no matter where you land on the political arena you're liable to get reamed by those who think your views are too strong or not strong enough.
"Moderate" views are just the status quo, so of course that's the case. In an oversimplified 1-dimensional view of politics ("both sides") where you have a left, center, and right, you will always be criticized by the other two.
There is absolutely room in the middle for compromise. We are not the extremes put forth by the news agencies, but shades of grey.
Perhaps more bluntly, are you yourself a Nazi, a Communist, or happy with where the US is politically? If you're none of the above (as you likely aren't), then you must be able to see that moderate views can still be left or right-leaning.
Maybe the kindest reading of your comment is that the average person that's overly critical on Facebook only sees in black and white, left vs right. And if so, we completely agree :)
This is nothing to do with the political climate of the US in 2020, it's very much to do with the fact that formative experiences early in my career very strongly influenced the prior that work and personal lives are streams that shall not be crossed, and coworkers are not to be trusted.
It's not just what you don't say, you're also expected to say certain things. I feel like the system at work compels people to believe certain things if they want to stay employed.
I can totally appreciate the desire for simplicity in work, and having a single objective number is about as simple as you can get.
But there's a difference between simplicity in jobs like flipping burgers vs finance, and that's power. If we work in a job that is both powerful AND simple (like many in tech & finance), it's likely many unintended externalities are being created.
Externalities, because they affect others, have strong political ramifications. So if you're working in a field with a lot of power, and you're having simple to nonexistent conversation about externalities, there's a good chance you're contributing to the problems you're trying to avoid discussing by virtue of wielding power blindly.
Perhaps those externalities would be better solved at their source of the workplace rather than let fester in the public sphere. This is a sort of 'ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure' argument for why its important that workplaces engage in these discussions, and why the shareholder value maximization approach is too reductionist for corporate entities of any meaningful size or power.
Maybe there's real discussion going on at the board/C-suite level - which is where the power is anyways. I would not consider the stuff I see at an individual contributor level to be a discussion. If management is involved, then the 'discussion' is more like that of a parent speaking to a child and valid questions tend to be ignored or met with 'answers' that do not address the question at hand.
Agree C-level is where the most easily accessible power resides, but when banded together employees also do have lots of power and can push for things. Hence there's still value of discussion in companies around these ideas.
I work in as a software dev for a financial company. The company does weigh in on political/ideological stuff from the CEO to the managers. Even if that were not the case, silence on some issues could get you in hot water with your coworkers.
Most of the stuff they push, I'm not opposed to in general. My opinions tend to be more focused on the libertarian implementation of achieving those things and adhering to rule of law. This tends to be aligned with the outcomes they say they stand for, but it's not the 'right' answer (liberal).
And don't even think about telling a joke that could even slightly be misinterpreted or overheard by a 3rd party. A guy from my building got fired for moving a diversity poster because somebody thought the action was offensive.
Every discussion of free speech in the US seems to conveniently elide how much control employers have over employees, including the ability to take away their healthcare from them for speech that doesn’t even broach the political. Disagree with your boss too much and good luck paying for your kid’s doctor’s appointments.
Cancel culture is tedious moralizing, but mostly a media spectacle meant to drive attention to various figures and platforms. The average worker has more to fear from those who sign their paychecks than anyone else.
You get to keep your insurance even when you're let go, until you find another job, but you do have to pay out of pocket for it. Probably this expense should be covered by unemployment insurance or something similar.
The average person has little ability to pay out of pocket for COBRA in the event they lose a job. The pandemic is demonstrating this right now. For a family, you’re looking at at least $2000 a month.
> Probably this expense should be covered by unemployment insurance or something similar.
A better solution is to stop deductions for employer-sponsored healthcare and shift the expense from the employer to the employee with a mandate that old employer health insurance premiums be passed on to employees as wages.
That deduction is the largest lever when it comes to the cost of health insurance (short of bad IP policy and regulation of pharma products).
That's what average people refer to as "losing your insurance". They don't have enough money to pay for insurance out of pocket, especially after they have lost their job.
Does it not concern you that a significant portion of those surveyed think it’s okay to fire someone for their (financial) support of a political candidate? You don’t have to talk about it for people to find out — it’s part public record if you are contributing more than $200.
I would strongly support firing my company's CEO if they donated to Trump. And I would not have said that about Romney or McCain.
The problem is not "a political candidate" or even "a highly conservative and deeply capitalistic candidate." The problem is that Trump is a fascist, a vicious racist, and the most corrupt president in American history. Supporting Trump doesn't speak to a difference in political philosophy: it's a fundamental deficit in character.
How could anyone really say that a CEO who donated to Trump is also a CEO committed to a workplace free of bigotry and discrimination? Frankly, the same argument applies to any employee with hiring/firing responsibilities: they should be ashamed for supporting Trump and carry that black mark with them for the rest of their professional lives.
Donald Trump said Mexican immigrants are rapists. If my coworker supports Trump, do they agree with this? I'm Mexican, do they think I'm a rapist? I know a friend who is a DREAMer, i.e., they are undocumented. Are they a rapist? How does my coworker's belief that Mexican immigrants are rapists affect their ability to work with other people? Should I have to wonder these things about someone I'm on a project with?
His remarks are open to interpretation. Note however that he said that "They're not sending their best". One could interpret that to mean that he believes Mexicans as a whole are a fine group of people, but that those who immigrate from Mexico to the US represent a "worse" subgroup of the total group. Charitably, I think this could be characterized as meaning somewhere from "many Mexican immigrants are rapists" to "a higher-than-normal proportion of Mexican immigrants are rapists". In fact we know that immigrants commit crimes at a lower rate than the non-immigrant population.
And setting aside the close-reading and the statistics, we should not be naive about his intention, which is to characterize Mexican immigrants as dangerous criminals. Again, should I have to wonder if my coworker believes this about me or my family?
This is a thread where people are discussing politics, in which I am earnestly participating. Are you saying I'm not allowed to share my politics or ask questions on here? I thought we were concerned about free expression here.
If you'd like to address my questions more specifically, I would be happy to read your response. But attempting to shut down my questions because you disagree with the direction you think they're heading is exactly what I thought we were opposed to.
I think it's safe to assume that your coworker may have these beliefs. It's even highly likely since these are the core beliefs of the person and platform they voted for. Should you wonder about such things? Absolutely. I've worked with worse people though, no doubt, likely actual rapists. It's just a fact of life. Stay away from them and don't talk to them outside of work. Hell, that goes for people who don't think you're a rapist or murderer, but ten times over for those who do. It's possible, but dangerous, to make friends at work.
Heres an alternative way of thinking about it - why are you around someone you dislike? Businesses are not families, but if you cannot get along with your cowokers you cannot be that cooperative with them.
Fundamentally I at least do not want to work with someone who is even still on the level of asking questions like "is racism bad?" or "do women deserve rights?". But a lot of people do do that. If I was hiring... I wouldn't want to hire people thinking like that. Its going to negatively impact what would almost certainly be a diverse group of people trying to cooperatively work together.
It only feels problematic because we each recognize both how biased against the worker the power dynamic in modern western society is and that the job is not merely "the thing you do during the day with your buds" but "the means by which you put food in your mouth and have a bed". If its only about the former breaking relations over political leanings makes perfect sense, for the latter its ruining someones life over "frivolous politics".
I'd rather be in the world where groups dissociate over ideological incompatibilities but where nobody is homeless or hungry for it than the one where ones need for food and shelter is an excuse to let toxic people make life worse for those around them.
I think you’re making a fundamentally incorrect assumption that you have to politically agree with someone to like them or successfully work with them.
At least for me that’s not the case at all.
I guess diversity includes everything but diversity of political opinion?
People in this thread claim to be concerned about others not feeling comfortable expressing their political views. And yet, a sibling to my comment which was simply expressing a political view is flagged/dead. https://i.imgur.com/9UtP4mU.png. Will people speak out for this view, even if they disagree with it?
This "political view" is endorsing ruining/derailing someone's life because they support a cause. And most of it is defamatory towards Trump (because of course it is). This is some nice bait you've posted here. It's got all of the buzzwords in one comment: racist, bigotry, discrimination, conservative, capitalistic, facist, corrupt, and more!
What does this have to do with my comment? I'm not saying the president flagged the thread, I'm saying HN users did. I don't think the president browses HN.
The comment was about firing a CEO who donated to Trump. I'm pointing out that the US is a democracy which doesn't have a king. Being president doesn't mean one can do & act as they want..unlike donating to a would be king who would not be limited/balanced by the other branches of government.
There are kernels of a political opinion in that comment, but it mostly consists of ad hominems against Trump supporters. They have a "fundamental deficit of character", they can't be trusted to avoid "bigotry and discrimination", they should "carry that black mark with them for the rest of their professional lives". I don't consider aggressive personal attacks like this to be political opinions; they're on the same level as wordless screams, attempts to rile people up rather than engage in discourse.
It seems insane to me, too. I guess I'm old-fashioned, but I don't think people should be getting fired for a political position they expressed outside of work.
If Person A can't work with Person B because they don't like their political opinions and Person B keeps their opinions to themselves while on the job, I'd be much more likely to get rid of Person A. I would see them as the person that is causing strife in the workplace, not the other way around.
I keep most not directly work related talk out of work. Not because I think they must not be crossed, or because I'm afraid of someone disagreeing (I'm also fairly far left, so plenty of my views are en vouge at the moment), but because usually there is no time for any nuanced discussions during work hours, so it just ends up being people throwing rehashed phrases at each other while passing by.
I'll happely meet a co-worker over lunch/dinner to discuss things more deeply.
But since over time the workplaces is inevitably shaped by the society it is in, in my opinion we might as well try figure out ways to deal with broader issues while at work, instead of pretending they are isolated. (I'm not saying I have a good solution of how this would look like.)
> I keep most not directly work related talk out of work. Not because I think they must not be crossed, or because I'm afraid of someone disagreeing (I'm also fairly far left, so plenty of my views are en vouge at the moment), but because usually there is no time for any nuanced discussions during work hours, so it just ends up being people throwing rehashed phrases at each other while passing by.
I have noted that the 2 options when talking politics at work are that either 1. you'll disagree, or 2. you'll agree, and I'm not sure which option is worse.
The political environment in the USA is interesting. Common thought is that the media and general sentiment on social media are representative of the countries overall opinion.
But this is not really true, people arent as swayed as the internet likes to believe. It's a giant fabricated hive mind, where a ton of people feel adversarial towards the commonly held opinions, which are in fact, not commonly held.
Interesting...I wonder if there was an implied context for the survey. I think there is a difference between saying something in a discussion between friends over a cup of coffee/glass of beer and putting something in an email or social media of any kind (i.e. anything that leaves a permanent record without the full context of the discussion and crucially missing any non-verbal cues).
Is there any reason to think this self censoring applies when answering to polls ? The "shy X voter" hypothesis is often dismissed (and slightly untestable), but could this be a sign ?
The November US election is going to be very interesting in that regard. If people are truly so upset with the current state of social discourse enough to hold their nose and vote for Trump again, it might just embolden some more vocal and confident push back. Of course, that doesn't seem very likely given all that's going on in the world. But I would have never predicted his winning the first time around either.
I'm not sure people upset with the current state of social discourse have much incentive to vote for an incumbent. That seems inherently counterproductive.
I think that people upset with the dominant narrative may be the reason Trump got elected in the first place. That same socially dominant sector has been railing against him non-stop for 4 years (as well as everything else they're doing). So if some people are afraid of speaking out against that narrative, the idea of secretly punishing it with their vote might come into play.
I really don't know how to avoid overcompensating for failing to "see it coming" in 2016. I was not as confident as many people (reading Scott Adams, at the time, at least made it more of a possibility.)
Now, I simply can't picture the guy not being reelected, no matter how many poll aggregator I can see.
So, my rationalization is that polls are just getting it wrong, again, and are pretty much useless, but that the silent majority will, again, surprise everyone. We need brain scans rather than poll, quickly
Perhaps if the choices were not stark, perhaps if you werene't staring down the barrel of calamity, perhaps if America didn't have the capability to inflict immense suffering around the world or make a huge positive contribution, perhaps if political changes didn't directly affect your livelihood, perhaps if which rights you had and how much violence could be directed at you didn't depend on the politicians in power - perhaps - then we wouldn't need to worry about politics, and could talk about it as if it were the weather.
Politics has always been high-stakes, but politicizing everything would effectively mean destroying society.
"I am a pro-choice atheist. When I lived in Ireland, one of my friends was a pro-life Christian. I thought she was responsible for the unnecessary suffering of millions of women. She thought I was responsible for killing millions of babies. And yet she invited me over to her house for dinner without poisoning the food. And I ate it, and thanked her, and sent her a nice card, without smashing all her china."
It can be summarized as " Instead the iconoclast can choose what I think of as the Kolmogorov option. This is where you build up fortresses of truth in places the ideological authorities don’t particularly understand or care about, like pure math, or butterfly taxonomy, or irregular verbs. You avoid a direct assault on any beliefs your culture considers necessary for it to operate. You even seek out common ground with the local enforcers of orthodoxy."
I just went to it from the parent comment, then checked the main page which notes:
[EDIT 7/21: This post is now a month old, and I am cautiously optimistic that the Times has changed their mind. There is no further need to take any of the actions described below.]
Most interesting to me is how common this is across demographic groups.
>Self‐ censorship is widespread across demographic groups as well. Nearly two‐ thirds of Latino Americans (65%) and White Americans (64%) and nearly half of African Americans (49%) have political views they are afraid to share. Majorities of men (65%) and women (59%), people with incomes over $100,000 (60%) and people with incomes less than $20,000 (58%), people under 35 (55%) and over 65 (66%), religious (71%) and non‐ religious (56%) all agree that the political climate prevents them from expressing their true beliefs.
(D) might be in for the bigger surprise than the ones Upper East Siders saying "No one is going to vote for Nixon. I have all kinds of friends and none of them is pro-Nixon"
Well as a POC, there's plenty of things I don't feel comfortable sharing. A lot is situational. It's really hard sharing anything that might make people realize they might not be as "progressive" as they think they are – regardless of where they are on the political spectrum.
Liberals are frequently unaware of their blind spots (but if you take care, they can be corrected). And then there's a swath of conservatives that don't think they're racist. If you should suggest it, it's too easy for them to dig themselves deeper into a hole.
All too frequently, I'll wish I stuck to non-political / comfortable topics – and remembered that political-correctness is there to protect me as an individual, so I can live in my bubble and get on with the day, even though PC-culture might be bad policy for society.
Mostly people are not mad at me for this but for other things I guess.
In fact I have had a foreigner come back and thank me several years later for the effort I put in for her and there are several others that seem happy evertime I meet them.
(HN is a weird place though. Here I am racist according to many peoples definitions.)
Ding ding ding! Yes. We all are. Conservatives and liberals.
Everyone is programmed with racist attitudes from the culture-at-large. Many or most never question these unconscious attitudes.
In my experience, folks who have been actively working on racism and social justice for years if not decades are the first to admit that they too carry racist, largely unconscious, beliefs and attitudes.
A lot of people don't seem to grok unconscious bias.
Racism, also called racialism, the belief that humans may be divided into separate and exclusive biological entities called “races”; that there is a causal link between inherited physical traits and traits of personality, intellect, morality, and other cultural and behavioral features; and that some races are innately superior to others.
Ding ding ding! Yes. We all are. Christians and Jews.
Everyone is born with original sin from being born from Adam and Eve. Many or most never question this concupiscence.
In my experience, folks who have been actively working on heresy and inquisitions for years if not decades are the first to admit that they too carry rebellious, largely hereditary, inclinations towards sin.
My analysis as a reader is that there might be something to it. On the one hand, the concept of original sin sounds deeply unfair, but then again, when you look at society, it's kinda hard to deny that most people really are drawn to all sorts of prejudice, selfishness, etc, and it takes real effort to recognise that, admit it, and work to improve. A lot of people feel like they don't need to do that because their arrogance tells them they're already doing everything right. I don't think that's ever the case.
> On the one hand, the concept of original sin sounds deeply unfair, but then again, when you look at society, it's kinda hard to deny that most people really are drawn to all sorts of prejudice, selfishness, etc, and it takes real effort to recognise that, admit it, and work to improve.
As a christian I feel this is a major thing: the realization that you can be perfectly innocent in that you:
- didn't do anything that any law can punish you for
- wasn't aware of doing anything wrong as you were doing it
yet you are far from perfect and when you minutes/days/years later you realize despite your best intentions you still bragged/discriminated/were unfair/went too far/didn't go far enough/etc and you'll be sorry and wish you could do better.
To keep this interesting to everyone in this audience I think I'll avoid going further into the topic unless anyone asks but for anyone particularly interested I'll say that I think this is what Paul grapples with in in Romans 7.
You are suggesting that modern society is fighting human nature then. That's unwinnable, barring genetic modification. Also, the idea of an original sin is a very christian thing which makes the advocacy of that view ... religioist?
Societies ban actions, not subconscious thoughts. People can fantasize about polygamy or rape or bestiality as long as they are not realized. Societies that suppress thoughts are called oppressive.
Being human is all about going against your instincts. We're not merely animals; we can learn and improve, we can think about consequences, we can better ourselves. This is what all of human history has been about. We might never reach a perfect end-state, but that doesn't mean that improvement is not a worthwhile endeavor.
Women and men can both be sexist towards women, and hold generalised negative prejudices and biases towards men. (what some people would call sexism towards men.)
Similarly black people can both be racist towards black people, and similarly hold negative generalised prejudices and biases towards non-black people. (What some people refer to as racism.)
I apologize if it made you feel that and it wasn't comfortable. But part of my consideration in saying that was... this is not politically correct to say (i.e. that it might sound like all conservatives are racist), and I don't know how else to say it, so, I'll say it.
But I do appreciate that you called it out.
I grapple with being racist all the time. The way I climbed up was through a lot of institutions that racist. I grapple with my complicated place in the world, when I talk to my shrink, and not infrequently, because there's a lot of non-PC / uncomfortable things about it all too. I can't get away from both sides of the racism, because of the genes I was born with, so I have to talk about it with someone. If people don't like the whole politically-correct thing, well, this is it too.
That is a good attitude, in line with what others are talking about with "original sin".
My and I guess many others point in this thread is that a lot of people are running around alienating a lot of people who would be ashamed to even catch themselves thinking a racist thought by insisting they are "racist" since they might have implicit biases.
Supporting the racists because you think it's better for your wallet is still racist. Supporting policies that hurt POCs disproportionately is racist even if you don't understand why.
When someone points out something is racist, is your response to explain why it isn't or change?
Because that person believes their point of view must be taken as truth and cannot be questioned because of the color of their skin. We used to call this "racist".
Excuse me? If you don’t mind, can you please point out the sentence or phrase lambdasquirrel said that would indicate to you that they consider their point of view must be taken as truth and cannot be questioned?
They were just giving their opinion based on their perspective, and their status as a person of color was something they felt was an important detail since the original article involved demographic data, and you jumped down their throat over it.
Being POC doesn't make you any more or less right - considering that nothing of what you wrote is exclusively applicable to POC in US.
You created a narrative that any opposition to your opinion will be instantly regarded as racist. (That said, I disagree with the prejudiced person above)
> Being POC doesn't make you any more or less right
That is obviously true. However when someone is describing thier personal experience, that context is quite useful, which was clearly what was going on in the original comment.
I did mention that not one part of that comment is actually specific to being POC. The comment lacks the subject that explains where that matters. Without that relevant context, the first few words seem to be just a shield from criticism. I suspect that that is a slip by the OP, but it is easily interpreted as "I'm POC, so shut up"
For example - As a gay man I notice subtle prejudice against me in the use of "gay" in negative connotations. (being gay is relevant to the experience here)
> And then there's a swath of conservatives that don't think they're racist
You do realize you are taking a gigantic group of people and classifying them all as having some property without knowing the person at all, sounds discriminatory.
And realize you used the word conservative, not Republican, so don't base it on policy decisions that people support as we all known Republicans do not represent conservative policies in most cases you are concerned about. These are two different things which are not inclusive or mutually exclusive.
As I said to another comment, this is all just a restatement in flowery terms of “if you’re not with me you’re against me”. And that should scare people.
Someone who was 'neutral' in the civil rights era on the topic of Jim Crow would be implicitly supporting Jim Crow. Their neutrality implies tolerance of the injustice that was the state of things at the time.
I find this statement confusing. The Jim Crow laws were a source of injustice, not an answer to it. Did you mean the civil rights act and related laws?
Tolerance is not support. That's why we have different words for it. For example, you probably tolerate the marketing of sugary drinks. Does that mean you support Coca Cola?
Political change does not happen overnight, or everything would already be perfect. I would much rather someone "implicitly support Jim Crow" while remaining open to change when the tide finally shifts, than for them to be forced to pick a side and dig in their heels as an explicit supporter.
“You always told me ‘It takes time.’ It’s taken my father’s time, my mother’s time, my uncle’s time, my brothers’ and my sisters’ time. How much time do you want for your progress?”
I don't see how that is a response to the core of what I said. It's lamentable that change takes so long, and this is often used as an excuse to discourage progress. But I was making the point that when you force an indifferent person to pick a side, you're most likely creating more opposition to your cause.
I'm fascinated by how each of these restatements in some ways say the exact same thing but also strongly imply very different moral choices. Another restatement might be: "If you don't die on this hill, you leave me to die on it."
I think the key difference between Tutu's phrasing and "if you're not with me you're against me", is that the former presumes some people don't have the luxury of choosing sides and they are requesting support from people who do. If you are, for example, Black in the US, you can't really choose to not make racism a priority, since you will experience its effects whether you like it or not.
"If you're not with me you're against me" doesn't imply anything about the speaker's own agency. In that sense, I think it's a less compassionate thing to say, because the listener chould just as well ask them to change sides. Tutu's framing makes it clearer that not everyone has that freedom.
Ah but the definition of justice isn't exactly absolute, is it? It's also subject to bias, interpretation, information, and tons of grey area isn't it?
People tend to choose silence not from indifference, but as a form of self-preservation. So it makes sense to me that you would want to do this, but it is absolutely not a neutral position.
> "If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor" - Desmond Tutu
I don't really like this quote.
It starts off with a false premise, because neutrality is required in order to have justice. A neutral assessment of oppression is that it's wrong.
What Desmond Tutu is really getting at is that so-called "neutrality" which defends the status quo when the status quo is oppression is wrong. But that's not what actual neutrality would do.
And then the quote gets put forth to quash demands for actual neutrality as illegitimate, even when the people in need of it are the victims rather than the oppressors.
> It starts off with a false premise, because neutrality is required in order to have justice.
I mean that's just not true? There are quite a few subjects that are currently polarized where each side considers theirs to be just and enforcing it justice.
> neutrality is required in order to have justice.
This seems like the opposite of the truth. Surely justice in most cases is looking at a dispute between two or more parties and deciding which party is right and which is wrong and to what extent. It’s very much the opposite of neutrality.
As a very basic example, neutrality in adjudicating a theft of property is to side with the thief and not demand the return of the property.
One thing that has slowly eroded American ideals (IMO) is the politicization of literally everything. Not only can you not have or share a "bad" thought on politics itself...but something completely unrelated to politics (that is now politicized) is also something you could be burned at the stake for. Then there are just people that share their politics openly and often to spite others.
We've essentially split into two Americas, one red and one blue. The people in the middle (which I generally identify with) are left in the cold...and not only are left in the cold but are attacked by both sides for not abiding by the doctrine. Honestly, the Left is the worst at this. They will actively try to ruin your life over wrongthink. I am much more likely to share a controversial opinion with someone on the Right than on the Left. But it's both sides, a local race here has a Republican attacking another Republican...for endorsing Romney in 2012. It's like I'm living in a bizarro world.
It's literally not; how do you know I don't support the status quo? I'm just pointing out that being "apolitical" is a political stance, whether or not you agree with that stance.
There aren’t “two main sides” in US politics. There are two parties and choosing either comes with a metric fuck-ton of positions. Generally supporting Democrats just because they support one position you agree with is dumber than not supporting either side.
Well ironically, the great grandparent also lacks nuance. I think your comment is the one the brings it forward, and is more valuable than the great grandparent for that reason.
> You could also be apolitical because you find all available options to be unacceptable
Is this apolitical, or is it having a politics that is not well represented? It seems more like the latter to me.
I think being apolitical is more about having an objective view and judging opinions based on merit rather than the political spectrum they originated from. Could also mean you're either are against all political views, or have none, but this last one seems less likely to happen in practice. People tend to have an opinion, more or less informed or objective as it may be.
Exactly. Anybody who earnestly tries to be informed will realize that there are limits to what they know and subjects for which they are not [yet] informed. There needs to be room for people to say "I'm not informed on that issue, so I don't have an opinion."
As I like to say; why would we have a word 'apolitical' if we can't imagine a thing that is accepted as apolitical? It would be a rather useless adjective.
It is completely reasonable for someone to say they don't like the status quo but also are uncertain about whether a policy improves on the status quo due to their limited knowledge. If that isn't being apolitical we may as well strike the word from the dictionary. It is technically a political stance, but it is not forceful enough to be called support of anything.
I keep to myself because I don't trust people to take my slight differences of opinion with appropriate calm. I've been burned one too many times by "you don't agree with my concept/idea/candidate you're a literal fucking monster." No thanks, I could have been your ally but I'll just stay home.
I should add, this goes in both directions and I see it from both sides of the political spectrum. I consider myself an independent. I try to judge all issues individually and fall into different camps depending on what we're talking about, but political dialogue has become so toxic that I've gotten to the point where I just cast my vote and move on.
If you are not against the oppressor, if you are okay with allowing oppression to continue happening for any reason, you are on the side of the oppressor. You cannot be an ally from a neutral position, you need to pick your side and commit.
This is why if you want to be an ally to people of color it's not enough to not be racist, but rather you need to be anti-racist. We're seeing more and more how neutrality is dangerous in allowing systemic issues to exist and flourish (see elected Democrats in major American cities, the "not racists", allowing the police state to exist and perpetuate systemic racism). If you want to be an ally, you need to become comfortable admitting that the privileged position of neutrality isn't compatible with allyship.
It is. Sorry it is. I am not American and the whole two party thing annoys the heck out of me, but politics is the question of how we (or others) organize how we live with each other. This spans from mundane things like whether you can paint your fence in the color you like to fundamental existential questions that regard your safety and wellbeing.
If you think you hold no political opinion this is usually a sign that you can afford to do so. Just like my grandfather who fought in the Wehrmacht and said afterwards that he wasn't convinced, he just went the easy way and didn't question his orders. Was that apolitical? I don't think so — it was more an excuse he told himself to avoid responsibility for what he helped create.
Sorry, but sometimes inaction is political, because it means you are willing to give the controls to the next person who grabs it as long as you don't think you will end up worse off. "I don't care what happens to anyone but me", may sound apolitical, but it really isn't.
People just put different meaning into "support". There are some who honestly believe you can support something through apathy and there are some who, just as honestly, believe that support is an action and hence cannot happen through inaction.
Interestingly, both meanings are in the dictionary[1] and the argument that there is just one is either coming from ignorance or bad faith. The GP's "being apolitical just means you support the status quo" definitely looks like a troll. It uses "support" as "endure" (an unusual meaning in such a context) but implies "support" as "promote".
This is indeed a quite tricky question. Trickier than one would intuitivly think.
Back when I studied ethics we were talking about the famous trolly problem. The professor proposed multiple scenarios and after each asked the auditorium who would act and who wouldn't. I can vividly remember three points:
1. Even seemingly clear cut ethical questions weren't clear cut at all. Rarely as much as 80:20 more often 60:40
2. Doing nothing always gets a perk over doing smomething. If you do something you might have done the wrong thing and feel silly for it - if you do nothing it is easier to brush off.
3. When the professor rephrased a scenario in such a way that you had to take basically the same decision, but your role was more direct (instead of pulling a lever to sacrifice one person, you'd have to push them in front of the trolly) nearly nobody would do so.
These differences in perception of indirect and direct effect is what we use to excuse ourselves in cases where our inaction would have saved lives ("I could have easily pulled the lever and saved four lives" VS "I couldn't have pushed that person in front of the trolly, even if it would have saved lives").
Similarily my grandfather's generation would have said: "There was nothing I could have done to stop it anyways" - with the unspoken part beeing "without taking a personal burden". Note that we live in one of the few areas where people were hiding in the mountains to resist the Nazis and these were partely people he personally knew. So he knew one could do something, he just either didn't dare, chose to (conveniently for him) not think about it, or only felt sorry in hindsight.
As another data point: At least where I grew up not helping someone in need (e.g. of first aid) is a felony, as long as the circumstances allowed you to help. Not sure how this is in the US tho
This is not a trolley problem and is just a language trick: "to support" means "to quietly endure" and "to promote". If you wanted to a variant of a trolley problem for this it would be: there is a lever, if you pull it then something happens (you don't know what) and if you don't pull it then something else or the same thing continues to happen (you don't know what will or won't happen).
And this is sidetracking. Even in the original trolley problem you don't know what is or isn't going to happen. For the sake of the thought experiment you certainly could just assume mathematical precision, but nowhere does it say you must.
Back to the trolley problem and the thesis of everything being a subject of politics as in politics as "the principles relating to or inherent in a sphere or activity, especially when concerned with power and status." and "a particular set of political beliefs or principles".
Is a rich aristocrat on the court of the french king who puts sticks down his throat so he can vomit and eat on while the poor starve at the gates apolitical? This aristocrat is completely minding his own business, might even be a very nice soul who never hurt a fly.
In my eyes there is rarely any way to act apolitical. Even if you exile yourself in the desert that would be a choice that e.g. influences your family. This influence on your surrounding world is what makes things political, because we constantly decide how to interact with the society around us. And it doesn't matter if you hold strong political opinions or are oblivious to everything, what you do is still a part of politics (e.g. by signaling others what is commonly accepted behavior and which your (polical) values are. Do you pull the lever and kill the man or do you let the five other people die? What if they are kids? What if they are old people? What if they are black?
Decisions like these are not arbitrary, they show us fundamental truths of how we think and work in relation to our surroundings, and this is – in my book – political.
>And this is sidetracking. Even in the original trolley problem you don't know what is or isn't going to happen.
Indeed. The premise of the problem is that you believe that a certain action will cause a certain effect and the actual effects of your actions do not matter as it's an ethical and not mechanical, medical or engineering problem.
>In my eyes there is rarely any way to act apolitical.
It is understood. I just wanted to make you aware that in some other people eyes it's bonkers.
The problem is most people are spectators in their own country, not citizens. And they do have the luxury of apathy. It may very well be true they consider having an opinion on civil matters too strenuous, meaning it would take them away from the daily entertainment, the need to get attention, rather than paying attention. There's nothing to be done about it really. It's a kind of corruption and a cultural rot. George Carlin called these people dumbass motherfuckers. And I think that's diplomatic. Bullshit jobs, bullshit life, they are there to earn money only to spend it all to enrich someone else. It's so terrible they can't even be bothered to have an opinion about how civil society is organized, because really what they're living is something of a nightmare. They are so ignorant, they have anti-imagination. You give them an idea by historical reference, and it's instant annihilation, and time for more bonbons. The capacity to have a conversation just doesn't exist.
And there were all kinds of ignorant kids, grew up in podunk poor towns, but still had an opinion about the civil and the uncivil. They were certainly political. And they volunteered to fight fascism and quite a lot of them died for it. Now, fascism is just name calling. It's not a real thing that exists, or could exist. It's just politics, which is also unimportant and mostly make believe. It's something that his site considers anti-intellectual.
So when people intentionally refuse to think and wilfully run from fundamental truth, the situation is pretty dire. Apolitical is indistinguishable from apathy. Perhaps some part of it's cognitive dissonance, that at least suggests there's an awareness of a conflict that matters enough to ignore because it's more comfortable.
In "The Coddling of the American Mind" Jonathan Haidt speaks of catastrophizing. I believe the new cult of Puritanism is from a place of catastrophizing.
You always own the option of having no opinion. There is never any need to get worked up or to trouble your soul about things you can't control. These things are not asking to be judged by you. Leave them alone.
― Marcus Aurelius, Meditations
Nobody is obliged to vote on a matter. At least not in America, I've heard it might be different in Australia. When I feel as though I cannot make an informed decision, I choose not to vote. Why should my uninformed vote be so valued that I'm obliged to give it? What utility is there in an uninformed vote?
My politics are outside the Overton window to the point I'm just depending on the rest of my fellow citizens not to make their mess my mess with their choices.
Were you saying this in a comedic way, as a parody of the thinking the parent complained about? Because it's exactly that, intentional or not.
Politics is about applying collective power from an entity funded by taxpayers. There is nothing political about the decision of whether or not to assist an elderly woman who is lost, or volunteer to coach a youth basketball team, or you know, just do decent things to make the world a better place that doesn't require the application of the collective power of our government institutions.
Not true. “The Earth revolves around the sun” is not a political statement. “Climate change is real, and is caused by humans”, however is equally true but for some (really bad) reasons, it is a political statement.
If we move from scientific facts to moral once: “Slavery is bad and should be illegal” is not a political statement. Meanwhile “Women have the rights to their own bodies” is (also for a very bad reason) a political statement.
If we would give climate-deniers and anti-abortion biggots the platform they deserve (i.e. none) their viewpoints would only be as fringe as the once of the flat earth conspiracy theory—i.e. not relevant because their obviously wrong, and therefor not political.
> “Slavery is bad and should be illegal” is not a political statement.
This is a political statement. I'm not sure how the world "political" drifted away from the meaning of law, rulers, and representation to whatever it means now. Any statement about what the law should be is political. Any statement about how best to change or preserve laws, specifically or generally, is political.
edit: Whether global warming is anthropogenic or not is not political. What we should do about it (or not do about it if we don't think it's real or we don't think it's important) is political.
Some of these things should not be as controversial as they are, though. Many people are resistant to supporting the right thing because they fear it will threaten their own comfort.
"The Earth revolves around the sun" was a highly political statement for part of history and still is (among hard-core fringe Christian apologists) in a minority of cases. You could even argue it's disrespectful to the 30% of Americans who believe the Bible to be literally true.
So it is a political statement, but not controversial to say in most situations.
> Not true. “The Earth revolves around the sun” is not a political statement. “Climate change is real, and is caused by humans”, however is equally true but for some (really bad) reasons, it is a political statement.
I disagree. Those are both political statements for precisely the same reason. You're just very unlikely to find people with political power or influence disagreeing with the first statement (although that wasn't true in the past!).
"If we would give climate-deniers and anti-abortion biggots the platform they deserve"
My wife happens to be vehemently opposed to abortion, and also a woman of color. Yet you associated her with a bigot and climate change denial.
Which exposes similar thinking to what the OP was talking about:
Not everything is political, but because my wife thinks differently from you on terminating fetuses due to her having worked in a neonatal ICU with premature babies, she's a bigot? Sounds like you are in a tribe and are lumping my wife into the opposing tribe based on one opinion she holds.
By the way, I find it ironic that your last sentence that condemns view points that differ from your own to be silenced and then mentions flat-earthers. The original flat-earthers gave Galileo the platform they thought he deserved: a life sentence in prison. They were confident and lacked the intellectual humility to believe opposing views should be countered, not suppressed. Ring a bell?
Note I specifically said that the platforms climate change deniers and anti-abortion bigots is no platform. I did not advocate for imprisoning these people. That would be wrong. People have the rights to their opinion, even though their opinion is wrong.
That said, wrong opinions—which I am willing to state exist—do not deserve to be elevated, they do deserve scrutiny if stated.
Banning abortions is a wrong opinion. Perhaps some people have some reason to hold this opinion, and perhaps not all of these people are bigots (although many are). However they are still wrong. And when these wrong options are stated, they do deserve to be scrutinized, and they don’t deserve to be elevated in the general discourse.
I happen to share your opinion that banning abortions is not an ideal solution, and therefore I don't support it.
However, your statement "banning abortions is a wrong opinion" is itself an opinion. Yet you stated it as if it's a scientific certainty, when in fact it's an opinion you don't share. My wife and I debate it all the time, and it comes down to a prioritization difference in my mind vs her mind. I prioritize the privacy and rights of the pregnant woman over the future existence of the fetus. She views the fetus identically to one that has exited the birth canal and is now a baby. She doesn't think there is a break in the continuum.
I disagree with her entirely, but that doesn't make me right and her wrong. It just means that I put a higher priority on the woman's freedom than I do on the right of the fetus to develop into a human. It's amusing to me that when my wife and I argue about this topic, she is focused on the rights of the fetus, and I'm focused on the rights of the woman. We aren't having one argument over a woman's rights, we are having two arguments simultaneously. This is a nuanced view that the current political debate doesn't allow for. Her view was obviously influenced by walking into a hospital and watching parents pray by the side of incubators containing 26 week preemies, and then seeing activists debating whether third-trimester abortions should be banned. I certainly don't blame her for having that opinion when she has to reconcile those two ideas simultaneously. It's a lot easier to hold the opinion that you and I share when we view fetuses clinically rather than in incubators.
I agree: “Can opinions be wrong?” is an unresolved philosophical question. I am of the opinion that they can, and you may disagree with my. Under my philosophical framework your disagreement is not wrong.
However I don’t see the statement “Women have rights to their bodies” as an unresolved political question. I see it as a pretty clear truth, as true as “slavery is wrong and should be illegal”. I have my reasons to believe this is so (which I won’t go into because we are debating whether “everything is political”, not abortion rights). So under my philosophical framework anti-abortion is a wrong opinion to have. And I am certainly not the only person to believe this.
Galileo was not jailed at all, but got house arrest. And he got it mainly because he insulted the pope. Before that, he was actually on very good terms with the pope and the pope was seriously entertaining the idea of heliocentrism, but wasn't convinced because the evidence didn't add up, which indeed it didn't, because Galileo insisted on circular orbits that didn't match observations. Galileo was right about heliocentrism, but his model for it was incorrect, and that was a big factor in why it wasn't adopted. Asked by the pope to write a book to discuss the merits of heliocentrism and geocentrism in a balanced way, he instead used that book to insult the pope (he had a character called 'Simplico', or 'Fool', use arguments the pope had used), after which he fell out of favour, got investigated by the inquisition, which added a heresy charge for good measure. But for a long time his ideas weren't considered heretical at all and were seriously considered.
Sorry, I don’t understand the statement. Intersex people exist, however there can be interference soon after birth which pushes them into developing more like one sex over the other. Is this interference a biological process? I don’t know. Is this statement political? Probably... not. I don’t know.
I will wait for an trans/intersex person who is well versed in LGBTQ+ policy to answer.
"Trying to forcibly deplatform an widely held opinion doesn't work and may need to it's resurgence" is another fact that people unfortunately do not understand.
If you want to deplatform anti-abortion people, you need to show to them that their understanding of when a cell becomes a human is wrong. The only way to do that is to have widely used technology of growing a baby from any cell artificially, and for that we need to remove the 14 day limit on embryo exexperimentation.
I guess these silly generalizations can go on ad infinitum and we end up with every concept A describes any situation B.
It reminds me of what happens to the numbers if we allow for 2 + 2 = 5 to be true. Effectively 1 will end up being equal to 0, and since every number multiplied by 1 is it self, and every number multiplied by 0 is 0, we end up with all numbers being equal to 0. Effectively rendering them useless.
I think the one of the big things that makes things political is coercion. If you are using the power of the state to advance a controversial goal then it is political.
Take for example how we got to religious freedom. In the past, if you were the wrong religion, you would be tortured and executed.
In a lot of places, this led to horrendous religious wars where literally millions of people died. In the end, we ended up with freedom of religion as a compromise. The state would no longer compel you to choose a religion.
Of course each religion thought they were right and the others were wrong. But they stopped using the power of the state to compel conversions. They would still proselytize and try to persuade other people to join their faith, but they stopped trying to use the power of the state to compel people. After that, religion became a lot more apolitical.
Sometimes begin apoliticial means you don't think it is worth using the power of the state to change the status quo. You may be against the status quo, and think debate or persuasion is more effective.
In addition, reference to the status quo in the quote is simplistic. A lot of times the status quo is like an armistice line between two warring sides. Many times the status quo includes things you are for and things you are against. Maybe the way the status quo is right now, the benefit of the things you are for, is greater than the burden of the things you are against. If you try to change the status quo, you may end up destabilizing the status quo so much, that when the new equilibrium is reached, you end up losing some of things you were for.
Or being apolitical just means you don’t have time or inclination to obsess about the political origins and implications of every atomic micro-decision in your day because doing so is a tremendously tedious and unproductive burden that frequently yields no meaningful insight or behavior change. Not every one needs to be an activist about every thing.
If a person feels strongly about some special political cause, fantastic, they ought to make their case convincingly. But the idea of castigating others for not putting in the time or enthusiasm to share their superior moral clarity is exhausting.
I generally agree. It's impossible to have a knowledgable position on every single issue, and a full-time job to have a position on whatever is popular in a given week. The end result is that on most issues, most of us default to the status quo, because, well, that's how the status quo works. It's literally the default until enough people care to change it.
In other words, "you don’t have time or inclination to obsess about the political origins and implications of every atomic micro-decision in your day because doing so is a tremendously tedious and unproductive burden that frequently yields no meaningful insight or behavior change" is a lot of words to say that you support the status quo.
I think everybody does, on issues that aren't important to them.
Semantics, but I view “support” as an active measure.
There are loads of issues folks are just not engaged with enough to have a qualified opinion (their perspective not mine), which is fine. I view that as living in the status quo but not necessarily evidence of endorsing the status quo.
For instance, do we really expect your average citizen (American in this case) to have a thought out POV on qualified immunity? Policing tactics? Effective tactics to address diversity in the workplace? Herd immunity? Actuarial risk assessment of economic activity during the pandemic? If not are they supporting the status quo?
I think most people just shrug and I don’t blame them. Processing information in the era of the death of expertise has made even having an opinion right now an absolute hellscape.
You're equivocating on the word "support". Actively supporting whoever is currently in power is not the same as not caring enough to bother or being on the fence as to which side to support.
A centrist isn't always someone who's avoiding working on problems or avoiding decisions. A centrist can be someone who believes that different people see different parts of various problems and that solutions can come from people who aren't subscribed to a set political party.
Centrists see themselves as imminently reasonable, sure. But virtually everyone believes "that different people see different parts of various problems and that solutions can come from people who aren't subscribed to a set political party." It's not a defining characteristic of centrists, it's a a defining characteristic of people who think of themselves as reasonable. IMO, the defining characteristic of centrists is that they think that they're the only reasonable ones and that everyone else is an ideologue.
At their worst, sure. At their best, it's someone who aspires to remain "centered" in their analysis, without letting it lead to arrogance over others.
Honestly, I think some people just want a break. And I can both respect that AND firmly believe that if a musician, for example, wants to make a comment on current events as part of their performance, they absolutely should.
I've been told that "taking a neutral position, when privileged, is unethical."
(I understand the postmodern thrust here, and I actually to some degree agree with it, but at the limit this completely obliterates any pretense of objectivity - even within science.)
I don't think you understand the point of centrists.
Centrists agree that choices need to be made. Centrists think that some of those choices should go in one direction, some in the other, and most in a direction not presented by either side. Centrists believe in logic, discourse, and evidence to get to choices, over ideology. Centrists believe in looking for solutions which work for everyone when possible. Etc.
Everyone hates centrists, since if you disagree on charters OR abortion OR charters OR race OR police OR .... with someone on the left or on the right, they think you're a horrible person. You'll always disagree on at least one axis.
Charter schools: They work great with proper checks-and-balances. They should be not-for-profits, follow extensive transparency laws, have salary caps, and strong civil rights protections. They should compete with public schools without restrictions beyond that. If public schools go under because of better competitors, more power to them!
Medicine: Works great pure free market. Works great purely nationalized. What we don't want is a complex network of regulations from lobbyists combined with mandatory insurance (whether by government regulation or by practicality). Both the far-right and the far-left solutions would work great! We've landed in a no-man's land in between.
Gun control: It's a reasonable policy, but rule-of-law should prevail. We've got a Constitution for a reason, and we should follow it, even if it feels unreasonable. If we disagree, we should amend it.
Race: The left is correct about most of the problems, and bonkers about most of the solutions. We need to have an open national discourse about changes, and to do that, we need free speech and to get rid of cancel culture. The left's oppression of free speech contributes to the systemic oppression they're trying to eliminate.
... and so on.
You don't need to agree with the above, but they're strong, principled stances, agreeing with neither side.
I’m not sure those are centrist positions. On the first one, I disagree with you on the science. On the second, you explicitly pointed put why centrism is bad (and with important qualifications, I sort of agree with the point you were making there). With respect to guns... meh that might be centrist, but it’s not really specific enough to base actual policy and constitutional law on - the history is also much more complex than you imply. With respect to race, I’d suggest you’re painting with an absurdly broad brush that doesn’t reflect the actual ideological spectrum.
In my opinion, trying to be “centrist” is more of an aesthetic choice than actually related to ideology.
What I will give you is that any community where honest discussion of actual, specific issues is impossible is toxic... but in practice I see that critique most often wielded by dishonest provocateurs.
2) Each of those is an essay or two to justify. Of course they're not specific. This isn't a political essay. I'm giving examples -- enough to understand the gist, not the nuance.
3) In modern America, all of these views piss everyone off -- left AND right. If you articulate most of them, you'll get fired WHOEVER your boss is AND uninvited to the family dinner.
That this "critique [is] most often wielded by dishonest provocateurs" is precisely because everyone else is afraid to speak. In a functioning civic society, we'd have many opinions like the ones above, and we'd all discuss them and work towards the best solutions. I've found that the best solution to "dishonest provocateurs" is still to assume the best intentions until shown otherwise.
1. I know, I also don’t think its meaningfully “centrist”.
2. Not sure what your point is here - you originally pointed out why either right or left solutions would be good, but the compromise is bad.
3. I don’t think that’s true - believe it or not it is still possible to discuss actual issues. I certainly do, with people who disagree with me.
So... there are a few positions on which you might be a “moderate”, but I don’t see any argument actually presented for why centrist solutions are preferable to those backed up by an actual ideological goal.
I think you define "centrist" differently than I do.
Your definition seems to be "split the left-and-right down the middle." That's not the one I've heard or used.
That's okay; words are used differently in different places, but I'm not sure we're actually disagreeing as much as initial posts suggested. Most people I know who consider themselves "centrists" hold a mixture of left-wing and right-wing views. They don't just find the median opinions.
I think what you call "centrist," where I live would be called a "moderate."
None of this is strong or principled. What's the principle?
* Charter schools: Politicians create charter school setups that don't have proper checks and balances and tend to completely shirk their responsibility to public schools in the process. Your statement isn't some fringe idea. It's just not why charter schools are pushed. If you take a look at what happens with charter schools you'd see why people get divided on them. We aren't presented with a rational system. We're presented with a system that gets hijacked to push religious schools and/or defund public schools without.
* Medicine: "Works great pure free market." - Citation Needed. No one will give us your far left solution.
* Gun control: In case you haven't noticed, we aren't allowed to question it. We aren't even allowed to study it. This game is rigged.
* Race: How does cancel culture play into this? I'm not allowed to find a different Applebees if the manager is a racist? "The left's oppression of free speech" - do tell.
Many poor countries have free market medicine: the number of medical providers is not constrained by a guild system; new drugs and medical procedures are regulated lightly if at all; pricing is completely transparent; patients can choose their standard of care, and there is extensive unbundling (e.g. a surgeon gives you a recommended list of supplies, and you have the option to obtain them yourself in any way you wish); non-emergency procedures must be paid for in cash in advance (which tends to result in prices being reasonable); the very poor rely on charities or an extremely basic state-funded backstop.
Such systems are surprisingly efficient and often seem to work better than the lawyer- and lobbyist-designed mess of American healthcare.
This reads a lot like "My very-conservative positions are centrist."
I don't think you'd find very many people willing to agree those positions are centrist.
Which is fine. Your positions are your positions, and obviously you hold them because you think them to be reasonable. But "centrist?" I don't think so.
You're both applying a wildly subjective label whose meaning nobody can agree on. I happen to think (as a relatively centrist American living on the West Coast) that those opinions are indeed "centrist". They might count as "very conservative" in the part of the country I live in, but in many other parts they would be distinctly "liberal" (another word whose meaning has been utterly scrambled).
In general I think there's a tendency for politically engaged people to put "views I disagree with" in the "other" bin, and everyone defines "extreme" and "center" to reflect their particular idea of what the sane, morally correct opinion is. There were plenty of people on the left who seemed to think Warren (for example) was a centrist neoliberal sellout.
This is exactly it. Every conservative I speak with thinks I'm Joseph Stalin, and every liberal thinks I'm Adolf Hitler. I've stopped talking to people about these things.
What's amazing about it is you can voice disagreement in just one place, and you're either a liberal snowflake or a Trump-supporting racist. It doesn't seem to matter which place you disagree, or whether your disagreement falls on the other side of the political spectrum.
What terrifies me even more is when the same tribalism leads people on either side to start reflexively defending their entire "side" - thus the right-wing fondness for Pinochet or Franco, or the left-wing fondness for Castro or Maduro (just to cherry-pick some examples). Sooner or later you just end up delegitimizing liberal democracy altogether (which I'm sure is the entire point, for some).
I live in Texas. The list of more-conservative areas in this country is very small. I am surrounded by conservatives, and these views are very common among right-wingers.
Pro-charter schools, free market medicine, 2nd amendment over all, free speech and "cancel culture" as prime issues of race -- these are generally in line with conservative positions, and very, very far from liberal positions.
And again, as I said, that's fine! I'm not disagreeing with the positions, I'm just saying that claiming to be "centrist' doesn't actually make you centrist.
Most people aren't far-right nor far-left. Most people, knowingly or unknowingly, adopt positions from each side. Holding both right-wing and left-wing views doesn't make one centrist, it makes one independent, and I think most people are in this category.
> "Medicine: Works great pure free market. Works great purely nationalized. What we don't want is a complex network of regulations from lobbyists combined with mandatory insurance (whether by government regulation or by practicality). Both the far-right and the far-left solutions would work great! We've landed in a no-man's land in between."
I don't think the far-right solution ever worked great. ACA is far from perfect, but it is saving lives. But the problem with US health insurance goes far deeper than merely how you pay for it and who gets access to it; the entire system is run in a very non-transparent way in order to maximise profits. The goal of the current system is still profit, not healing people, and that's where it goes wrong.
It's good that you mention mandatory insurance by practicality, because that's really the case: only very rich people can pay medical costs out of pocket; to most people, medical costs are a life or death issue, so it can never be a truly free market. A healthy-in-between system would be private insurance in a strongly regulated system; this works in a lot of countries. It's the lawless free-for-all where it's fine to screw or misinform patients for profit, that doesn't work.
My primary "centrist" issue is probably abortion: in the US the discussion seems to be all-or-nothing: either all abortion is legal or all abortion is banned, no matter what. A sensible compromise would be to allow early term abortions (first trimester miscarriages are extremely common, the embryo is still in an early stage of development), while strongly regulating late term abortions (they're already rare, and are only necessary for extreme medical problems). Abortion as an alternative to contraception can be made unnecessary through better sex ed and better access to contraceptives.
People over-estimate the degree to which our political parties represent an inherently consistent set of policy ideas. For example, social liberalism and being pro-immigration are intertwined in the US. But the socially liberal women prime ministers of Denmark and New Zealand are also anti-immigration. About 1 in 6 Democrats believe abortion should nearly always be illegal. African Americans, who overwhelmingly vote Democrat, have a similar split to Republicans when it comes to same-sex marriage and whether belief in God is a necessary prerequisite to morality.
The political parties are a compromise amongst groups of people with heterodox views. They’re not something that ideologically must be bundled together.
That's probably more true of the Democratic party, which is in fact a coalition of several large and somewhat disparate blocks (in particular, the black vote, which strategically prefers the concentrated vote over the most ideologically representative one --- Ismail White's book on this is pretty interesting). I don't think there are comparable forces in the Republican party --- though there were before the "ideological sort".
There are at least two significant and distinct forces in the Republican Party: pro-business and free enterprise people, and (mostly religious) social conservatives. You can find more if you look carefully — by no means Republican Party is a monolith.
Sorry, what do you mean? In the comment above, you said “I don't think there are comparable forces in the Republican party”, and now you admit that there are. I am very confused by what you are trying to convey.
They’re not at odds in the same way as Democratic subgroups, but they are meaningfully in conflict and the divisions are growing bigger. Social conservatives, in general, would be willing to give a lot more on economic/regulatory issues, in order to make meaningful progress on social issues. Indeed, many chafe are the restrictions of a small-government platform that limits government power to shape society. Pro-business conservatives, by contrast, are wedded to limited government. And they see social conservative positions as a liability in a modern corporate climate. (Issues like immigration, abortion, and same-sex marriage are why many Wall Street types have switched to the Democratic Party in recent years.)
I saw a remarkable illustration of this at a conservative event where a panel was discussing Bostock before the case was decided. The room was evenly divided, but with very strong opinions on both sides. There is a seed of a real conflict there. Textualism isn’t a robust foundation for the kind of broad structural changes social conservatives want. You need the conservative counterparts to liberal judges, who seek to vindicate broader principles gleaned from the law (except here to conservative ends).
Thanks for the book recommendation! Within the Republican Party, there is less in the way of groups with diametrically opposed views. But Republicans also have fairly heterodox positions on individual issues. The party contains nearly everyone that has a broad view of the second amendment, but a third want stricter gun laws. The party contains nearly everyone that wants to overturn Roe but the majority do not. Republicans contain nearly all the super anti-tax people, but half want to raise taxes on those making above $10 million. About half of republicans support same sex marriage (while 1:6 Democrats oppose it).
In terms of larger ideology, a schism is brewing between social conservatives, nationalists, and pro-business conservatives, with Trumpism versus anti-Trumpism cutting across all those groups. (As you recall, while Republicans supported him, most wanted someone else in the primaries initially.) The differences are less extreme than in the Democratic Party—where you have Marxists and 2/3 of Wall Street under the same tent—but they divisions are growing.
Both parties are mostly groups of "single issue voters".
How do you think a gay man is able to talk at RNC and them having "gay cure" support in their platform? Because when you put all of the different positions in one document - they tend to contradict the majority's views. (Outright ban on abortion is supported only by a third of republicans! SSM ban is also supported by a third.)
Independents are more liberal on the topic of abortion than democrats...
You've just summed up why being a moderate is such a miserable experience for most of us. These days, being a moderate isn't being in the middle on everything. Instead, being a moderate means that someone can't infer my position on gun control based on my position on universal health care. Because I'm not enough of an ideologue to have a consistently predictable menu of choices based on the tribe I find more affinity with, I'm always the bad guy for different reasons depending on the tribe I'm around.
Nowadays I define my moderation as "somewhere between the libertarians and the democratic socialists", which of course would make me completely unacceptable to either of those groups.
I don’t understand why is it so unusual to simply judge each issue according to your individual reason, morals and the best data you can find, but I also lack a lot of group joining instinct. Apparently both sides prefer loyalty to being right. I’ve been wearing masks since February and have at various times run afoul of both sides as they politicized the issue differently as time went by.
The point is that choices should be made about singular policy items.
Random example: I should be able to argue for second amendment rights with out buying into isolationist trade policies. The way things are right now the two come bundled together and legislative votes are based on partisanship, not policy.
Centrists tend to be more pragmatic and prefer approaches that work, while those on the left and right are more ideological, and wish to conform the world to their ideas, regardless of the cost or feasibility. And anyone who disagrees is treated as a heretic, as if one side has the truth concerning the messy complexity of social reality.
So, "silence is complicity"? That's pretty accusatory and offputting.
But of course this debate has been going on a long time. And maybe yours are the more recent words echoing a past hero's opinion.
In the words of MLK:
"First, I must confess that over the past few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro's great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen's Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to "order" than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: "I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action"; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man's freedom; who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a "more convenient season." Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection...."
I suppose it depends on whether you see current ills of society as at the level of segregation and outright violence against peoples (and need street-level action and peaceful revolution immediately), or more subtle things that affect everyone, like rich-vs-poor class differences growing (and are things to be solved through our deliberative political process).
But back to the point, the problem with shouting down anyone who doesn't agree with you and/or labeling people who are not 100% on board with you as the hidden "enemy", is that you will later find out you weren't winning as much as you thought based on the silence. And some of that silent segment will find they can only express themselves when standing alone, safe in the voting booth, and you get a result like we have had for the last couple years. Worse, those that could've joined your side are put off by the aggression and withhold their vote for you.
> So, "silence is complicity"? That's pretty accusatory and offputting.
Yeah people don't like facing their complicity with the horror of the world, especially since it's not at all obvious how to fix it. It can feel like (and can actually be) pointless self-flagellation.
Or perhaps, I just hate both sides? I can't stand the crazy right wingers who think climate change is a hoax, that masks oppress people, etc. I can't stand left wingers who virtue signal constantly and call me x-phobic or x-ist for not agreeing with something. So yes, I'm apolitical because I truly hate both sides anymore. I think of it as polarization to the point of pushing people like me aside.
And I tire of Twitter - the agent of that chaos - insisting I must always be "on," having a political position on everything all the time, and always ready to rally around wrong-doing.
This is inhuman. I cannot always be on - I am not a machine. I cannot be useful to anyone when I am torn into anxious shreds by knowing about everything that is wrong in the world all at once. Our brains were built for knowing what's "bad" on a local level - not on a global, ~7.8 billion people level. It is inhuman for you to insist that I jump at the bit every time "bad things happen."
I can only choose to pick certain hills which are most important to me, and I will die on them. You choose your things - you are welcome to die on them, too. Do not shame people for trying to survive this chaos that is bad enough with the world's population's problems, and amplified through social network's outrage machines that benefit from any (but especially psychologically traumatic) "engagement."
It's 100% okay to not be completely informed on an issue! If anyone is accosting you for that, then that's not okay or constructive. I'm not asking any more than that you be understanding that when our freedoms are under attack, ie currently, you are willing to make a choice and not complain because a lot is at stake.
What I do for joy on Twitter, when a mind-reader has (yet again) ascribed strange opinions or motives to me, is sincerely forgive them for their behavior.
As a centrist I'm not completely apathetic to all politics and I have some strongly held viewpoints, even if they are moderate. So I'm not sure why you're tired of centrists. Centrists understand there's nuance in everything, and leaning too heavily in either direction can be unhealthy.
I will say I also don't care for the daily discourse and politicization of everything.
What's a controversial opinion you (or any other commenters) can share that you would feel comfortable sharing with the right but not the left?
Without concrete examples, I don't know what to make of a statement like that besides "I have bigoted ideas I want to keep quiet and can only share w/ other bigots"
Do you want to share an example? My prejudice is based on me listening to one too many people online (and often in person) share their "controversial" opinion with me.
I'm genuinely curious what the HN crowd is going to regard as "controversial opinions" that will get you in trouble.
I've been explicitly told by the HN moderators that my opinions on policing - which are well within the American mainstream and probably a touch left of center - are so controversial they constitute flamebait and I shouldn't discuss them here.
That doesn't sound very likely. People make up all sorts of stories about what moderators supposedly said or did. The tell is that they're invariably linkless. If they came with the relevant links, readers could see what actually happened and make up their own minds.
I generally err on the side of not providing links to other comment threads so as not to give the impression I'm calling for a pileon. I'd happily link it, but my old profile https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=SpicyLemonZest no longer shows the comment thread. It was on a post about federal police in Portland from last week which I'm not sure how to find.
it could be you can't see that thread anymore because a lot of it was flagged dead. if you turn on showdead in your profile, threads like that will be visible.
it could be you are talking about the one that starts here:
dang says: "We've rate limited your account again for perpetuating flamewars on this site."
you said: "I've been explicitly told by the HN moderators that my opinions on policing - which are well within the American mainstream and probably a touch left of center - are so controversial they constitute flamebait and I shouldn't discuss them here."
that does not to me sound at all like a good-faith representation of what dang said.
Here's one of mine: Fetuses have human DNA, and different DNA from their mothers. Saying "The right of the mother over her own body" doesn't extend to a different individual that is temporarily present within her body.
Here's another: If you take the Bible seriously, you also have to take seriously what the Old Testament prophets said about God's concern for the poor, the widow, the orphan, and the alien.
I personally would feel comfortable sharing either of those with people on the right, but I would be rather more nervous sharing one of them with people on the left.
The person you're responding to was flagged, so I'll respond to you to continue.
I don't like diversity initiatives. I've literally worked at companies where the CEO announced we were NOT to hire any more white men. I am not ok with anyone putting a restriction on you because of your gender identity or skin color. Increasingly, woke people are ok with this as long as the restriction is placed on white men. I believe this is because many woke groups mistakenly see things as zero sum games where bringing people down will literally lift others up. I would not be willing to speak out about this since it would label me a bigot and a racist, even though my wife and kids aren't white.
- Not all problems require more/bigger Government, and sometimes makes the problems worse.
- I am pro 2nd amendment and don't think most gun laws are actually legal.
- Actual Socialism is bad, even immoral imo but I do support socialized healthcare and a few other things (see below)
- Capitalism is pretty great most of the time, except when it comes to externalities, transactions under duress (like healthcare often is) and tragedy of the commons scenarios.
- Democrats have been swayed by extreme leftists lately and they are trying to use any tragedy to push a socialist addenda.
Probably many more. If there was a pro capitalism party that supported moderate government intervention (when needed) and stood up for all of our constitutional rights, I would jump ship in a second.
You monster. I'm unfriending you this instant and telling all of my friends they have to unfriend you too in the next 6 hours or else I'm unfriending them also.
While I'm kidding about the op, I see this all the time on my feed. Just today, I saw someone in my Facebook feed just today demand that everyone unfriend person X right away because they're a Trump supporter, and he would go through the list of mutual friends and unfriend everyone who didn't. I'm far from a Trump supporter, but I find this behavior childish.
You make the distinction between actual socialism and socialization of certain institutions, but then immediately claim democrats are trying to push socialist agendas which leads me to believe you're being disingenuous or you don't know what "actual socialism" is, which I assure you is not nearly as mainstream as you'd like to think.
Perhaps my post was not clear, but I mean the leftist wing are pushing socialism, not mainstream Democrats (yet). My fear is that there influence in the party will grow and in a two party system where am I to go? It won't be the Republican party.
Also I am sure there is a perception bubble effect but on pretty mainstream sites like reddit I regularly see posts and comments blaming all of societies ills on Capitalism that are highly up-voted.
It's pretty bad. I have friends that I can't really talk to about politics because they're super on board with trump, and other friends that I need to avoid the topic with because they're so committed to socialism. It's mostly when we speak online where people just feel free to be the shittiest just because you're talking to them over chat instead of to their faces.
yes, and in my opinion, this is one of the factors behind the abysmal pandemic response from the country as a whole. Bad ideas become good ideas if they come one's team and good ideas become bad if they are not. As a result both halves of the country do stupid things, different kinds of stupid of course, while at the same time both sides refuse to do reasonable things.
It strikes me as nonproductive to call it "stupidity" or debate whether there's a precise equality. Both halves of the country have made it clear, in word and in action, that they think some causes are worth spreading the pandemic.
I have an opinion of course, but I am not interested in debating which side has done dumber things. It is impossible to discuss that issue productively.
Bring what up? That we are being pushed into suicidal stupidity by our allegiance to our political team? I rather think it is worth to bring it up, so that perhaps we all can do it a little less. Debating who exactly is the most to blame is counter productive to that goal.
I don't think it's particular productive to suggest that the problem is some kind of tribalism or reflexive rejections without providing any kind of rationale, argument, or support.
I recall folks on the left mocking those who wanted the economy to partially reopen as “valuing a haircut more than human lives”. They mocked with derision the very real depression that I, and many other people here on HN, had as a function of being stuck inside 24/7 while watching businesses and jobs implode while COVID cases explode.
Interacting with other humans inherently carries risk that you could harm others. I could get distracted by my children in the car and kill someone when I cross the center line.
That doesn’t make me evil or selfish for wanting to own a car and drive it.
It also doesn’t make someone selfish for wanting to support their family in normal commerce, in the rare chance that their very legal and very normal economic activity may inadvertently harm someone.
Nope because we're not saving any net lives. We're only exchanging lives during this whole thing. Exchanging mostly older folks for others. The whole quarantine can be described: If you have covid your life matters more than someone who has cancer or another illness.
When all of our children become serial killers and cancer death rates rise we'll look back on this time as the worst decision the world has ever made. Being a human means excepting risk. You wake up everyday and take on risk. Yes some people are willing to take more risks than others. I'm an avid skydiver. To those people who don't like risk: Stay at home and get someone to deliver groceries and live your miserable life by yourself at home. Thanks.
Don't you think that the people in Korea, Vietnam, Japan, Germany, New Zealand, Portugal,etc, are better of for having accomplished an effective and relatively short-lived quarantine? In the US the choice did not have to be between indefinite home detention and 1/4 million excess deaths. We fucked this up.
What's worse is the Left's then about-face to let's pack tens of thousands of people together to protest exposing untold numbers more to the very virus they professed to oppose. The political "side" I once found myself cheering on has turned into a outrage-fueled hypocrisy-machine where the greatest victim wins.
I really don't think that's a totally fair take on the situation. The theme of the BLM protests was people taking on huge personal risk to seize an opportunity for change that might not present itself again. I don't think anyone was trying to argue that joining a crowd in a pandemic and standing opposed to police in riot gear itching to use it was a safe thing to do.
And no one principled would object to that if the risk was indeed personal. It is not, obviously, and the people protesting surely know it, so if you have a shred of intellectual honesty that noble narrative cannot possibly hold. The real truth is that these people weighted the risk of infecting themselves and others and decided on behalf of us all, that it was worth it.
See that sounds good but that applies to everything anyone does right now. If you leave your home at all at this point you're making the choice that whatever you doing carries a risk of harming yourself and others. There's really no way to isolate the risk to just yourself.
And so yeah, that was a real choice that made. Like my friends and I had to decide if worth it to join the protests and we were pretty firmly on the side of this was too important to not do. And so you're absolutely right but I feel like it's hard to be measured when the argument is "look the left is going out to march in a civil rights protest but doesn't want hair salons or schools to open -- the hipocrits!"
There need to be some nuance here. I think most people agree that grocery stores and hospitals needs to be open and that chuck-e-cheese probably doesn't. I don't think it's at all hypocritical to take a stance in the middle. Of course there's going to be lots of disagreement about what falls on what side but that's the argument to have.
> See that sounds good but that applies to everything anyone does right now. If you leave your home at all at this point you're making the choice that whatever you doing carries a risk of harming yourself and others.
It's a poor comparison: the risk of transmission when gathering huge numbers of humans together is exponentially higher than leaving your home to buy groceries.
Have you seen the fly-by drone footage of Hollywood Blvd on July 7th of the BLM protests [1]? It was outrageously reckless and not just to the lives of the people who took part.
Of course the risk isn't equal, it's just that the argument "look at these people risking the live of others by going out" can't hold absolutely because even going groceries is risking the lives of others so the argument needs to take into the risks and reward to decide if it's reckless or not.
So yes BLM protests are high risk, but to the protesters they're also high reward if they manage to affect change which, largely, they are!
Reckless would be going to a music festival right now, and in my opinion, opening schools. The reward just isn't there. Kids will be happy to have an extra long summer break.
First of all let me say I appreciate your civility and candor and that I believe you, and your friends, truly believe that your choice is honorable and just. However, consider that many, many people do not have the same privileges of the typical young, affluent and still comfortably employed HN audience. Many people, who worked incredibly hard to buy their chuck-e-cheese franchise or their hair salon are middle aged, have a family to support and no way to do it. Many of them will never recover from this. They are too old, too broke, and do not have the sort of mind that can give them access to the highly paid jobs that we take for granted. Their protests strike me as at least equally noble and justified. Its a big country and tragedy abounds. You can weave true, heartbreaking narratives about almost any group. The question of which of those are worthy enough to justify spreading this germ seems to me, at present, ridiculous. None are. Protests in the streets now just increase our division, make it impossible to take appeals for a lock down seriously and will ultimately just plunge us, all of us, deeper into the hell we are already in.
I don't think the parent's point is that on any given issue both sides respond stupidly, I would guess they think two sides respond stupidly in different areas.
As a representative of a minority within a minority - libertarian gay atheist immigrant - both sides have been completely crap about it. For different reasons...
Such as - banning testing for COVID by nursing homes upon (re)admittance in NYC.
If anything should unite Americans now is utter and universal contempt for the institutions that failed us in navigating this crisis. The government, the media, the opposition, even parts of the medical community. The health of both the people and the economy was treated not as the prime concern but as an opportunity to pursue other agendas. A terrible reckoning is due, but we are too blinded by hatred towards each other to demand it. What a sad, sad epilogue to the American story.
It's generally easier to play the role of the Very Reasonable Person Who's Just Asking Questions when you're defending the status quo; any change you stymie by undercutting people's emotional energy or by slowing things down works to your advantage.
To give an example of someone a large subset of HN would like to sh*t on with that question, a company I have worked for:
In our case (we have some minorities but not as many as HN would like).
Why: because they aren't available.
We have KPIs for HR and managers that strongly encourage it, but there just aren't more qualified women/black/etc coders.
Which, in our case, translates to less than 5 (but awesome, and highly regarded) black persons[0], about 30% women.
[0]: Note however that the demographic is quite different here in Norway. I know people here who never saw black people except on holiday until they were far beyond 20 years old. In their defense though: 1.) Part of why there are so few black peopøe here seems to be that keeping slaves hasn't been popular here for hundreds of years. 2.) Norwegians have accepted a lot of people from other countries over the years: Pakistani, Chilean etc, so I don't think it is about xenophobia.
I think you lost the thread of conversation somewhere. The original question was:
"It's generally easier to play the role of the Very Reasonable Person Who's Just Asking Questions when you're defending the status quo; any change you stymie by undercutting people's emotional energy or by slowing things down works to your advantage."
I gave a counterexample.
That said, in most cases, good equity policies have nothing to do with racist quotas, and everything to do with cultures which are accepting of diverse patterns of communication, cultures, and behavioral styles, and with identifying talent wherever it may be found, rather than using surface indicators like school someone went to, clothing, or similar.
Long term poverty in certain areas; Leading to poorer education systems; Resulting in less than stellar academic attainment; Resulting is lack of experience.
If I put out a simple coding test and some people cannot crack it - I'm not going to check if my 2+2 test is unfairly biased towards people with red hair.
Did you know, for example, that even fairly wealthy black American families are less able to educate their kids to the same level as white American families?
Because access to proper education and parental education levels matter a lot. Because kids growing up in poor areas will get lower levels of attainment. Because long term poverty matters.
Breaking that education barrier takes more than one generation.
"Gosh. Do you think that /REALLY/ accounts for having just two African American employees in our labor force of 300, one working as an admin, and one who grew up outside of an African American community? There's definitely an effect, but 12% of the US population is African American. You'd expect 36 African Americans. I can see a paper like that justifying 15, but you can do the math here as well as anyone. I certainly wouldn't expect you to hire someone unqualified, but it seems like there might be something else going on than your 2+2 test, but where are you looking for people? And how are you screening for 'culture fit?'"
Just to give context, since I got crapped on this another place, the thread is: "How does one create change by asking reasonable questions?" I am giving an example of such a thread which would work in the current political climate. I am neither claiming agreement or disagreement with either the questions or answers. To avoid that impression, I'm putting questions in quotes. I could just as easily take a far-right view for this exercise, or one from a non-US culture. I picked this one since I thought it would resonate with the current political climate and with reddit.
But keep on answering, and I'll keep asking "reasonable questions" until hopefully I'll have backed you into a corner. :) It's not a bad exercise, or an ineffective change strategy.
We are actively looking for them, employing them whenever possible[0].
[0]: I lost two female candidates I tried to hire, one because she wasn't fluent in a language that a majority of our customers use and one because HR didn't react in time and when she interviewed with us she was also on the way to her second interview at another company.
Both landed well-paying jobs shortly afterwards. I guess we are not the only company trying to look diverse.
There are so few black people around here that I guess the reason I don't see more black coders is just statistics.
Its enlightened centrism and a place of profound privilege to be comfortable in the world as it exists thinking all of those "extremists" advocating for change are just being too emotional and partisan.
Centrism is de-facto the status quo. Which, in current times, means support for the police as it exists, supports for business regulation as it exists, supports greenhouse gases and military conduct as it exists, supports the behavior and election processes of politicians as they exist, etc.
Its simply the privilege of the majority to be the "moderate" ones. To be radical is not to be good or bad, it just to be outside the norm. And it makes sense that those in the norm find those outside it dangerous and threatening, because... they want to be. Thats the whole point. Their time is wasted if the goal is not to become the new moderate, the new normal, the new center.
In addition, this "centrism" isn't actually "center", ideologies don't actually fall neatly along a single dimension. These are just handy ways to reference and group ideologies.
The "center" people are referring to here is a United States-centric form of liberalism. It's not any less "extreme" than communism, it's just the dominant political force and, as you say, has the privilege of positioning itself as the comfortable default. In reality, it's a fairly extreme commitment to a different set of principles.
How is the US style of center-liberalism extreme, as compared to an ideology that demands total control over the economy and its citizens? Or do you think concepts such as "rule of law" are extremist?
- Strong national chauvinism that is exploited by all major parties.
- A commitment to policing / hegemony, destroying, destabilizing countries while convincing themselves that it's "for democracy", etc. The bar for destroying another country is very low and usually based on lies, but the forces leading to it are never questioned.
- A 90% commitment to laissez-faire economics with token controls thrown in to prevent the economic system from destroying itself every ten years.
- The moralization of poverty: the poor deserve it in some sense.
- A conviction that problems are solved through the "marketplace of ideas", not class conflict or a return to former glory, tradition, etc.
- A hard ideological divide between civil liberties and economic inequities.
- The equation of laissez-faire with freedom.
- The cultural acceptance of white supremacy as the norm, even to the extent that it's frequently unnoticed.
It isn't absolutely everything for one. If it was then you could legally buy slaves, nuclear weapons or foreign nations could buy New York in its entirety based upon a market cap would be far closer to commodification of everything.
Commoditization is just a fundamental result of math basically. Fundamentally there is still a cost to a commodities no matter what party pays for it to provide it or bar access through certain methods as illegitimate like it being illegal to buy organs from a donor for transplant.
You call them priveledged but are they necessarily always wrong? There would be a bias towards more extreme passions to try to go towards extreme changes and would feel a temptation towards partisanship feeling so outnumbered.
Given that norms say nothing about it doesn't mean they are always but the possibility exists that the extremists really are too emotional and partisan, and getting what they wanted would be the proverbial dog catching the car and not knowing what to do with it or crashing it immediately.
How about this: you're in denial about basically being on the edge of the right, and you're using the "both sides" shtick to cling to your centrist label.
Imagine touting "both sides" in the civil war area..
> The people in the middle (which I generally identify with) are left in the cold
Quit being a coward and at least own your shitty opinion:
> I must confess that over the past few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro's great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen's Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to 'order' than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice
On the flip side, a lot of the more abhorrent things to come out of the current President's mouth are things that were clearly not politically-correct, that a lot of America has been holding back, that are now back in the open.
I'm not sure what the solution is. On one hand, it was there all along, and political-correctness did not help it. On the other hand, racists everywhere have been empowered once again, and all manner of groups have to face stereotypes they've fought so hard over the years. I don't think the U.S. will really get its house in order until it becomes an issue of survival, and of geopolitical importance.
> On the flip side, a lot of the more abhorrent things to come out of the current President's mouth are things that were clearly not politically-correct, that a lot of America has been holding back, that are now back in the open.
It's not hard to see his initial popularity as linked to this. That is, the vilification of having views that are not the same as the majority leading people to feel repressed, and them supporting someone that's unwilling to bend to that, even if they don't support every decision he makes or view he takes.
I don't want racists and white supremacists spreading their rhetoric, but I also don't want our society so constrained by mob mentality that having merely unpopular opinions have dire consequences. If we take it as a given that mob mentality (to this degree) is an emergent phenomenon because of our hyper connected world, and that too much mob mentality is causing the problem, how do you mitigate emerging phenomena when you can't really alter what it emerges from?
I'd also be happy if someone could convincingly refute that it's an emergent phenomena, or that mob mentality is the problem, since those seem intractable to me.
> I don't want racists and white supremacists spreading their rhetoric, but I also don't want our society so constrained by mob mentality that having merely unpopular opinions have dire consequences.
Either you're in favor of free speech or you're not. Republicans, Democrats, and, yes, Hacker News all participate in cancel culture in one way or another.
Sure there are bots, provocateurs, and anonymous trolls who have no intent on changing their beliefs. But, please, let the American people have enough credit to make decisions for themselves and see racists for who they truly are.
I normally don't reply to my own posts, but I think this is worthy for consideration.
There was someone with a throwaway account that replied with the argument that "Free speech need not be absolute", and then started getting voted down.
What's truly ironic I feel is that in my world view, his speech would just sit there as an alternative viewpoint, read and disagreed with.
But in his world his viewpoint could made illegal (or in the HN world downvoted), based upon what might be perceived as the popular rhetoric of the day.
Unfortunately, in your world, the racists and white supremacists take over because the only thing anyone is allowed to do to stop them is to politely and civilly debate them, which doesn't work because hate, fear and lies can circle the world twice before the truth even has its boots on and sources organized.
I'm actually fine with such views not being made illegal though - but I'm not fine with the premise that there should never be any social consequences at all for any ideology or viewpoint regardless of its nature or intent to do harm. Nor do I believe that the right to free speech means everyone must be forced to hear, seriously consider, host or publish that speech.
> the racists and white supremacists take over because the only thing anyone is allowed to do to stop them is to politely and civilly debate them.
There are 300,000,000 million Americans each with his or her own free will and ability to determine right from wrong. So you're saying they are just sheep and do things blindly?
The real changes, the ones that lasted generations, the things that made America truly great, were done because free speech convinced people to change their minds.
>So you're saying they are just sheep and do things blindly?
No. Not only did I not say that, there's no reasonable way to infer that from my comment, and your doing so demonstrates an unwillingness on your part to argue in good faith.
That people are influenced by more than purely logical, didactic arguments should be self evident, nor does that fact make people sheep, it's simply human nature. We're not compilers, after all, we're primates with countless irrational biases hard wired into our brains. Anti-vaxxers, COVID-denialists, flat-earthers, conspiracy theorists of all stripes, the resurgence of discredited white supremacist and anti-semitic ideology under the politically correct guise of "racial realism" and the phenomenon of fake news spread by social media should be enough to demonstrate that falsehood can be more compelling than fact, and that facts alone are not sufficient to dissuade such people from their false beliefs, or stop their influence.
>The real changes, the ones that lasted generations, the things that made America truly great, were done because free speech convinced people to change their minds.
No they weren't. They were accomplished with speech and consequence, often long, violent, ugly protests and frequently civil unrest. America has only ever granted its inalienable rights to white Christian men by default - everyone else has had to fight tooth and nail for their seat at the table and for every scrap of human dignity they could take from the cornucopia of American liberty.
Women's suffrage was earned with speech and blood. African American rights were earned with speech and blood. LGBT rights were earned with speech and blood. Even recently, few outside of the black community really cared about systemic racist violence among the police, despite the black community speaking at length about it for years until they also started taking to the streets and burning shit down... then suddenly everyone else noticed and started listening.
Speech without the force of consequence is as useless as a toothless guard dog.
>No. Not only did I not say that, there's no reasonable way to infer that from my comment, and your doing so demonstrates an unwillingness on your part to argue in good faith.
It's quite straightforward to draw this conclusion from the following portion of your previous comment:
>Unfortunately, in your world, the racists and white supremacists take over
How does a community 'take over' without expanding to at least a dominant minority? And how does the point being argued, allowing them to speak freely, enable that unless we're to assume that simply being exposed to that worldview will grow their ranks?
> ... your doing so demonstrates an unwillingness on your part to argue in good faith.
You argued:
A: Unfortunately, in your world, the racists and white
supremacists take over
That presupposes this:
B: In a democracy a majority of the people have to agree
that white supremacy should be the dominant principle for
governmental rule.
I was pointing out that in order for A to happen, B must happen as well -- but in a rhetorical way to deeply undermine your argument. I assure you, it was completely in good faith. You probably just didn't like the result of it.
> No they weren't. They were accomplished with speech and consequence, often long, violent, ugly protests and frequently civil unrest.
Rosa Parks didn't throw a brick through a window. She refused to sit in the back of the bus. That started a boycott of the bus system, and it worked without bloodshed.
Sure blood was spilled in the civil rights marches but not because the people marching wanted it to be.
From what I've read just today on HN, many would likely argue that this was not a peaceful protest because perhaps it inconvenienced others on the bus. Should've just shut up and followed orders.
Rosa Parks sitting in was not act of activism. Pretty much everything before and after in her life was.
I Rosa Parks was radical whole her life. She was not proponent of super peaceful activism, she at the moment thought fighting would he strategically bad idea.
Had she been meek lady, there would be no protests.
She did lived at violent place at the time, did dealt with lynchings, beatings and legal protests up to that point. She did not had philosophy of peaceful activism above all.
While she was not violent, she was not proponent of peaceful above all protesting. That was Kings philosophy and even he was up to breaking law.
Since H is eighth character in the alphabeth some neo-nazi groups use "88" as a shorthand for "Heil Hitler" - they would even tatoo "88" on their body.
Free speech is in now way absolute. We have laws against speech that incites violence, laws against speech in the pursuit of fraud, laws against speech laws against speech that violates IP law, laws against speech integral to criminal activities.
And the world would be a worse place without those laws. Any real discussion about free speech starts with the premise that not all speech can be free and the real questions is in the details of what speech should be free.
I wasn't calling for curtailing speech in any way, but instead mitigating out of control feedback loops that result from the public's way of disincentivizing undesirable speech, which is calling it out.
I don't want racist and white supremacists spreading their rhetoric, so I want societal pressure to continue to work as it does against those people. At the same time, I don't want merely unpopular opinions getting the full weight of societal pressure causing problems for people that merely want to discuss what are actually open questions.
Reducing this to simply a matter of free speech or not is missing the point. This is a matter of figuring out how to deal with the negative effects of free speech when we care enough about free speech that limiting it in some way is not on the table.
> I don't want racist and white supremacists spreading their rhetoric
That ship has sailed.
> At the same time, I don't want merely unpopular opinions getting the full weight of societal pressure causing problems for people that merely want to discuss what are actually open questions.
Free speech isn't just about who gets to speak what, it's about who decides who gets to read/listen/watch what they want. That's basically the crux of censorship, right? I don't want mob induced censorship any more than I want government censorship.
In the end, cancel culture is people who choose not to use free speech to push their agenda, but instead threatens other's livelihood or shame critics of an unpopular position into silence.
That's called "living in a community". It's impossible to interact with other people without providing some level of acceptance or rejection of what they are doing, whether on purpose or accident, whether they interpret you correctly or not.
Even just walking away communicates something.this isn't always bad, it's how we enforce norms that are not laws. Lie or act in a way I do not approve of and I can choose to stop or limit my interactions with you, and I can express my opinion to others. I this way I am censoring you in a small way. It's how humans interact, and it's useful and good when used in moderation for good causes.
When not used in moderation, and when a million people jump on a single person and express enough displeasure to cause severe ramifications for relatively small offenses, then it's not good.
I don't want to see racist rhetoric in the same way I don't want to see poor behavior at others expenses. That is, I want it allowed, but for people to face somewhat appropriate ramifications for the offense, to discourage them from spouting it everywhere people do t want to see it. To be clear, I mean it in the literal, bit colloquial sense, in that it's a preference, not a call to censor others be preventing it entirely, as overreactions are what I'm arguing against.
Except cancel culture is anything but community driven. It's social media driven -- which in itself is a platform to get more views to sell you more ads. The more the platform can draw your ire, the more ads it sells, the more ire the platform spreads, etc.
The problem is that words aren't which we argue our politics by anymore. It's now who has the biggest weapon to personally destroy those that speak out.
> I don't want mob induced censorship any more than I want government censorship.
So what you want is to be able to say whatever you like, and suffer no consequences from that speech.
Sorry, the First Amendment does not guarantee consequence-free speech, particularly if your speech is a pack of lies or racist, or as occurs so often, both.
I would add that after a decade of watching the First Amendment cited almost exclusively to protect hate speech from psychopaths, my respect for it is badly tarnished.
Sorry, autocratic rule by those on the left is still autocratic rule.
> The First Amendment does not guarantee consequence-free speech.
Civics 101. My right to through my fist stops at your face. Simple. Yelling fire in a crowded movie theater, etc. etc.
Political speech, ie, expressing ones viewpoint, is and has always been protected by the First Amendment -- even if it's false or racist speech.
> I would add that after a decade of watching the First Amendment cited almost exclusively to protect hate speech from psychopaths...
What would you replace it with? Seriously. Are you going to punish people for lying? Lock them up for something just slightly racist? Who do we trust to make these judgements? Republican appointed judges? What?
> Civics 101. [...] Yelling fire in a crowded movie theater, etc. etc.
> Are you going to punish people for lying?
We punish people for lies that cause harm all the time. Though a bad example to use (because it is dicta unsupported by the law at the time in a particularly repugnant case suppressing core political speech that was later overturned, so that the quote at issue was never part of the substantive case law itself, wasn't particularly supported by the substantive case law, and was issued in a case now widely recognized as having been wrongly decided), the quote you wave your hand in the vague direction of about falsely yelling fire in a crowded theater is also an odd one to raise if you are going to turn around and sneer at that idea.
I think the tension here has always come from the fact that we've never had a right to free speech with no respect to context. If I run a coffee shop and let people pin flyers to the corkboard, I have a say in what flyers get to stay up. If Bob posts flyers for his Alt-Right Potluck Dinner, I'm going to take them down. I may, in fact, ban Bob from the coffee shop entirely. If Bob protests "but you've let Jennifer post flyers for her Antifa Vegan Cookbook," I'm going to say, "Yes, Bob, and her dairy-free brownies are surprisingly delicious." Bob doesn't have a protected constitutional right to use my space.
It's certainly true the left can have illiberal tendencies, and there's some indication that's on the rise, and that's worrisome. But when people yell "cancel culture" in a crowded online letter, it's always worth asking how many people have been "cancelled" and to what degree. Andrew Sullivan and Bari Weiss have never been denied an audience and will almost certainly continue to have huge ones. J.K. Rowling, for all of the articles about her "cancellation" over the past couple of months, turns out to still be a multibillionaire author who still has a book contract. Yes, every day brings us complaints from prominent conservatives about how Twitter is stifling their voice -- complaints generally tweeted to their millions of Twitter followers who like and retweet them in support.
In any case, while I'd be loathe to carve out explicit exceptions to the First Amendment, I'd also be loathe to invoke it too cavalierly. Would I lock someone up for "something just slightly racist"? No, but in practice that's very rarely what we're arguing about when we argue about cancel culture: you mentioned it was a social media phenomenon in another comment here. Would you demand that social media networks not be allowed to make decisions about what content they're willing to carry? How about employers? Firing someone for that "something just slightly racist" is harsh, but do we want to say that HR departments are no longer allowed to make those calls? If so, who is?
> Would I lock someone up for "something just slightly racist"?
I mean, if you don't have protected free speech, you have regulated speech. If you can't say "I believe in X because .... " where X might be racism, then it's no longer freedom, and therefore subject to potential criminal legislation. See John Adams and the sedition act.
> But when people yell "cancel culture" in a crowded online letter...
Bari Weiss made it clear it was the anger from the Tom Cotton essay where she felt her career at the times became untenable.
When did we decide that an essay by Tom Cotton was too dangerous to be published? That his speech was so dangerous that the core ideas could not just have been countered with... wait for it... more speech.
And no one said that freedom of speech never meant freedom of jobs. Nor did freedom of speech ever mean that people would buy your product after your ugly ideas came to light.
So what is cancel culture? It's this. Specifically this article:
Luckily here in the United States we have a clever mechanism to deal with the negative effects of free speech. It is called the Bill of Rights, and it works really well. In fact it is the best such system in history.
That is, the vilification of having views that are not the same as the majority leading people to feel repressed, and them supporting someone that's unwilling to bend to that, even if they don't support every decision he makes or view he takes.
We gotta break this stuff into more detail.
If you look at say, the start of #metoo, you see Harvey Weinstein, a man so powerful that the ordinary justice system could not touch him until essentially a Twitter mob took him down.
Now, public accusation is a crappy way to settle bad behavior, it's easy to channel this stuff in any direction a manipulator might choose. But people choose that rout of desperation, when the ordinary justice and more broadly ordinary government processes fail.
If we look at the Minneapolis Police Department in particular, we see a department with such a long history of corruption and even murder that the entire group should be fired. And moreover, all of Minneapolis civic government out side the police would like to do that - but are in fact powerless to do that through a web of laws the police have protecting their interests.
And this is the thing. You have powerful, unaccountable men and women whose acts provoke anger in many parts of the population. Then you have an angry mob which actually can't impose any significant change and once they get going can inflict collateral damage themselves - and maybe get met by a counter-mob. But after the upsurge, any reform is thin and the stage is set for the next event.
So, I'd say mobs and counter-mobs are problematic but the root is permanent unaccountable powers that can ignore whatever material grievances different groups have.
> So, I'd say mobs and counter-mobs are problematic but the root is permanent unaccountable powers that can ignore whatever material grievances different groups have.
I don't think it's a foregone conclusion that the current mob mentality only came about because of unaccountable powers, or even if it did, that it will necessarily dissipate if those powers become and are held accountable. Some things are self-sustaining.
I don't think we can just look the other way because the negative behavior is caused by a feeling of rage and impotency. Should we try to fix the injustices that cause the feeling of rage and impotency? Yes. That doesn't mean we should also ignore the negative effects that rage and impotency results in, otherwise we'll be following a chain back forever.
I don't think we can just look the other way because the negative behavior is caused by a feeling of rage and impotency.
I don't know who's "we" or who's looking the other way.
Everyone on every part of the political spectrum has one or more mob-tendencies they'd like to stamp out (or at least look like they're stamping out). And yet this situation continues. Indeed, it seems like the whole this different mobs gunning for each other.
It seems like one can't just take negative phenomena in isolation, say "that bad" and go get it. Or you can and everyone's doing it and things are still in a mess and you're part of the mess now.
You actually need positive, concrete alternatives to mob behavior. The problem in many ways is that the mob is also a lot of people, including other mobs, favorite enemy.
> I don't know who's "we" or who's looking the other way.
"We", as a societal group, whether that be "Americans" or "Westerners" or "Human beings". By looking the other way, I meant "assuming the problem will get better if the unaccountable powers are held accountable." People don't change their behavior overnight, even if it's unconsciously acting as a face in a mob they don't realize they're part of, and revolutions rarely result in a change that is positive in all aspects.
What if we trade unaccountable individuals (which sometimes were held accountable) for unaccountable mobs? I don't see one as necessarily better than the other, it's the prevalence and consequences of each that matter to me.
> Everyone on every part of the political spectrum has one or more mob-tendencies they'd like to stamp out (or at least look like they're stamping out). And yet this situation continues. Indeed, it seems like the whole this different mobs gunning for each other.
Yes, it's almost as if we've started identifying more with our subgroups than the larger group, and it's like multiple nations forced to coexist within the same borders of people we view as others. Like a digital Gaza Strip.
> It seems like one can't just take negative phenomena in isolation, say "that bad" and go get it. Or you can and everyone's doing it and things are still in a mess and you're part of the mess now.
Sure. That's the other end of the spectrum. I advocated for doing both. Address the root cause, also address the problem. If we accept that poverty increases crime, we shouldn't use that as an excuse to ignore crimes committed by the poor, and we shouldn't ignore that causal relationship and focus purely on policing and punishment.
> You actually need positive, concrete alternatives to mob behavior.
The whole point of my original comment is that I don't know what those are, but we need to find and/or advertise and explore any we can find because they are important.
Me: You actually need positive, concrete alternatives to mob behavior.
kbenson:The whole point of my original comment is that I don't know what those are, but we need to find and/or advertise and explore any we can find because they are important.
Me: Well, all of the mechanism of modern democracy - a fair justice system, a congress representing the popular will, an executive branch primarily carrying out laws, a press that exposes flaws, etc are the ways modern democratic society has discovered for balancing interests.
In situations of imbalance, when things are not working, reforms within such a democratic capitalist society tend to come from elites because they hold power (with or without a popular mandate). We can see this in the Progressive Era, the New Deal, the Civil Right Movement. Protests may get things going but those with power have to enact legislation.
Today, it may sound harsh but America's elites allowed American institutions become something like a dumpster fire because the situation didn't bother them. I mentioned the Minneapolis city council, theoretically the representatives of the city, would like to fire the police but cannot. (Nearly) "everyone" have some solutions but they aren't able to exercise them.
At this point, I'd look at Ralph Nader's Only The Super Rich Can Save Us. Because everything points to the very rich having decisive power and this quite willing to let things fall to hell. We can hope these people realize that triumph over a flaming ruin might not actually help as much as they're imagine.
> Today, it may sound harsh but America's elites allowed American institutions become something like a dumpster fire because the situation didn't bother them.
Well, I would say it didn't bother them initially, and it changed so fast that by the time it did bother them (if it does), it was too late. We're talking about a decade or less of time here, since that's about the period of time that social media has had major usage by a majority of people, and while there were less efficient precursor networks (such as radio and television), nothing really compares to the current immediate feedback look of of the current systems, where time for info to permeate a platform and then regurgitates and eaten again can be measured in minutes in some cases, but often in just a few hours.
I doubt even the people that "saw it coming" really understood where it would get to, and there's no concrete indication that we're at the peak (there's pushback, but that can be steamrolled for while).
Elites have more power, and can get stuff done because there's a purity of intent and will expressed by one person with power that's hard to match with many people pooling power... but then again, we're dealing with runaway feedback loops, so who knows what the public can do if a good meme is found.
> At this point, I'd look at Ralph Nader's Only The Super Rich Can Save Us. Because everything points to the very rich having decisive power and this quite willing to let things fall to hell. We can hope these people realize that triumph over a flaming ruin might not actually help as much as they're imagine.
I'd much rather have the stability of the 1990s or 2000s that what we seem to have now when considering my own situation, but I'm white middle class, and I imagine people that have felt disenfranchised their whole lives may see the balance of good and bad happening now a bit differently, and I'm not willing to say they are better off as they were in the 1990s or 2000s. I dunno.
No, when I say "America's elites allowed American institutions become something like a dumpster fire I mean traditional American institutions - the courts, the congress, the presidency, our schools, our health care system etc.
It seems like you imagine that out-of-control social media is happening in a vacuum or can be fixed in a vacuum. It's not and it cannot.
I'm sure almost everyone would prefer not be (hopefully) living through a era in which things fall apart on a multitude of levels. But hey, we should try to do something and if we can't do something immediately, at least analyze it.
>So, I'd say mobs and counter-mobs are problematic but the root is permanent unaccountable powers that can ignore whatever material grievances different groups have.
I don't know that mobs are rational. Sometimes, I'm sure they will be pointing to a genuine injustice, but just as often as not, they're going to be a rampaging mob. I'm not 100% sure how I feel about this next claim, but I wonder that it's simply an accident when they get it "right."
Nonetheless, even the worst among us deserve representation and due process protections: which a mob cannot (and will not) give.
the problem with censorship is that it only capable of censoring unpopular ideas and unpopular ideas are generally not a problem. the problem ideas are the popular memeplexes that propagate the meme that all opposing ideas should be censored.
The issue with all of those instances is that the people behind the services - could not stay associated with these elements.
Enforced tolerance is the only thing that is keeping really bad people comfortable at expressing their badness. (Suprisingly - the anti-discrimination applied to private businesses is the reason why people like Alex Jones can safely say whatever he wants and then get a free upgrade at Ramada)
> the vilification of having views that are not the same as the majority leading people to feel repressed
The fact that most of these "views" are things that are false to the fact - like "climate change is a Chinese hoax" or "vaccines are bad" or "Obama is a Muslim married to a transsexual" - this doesn't bother you even a little?
What this demographic wants is to be able to have false, hateful, destructive beliefs, and suffer no consequences from their abhorrent ideas.
Sorry. The First Amendment guarantees people only the right to spew ignorant hateful shit, it doesn't guarantee that we have to take that hateful ignorant shit seriously.
I think maybe you shouldn't have stopped reading at the first paragraph, as your comment is a non sequitur if you read beyond the small bit you commented.
But that's the thing things have changed, the majority of people now disagree with racial segregation, blaming women for being raped etc. and that is a good thing. The thing is people voted for Trump because they want the old times back where "a n* knew their place". There is a reason why the majority of his supporters are significantly over 50. However, it is an illusion that people were not feeling consequences for expressing certain views (or even being suspected of it), just think of Mccarthy or the outrage on Fox if somebody criticises "our troops". The only thing that changed is that now it's also so called "conservatives" (I would call many of the right wing activists) who face this, together with the amplification allowed by social media and peoples (on all sides of the spectrum) desire to somehow feel like a victim.
What racists have been empowered, and by whom? What has the president said that was racist? When has he ever endorsed racism? How is it that he has a 40% approval rating among black voters? Are they stupid?
Note however that one way to make a society appear to be less politically polarized is to silence the voice of groups who are not being served well by the current political status quo. When voices fighting for representation and fairness and equality are amplified, and supporters of the status quo resist (which they nearly always do), that will necessarily increase the apparent polarization, but I don't think that's a bad thing, and I certainly don't think it's worse than those voices remaining silenced.
The problem is America isn’t making an effort to not silence other people and give them a platform to talk about their concerns. It’s becoming a crowd of endless screaming with almost zero listening, and people actively trying to silence those who don’t yell alongside them.
The counter to this though, is that the time when things weren't politicized was essentially when minority groups didn't have political, eoconomic, cultural power.
There is no new split into two Americas, there was always a split- between those who had political, cultural and economic power, and those that don't. The only difference now is that the people who are in the group with power aren't exclusively rich, white, conservative men.
We can go back, we can stop black people from getting loans and decent jobs, we can make all our women secretaries again, and I'm sure that will solve all our political ills.
The idea that "everything is getting politicized" is more often an expression of the loss of normative dominance: ideas that you used to enjoy free of criticism and pushback are now subject to challenge. They haven't become politicized, they were always political. You just didn't have to justify them versus criticism.
The only sense in which horseshoe theory is real is that the rejection of the status quo tends to split someone in one direction or the other, and occasionally those new to alternative political ideologies will waffle or get shunted down different pipelines. Example: younger people going down the IDW pipeline who end up socialist once they realize the error. They don't return to dominant liberal narratives because they already figured out the ways in which they are toxic and false, and they also reject their previous pathway.
I can't imagine thinking that "bizarro world" is one in which people hold a larger diversity of opinion and criticize within a party.
> Honestly, the Left is the worst at this. They will actively try to ruin your life over wrongthink.
This experience must vary a lot with your locale. I live in a medium sized town in Canada and feel very uncomfortable talking to my conservative, suburban neighbours about issues I strongly believe should be a priority for everyone. Like climate change.
They know that them and me don’t see eye to eye on these issues but I can’t bring it up in a way that I would with my left leaning friends and it pains me. Because it’s something that both sides of the political spectrum should be able to rally behind. Many conservatives here fancy themselves as sort of “salt of the earth people” so I don’t get the hostility towards some kind of conservation.
Will your conservative neighbors be annoyed and maybe ignore you if you bring up climate change, or will they actively try to get you fired from your job?
I think the Left is getting flak for doing the latter.
They will at best ostracize me from their social circles. And at worst damage my property.
Yes, I had a direct experience of the latter when my car was keyed for having a “give peace a chance” bumper sticker during the times of the war on Iraq. And that’s in Canada, bear in mind.
It is dangerous that political differences are now being moralized. You vote for Biden? You're evil and should be fired. You vote for Trump? You're a Nazi and should be fired. Then what? What's the next step? I used to read about the French Revolution in horror. Parisans cheered when a Guillotine dropped, for they thought it was the righteous thing to do. And the history repeated itself in China 55 years ago and then 35 years ago, all in the name of upholding superior morality.
Who the next enemy is predictably being determined by the ruling party and Wall Street, and there's nothing anybody can do about that now that it's gone too far. If you wish to compare history, it's close to Weimar Republic, the social unrest, threats of violence, propaganda lies, full-on corruption and domination at cost of human health and lives.
It's all sleight of hand, everybody gets fooled into a suckers rally that makes most current matters irrelevant. Ofc I hope I'm wrong, but just watch what they do.
> Who the next enemy is predictably being determined by the ruling party and Wall Street,
1. If this was generally true the Wall street and Republicans started #metoo and I can't believe that.
> and there's nothing anybody can do about that now that it's gone too far.
2. This is not only pessimistic but too pessimistic and also counterproductive (unless one wish to drive society faster to the edge.)
> It's all sleight of hand, everybody gets fooled into a suckers rally that makes most current matters irrelevant. Ofc I hope I'm wrong, but just watch what they do.
Kind of agree. I guess if you made a real poll between Americans on if they wanted
1. Trump
2. Biden
3. A randomly selected choice between 5 men and 5 women that were decent, smart, had succeeded in life despite being nice
then I guess people would vote for 3 in the poll.
The American system seems to favour bad compromises lately.
In that case: have my apology and also know that I misunderstood you (and in that case: still don't understand you despite trying), so a little clarification might be helpful if you care :-)
American electoral system, same as in UK, is about 500 years old.
It makes it unsafe to vote for your actual favourite candidate, because you don't get a second round... I always remind people that Maine's scandalous governor LePage never won 50% of the voter support and his first win was with merely 37% of the vote.
You can only really have those kinds of discussions calmly if you're not at all affected by the decision. It doesn't have anything to do with a functioning society. If you're black it's hard to have a dispassionate discussion about stop-and-frisk or no-knock raids.
If I point a gun to your head do you think we can stand there and have a calm and rational discussion about whether I should pull the trigger? Of course not! You're going to fight to protect yourself.
I always find it curious how easy it is for beliefs seem to line up so smoothly along party lines... even unrelated ones like economic policy and religion all seem to line up in a very clean way in the US.
Is there another universe where all the religious people are very pro-economic redistribution? That seems to be within reasonable interpretation of the teachings of Jesus.
Try having "morals put into law" and what you end up with is Sharia law. In democracy you should avoid doing that, because people typically do not agree on what's moral.
Laws should made from purely utilitarian point of view, not the moral one. The reason why, for example, murder is illegal isn't because it's immoral, but because most people do not want to fall victim to such crime so they voted to make it illegal. Same for theft, or even such minor annoyances like fining someone for playing music too loud.
> Laws should made from purely utilitarian point of view, not the moral one.
You are trying to draw a distinction between the "utilitarian" and the "moral". But, to quote the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy (IEP), "Utilitarianism is one of the best known and most influential moral theories" [1]. Claims about what is "utilitarian" are inescapably moral claims.
> but because most people do not want to fall victim to such crime so they voted to make it illegal.
In historical terms, that is quite false. In every democratic country, murder was already illegal for centuries (even millennia) before democracy was introduced. In fact, the earliest surviving legal text (the Sumerian code of Ur-Nammu, c. 2100–2050 BCE) criminalised murder, and predates the invention of democracy in ancient Athens (594 BCE) by approximately 1500 years.
> It is increasingly tempting to vote for the Guillotine.
It didn't work so well the last few times it was used - the English revolution, the French revolution, the Russian revolution, all ended up in a bloodbath, next one more gruesome than the last. I urge you to reconsider.
France never returned back to monarchy, and Russia never reinstated the empire after the revolutions. Yes some awful people used the political turmoil to seize power in both cases—and similar thing would probably happen if Americans started chopping the heads of the rich—but in both cases the revolutions left a lasting mark, and both France and Russia are more democratic then they were during monarchy (although Russia is in serious regression at the moment).
This is not necessary the case though, as seen after the Cuban or the Zapatista revolution in Chiapas, Mexico.
At some point revolution becomes necessary, and if democratic means remain unavailable, this revolution will be violent. Horrible people using the political turmoil will become a risk people are willing to take in this growing frustration.
If you read up on the history of French revolution, they didn't particularly want a republic. They got a republic as the last resort... and they changed the country forever, even Emperor Napoleon didn't roll everything back.
They still wanted a lot of changes to allow more freedom, restrictions and more transparency... just not necessarily a formal republic.
Think about this - in CATO's own Human Freedom Index half of the top 16 countries are monarchies.
1 New Zealand - monarchy
2 Switzerland - republic
3 Hong Kong (definitely not going to be in #4 now)
4 Canada - monarchy
5 Australia - monarchy
6 Denmark - monarchy
6 Luxembourg - monarchy
8 Finland - republic
8 Germany - republic
10 Ireland - repulbic
11 Sweden - monarchy
11 Netherlands - monarchy
13 Austria - republic
14 United Kingdom - monarchy
15 Estonia - republic
15 United States - republic
idk. Russia had a lot of czars, some of them (like Ivan the Terrible) were probably worse then even Stalin, and some of them might even have been better then Gorbachev.
That said, the revolutionary spirit under Czar Nicolas II were completely rational, and understandable. The use of violence was needed because the ruling class was—unlike at the end of the Soviet Union—unwilling to make the revolution happen peacefully.
Nobody can tell the future. The fact that awful people might use the turmoil to seize power is not something that people are thinking about when they are trying to overthrow their current oppressors.
France returned back to monarchy a couple of times. They kept switching back and forth between various kind of monarchies and republics. Fortunately not with the kind of bloodbaths that accompanied the initial revolution.
Why? Trump will have just one more term at most. So are you essentially saying that you're not happy with the current election system and you tend to use violence to overthrow it?
Or are you saying that you dislike Trump or Biden so much that you'd rather use violence to achieve what you desire?
Let's say you'd use Guillotine so Trump can step down, then should those who dislike democrats also use the same means to have Biden step down? And if someone tends to oppose what you do, you'd rather use Guillotine to resolve the difference?
I think it's pretty clear what kind of person you are.
I’m saying there are policies that an overwhelming majority in USA supports, such as universal healthcare, taxing the rich, stop foreign wars, stop police violence, reduce carbon emission, etc. which will never be enacted in the current political climate. Our choices—well the voters choice; I’m not allowed to vote—is basically: Not getting what we want or not getting what we want plus inhumane bigotry.
If this were a real democracy, popular policies would be enacted, or at least be on the ballot. But this is not the case. As evident from the Black Lives Matter protest, riot seems to be the only avenue for change. And as popular policies keep getting put on the back burner while corporate interests keep getting the front seat regardless of who we vote, the illusion of democracy will frustrate more and more people. The more frustrated we get the more likely we will resort to violence.
I’m not saying that violence will lead to good outcome (it probably won’t; as history shows), but an ever angrier and more frustrated population will eventually use it if democratic means remain unavailable. That is more and more people will vote for the Guillotine if the only options on the ballots are: a) business as usual, or b) business as usual + hating minorities.
> are policies that an overwhelming majority in USA supports, such as universal healthcare, taxing the rich, stop foreign wars, stop police violence, reduce carbon emission
None of those things are supported by an overwhelming majority unless 3/5ths now constitutes “overwhelming”. Additionally, your view of what the issues are show how biased your approach is to begin with.
- Almost nobody has an issue with reducing police violence, but a bunch of people have issues with getting rid of the police.
- Almost nobody “wants foreign wars” but a bunch of people think military intervention is needed.
- Nobody is against taxing the rich, it’s already right in the tax code and the top 1 percent pays something like a third of all tax revenues already. What a bunch of people are against is arbitrarily raising their taxes further because of tall poppy syndrome.
- Reduce carbon emissions. Yes, but sadly not overwhelming majority still and even then, the “how” is critical and there is even less common ground there.
So there are nuances when making legislation to enact popular policies. I know that, what is your point?
A functioning legislator discusses these nuances, and comes up with a legislation that enacts the policy such that most people can benefit from it. This is one of the benefits of having a diverse ruling class. No one person needs to know how a popular policy gets enacted, that is the purpose of representative democracy.
He explicitly stated his point before the enumeration; your phrasing of the original comment is both technically inaccurate and reeks of your biases to such an extent as to sour further engagement with you.
You're technically inaccurate because 58-60% is not an "overwhelming majority".
I'm not a US citizen (or resident), and I find it almost unbelievable and absolutely unacceptable that you don't have some form of universal healthcare, for example. I probably agree with you politically way more than I disagree with you, but the other posters points against you still stand.
EDIT: I realise my first paragraph here might sound a bit harsh, that was not my intention - my intention was to make it explicitly known to you such that you might take it to heart and it might possibly be helpful to you to realise.
No, you’re not getting it. “Reduce police violence” is something people can support. However, the position taken by a major party has been “defund the police” instead. They have started with the “how” and have done so with an untenable position for more than half of the country.
The same applies to solving global warming. Carbon taxation was actually a feasible solution with conservative support. Now instead, a huge chunk of the liberal position has shifted to the green new deal, which is a jobs program and wealth redistribution scheme only orthogonally related to slowing global warming. Nuclear is another viable solution to global warming that nobody wants to touch because science is scary.
This is precisely the kind of scarecrowing we are seeing with the ruling class today in America. I purposely worded the demands as vague and agreeable as possible, because that is what the majority of the population can agree on.
I personally want carbon tax and police abolition, but there is no consensus on either of these, and what I personally want doesn’t matter. I am not a dictator and the USA is not a dictatorship. It is the legislator’s job to gather what the people want, and find a way to deliver it in a way that will benefit the most. However the American ruling class is not even pretending to be interested in what policies the general population supports.
What? How is that any different from any programs funded with taxation money? Am I automatically in the Army because my tax-dollars help fund the military? Am I in the AAA because my tax-dollars help pay for roads?
> I’m saying there are policies that an overwhelming majority in USA supports, such as universal healthcare, taxing the rich, stop foreign wars, stop police violence, reduce carbon emission, etc.
The average person might support all of those end results if the cost to get there were zero, i.e. if we could wave a magic wand.
However each one of those has a cost or tradeoff that a significant number - possibly majority - of people would be unwilling to accept.
I think the moralization is due to the religious root of the American culture. Religion is all about morality, and the American people, especially those on the right side, invoke God too easily. Those on the left side, still think it's God that grant the America the privilege to herd all the people of the whole world, to teach the world what's right and wrong.
If people in another country may be wrong and have to be taught what's right, well, how can people in another state avoid such error? How can people next door be always right, such as I am?
No, 'moralisation' comes from the emotions of our biology. Disgust, tribalism, groupthink, mob mentality - all the horrors are in our biology, right here, right now, inside everyone, in 2020.
'Godless' non-religious people on the left are extremely 'moral' and burn people at the stake via deplatforming and cancelling.
Science and scientific culture of the last 50/100 years has helped, but even it's been hijacked by our monolithic emotional reality of tribalism and fear. Zooming out, scientific culture is a momentary lifting of a mountain one inch off the ground.
The development of human nature is frozen in time compared to the development of science. Science has caught up to it, and has hit a wall which scientific papers alone cannot move. In fact, the analogy of throwing wads of paper at a wall and expecting it to move. That's the impact it's having.
I fear there is not much we can do about human nature until we can physically change ourselves at the DNA level, to rid or regulate emotions like rage and disgust via CRISPR etc. There's pros and cons of being in the 'World State' or in the 'Savage Reservation'. (Brave New World reference.)
It's been brewing since around 1970, plus or minus a few years.
What changed then? A lot of things. We can talk about the financial decoupling and tech, of course. But that was also when imported oil became a concern. It was when international shipping settled on a standard intermodal container. It was when the drug wars started. And it was after major victories in the civil rights movement, and failures in Vietnam. There were winners and losers in these changes. The big winners were neoliberal-progressives who could shape all these influences into a new political alignment that pleased globalizing businesses and placated the masses. The losers were the remnants of the supremacist structure post-Reconstruction, who had fell into a decline with the Depression and war years, and saw collapse in the 60's. They were ushered towards religion, nostalgia narratives about the good old days, and apocalyptic fiction about the decline of the world and those few who would stand up to it.
The problem that the neoliberal structure faced was the one politicians always face: how to accommodate a divided electorate and keep one's career? The formula that emerged was to force the talking points into a narrower spectrum, a tactic refined over the course of decades. In this space, policy change is blocked where it hurts private property interests(as neoliberalism indicates), and the remainder is a set-aside for partisanship where professionals craft pro and contra arguments.
But the consequence of doing that is a build-up of pressure on both left and right, as everything gradually becomes a property issue and gets blocked or deferred. With no enfranchisement, both have radicalized - first the right, and then the left in reaction.
And that's the state of things. How does it end? With a new coalition that courts all the defining forces of this era effectively, guided by some overarching ideology. However, if we take this to be a cycle as in Strauss-Howe's theory, this is simply the beginning of the neoliberal decline, a period of crisis management and compromise, not the defining of that coalition.
Then it is time to create a formal, enforceable separation between person and profession. That is, what one does personally is taken separately from professional conduct and vice versa.
I'm so sick of this "both sides" garbage. I'm not R or D, I'm not even an American, but one side, the R side, has simply gone insane, and the other has barely changed at all, except to move to the right.
> They will actively try to ruin your life over wrongthink.
In most cases, the wrongthink is someone saying something so horrible that most people are disgusted.
A small number of these cases are definitely an overreach.
This is what baffles me about Americans. "Well, the Ds were rude to some people, and the Rs killed a hundred thousand American. I can't see the difference!"
> I'm so sick of this "both sides" garbage. I'm not R or D, I'm not even an American, but one side, the R side, has simply gone insane, and the other has barely changed at all, except to move to the right.
I feel identical, but apparently mirrored politically to you. So in the spirit of charity, how do you feel the R side has gotten more conservative? I don't even need sources, just your perspective.
The Republicans under Eisenhower, and pretty much until Nixon's Southern Strategy, supported social programs, civil rights, fighting income inequality, investments in infrastructure, education, etc. Even under Nixon, they still supported a Basic Income.
Since Reagan, the Republican Party has moved very far to the right, focused primarily on lowering taxes for the rich, undermining the social programs they used to support, creative gerrymandering, and suppressing votes they don't like (often black votes).
Under Reagan there was still some sanity and reason behind it and especially under George HW Bush, but since Newt Gingrich, the party seems to have abandoned all common sense, embraced lies to justify war under Bush jr, and with Trump, it's just all lies for the sake of lies, with every remaining principle they used to have thrown out of the window, with the lone exception of power for its own sake, and hurting people they disagree with.
McCain and Romney seem(ed) to be the last of the old guard that still care (somewhat?) about basic honesty.
Though I guess the move towards the current insanity has nothing to do with anything resembling conservatism or "right" anymore. But the party has definitely changed beyond recognition. And I do think it started with Nixon's Southern Strategy, which was already about sacrificing principles for power. The first step on a very long slide down.
The idea that taking away health coverage (during a pandemic even!!!) and doing everything possible to let the most amount of people die in a pandemic is comparable to political correctness or sending people extra unemployment so they don't have to work in a pandemic is unbelievably absurd. It's beyond stupid. But you can see this twosideism play out in society at large. The news interviews experts who know what they're talking about and alongside them gives equal coverage to whackos with insane ideas that have no base in reality.
The problem isn't giving both sides the chance to speak, it's pretending that the ideas are equal and giving them equal weight. For example, wearing masks, washing hands, and social distancing as ideas for fighting the pandemic are not similar to drinking bleach and bathing in UV light. Yet both ideas get equal coverage and equal weight, as if they are both valid methods of dealing with the pandemic. This is why we cannot discuss politics and why Americans have to hide their views. People who can think will not put up with the stupidity of the idiotic ideas people who can't think put forward. How can you have a conversation with an idiot who thinks it's a good idea to drink bleach? Or one who thinks corona is spread by 5G towers. There is nothing to talk about. And the idiot cannot converse back either. They are likely unable to actually understand the situation so any evidence provided goes above their head.
Eventually, the idiots move to one side, the rest move to another, and it becomes an intractable problem. That's what we're seeing now in America. The institutions that are led by idiots have failed horribly, often on purpose: White House, Senate, CDC, FDA, Florida, Texas, Arizona, etc. But of course, this is all taboo to discuss in the first place. Politics are taboo in America. That's why no one talks about any issues and why we truly are a "shithole country," as the president called it.
Ny view is like this. We are entering into narratives which are not only abhorrent but also, largely idiotic and they're being called political beliefs.
It's a very difficult bind, because the media has fully bought in.
Since you're not an American, I'm curious where you get your information. Here in the United States the states have their own rights. Of the top ten states for per capita deaths, eight have Democrat governors. Some of those Democrat governors decided to place COVID-positive patients into facilities with the elderly, killing thousands. New York government agencies are even fighting the release of information about their actions regarding the nursing homes.
Democrat officials in multiple states encouraged people to attend large gatherings in Asian neighborhoods to "fight racism" when the pandemic was getting started. So it goes far beyond being "rude to some people". Both sides have made huge mistakes, and it appears that the foreign press is giving one side a pass.
> Of the top ten states for per capita deaths, eight have Democrat governors.
This is going to change rapidly over the coming days, as the virus is rapidly growing the south.
According to JHU, for confirmed cases (not deaths, as in your comment): AZ (#3), FL (#5), MS (#8), AL (#9), SC (#10). (50/50) In approx. another week, GA (currently #11) will probably also become #10.
I've been deriving this data from the JHU data (which is on GitHub) myself for a while now: https://imgur.com/a/RpjEm9Z ; the full chart is remarkably busy, and not that great. I mean to try to clean it up into something more usable, but I've been swamped with my day job all week.
I expect deaths will generally follow in the coming weeks, regrettably. There might be some variance, of course, between states in deaths-per-captia, and that is a graph I've been meaning to make (since that might show something interesting about which states are better dealing with infections), especially after Chris Wallace's interview with Trump, and the remarks the President made there.
You're forgetting a group (that probably existed all along): many people simply don't care.
Also the fact that people actually feel the need to have bans on talking about politics eg at the workplace doesn't seem like a good sign to me, and that's hardly new at all.
What "sharing" though? Not discussing at work? I don't talk about anything non-business other than "appropriate business small-talk" with people I only know professionally. It's common courtesy.
Yeah, I'd need to see some historical baselines before I care about these percentages. If they've stayed roughly flat for 100 years versus wild 50 point swings just in the last 5 years... those bring two completely different takeaways.
If the majority hide their political views then there is no way to engage with them and ever present your side on issues.
Which migh sound bad but is actually a natural response to being forcefully fed extreme ends of political stances.
So the debate over media and internet missinformation might be for nothing. People adapt arround obstacles. In the end there could only be bots responding to bots and campaign members patting eachother on the back for the number of likes the bots generated.
> If the majority hide their political views then there is no way to engage with them and ever present your side on issues.
Was this ever true? Do the majority of companies encourage talk about religion or the majority of churches encourage talk about politics?
The people react to stimuli like {media, campaigns, bots} just like they do any other marketing: there is a game theory response to stimuli. If they get overwhelmed on one platform, they will change habits (eg. move to a different platform, discuss only in person where there are no bots, discuss these topics less). I suspect campaigns have been around long enough that more people (with the help of information widely distributed on the internet) have gained a different tolerance to the same old campaign tricks.
Says people on both sides, unbeknownst to them as they neg the centrist who has the audacity to analyze policies important to them at that point in time.
I was raised in a conservative family. My views have shifted greatly leftward over the last 20 years. I avoid sharing my views at work not because I am afraid for myself, but because I don't want to make conservative colleagues of mine feel unwelcome. I prioritize their comfort in our shared work environment over the enjoyment I would derive from a vigorous political argument. We are there together to work on difficult technical and business problems -- not to solve (or even define) what needs changing in American political life. If I want to talk politics, I'll jump into the comments section of a blog.
I go back and forth on this. I think you can always find people in your life with whom you could have these conversations with. Especially at work I think you'd have a high chance of finding someone with whom you'd actually want to discuss these things because you respect them a lot given their work ethics and personality. They'd have different ideas and thoughts than you but wouldn't try to "convert" you in any way.
I don't know... I think discourse with real people in real life is still worth something.
The only thing I simply won't discuss with anyone, either online or not, is theology. It will never lead to anything good. I think everyone has to find their own way there.
> The only thing I simply won't discuss with anyone, either online or not, is theology. It will never lead to anything good. I think everyone has to find their own way there.
Ultimately, yes, each person must arrive at their own personal set of beliefs and conclusions, if that's what you mean. But surely silent introspection without ever engaging with anyone else can only take one so far? Everyone is exposed to the ideas of others, and discussions often lead to epiphanies or meaningful progress in someone's own personal journey (conversations with counselors and therapists come to mind). Maybe experience will also teach me that theology/spirituality/some other prickly topic is just never worth discussing with anyone, but I also believe that it's possible to have productive discussions about a topic that is this close to what makes us human.
...Sorry, I just realized this post counts as discussing theology with you!
There is a remarkable corollary in these statistics:
> Nearly two‐ thirds of Latino Americans (65%) and White Americans (64%) and nearly half of African Americans (49%) have political views they are afraid to share
According to the first chart, 42% of “strong liberals” feel like they can share their political views. That group is disproportionately white: https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2020/02/27/5-facts-abo.... So there are all these people of color who are substantially more afraid to share their political views than a group of disproportionately white liberals on the far left.
because no party has ever represented them, only pandered. the affiliation assumptions aren't as strong as people are led to believe, I would say nonexistent.
but more closer to 50% since literally half of the people don’t openly espouse verbatim party line beliefs and dont want people to know, while a much greater percent of the subset that bothers/is enfranchised to vote sticks with one party
Reinforcing an assumption, useful for pandering, while with this information another approach could be possible
No, I mean to the right of the median. For example, in poll data from last year 61% of Americans overall but only 51% of black Americans support gay marriage. On some issues like interracial marriage, they're actually even further to the right; 18% of black Americans say interracial marriage is bad for society, while only 12% of Republican-leaners do.
Marriage equality is a notorious outlier. Compare abortion, marijuana legalization, immigration, and taxes. (Rayiner noted earlier that black voters are to the right of Democrats more generally, which is true, but they're right at the median overall, and far to the left of evangelical white voters).
My understanding is that black voters are also to the right of the median on abortion. I can't find any recent statistics - all the polls I'm seeing only break down "white" and "non-white", but black Americans trailing in support for abortion is a historically well-known phenomenon (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/3852356/).
The other issues, yeah, you're right. I don't really consider taxes a social issue, but I realized I forgot about gun control.
> My understanding is that black voters are also to the right of the median on abortion
As I point out, with a source, in another subthread, Blacks are more supportive of abortion than the nation as a whole, and second only to Asians.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23936024
Even in your ancient (5 years after Roe!) piece, while Blacks were less supportive of abortion than average, they were also becoming supportive more rapidly than other groups. 40+ years later, that faster change has flipped the starting positions.
> For those who aren't aware, the reason for this is well-known: the average POC statistically leans right on all social issues except for race.
Blacks are the most supportive of abortion legality in most or all cases of any race other than Asians, so that's one issue that isn't race that Blacks lean to the left on.
It’s complicated. They are also more likely to say abortion is morally wrong than many other groups, which has political implications. (Legality versus non-legality isn’t really the main issue today.)
Is there a baseline for how high this was in the past other than the mentioned 58% a few years ago in the article?
I can't imagine that there wasn't substantial amounts of this during say, the heights of McCarthyism or when gay-rights weren't as accepted. Not to mention another interesting meta question, are people nowadays more prone to share that they feel like they cannot express their opinion?
My grandparents for example have it so ingrained to not question religious belief that they probably wouldn't even perceive it that way. Or just women in general. The stereotypical "housewife" only a few decades ago wasn't participating in public discourse at all and certainly not expected to. With the exception of a few high profile intellectuals women were mostly excluded from political life. I have a hard time even comparing this to today.
I'm sure it existed back then to some extent (and to a large extent in specific periods, such as McCarthyism), but all that predates social media, which makes it so much faster and easier to spread this information to everyone in your life.
In those days, you'd have to have someone want to bring it forth to the police or government for anyone to bother, and most people won't know about it until it hits the newspaper, if it does. But now it's the court of public opinion with instant judgement and you can be fired from your job, unfriended or blocked by half your friends, and everyone publicly disavowing any association with you before you even find out about it or have a chance to defend yourself. Which, from what I've seen, rarely makes a difference. The damage is already done and doesn't usually ever get undone.
Of course a bunch of people are going to keep their mouths shut on political views in this environment. They want to keep their career and friends.
I don't share some of my political beliefs for the same reason I don't talk about my atheism to my grandmother right now, so soon after my grandfather died. While I think they're right, they're both hurtful and unproductive to express. IMO one both should have some views that would bother people (because reason leads one to them), but sometimes choose not to express them because one's opinion isn't the most important thing in the world for other people to hear. I wish the OP meant that 62% of people have a conscience. Instead, I think it means a lot of people are afraid other people will get mad and fire them if they're openly racist.
"Strong liberals" are apparently the only people who are proud enough about what they believe to be judged for it. Or maybe it's just impunity because it's illegal to fire people based on race, gender, and (often) sexual orientation, so they feel protected. Overt racists should lobby for similar protections, although I don't think they'll have a lot of luck.
The racist label is tossed around so frivolously these days, like Nazi, to become practically meaningless except to intimidate people into silence.
The truth is that strong liberals have become extremely aggressive in intimidating and shaming anyone who disagrees with them in the modern era. And it's disturbing and completely corrosive, toxic and destructive.
I believe the U.S. needs its right brain and left brain to openly discuss and debate issues because neither side has a monopoly on morality or correctness.
Democracy doesn't die in darkness. It dies in uniformity. Have you ever lived in a one party country? It's the closest thing to hell on Earth.
The USA is a one party country -- it's just very good at marketing it as two parties. They never actually solve the problems they claim to care about -- they just keep using the same wedge issues for successive elections.
Until we actually have competition from other parties, the two party oligopoly (enforced by entrenched interests at the state level) makes our political system as useless as a one party political system.
It is worth pondering what these "political views" are.
A huge number of white people (and a distressing number of nonwhites) believe in racist pseudoscience, and are justifiably afraid of expressing that view in polite company. If one of my employees said "whites are on average more intelligent than blacks," either in the office or on Facebook, I would fire them, even if it's probably true that most whites feel this way. If I had an employee that held such views, then darn right they should be afraid to talk about it.
The Cato poll indicates that the biggest difference in "self-censorship" occurs among conservatives. I suspect this is because most conservatives know that supporting Donald Trump is morally indefensible, and don't want to talk about why exactly they are still voting for the most corrupt president in American history.
129 comments and nobody pointed out that cato institute is a right wing "think tank".
And that the way the survey is phrased clearly hints that conservatives are being silenced while "Strong liberals stand out as the only political group who feel they can express themselves"
Ironically, a survey on the political spectrum depicts such spectrum as "liberal vs conservative". Excellent display of Overton window at work.
I wonder if "hacker" news is going to downvote me to hell for saying this.
the saddest thing is while us Plebs persecute each other over which wrestler we like, the real power structure running America remains invisible and unchallenged.
neither Biden or Trump have as much power as our Media Overlords have fooled us into believing. The President is largely the head cheerleader of Team America. they can tweet, they can give a speech, but they cannot control the Deep State one iota. Back in 2009, I remember Obama said one of the most insightful things Ive heard any President say. He said the FedGov is like a ship and all he can do is turn the rudder to aim us in a given direction, but we wont arrive for 10 or 20 years.
personally, i think MAGAtards are just as blind as DemonRats. i guess that opinion means i have to be extra careful expressing my views at work, because i'll get Canceled by both the Left and the Right for heresy against their UniParty-WarParty othodoxy.
I think there needs to be a distinction between political ideas and political ideologies. Especially in the United States, where there's an obsession between the GOP and the DCCC, even though neither political party represents a majority.
When you ask respondents on political ideas, like voting rights, immigration, state welfare, infrastructure, etc, a much broader and more moderate viewpoint emerges.
Also there seems to be a more growing disconnect between people in power and the masses. I think as data science becomes a more developed craft, more people will become aware about the motivations of our political actors. Sensationalism and political correctness are usually signs of a deeper problem---
This doesn't surprise me. I am also afraid to express myself for fear of being rejected by most of my friends or excluded from my professional network.
It is sad that I can only be honest and say things such as "let's wait for the facts" under a nickname on some dark corner of the web.
Maybe take some self-examination. Your friends should be your most sympathetic audience, if you're afraid of expressing your opinions even to them, maybe you need to have an honest converstaion either with yoursself or with them.
My family is my most sympathetic audience. Also, my closest friends understand me well and accept who I am.
However, I have tons of friends apart from the groups mentioned above; people that I appreciate, whom I have met through different hobbies or passions. None of these bonds have a connection to politics, but it is common for some of them to bring up political topics during these months. I reserve my opinions on these topics because I understand that there are a lot of emotions involved. Moreover, we all have biases. We are not at war, we just digress on the solutions the country needs.
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[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 346 ms ] threadHoly shit. Am I reading this right? 53% of Americans would support firing someone based on a donation to a presidential campaign? Later in the post it says this figure rises to 71% of people under 30.
I've always wondered how far this extends in the minds of people okay with this. If they found out in a year or two that someone donated to trump's campaign, does that justify firing too? I imagine this dystopia where someone gets fired for a donation, only for their new employer to find out about the donation and fire them too, and so on, leaving them either unemployable, or dividing employment along party lines.
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edit: Yes, it crossed my mind that we're assuming these are disjoint groups. We might be double counting the intersection of the two groups. The true total is the percent listed above minus the percent who support firing a Trump donor while also wanting to fire a Biden donor. I can't imagine the intersection being significant, so I left it out. I expect these figures are approximately accurate if the survey is accurate.
My conclusion above is independent of my own political views. Supposing I were a fervent Trump supporter, I should hope in that case that the Biden-firers are mostly non-partisan supporters of right-to-work laws rather than haters of my guy. Not saying I'd expect that to be true, just that I'd prefer it.
the Right powerstructure has convinced 50% of Americans that Biden will be the re-animated corpse of Stalin, and that he will sieze all private property and throw us all in gulags.
the net effect of this hyperpartisan polarization driven by fake news filter bubbles is that none of us can have a plain old reasonable discussion with each other, and agree to disagree about certain fundamentals, while finding a practical compromise going foward. being forced into being an extremist foot soldier of either Party or risk being destroyed by the partisans of the other Party is the worst lose-lose outcome of Prisoner's Dilemma.
i think the Deep State wants us divided and at each other's throats so that we don't team up and topple them.
The US isn’t a first world country anymore, it is devolving into a political and cultural mess.
Presumably there is some line that many of us would agree you can't cross but opinions will differ on where and what the line is.
For example, it might be your stance that all Trump supporters are racist. Would I hire someone who was openly racist? Absolutely not.
Is the reality that all Trump supporters are racists? No, probably not.
A counter-example, you believe that abortion is murder. Would you hire someone who supports murder? absolutely not.
Is abortion murder? Not definitively. It depends on your personal outlook.
Hiring/firing is just not an objective process anywhere, and you're going to be subject to the personal biases of the boss... and we're in particularly biased times. On the bright side, I suspect historical numbers would be worse... and at least it's not a civil war.
Are you against this in principle, for all possible presidential candidates regardless of how bad their views and policies and actions are (by your own definition of "bad")? Or do you just think that, right now, no major candidate is "bad enough" that you would advocate firing someone for supporting that candidate?
Not the GP, but of course yes. If someone is good enough for your political and legal system to advance his candidature at the elections and be voted by citizens, then who has the right to damage me for my legitimate political choice?
I don't see how an endorsement of a vile racist couldn't be seen as disqualifying for positions of authority.
The state defines a frame of things that are lawful and that every citizen should be able to perform in perfect safety. If you think that the laws of your country are not sufficient, then seek to change them; instead you seem to advocate for vigilante justice in the absence of shared and agreed upon rules.
Do you seriously not see the difference between, "this opinion should not get you thrown in jail" and "this opinion should not belong to someone in a position of power"?
In essence, the opinions of your opponents and enemies are just as valid as your opinions, no matter how much you dislike these opinions (it's plausible that they dislike your opinions just as much) and you should not get a veto to say that their opinions don't belong to someone in a position of power but your opinion can do so; people have the right to have their opinions represented in politics.
Fringe opinions deserve only trivial representation and that's what they get, but this article is about various mainstream opinions held by as much as 62% of people, it's obvious that most of these opinions should be allowed to belong to someone in a position of power.
I think that this is not true and that society and individuals can and should reserve the right to suppress intolerant ideologies.
A line in the sand of "we won't harass people because of their political views" generally works as protection against oppression, even if you have to include oppressive political views as well in that basket.
In essence, the choice in this matter is simply about escalation or living side by side with your political enemies by agreeing to specify where "the battlefield" is - IMHO, ideally, limited to debates and votes by elected representatives and discourse in media and social circles. If it's escalated to "let's fight our enemies" in the field of employment or providing services then it's not as bad as street fights (which were used in political 'discourse' a hundred years ago) but still going to lead to a lot of people harmed on both sides.
All modes of justification can be invoked fraudulently. This does not invalidate my mode of justification any more than it invalidates very basic uncontroversial modes of justification such as "we should reserve the right to use force to suppress murder." Sure, those in power can and do invoke that mode of justification fraudulently by falsely claiming that people are murderers and thus using violence against them. We do not throw up our hands and say "well, we cannot ever use that mode of justification, because who can really say for sure what is and isn't murder?"
> Trump reserving the right to suppress ideologies that are intolerant to "Blue lives matter" cause or conservative politicians reserving the right to suppress ideologies that threaten christian family values.
Just like my even simpler example above, this is not a problem for my argument. I can and do claim two things: that we are justified using violence to suppress intolerance, and that it's bad when people use violence to suppress things that they falsely claim are intolerance.
I understand, but how can the same state allow mobs and employers to harass people and sometimes destroy their lives because they do what the state allows? The state doesn't just declare freedoms, it protects them. For example, if the state doesn't throw you in jail for your opinions, can someone else do it without the state intervening?
> Do you seriously not see the difference between, "this opinion should not get you thrown in jail" and "this opinion should not belong to someone in a position of power"?
I see that the first statement comes from the state and it is valid for everyone; the second is subjective and is made by a group of people who have taken on themselves the role of judge, jury and executioner. Granted, it's a statement that is in your right to make; but if you act on it you can become responsible of harassment, stalking, mobbing.
What do you mean? Who among us gets to decide who is allowed on the ballot?
However I guess the keyword is can. Tolerance should be exercised from all sides and political ideas should not be a motivation in and by themselves. However it's also true that the CEO of a company is in some cases him/herself a political figure, so I guess it depends on the case.
That's certainly the case. And, at some level, a political figure doesn't get to have a private life beyond some constraints. In principle, this doesn't apply to lower-level employees--although in many cases those employees are public faces to the company as well. And companies will much more quickly dismiss individuals who become a headache for whatever reason than they will their CEO.
So, to be clear: intolerance should be frowned upon by default. The community can decide to be intolerant towards some things, but those things must be agreed, shared and made clear once and for all. And at that point, that agreed-upon intolerance becomes a law and can be actually enforced by the state itself.
However, I'm not sure what kind of "regulation" you're referring to, because if you mean that, say, only the government gets to decide when to use force to suppress intolerance, there's the obvious problem of "what happens if the government is intolerant?"
Well, I guess that at some point you have to accept one risk or another. Any system can fail in one way or the other.
I personally don't like laws limiting freedom of speech; but I also don't like angry mobs that openly and proudly exercise intolerance of anything that falls into their own entirely subjective definition of intolerance.
I would like the state to protect me from those who try to set the limits of freedom of speech as it suits them; but I understand that if the state wants to take from the people the power to silence unacceptable speech, then it must provide some minimum guarantee by taking it upon itself. Best of all would be no laws, but education and common sense, and of course tolerance, from all parts: but again, what do you do if that fails?
That and imagining it the other way around. I'm adamantly pro-choice and have donated to orgs supporting this. From the right wing perspective, I support literal murder. What better justification than that to fire me? The only reason I can think that I shouldn't be fired for being pro-choice is that, well, my worldview is the right one.
It seems like many people think that "political" actions should enjoy a special protection and that no such actions should ever draw any criticism or consequences. The same attitude is common for actions labelled as "religious." I reject that special status.
Yep and for the same reason free speech is protected. Because nobody can be trusted with being the arbiter of correct speech, or which candidate to support. Sure, it sounds good for extreme right-wing examples, but there's no guarantee you can limit it to the worst extremes once people have that arbitrary power. Might be your job the mob decides to go after some day, because you chose the wrong candidate to support, according to whatever criteria they're using.
Also because donating to a presidential campaign has nothing to do with their work performance.
As far as I know, in USA the employment discrimination laws draw a distinction between these classes (ethnicity and religion are protected classes, politics is not), however, my local laws and my personal moral compass puts them in the same basket; I'd consider someone being fired because they're, for example, a card-carrying member of the local radical communist party to be equivalent of firing someone because they're Jehovah’s Witness or have sexual practices of which the local church disapproves. They should be able to run as a candidate for that party in some elections while not having their employment threatened for that - this is needed to prevent e.g. the owner of a town-dominating factory from suppressing political opposition to the current elected town officials.
I support firing someone for supporting a harmful cause, and particularly from intolerant causes. If, for instance, you provide material support for stripping voting rights from a minority group, or denying hospital visitation rights to couples with a certain sexuality, I would support your employer firing you for that. That applies regardless of whether you’re providing that support via a political or religious group. Political and religious groups shouldn’t enjoy any special protection when they’re doing harmful and intolerant things.
Are you a 'person of color'? You're presuming to speak for all of them and can't imagine anyone would not share your same political views. Worse, that based on their skin color they must act as some homogeneous group.
I didn't do any of that. It's kinda weird to me that you think that at all summarizes what I wrote.
So tell me then, why do you think someone supporting Trump "would not go over well" with "employees of color".
Your words.
Please, tell me more about how 'employees of color' think
I guess I do hold controversial opinions. Please don't cancel me, 2020views.
I'm not sure why it was phrased that way. It seems to be hinting at wealthy people controlling the outcome of elections.
A: Support for liberty means I don't want to restrict who works with whom.
B: Veil of Ignorance means I don't want circumstances out of someone's control to result in use of A to discriminate in hire/fire.
C: Individual freedom is important.
D: Societal success is important.
The nuance is not quick-expressible in text, but that's the short form. I believe principles are only useful if they lead to desirable outcomes, so I have no problem special-casing exemptions to these, but I don't think political opinion is worth making a protected hiring class. This is a point where I disagree with California employment law (which does make political affiliation a protected class) and agree with Federal employment law which is more circumspect in its.
On the other hand, I wouldn't fire a person for political affiliation, generally. If it would almost certainly sink my business, then I would.
Perhaps more bluntly, are you yourself a Nazi, a Communist, or happy with where the US is politically? If you're none of the above (as you likely aren't), then you must be able to see that moderate views can still be left or right-leaning.
Maybe the kindest reading of your comment is that the average person that's overly critical on Facebook only sees in black and white, left vs right. And if so, we completely agree :)
This is nothing to do with the political climate of the US in 2020, it's very much to do with the fact that formative experiences early in my career very strongly influenced the prior that work and personal lives are streams that shall not be crossed, and coworkers are not to be trusted.
More money (for whom? and by what means?) is not always better.
But there's a difference between simplicity in jobs like flipping burgers vs finance, and that's power. If we work in a job that is both powerful AND simple (like many in tech & finance), it's likely many unintended externalities are being created.
Externalities, because they affect others, have strong political ramifications. So if you're working in a field with a lot of power, and you're having simple to nonexistent conversation about externalities, there's a good chance you're contributing to the problems you're trying to avoid discussing by virtue of wielding power blindly.
Perhaps those externalities would be better solved at their source of the workplace rather than let fester in the public sphere. This is a sort of 'ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure' argument for why its important that workplaces engage in these discussions, and why the shareholder value maximization approach is too reductionist for corporate entities of any meaningful size or power.
I would love to see better defined contacts or unionization.
Most of the stuff they push, I'm not opposed to in general. My opinions tend to be more focused on the libertarian implementation of achieving those things and adhering to rule of law. This tends to be aligned with the outcomes they say they stand for, but it's not the 'right' answer (liberal).
And don't even think about telling a joke that could even slightly be misinterpreted or overheard by a 3rd party. A guy from my building got fired for moving a diversity poster because somebody thought the action was offensive.
Cancel culture is tedious moralizing, but mostly a media spectacle meant to drive attention to various figures and platforms. The average worker has more to fear from those who sign their paychecks than anyone else.
A better solution is to stop deductions for employer-sponsored healthcare and shift the expense from the employer to the employee with a mandate that old employer health insurance premiums be passed on to employees as wages.
That deduction is the largest lever when it comes to the cost of health insurance (short of bad IP policy and regulation of pharma products).
Seems insane to me.
The problem is not "a political candidate" or even "a highly conservative and deeply capitalistic candidate." The problem is that Trump is a fascist, a vicious racist, and the most corrupt president in American history. Supporting Trump doesn't speak to a difference in political philosophy: it's a fundamental deficit in character.
How could anyone really say that a CEO who donated to Trump is also a CEO committed to a workplace free of bigotry and discrimination? Frankly, the same argument applies to any employee with hiring/firing responsibilities: they should be ashamed for supporting Trump and carry that black mark with them for the rest of their professional lives.
I’m always interested to hear how people arrive at these extreme opinions.
And setting aside the close-reading and the statistics, we should not be naive about his intention, which is to characterize Mexican immigrants as dangerous criminals. Again, should I have to wonder if my coworker believes this about me or my family?
Are you looking at illegal immigrants here, or just legal immigrants? Because it seems like this would be trivially false for illegal immigrants.
Also, the answer to your questions are predominantly no.
If you'd like to address my questions more specifically, I would be happy to read your response. But attempting to shut down my questions because you disagree with the direction you think they're heading is exactly what I thought we were opposed to.
Fundamentally I at least do not want to work with someone who is even still on the level of asking questions like "is racism bad?" or "do women deserve rights?". But a lot of people do do that. If I was hiring... I wouldn't want to hire people thinking like that. Its going to negatively impact what would almost certainly be a diverse group of people trying to cooperatively work together.
It only feels problematic because we each recognize both how biased against the worker the power dynamic in modern western society is and that the job is not merely "the thing you do during the day with your buds" but "the means by which you put food in your mouth and have a bed". If its only about the former breaking relations over political leanings makes perfect sense, for the latter its ruining someones life over "frivolous politics".
I'd rather be in the world where groups dissociate over ideological incompatibilities but where nobody is homeless or hungry for it than the one where ones need for food and shelter is an excuse to let toxic people make life worse for those around them.
At least for me that’s not the case at all.
I guess diversity includes everything but diversity of political opinion?
I know these are serious topics, but I hope we can all take a moment to have a laugh at this typo :).
If Person A can't work with Person B because they don't like their political opinions and Person B keeps their opinions to themselves while on the job, I'd be much more likely to get rid of Person A. I would see them as the person that is causing strife in the workplace, not the other way around.
I'll happely meet a co-worker over lunch/dinner to discuss things more deeply.
But since over time the workplaces is inevitably shaped by the society it is in, in my opinion we might as well try figure out ways to deal with broader issues while at work, instead of pretending they are isolated. (I'm not saying I have a good solution of how this would look like.)
I have noted that the 2 options when talking politics at work are that either 1. you'll disagree, or 2. you'll agree, and I'm not sure which option is worse.
But this is not really true, people arent as swayed as the internet likes to believe. It's a giant fabricated hive mind, where a ton of people feel adversarial towards the commonly held opinions, which are in fact, not commonly held.
Now, I simply can't picture the guy not being reelected, no matter how many poll aggregator I can see.
So, my rationalization is that polls are just getting it wrong, again, and are pretty much useless, but that the silent majority will, again, surprise everyone. We need brain scans rather than poll, quickly
"I am a pro-choice atheist. When I lived in Ireland, one of my friends was a pro-life Christian. I thought she was responsible for the unnecessary suffering of millions of women. She thought I was responsible for killing millions of babies. And yet she invited me over to her house for dinner without poisoning the food. And I ate it, and thanked her, and sent her a nice card, without smashing all her china."
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/rkpDX7j7va6c8Q7cZ/in-favor-o...
It can be summarized as " Instead the iconoclast can choose what I think of as the Kolmogorov option. This is where you build up fortresses of truth in places the ideological authorities don’t particularly understand or care about, like pure math, or butterfly taxonomy, or irregular verbs. You avoid a direct assault on any beliefs your culture considers necessary for it to operate. You even seek out common ground with the local enforcers of orthodoxy."
SlateStarCodex has a related post on the concept titled "Kolmogorov Complicity...": https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/10/23/kolmogorov-complicity-...
I checked as late as a few days ago and it was still disabled ... and now it appears to be back ?
[EDIT 7/21: This post is now a month old, and I am cautiously optimistic that the Times has changed their mind. There is no further need to take any of the actions described below.]
>Self‐ censorship is widespread across demographic groups as well. Nearly two‐ thirds of Latino Americans (65%) and White Americans (64%) and nearly half of African Americans (49%) have political views they are afraid to share. Majorities of men (65%) and women (59%), people with incomes over $100,000 (60%) and people with incomes less than $20,000 (58%), people under 35 (55%) and over 65 (66%), religious (71%) and non‐ religious (56%) all agree that the political climate prevents them from expressing their true beliefs.
Liberals are frequently unaware of their blind spots (but if you take care, they can be corrected). And then there's a swath of conservatives that don't think they're racist. If you should suggest it, it's too easy for them to dig themselves deeper into a hole.
All too frequently, I'll wish I stuck to non-political / comfortable topics – and remembered that political-correctness is there to protect me as an individual, so I can live in my bubble and get on with the day, even though PC-culture might be bad policy for society.
You are aware that the way you phrase it makes it sound like we all are?
I've recognized a few times that I say things in a way that makes people mad even though my original point was fine.
In fact I have had a foreigner come back and thank me several years later for the effort I put in for her and there are several others that seem happy evertime I meet them.
(HN is a weird place though. Here I am racist according to many peoples definitions.)
Ding ding ding! Yes. We all are. Conservatives and liberals.
Everyone is programmed with racist attitudes from the culture-at-large. Many or most never question these unconscious attitudes.
In my experience, folks who have been actively working on racism and social justice for years if not decades are the first to admit that they too carry racist, largely unconscious, beliefs and attitudes.
A lot of people don't seem to grok unconscious bias.
Genuine question, does this include black people?
Racism, also called racialism, the belief that humans may be divided into separate and exclusive biological entities called “races”; that there is a causal link between inherited physical traits and traits of personality, intellect, morality, and other cultural and behavioral features; and that some races are innately superior to others.
https://www.britannica.com/topic/racism
Everyone is born with original sin from being born from Adam and Eve. Many or most never question this concupiscence.
In my experience, folks who have been actively working on heresy and inquisitions for years if not decades are the first to admit that they too carry rebellious, largely hereditary, inclinations towards sin.
A lot of people don't seem to grok original sin.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Implicit_stereotype
As a christian I feel this is a major thing: the realization that you can be perfectly innocent in that you:
- didn't do anything that any law can punish you for
- wasn't aware of doing anything wrong as you were doing it
yet you are far from perfect and when you minutes/days/years later you realize despite your best intentions you still bragged/discriminated/were unfair/went too far/didn't go far enough/etc and you'll be sorry and wish you could do better.
To keep this interesting to everyone in this audience I think I'll avoid going further into the topic unless anyone asks but for anyone particularly interested I'll say that I think this is what Paul grapples with in in Romans 7.
https://activechristianity.org/who-will-deliver-me-from-this...
I started by reading the top but it actually covers a lot of the topics in this thread from a christian perspective.
We can't blame it all on culture when even six month old babies exhibit racism: https://www.utoronto.ca/news/racial-bias-may-begin-babies-si...
Why? Modern society is built on things that go against human nature: The national state, living till we're 80, flying, not killing people, monogamy.
I think you are making the classical moral mistake of assuming the natural state of things is the best state of things.
A full 9% of Republican congresspeople are women.
There are 3 Black Republican congresspeople, or 1.19%.
Women and men can both be sexist towards women, and hold generalised negative prejudices and biases towards men. (what some people would call sexism towards men.)
Similarly black people can both be racist towards black people, and similarly hold negative generalised prejudices and biases towards non-black people. (What some people refer to as racism.)
Humans are inherently biased.
But I do appreciate that you called it out.
I grapple with being racist all the time. The way I climbed up was through a lot of institutions that racist. I grapple with my complicated place in the world, when I talk to my shrink, and not infrequently, because there's a lot of non-PC / uncomfortable things about it all too. I can't get away from both sides of the racism, because of the genes I was born with, so I have to talk about it with someone. If people don't like the whole politically-correct thing, well, this is it too.
My and I guess many others point in this thread is that a lot of people are running around alienating a lot of people who would be ashamed to even catch themselves thinking a racist thought by insisting they are "racist" since they might have implicit biases.
When someone points out something is racist, is your response to explain why it isn't or change?
stopped reading
They were just giving their opinion based on their perspective, and their status as a person of color was something they felt was an important detail since the original article involved demographic data, and you jumped down their throat over it.
That right there.
You created a narrative that any opposition to your opinion will be instantly regarded as racist. (That said, I disagree with the prejudiced person above)
That is obviously true. However when someone is describing thier personal experience, that context is quite useful, which was clearly what was going on in the original comment.
For example - As a gay man I notice subtle prejudice against me in the use of "gay" in negative connotations. (being gay is relevant to the experience here)
You do realize you are taking a gigantic group of people and classifying them all as having some property without knowing the person at all, sounds discriminatory.
And realize you used the word conservative, not Republican, so don't base it on policy decisions that people support as we all known Republicans do not represent conservative policies in most cases you are concerned about. These are two different things which are not inclusive or mutually exclusive.
"If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor" - Desmond Tutu
And being silent is not even an option, because now "silence is violence".
...but in many situations, that's accurate.
Someone who was 'neutral' in the civil rights era on the topic of Jim Crow would be implicitly supporting Jim Crow. Their neutrality implies tolerance of the injustice that was the state of things at the time.
No one is turning a blind eye to our society's problems. I think we're all just wondering what major justice it is we need to deliver.
> No one is turning a blind eye to our society's problems.
Is this a serious statement?
- James Baldwin
I think the key difference between Tutu's phrasing and "if you're not with me you're against me", is that the former presumes some people don't have the luxury of choosing sides and they are requesting support from people who do. If you are, for example, Black in the US, you can't really choose to not make racism a priority, since you will experience its effects whether you like it or not.
"If you're not with me you're against me" doesn't imply anything about the speaker's own agency. In that sense, I think it's a less compassionate thing to say, because the listener chould just as well ask them to change sides. Tutu's framing makes it clearer that not everyone has that freedom.
I don't really like this quote.
It starts off with a false premise, because neutrality is required in order to have justice. A neutral assessment of oppression is that it's wrong.
What Desmond Tutu is really getting at is that so-called "neutrality" which defends the status quo when the status quo is oppression is wrong. But that's not what actual neutrality would do.
And then the quote gets put forth to quash demands for actual neutrality as illegitimate, even when the people in need of it are the victims rather than the oppressors.
I mean that's just not true? There are quite a few subjects that are currently polarized where each side considers theirs to be just and enforcing it justice.
This seems like the opposite of the truth. Surely justice in most cases is looking at a dispute between two or more parties and deciding which party is right and which is wrong and to what extent. It’s very much the opposite of neutrality.
As a very basic example, neutrality in adjudicating a theft of property is to side with the thief and not demand the return of the property.
We've essentially split into two Americas, one red and one blue. The people in the middle (which I generally identify with) are left in the cold...and not only are left in the cold but are attacked by both sides for not abiding by the doctrine. Honestly, the Left is the worst at this. They will actively try to ruin your life over wrongthink. I am much more likely to share a controversial opinion with someone on the Right than on the Left. But it's both sides, a local race here has a Republican attacking another Republican...for endorsing Romney in 2012. It's like I'm living in a bizarro world.
Horseshoe theory is real.
Separately, not opposing the status quo is more like accepting it than supporting it, and these are all different.
Your lack of nuance rather proves the point of the great grandparent post.
> You could also be apolitical because you find all available options to be unacceptable
Is this apolitical, or is it having a politics that is not well represented? It seems more like the latter to me.
Being apolitical is implying that you think that it's good enough as it is to not care.
I think being apolitical is more about having an objective view and judging opinions based on merit rather than the political spectrum they originated from. Could also mean you're either are against all political views, or have none, but this last one seems less likely to happen in practice. People tend to have an opinion, more or less informed or objective as it may be.
Exactly. Anybody who earnestly tries to be informed will realize that there are limits to what they know and subjects for which they are not [yet] informed. There needs to be room for people to say "I'm not informed on that issue, so I don't have an opinion."
Their response was "I get paid per signature, will you sign it so I can make more money?"
My response, "That's an even worse reason, are you telling me someone buying this prop its way into the ballot?" He left at this point.
It is completely reasonable for someone to say they don't like the status quo but also are uncertain about whether a policy improves on the status quo due to their limited knowledge. If that isn't being apolitical we may as well strike the word from the dictionary. It is technically a political stance, but it is not forceful enough to be called support of anything.
I should add, this goes in both directions and I see it from both sides of the political spectrum. I consider myself an independent. I try to judge all issues individually and fall into different camps depending on what we're talking about, but political dialogue has become so toxic that I've gotten to the point where I just cast my vote and move on.
This is why if you want to be an ally to people of color it's not enough to not be racist, but rather you need to be anti-racist. We're seeing more and more how neutrality is dangerous in allowing systemic issues to exist and flourish (see elected Democrats in major American cities, the "not racists", allowing the police state to exist and perpetuate systemic racism). If you want to be an ally, you need to become comfortable admitting that the privileged position of neutrality isn't compatible with allyship.
If you think you hold no political opinion this is usually a sign that you can afford to do so. Just like my grandfather who fought in the Wehrmacht and said afterwards that he wasn't convinced, he just went the easy way and didn't question his orders. Was that apolitical? I don't think so — it was more an excuse he told himself to avoid responsibility for what he helped create.
Sorry, but sometimes inaction is political, because it means you are willing to give the controls to the next person who grabs it as long as you don't think you will end up worse off. "I don't care what happens to anyone but me", may sound apolitical, but it really isn't.
Interestingly, both meanings are in the dictionary[1] and the argument that there is just one is either coming from ignorance or bad faith. The GP's "being apolitical just means you support the status quo" definitely looks like a troll. It uses "support" as "endure" (an unusual meaning in such a context) but implies "support" as "promote".
1. https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/support
Back when I studied ethics we were talking about the famous trolly problem. The professor proposed multiple scenarios and after each asked the auditorium who would act and who wouldn't. I can vividly remember three points:
1. Even seemingly clear cut ethical questions weren't clear cut at all. Rarely as much as 80:20 more often 60:40
2. Doing nothing always gets a perk over doing smomething. If you do something you might have done the wrong thing and feel silly for it - if you do nothing it is easier to brush off.
3. When the professor rephrased a scenario in such a way that you had to take basically the same decision, but your role was more direct (instead of pulling a lever to sacrifice one person, you'd have to push them in front of the trolly) nearly nobody would do so.
These differences in perception of indirect and direct effect is what we use to excuse ourselves in cases where our inaction would have saved lives ("I could have easily pulled the lever and saved four lives" VS "I couldn't have pushed that person in front of the trolly, even if it would have saved lives").
Similarily my grandfather's generation would have said: "There was nothing I could have done to stop it anyways" - with the unspoken part beeing "without taking a personal burden". Note that we live in one of the few areas where people were hiding in the mountains to resist the Nazis and these were partely people he personally knew. So he knew one could do something, he just either didn't dare, chose to (conveniently for him) not think about it, or only felt sorry in hindsight.
As another data point: At least where I grew up not helping someone in need (e.g. of first aid) is a felony, as long as the circumstances allowed you to help. Not sure how this is in the US tho
Back to the trolley problem and the thesis of everything being a subject of politics as in politics as "the principles relating to or inherent in a sphere or activity, especially when concerned with power and status." and "a particular set of political beliefs or principles".
Is a rich aristocrat on the court of the french king who puts sticks down his throat so he can vomit and eat on while the poor starve at the gates apolitical? This aristocrat is completely minding his own business, might even be a very nice soul who never hurt a fly.
In my eyes there is rarely any way to act apolitical. Even if you exile yourself in the desert that would be a choice that e.g. influences your family. This influence on your surrounding world is what makes things political, because we constantly decide how to interact with the society around us. And it doesn't matter if you hold strong political opinions or are oblivious to everything, what you do is still a part of politics (e.g. by signaling others what is commonly accepted behavior and which your (polical) values are. Do you pull the lever and kill the man or do you let the five other people die? What if they are kids? What if they are old people? What if they are black?
Decisions like these are not arbitrary, they show us fundamental truths of how we think and work in relation to our surroundings, and this is – in my book – political.
Indeed. The premise of the problem is that you believe that a certain action will cause a certain effect and the actual effects of your actions do not matter as it's an ethical and not mechanical, medical or engineering problem.
>In my eyes there is rarely any way to act apolitical.
It is understood. I just wanted to make you aware that in some other people eyes it's bonkers.
And there were all kinds of ignorant kids, grew up in podunk poor towns, but still had an opinion about the civil and the uncivil. They were certainly political. And they volunteered to fight fascism and quite a lot of them died for it. Now, fascism is just name calling. It's not a real thing that exists, or could exist. It's just politics, which is also unimportant and mostly make believe. It's something that his site considers anti-intellectual.
So when people intentionally refuse to think and wilfully run from fundamental truth, the situation is pretty dire. Apolitical is indistinguishable from apathy. Perhaps some part of it's cognitive dissonance, that at least suggests there's an awareness of a conflict that matters enough to ignore because it's more comfortable.
Somebody needs to tell me what voting is supposed to be about, then.
Politics is about applying collective power from an entity funded by taxpayers. There is nothing political about the decision of whether or not to assist an elderly woman who is lost, or volunteer to coach a youth basketball team, or you know, just do decent things to make the world a better place that doesn't require the application of the collective power of our government institutions.
If we move from scientific facts to moral once: “Slavery is bad and should be illegal” is not a political statement. Meanwhile “Women have the rights to their own bodies” is (also for a very bad reason) a political statement.
If we would give climate-deniers and anti-abortion biggots the platform they deserve (i.e. none) their viewpoints would only be as fringe as the once of the flat earth conspiracy theory—i.e. not relevant because their obviously wrong, and therefor not political.
This is a political statement. I'm not sure how the world "political" drifted away from the meaning of law, rulers, and representation to whatever it means now. Any statement about what the law should be is political. Any statement about how best to change or preserve laws, specifically or generally, is political.
edit: Whether global warming is anthropogenic or not is not political. What we should do about it (or not do about it if we don't think it's real or we don't think it's important) is political.
You think the morality of abortion is so clear-cut that it should not be a political issue? Lots of women are anti-abortion.
I see later that you refer to "anti-abortion biggots" (sic). You appear close-minded.
Hacker News guidelines say you shouldn't do that https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. "That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3."
So it is a political statement, but not controversial to say in most situations.
It is now.[1] "Donald Trump Says The Earth Is Flat" - Flat Earth Society.
[1] https://www.theflatearthsociety.org/forum/index.php?topic=69...
I disagree. Those are both political statements for precisely the same reason. You're just very unlikely to find people with political power or influence disagreeing with the first statement (although that wasn't true in the past!).
My wife happens to be vehemently opposed to abortion, and also a woman of color. Yet you associated her with a bigot and climate change denial.
Which exposes similar thinking to what the OP was talking about: Not everything is political, but because my wife thinks differently from you on terminating fetuses due to her having worked in a neonatal ICU with premature babies, she's a bigot? Sounds like you are in a tribe and are lumping my wife into the opposing tribe based on one opinion she holds.
By the way, I find it ironic that your last sentence that condemns view points that differ from your own to be silenced and then mentions flat-earthers. The original flat-earthers gave Galileo the platform they thought he deserved: a life sentence in prison. They were confident and lacked the intellectual humility to believe opposing views should be countered, not suppressed. Ring a bell?
That said, wrong opinions—which I am willing to state exist—do not deserve to be elevated, they do deserve scrutiny if stated.
Banning abortions is a wrong opinion. Perhaps some people have some reason to hold this opinion, and perhaps not all of these people are bigots (although many are). However they are still wrong. And when these wrong options are stated, they do deserve to be scrutinized, and they don’t deserve to be elevated in the general discourse.
However, your statement "banning abortions is a wrong opinion" is itself an opinion. Yet you stated it as if it's a scientific certainty, when in fact it's an opinion you don't share. My wife and I debate it all the time, and it comes down to a prioritization difference in my mind vs her mind. I prioritize the privacy and rights of the pregnant woman over the future existence of the fetus. She views the fetus identically to one that has exited the birth canal and is now a baby. She doesn't think there is a break in the continuum. I disagree with her entirely, but that doesn't make me right and her wrong. It just means that I put a higher priority on the woman's freedom than I do on the right of the fetus to develop into a human. It's amusing to me that when my wife and I argue about this topic, she is focused on the rights of the fetus, and I'm focused on the rights of the woman. We aren't having one argument over a woman's rights, we are having two arguments simultaneously. This is a nuanced view that the current political debate doesn't allow for. Her view was obviously influenced by walking into a hospital and watching parents pray by the side of incubators containing 26 week preemies, and then seeing activists debating whether third-trimester abortions should be banned. I certainly don't blame her for having that opinion when she has to reconcile those two ideas simultaneously. It's a lot easier to hold the opinion that you and I share when we view fetuses clinically rather than in incubators.
However I don’t see the statement “Women have rights to their bodies” as an unresolved political question. I see it as a pretty clear truth, as true as “slavery is wrong and should be illegal”. I have my reasons to believe this is so (which I won’t go into because we are debating whether “everything is political”, not abortion rights). So under my philosophical framework anti-abortion is a wrong opinion to have. And I am certainly not the only person to believe this.
Gallileo isn't relevant in this context at all.
I will wait for an trans/intersex person who is well versed in LGBTQ+ policy to answer.
If you want to deplatform anti-abortion people, you need to show to them that their understanding of when a cell becomes a human is wrong. The only way to do that is to have widely used technology of growing a baby from any cell artificially, and for that we need to remove the 14 day limit on embryo exexperimentation.
It reminds me of what happens to the numbers if we allow for 2 + 2 = 5 to be true. Effectively 1 will end up being equal to 0, and since every number multiplied by 1 is it self, and every number multiplied by 0 is 0, we end up with all numbers being equal to 0. Effectively rendering them useless.
Take for example how we got to religious freedom. In the past, if you were the wrong religion, you would be tortured and executed.
In a lot of places, this led to horrendous religious wars where literally millions of people died. In the end, we ended up with freedom of religion as a compromise. The state would no longer compel you to choose a religion.
Of course each religion thought they were right and the others were wrong. But they stopped using the power of the state to compel conversions. They would still proselytize and try to persuade other people to join their faith, but they stopped trying to use the power of the state to compel people. After that, religion became a lot more apolitical.
Sometimes begin apoliticial means you don't think it is worth using the power of the state to change the status quo. You may be against the status quo, and think debate or persuasion is more effective.
In addition, reference to the status quo in the quote is simplistic. A lot of times the status quo is like an armistice line between two warring sides. Many times the status quo includes things you are for and things you are against. Maybe the way the status quo is right now, the benefit of the things you are for, is greater than the burden of the things you are against. If you try to change the status quo, you may end up destabilizing the status quo so much, that when the new equilibrium is reached, you end up losing some of things you were for.
If a person feels strongly about some special political cause, fantastic, they ought to make their case convincingly. But the idea of castigating others for not putting in the time or enthusiasm to share their superior moral clarity is exhausting.
In other words, "you don’t have time or inclination to obsess about the political origins and implications of every atomic micro-decision in your day because doing so is a tremendously tedious and unproductive burden that frequently yields no meaningful insight or behavior change" is a lot of words to say that you support the status quo.
I think everybody does, on issues that aren't important to them.
There are loads of issues folks are just not engaged with enough to have a qualified opinion (their perspective not mine), which is fine. I view that as living in the status quo but not necessarily evidence of endorsing the status quo.
For instance, do we really expect your average citizen (American in this case) to have a thought out POV on qualified immunity? Policing tactics? Effective tactics to address diversity in the workplace? Herd immunity? Actuarial risk assessment of economic activity during the pandemic? If not are they supporting the status quo?
I think most people just shrug and I don’t blame them. Processing information in the era of the death of expertise has made even having an opinion right now an absolute hellscape.
Also - being apolitical is a political stance, in itself.
I'm sorry - once in a while bad things happen and a choice must be made.
(I understand the postmodern thrust here, and I actually to some degree agree with it, but at the limit this completely obliterates any pretense of objectivity - even within science.)
Centrists agree that choices need to be made. Centrists think that some of those choices should go in one direction, some in the other, and most in a direction not presented by either side. Centrists believe in logic, discourse, and evidence to get to choices, over ideology. Centrists believe in looking for solutions which work for everyone when possible. Etc.
Everyone hates centrists, since if you disagree on charters OR abortion OR charters OR race OR police OR .... with someone on the left or on the right, they think you're a horrible person. You'll always disagree on at least one axis.
Charter schools: They work great with proper checks-and-balances. They should be not-for-profits, follow extensive transparency laws, have salary caps, and strong civil rights protections. They should compete with public schools without restrictions beyond that. If public schools go under because of better competitors, more power to them!
Medicine: Works great pure free market. Works great purely nationalized. What we don't want is a complex network of regulations from lobbyists combined with mandatory insurance (whether by government regulation or by practicality). Both the far-right and the far-left solutions would work great! We've landed in a no-man's land in between.
Gun control: It's a reasonable policy, but rule-of-law should prevail. We've got a Constitution for a reason, and we should follow it, even if it feels unreasonable. If we disagree, we should amend it.
Race: The left is correct about most of the problems, and bonkers about most of the solutions. We need to have an open national discourse about changes, and to do that, we need free speech and to get rid of cancel culture. The left's oppression of free speech contributes to the systemic oppression they're trying to eliminate.
... and so on.
You don't need to agree with the above, but they're strong, principled stances, agreeing with neither side.
In my opinion, trying to be “centrist” is more of an aesthetic choice than actually related to ideology.
What I will give you is that any community where honest discussion of actual, specific issues is impossible is toxic... but in practice I see that critique most often wielded by dishonest provocateurs.
2) Each of those is an essay or two to justify. Of course they're not specific. This isn't a political essay. I'm giving examples -- enough to understand the gist, not the nuance.
3) In modern America, all of these views piss everyone off -- left AND right. If you articulate most of them, you'll get fired WHOEVER your boss is AND uninvited to the family dinner.
That this "critique [is] most often wielded by dishonest provocateurs" is precisely because everyone else is afraid to speak. In a functioning civic society, we'd have many opinions like the ones above, and we'd all discuss them and work towards the best solutions. I've found that the best solution to "dishonest provocateurs" is still to assume the best intentions until shown otherwise.
2. Not sure what your point is here - you originally pointed out why either right or left solutions would be good, but the compromise is bad.
3. I don’t think that’s true - believe it or not it is still possible to discuss actual issues. I certainly do, with people who disagree with me.
So... there are a few positions on which you might be a “moderate”, but I don’t see any argument actually presented for why centrist solutions are preferable to those backed up by an actual ideological goal.
Your definition seems to be "split the left-and-right down the middle." That's not the one I've heard or used.
That's okay; words are used differently in different places, but I'm not sure we're actually disagreeing as much as initial posts suggested. Most people I know who consider themselves "centrists" hold a mixture of left-wing and right-wing views. They don't just find the median opinions.
I think what you call "centrist," where I live would be called a "moderate."
* Charter schools: Politicians create charter school setups that don't have proper checks and balances and tend to completely shirk their responsibility to public schools in the process. Your statement isn't some fringe idea. It's just not why charter schools are pushed. If you take a look at what happens with charter schools you'd see why people get divided on them. We aren't presented with a rational system. We're presented with a system that gets hijacked to push religious schools and/or defund public schools without.
* Medicine: "Works great pure free market." - Citation Needed. No one will give us your far left solution.
* Gun control: In case you haven't noticed, we aren't allowed to question it. We aren't even allowed to study it. This game is rigged.
* Race: How does cancel culture play into this? I'm not allowed to find a different Applebees if the manager is a racist? "The left's oppression of free speech" - do tell.
Such systems are surprisingly efficient and often seem to work better than the lawyer- and lobbyist-designed mess of American healthcare.
I don't think you'd find very many people willing to agree those positions are centrist.
Which is fine. Your positions are your positions, and obviously you hold them because you think them to be reasonable. But "centrist?" I don't think so.
In general I think there's a tendency for politically engaged people to put "views I disagree with" in the "other" bin, and everyone defines "extreme" and "center" to reflect their particular idea of what the sane, morally correct opinion is. There were plenty of people on the left who seemed to think Warren (for example) was a centrist neoliberal sellout.
What's amazing about it is you can voice disagreement in just one place, and you're either a liberal snowflake or a Trump-supporting racist. It doesn't seem to matter which place you disagree, or whether your disagreement falls on the other side of the political spectrum.
They are. You seem to be in a bubble where the range of acceptable opinion goes from Stalin on the far left to Hillary Clinton on the far right.
Pro-charter schools, free market medicine, 2nd amendment over all, free speech and "cancel culture" as prime issues of race -- these are generally in line with conservative positions, and very, very far from liberal positions.
And again, as I said, that's fine! I'm not disagreeing with the positions, I'm just saying that claiming to be "centrist' doesn't actually make you centrist.
Most people aren't far-right nor far-left. Most people, knowingly or unknowingly, adopt positions from each side. Holding both right-wing and left-wing views doesn't make one centrist, it makes one independent, and I think most people are in this category.
I don't think the far-right solution ever worked great. ACA is far from perfect, but it is saving lives. But the problem with US health insurance goes far deeper than merely how you pay for it and who gets access to it; the entire system is run in a very non-transparent way in order to maximise profits. The goal of the current system is still profit, not healing people, and that's where it goes wrong.
It's good that you mention mandatory insurance by practicality, because that's really the case: only very rich people can pay medical costs out of pocket; to most people, medical costs are a life or death issue, so it can never be a truly free market. A healthy-in-between system would be private insurance in a strongly regulated system; this works in a lot of countries. It's the lawless free-for-all where it's fine to screw or misinform patients for profit, that doesn't work.
My primary "centrist" issue is probably abortion: in the US the discussion seems to be all-or-nothing: either all abortion is legal or all abortion is banned, no matter what. A sensible compromise would be to allow early term abortions (first trimester miscarriages are extremely common, the embryo is still in an early stage of development), while strongly regulating late term abortions (they're already rare, and are only necessary for extreme medical problems). Abortion as an alternative to contraception can be made unnecessary through better sex ed and better access to contraceptives.
People over-estimate the degree to which our political parties represent an inherently consistent set of policy ideas. For example, social liberalism and being pro-immigration are intertwined in the US. But the socially liberal women prime ministers of Denmark and New Zealand are also anti-immigration. About 1 in 6 Democrats believe abortion should nearly always be illegal. African Americans, who overwhelmingly vote Democrat, have a similar split to Republicans when it comes to same-sex marriage and whether belief in God is a necessary prerequisite to morality.
The political parties are a compromise amongst groups of people with heterodox views. They’re not something that ideologically must be bundled together.
(I'm not trying to be overly snarky here.)
I saw a remarkable illustration of this at a conservative event where a panel was discussing Bostock before the case was decided. The room was evenly divided, but with very strong opinions on both sides. There is a seed of a real conflict there. Textualism isn’t a robust foundation for the kind of broad structural changes social conservatives want. You need the conservative counterparts to liberal judges, who seek to vindicate broader principles gleaned from the law (except here to conservative ends).
In terms of larger ideology, a schism is brewing between social conservatives, nationalists, and pro-business conservatives, with Trumpism versus anti-Trumpism cutting across all those groups. (As you recall, while Republicans supported him, most wanted someone else in the primaries initially.) The differences are less extreme than in the Democratic Party—where you have Marxists and 2/3 of Wall Street under the same tent—but they divisions are growing.
How do you think a gay man is able to talk at RNC and them having "gay cure" support in their platform? Because when you put all of the different positions in one document - they tend to contradict the majority's views. (Outright ban on abortion is supported only by a third of republicans! SSM ban is also supported by a third.)
Independents are more liberal on the topic of abortion than democrats...
Random example: I should be able to argue for second amendment rights with out buying into isolationist trade policies. The way things are right now the two come bundled together and legislative votes are based on partisanship, not policy.
But of course this debate has been going on a long time. And maybe yours are the more recent words echoing a past hero's opinion.
In the words of MLK:
"First, I must confess that over the past few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro's great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen's Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to "order" than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: "I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action"; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man's freedom; who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a "more convenient season." Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection...."
I suppose it depends on whether you see current ills of society as at the level of segregation and outright violence against peoples (and need street-level action and peaceful revolution immediately), or more subtle things that affect everyone, like rich-vs-poor class differences growing (and are things to be solved through our deliberative political process).
But back to the point, the problem with shouting down anyone who doesn't agree with you and/or labeling people who are not 100% on board with you as the hidden "enemy", is that you will later find out you weren't winning as much as you thought based on the silence. And some of that silent segment will find they can only express themselves when standing alone, safe in the voting booth, and you get a result like we have had for the last couple years. Worse, those that could've joined your side are put off by the aggression and withhold their vote for you.
Yeah people don't like facing their complicity with the horror of the world, especially since it's not at all obvious how to fix it. It can feel like (and can actually be) pointless self-flagellation.
But it's not incorrect.
It's about making changes based on rationality rather than emotion and ideology.
This is inhuman. I cannot always be on - I am not a machine. I cannot be useful to anyone when I am torn into anxious shreds by knowing about everything that is wrong in the world all at once. Our brains were built for knowing what's "bad" on a local level - not on a global, ~7.8 billion people level. It is inhuman for you to insist that I jump at the bit every time "bad things happen."
I can only choose to pick certain hills which are most important to me, and I will die on them. You choose your things - you are welcome to die on them, too. Do not shame people for trying to survive this chaos that is bad enough with the world's population's problems, and amplified through social network's outrage machines that benefit from any (but especially psychologically traumatic) "engagement."
Try it out. Stops a troll cold.
“We are five days away from fundamentally transforming the United States of America.”
https://youtu.be/KrefKCaV8m4
I will say I also don't care for the daily discourse and politicization of everything.
Without concrete examples, I don't know what to make of a statement like that besides "I have bigoted ideas I want to keep quiet and can only share w/ other bigots"
I'm genuinely curious what the HN crowd is going to regard as "controversial opinions" that will get you in trouble.
it could be you are talking about the one that starts here:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23867618
dang gets around to taking notice right about here:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23868001
dang says: "We've rate limited your account again for perpetuating flamewars on this site."
you said: "I've been explicitly told by the HN moderators that my opinions on policing - which are well within the American mainstream and probably a touch left of center - are so controversial they constitute flamebait and I shouldn't discuss them here."
that does not to me sound at all like a good-faith representation of what dang said.
Here's one of mine: Fetuses have human DNA, and different DNA from their mothers. Saying "The right of the mother over her own body" doesn't extend to a different individual that is temporarily present within her body.
Here's another: If you take the Bible seriously, you also have to take seriously what the Old Testament prophets said about God's concern for the poor, the widow, the orphan, and the alien.
I personally would feel comfortable sharing either of those with people on the right, but I would be rather more nervous sharing one of them with people on the left.
I don't like diversity initiatives. I've literally worked at companies where the CEO announced we were NOT to hire any more white men. I am not ok with anyone putting a restriction on you because of your gender identity or skin color. Increasingly, woke people are ok with this as long as the restriction is placed on white men. I believe this is because many woke groups mistakenly see things as zero sum games where bringing people down will literally lift others up. I would not be willing to speak out about this since it would label me a bigot and a racist, even though my wife and kids aren't white.
- Not all problems require more/bigger Government, and sometimes makes the problems worse.
- I am pro 2nd amendment and don't think most gun laws are actually legal.
- Actual Socialism is bad, even immoral imo but I do support socialized healthcare and a few other things (see below)
- Capitalism is pretty great most of the time, except when it comes to externalities, transactions under duress (like healthcare often is) and tragedy of the commons scenarios.
- Democrats have been swayed by extreme leftists lately and they are trying to use any tragedy to push a socialist addenda.
Probably many more. If there was a pro capitalism party that supported moderate government intervention (when needed) and stood up for all of our constitutional rights, I would jump ship in a second.
While I'm kidding about the op, I see this all the time on my feed. Just today, I saw someone in my Facebook feed just today demand that everyone unfriend person X right away because they're a Trump supporter, and he would go through the list of mutual friends and unfriend everyone who didn't. I'm far from a Trump supporter, but I find this behavior childish.
Also I am sure there is a perception bubble effect but on pretty mainstream sites like reddit I regularly see posts and comments blaming all of societies ills on Capitalism that are highly up-voted.
Sharing the "concern for the disadvantaged" with a rightist I would expect to not result in a verbal confrontation, unless they were extreme right.
The context matters. The actual actions matter.
"The question each individual faces is 'Would you give up all the money in your IRA so that some old person you don't know will not die?"'
I think that question captures the essence of the situation better than the "haircut...lives" phrase.
Interacting with other humans inherently carries risk that you could harm others. I could get distracted by my children in the car and kill someone when I cross the center line.
That doesn’t make me evil or selfish for wanting to own a car and drive it.
It also doesn’t make someone selfish for wanting to support their family in normal commerce, in the rare chance that their very legal and very normal economic activity may inadvertently harm someone.
When all of our children become serial killers and cancer death rates rise we'll look back on this time as the worst decision the world has ever made. Being a human means excepting risk. You wake up everyday and take on risk. Yes some people are willing to take more risks than others. I'm an avid skydiver. To those people who don't like risk: Stay at home and get someone to deliver groceries and live your miserable life by yourself at home. Thanks.
And so yeah, that was a real choice that made. Like my friends and I had to decide if worth it to join the protests and we were pretty firmly on the side of this was too important to not do. And so you're absolutely right but I feel like it's hard to be measured when the argument is "look the left is going out to march in a civil rights protest but doesn't want hair salons or schools to open -- the hipocrits!"
There need to be some nuance here. I think most people agree that grocery stores and hospitals needs to be open and that chuck-e-cheese probably doesn't. I don't think it's at all hypocritical to take a stance in the middle. Of course there's going to be lots of disagreement about what falls on what side but that's the argument to have.
It's a poor comparison: the risk of transmission when gathering huge numbers of humans together is exponentially higher than leaving your home to buy groceries.
Have you seen the fly-by drone footage of Hollywood Blvd on July 7th of the BLM protests [1]? It was outrageously reckless and not just to the lives of the people who took part.
[1] https://i.imgur.com/iSlH3SG.gifv
So yes BLM protests are high risk, but to the protesters they're also high reward if they manage to affect change which, largely, they are!
Reckless would be going to a music festival right now, and in my opinion, opening schools. The reward just isn't there. Kids will be happy to have an extra long summer break.
Such as - banning testing for COVID by nursing homes upon (re)admittance in NYC.
Here's one you can try in the current political climate: "Why don't you have ANY [insert minority] employees working in your organization?"
In our case (we have some minorities but not as many as HN would like).
Why: because they aren't available.
We have KPIs for HR and managers that strongly encourage it, but there just aren't more qualified women/black/etc coders.
Which, in our case, translates to less than 5 (but awesome, and highly regarded) black persons[0], about 30% women.
[0]: Note however that the demographic is quite different here in Norway. I know people here who never saw black people except on holiday until they were far beyond 20 years old. In their defense though: 1.) Part of why there are so few black peopøe here seems to be that keeping slaves hasn't been popular here for hundreds of years. 2.) Norwegians have accepted a lot of people from other countries over the years: Pakistani, Chilean etc, so I don't think it is about xenophobia.
"It's generally easier to play the role of the Very Reasonable Person Who's Just Asking Questions when you're defending the status quo; any change you stymie by undercutting people's emotional energy or by slowing things down works to your advantage."
I gave a counterexample.
That said, in most cases, good equity policies have nothing to do with racist quotas, and everything to do with cultures which are accepting of diverse patterns of communication, cultures, and behavioral styles, and with identifying talent wherever it may be found, rather than using surface indicators like school someone went to, clothing, or similar.
If I put out a simple coding test and some people cannot crack it - I'm not going to check if my 2+2 test is unfairly biased towards people with red hair.
Did you know, for example, that even fairly wealthy black American families are less able to educate their kids to the same level as white American families? Because access to proper education and parental education levels matter a lot. Because kids growing up in poor areas will get lower levels of attainment. Because long term poverty matters.
Breaking that education barrier takes more than one generation.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/280232788_Race_Pove...
Just to give context, since I got crapped on this another place, the thread is: "How does one create change by asking reasonable questions?" I am giving an example of such a thread which would work in the current political climate. I am neither claiming agreement or disagreement with either the questions or answers. To avoid that impression, I'm putting questions in quotes. I could just as easily take a far-right view for this exercise, or one from a non-US culture. I picked this one since I thought it would resonate with the current political climate and with reddit.
But keep on answering, and I'll keep asking "reasonable questions" until hopefully I'll have backed you into a corner. :) It's not a bad exercise, or an ineffective change strategy.
We are actively looking for them, employing them whenever possible[0].
[0]: I lost two female candidates I tried to hire, one because she wasn't fluent in a language that a majority of our customers use and one because HR didn't react in time and when she interviewed with us she was also on the way to her second interview at another company.
Both landed well-paying jobs shortly afterwards. I guess we are not the only company trying to look diverse.
There are so few black people around here that I guess the reason I don't see more black coders is just statistics.
Centrism is de-facto the status quo. Which, in current times, means support for the police as it exists, supports for business regulation as it exists, supports greenhouse gases and military conduct as it exists, supports the behavior and election processes of politicians as they exist, etc.
Its simply the privilege of the majority to be the "moderate" ones. To be radical is not to be good or bad, it just to be outside the norm. And it makes sense that those in the norm find those outside it dangerous and threatening, because... they want to be. Thats the whole point. Their time is wasted if the goal is not to become the new moderate, the new normal, the new center.
The "center" people are referring to here is a United States-centric form of liberalism. It's not any less "extreme" than communism, it's just the dominant political force and, as you say, has the privilege of positioning itself as the comfortable default. In reality, it's a fairly extreme commitment to a different set of principles.
- Heavy militarism.
- Strong national chauvinism that is exploited by all major parties.
- A commitment to policing / hegemony, destroying, destabilizing countries while convincing themselves that it's "for democracy", etc. The bar for destroying another country is very low and usually based on lies, but the forces leading to it are never questioned.
- A 90% commitment to laissez-faire economics with token controls thrown in to prevent the economic system from destroying itself every ten years.
- The moralization of poverty: the poor deserve it in some sense.
- A conviction that problems are solved through the "marketplace of ideas", not class conflict or a return to former glory, tradition, etc.
- A hard ideological divide between civil liberties and economic inequities.
- The equation of laissez-faire with freedom.
- The cultural acceptance of white supremacy as the norm, even to the extent that it's frequently unnoticed.
etc etc
Commoditization is just a fundamental result of math basically. Fundamentally there is still a cost to a commodities no matter what party pays for it to provide it or bar access through certain methods as illegitimate like it being illegal to buy organs from a donor for transplant.
Given that norms say nothing about it doesn't mean they are always but the possibility exists that the extremists really are too emotional and partisan, and getting what they wanted would be the proverbial dog catching the car and not knowing what to do with it or crashing it immediately.
Imagine touting "both sides" in the civil war area..
Quit being a coward and at least own your shitty opinion:
> I must confess that over the past few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro's great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen's Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to 'order' than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice
Martin Luther King--1963
I'm not sure what the solution is. On one hand, it was there all along, and political-correctness did not help it. On the other hand, racists everywhere have been empowered once again, and all manner of groups have to face stereotypes they've fought so hard over the years. I don't think the U.S. will really get its house in order until it becomes an issue of survival, and of geopolitical importance.
It's not hard to see his initial popularity as linked to this. That is, the vilification of having views that are not the same as the majority leading people to feel repressed, and them supporting someone that's unwilling to bend to that, even if they don't support every decision he makes or view he takes.
I don't want racists and white supremacists spreading their rhetoric, but I also don't want our society so constrained by mob mentality that having merely unpopular opinions have dire consequences. If we take it as a given that mob mentality (to this degree) is an emergent phenomenon because of our hyper connected world, and that too much mob mentality is causing the problem, how do you mitigate emerging phenomena when you can't really alter what it emerges from?
I'd also be happy if someone could convincingly refute that it's an emergent phenomena, or that mob mentality is the problem, since those seem intractable to me.
Either you're in favor of free speech or you're not. Republicans, Democrats, and, yes, Hacker News all participate in cancel culture in one way or another.
Sure there are bots, provocateurs, and anonymous trolls who have no intent on changing their beliefs. But, please, let the American people have enough credit to make decisions for themselves and see racists for who they truly are.
There was someone with a throwaway account that replied with the argument that "Free speech need not be absolute", and then started getting voted down.
What's truly ironic I feel is that in my world view, his speech would just sit there as an alternative viewpoint, read and disagreed with.
But in his world his viewpoint could made illegal (or in the HN world downvoted), based upon what might be perceived as the popular rhetoric of the day.
I'm actually fine with such views not being made illegal though - but I'm not fine with the premise that there should never be any social consequences at all for any ideology or viewpoint regardless of its nature or intent to do harm. Nor do I believe that the right to free speech means everyone must be forced to hear, seriously consider, host or publish that speech.
There are 300,000,000 million Americans each with his or her own free will and ability to determine right from wrong. So you're saying they are just sheep and do things blindly?
The real changes, the ones that lasted generations, the things that made America truly great, were done because free speech convinced people to change their minds.
No. Not only did I not say that, there's no reasonable way to infer that from my comment, and your doing so demonstrates an unwillingness on your part to argue in good faith.
That people are influenced by more than purely logical, didactic arguments should be self evident, nor does that fact make people sheep, it's simply human nature. We're not compilers, after all, we're primates with countless irrational biases hard wired into our brains. Anti-vaxxers, COVID-denialists, flat-earthers, conspiracy theorists of all stripes, the resurgence of discredited white supremacist and anti-semitic ideology under the politically correct guise of "racial realism" and the phenomenon of fake news spread by social media should be enough to demonstrate that falsehood can be more compelling than fact, and that facts alone are not sufficient to dissuade such people from their false beliefs, or stop their influence.
>The real changes, the ones that lasted generations, the things that made America truly great, were done because free speech convinced people to change their minds.
No they weren't. They were accomplished with speech and consequence, often long, violent, ugly protests and frequently civil unrest. America has only ever granted its inalienable rights to white Christian men by default - everyone else has had to fight tooth and nail for their seat at the table and for every scrap of human dignity they could take from the cornucopia of American liberty.
Women's suffrage was earned with speech and blood. African American rights were earned with speech and blood. LGBT rights were earned with speech and blood. Even recently, few outside of the black community really cared about systemic racist violence among the police, despite the black community speaking at length about it for years until they also started taking to the streets and burning shit down... then suddenly everyone else noticed and started listening.
Speech without the force of consequence is as useless as a toothless guard dog.
It's quite straightforward to draw this conclusion from the following portion of your previous comment:
>Unfortunately, in your world, the racists and white supremacists take over
How does a community 'take over' without expanding to at least a dominant minority? And how does the point being argued, allowing them to speak freely, enable that unless we're to assume that simply being exposed to that worldview will grow their ranks?
You argued:
That presupposes this: I was pointing out that in order for A to happen, B must happen as well -- but in a rhetorical way to deeply undermine your argument. I assure you, it was completely in good faith. You probably just didn't like the result of it.> No they weren't. They were accomplished with speech and consequence, often long, violent, ugly protests and frequently civil unrest.
Rosa Parks didn't throw a brick through a window. She refused to sit in the back of the bus. That started a boycott of the bus system, and it worked without bloodshed.
Sure blood was spilled in the civil rights marches but not because the people marching wanted it to be.
I Rosa Parks was radical whole her life. She was not proponent of super peaceful activism, she at the moment thought fighting would he strategically bad idea.
Had she been meek lady, there would be no protests.
She did lived at violent place at the time, did dealt with lynchings, beatings and legal protests up to that point. She did not had philosophy of peaceful activism above all.
While she was not violent, she was not proponent of peaceful above all protesting. That was Kings philosophy and even he was up to breaking law.
> bb88
Hmm, I see that "88" number a lot these days. Is this some meme I missed?
The innocent explanation is more often right than the guilty one.
And the world would be a worse place without those laws. Any real discussion about free speech starts with the premise that not all speech can be free and the real questions is in the details of what speech should be free.
I don't want racist and white supremacists spreading their rhetoric, so I want societal pressure to continue to work as it does against those people. At the same time, I don't want merely unpopular opinions getting the full weight of societal pressure causing problems for people that merely want to discuss what are actually open questions.
Reducing this to simply a matter of free speech or not is missing the point. This is a matter of figuring out how to deal with the negative effects of free speech when we care enough about free speech that limiting it in some way is not on the table.
That ship has sailed.
> At the same time, I don't want merely unpopular opinions getting the full weight of societal pressure causing problems for people that merely want to discuss what are actually open questions.
Free speech isn't just about who gets to speak what, it's about who decides who gets to read/listen/watch what they want. That's basically the crux of censorship, right? I don't want mob induced censorship any more than I want government censorship.
In the end, cancel culture is people who choose not to use free speech to push their agenda, but instead threatens other's livelihood or shame critics of an unpopular position into silence.
That's called "living in a community". It's impossible to interact with other people without providing some level of acceptance or rejection of what they are doing, whether on purpose or accident, whether they interpret you correctly or not.
Even just walking away communicates something.this isn't always bad, it's how we enforce norms that are not laws. Lie or act in a way I do not approve of and I can choose to stop or limit my interactions with you, and I can express my opinion to others. I this way I am censoring you in a small way. It's how humans interact, and it's useful and good when used in moderation for good causes.
When not used in moderation, and when a million people jump on a single person and express enough displeasure to cause severe ramifications for relatively small offenses, then it's not good.
I don't want to see racist rhetoric in the same way I don't want to see poor behavior at others expenses. That is, I want it allowed, but for people to face somewhat appropriate ramifications for the offense, to discourage them from spouting it everywhere people do t want to see it. To be clear, I mean it in the literal, bit colloquial sense, in that it's a preference, not a call to censor others be preventing it entirely, as overreactions are what I'm arguing against.
Except cancel culture is anything but community driven. It's social media driven -- which in itself is a platform to get more views to sell you more ads. The more the platform can draw your ire, the more ads it sells, the more ire the platform spreads, etc.
The problem is that words aren't which we argue our politics by anymore. It's now who has the biggest weapon to personally destroy those that speak out.
So what you want is to be able to say whatever you like, and suffer no consequences from that speech.
Sorry, the First Amendment does not guarantee consequence-free speech, particularly if your speech is a pack of lies or racist, or as occurs so often, both.
I would add that after a decade of watching the First Amendment cited almost exclusively to protect hate speech from psychopaths, my respect for it is badly tarnished.
> The First Amendment does not guarantee consequence-free speech.
Civics 101. My right to through my fist stops at your face. Simple. Yelling fire in a crowded movie theater, etc. etc.
Political speech, ie, expressing ones viewpoint, is and has always been protected by the First Amendment -- even if it's false or racist speech.
> I would add that after a decade of watching the First Amendment cited almost exclusively to protect hate speech from psychopaths...
What would you replace it with? Seriously. Are you going to punish people for lying? Lock them up for something just slightly racist? Who do we trust to make these judgements? Republican appointed judges? What?
> Are you going to punish people for lying?
We punish people for lies that cause harm all the time. Though a bad example to use (because it is dicta unsupported by the law at the time in a particularly repugnant case suppressing core political speech that was later overturned, so that the quote at issue was never part of the substantive case law itself, wasn't particularly supported by the substantive case law, and was issued in a case now widely recognized as having been wrongly decided), the quote you wave your hand in the vague direction of about falsely yelling fire in a crowded theater is also an odd one to raise if you are going to turn around and sneer at that idea.
It's certainly true the left can have illiberal tendencies, and there's some indication that's on the rise, and that's worrisome. But when people yell "cancel culture" in a crowded online letter, it's always worth asking how many people have been "cancelled" and to what degree. Andrew Sullivan and Bari Weiss have never been denied an audience and will almost certainly continue to have huge ones. J.K. Rowling, for all of the articles about her "cancellation" over the past couple of months, turns out to still be a multibillionaire author who still has a book contract. Yes, every day brings us complaints from prominent conservatives about how Twitter is stifling their voice -- complaints generally tweeted to their millions of Twitter followers who like and retweet them in support.
In any case, while I'd be loathe to carve out explicit exceptions to the First Amendment, I'd also be loathe to invoke it too cavalierly. Would I lock someone up for "something just slightly racist"? No, but in practice that's very rarely what we're arguing about when we argue about cancel culture: you mentioned it was a social media phenomenon in another comment here. Would you demand that social media networks not be allowed to make decisions about what content they're willing to carry? How about employers? Firing someone for that "something just slightly racist" is harsh, but do we want to say that HR departments are no longer allowed to make those calls? If so, who is?
I mean, if you don't have protected free speech, you have regulated speech. If you can't say "I believe in X because .... " where X might be racism, then it's no longer freedom, and therefore subject to potential criminal legislation. See John Adams and the sedition act.
> But when people yell "cancel culture" in a crowded online letter...
Bari Weiss made it clear it was the anger from the Tom Cotton essay where she felt her career at the times became untenable.
When did we decide that an essay by Tom Cotton was too dangerous to be published? That his speech was so dangerous that the core ideas could not just have been countered with... wait for it... more speech.
And no one said that freedom of speech never meant freedom of jobs. Nor did freedom of speech ever mean that people would buy your product after your ugly ideas came to light.
So what is cancel culture? It's this. Specifically this article:
https://www.deseret.com/indepth/2019/9/25/20883697/cancel-cu...
And he advocated using force against protesters ... which is speech.
That has worked out badly. Any other ideas?
We gotta break this stuff into more detail.
If you look at say, the start of #metoo, you see Harvey Weinstein, a man so powerful that the ordinary justice system could not touch him until essentially a Twitter mob took him down.
Now, public accusation is a crappy way to settle bad behavior, it's easy to channel this stuff in any direction a manipulator might choose. But people choose that rout of desperation, when the ordinary justice and more broadly ordinary government processes fail.
If we look at the Minneapolis Police Department in particular, we see a department with such a long history of corruption and even murder that the entire group should be fired. And moreover, all of Minneapolis civic government out side the police would like to do that - but are in fact powerless to do that through a web of laws the police have protecting their interests.
And this is the thing. You have powerful, unaccountable men and women whose acts provoke anger in many parts of the population. Then you have an angry mob which actually can't impose any significant change and once they get going can inflict collateral damage themselves - and maybe get met by a counter-mob. But after the upsurge, any reform is thin and the stage is set for the next event.
So, I'd say mobs and counter-mobs are problematic but the root is permanent unaccountable powers that can ignore whatever material grievances different groups have.
I don't think it's a foregone conclusion that the current mob mentality only came about because of unaccountable powers, or even if it did, that it will necessarily dissipate if those powers become and are held accountable. Some things are self-sustaining.
I don't think we can just look the other way because the negative behavior is caused by a feeling of rage and impotency. Should we try to fix the injustices that cause the feeling of rage and impotency? Yes. That doesn't mean we should also ignore the negative effects that rage and impotency results in, otherwise we'll be following a chain back forever.
I don't know who's "we" or who's looking the other way.
Everyone on every part of the political spectrum has one or more mob-tendencies they'd like to stamp out (or at least look like they're stamping out). And yet this situation continues. Indeed, it seems like the whole this different mobs gunning for each other.
It seems like one can't just take negative phenomena in isolation, say "that bad" and go get it. Or you can and everyone's doing it and things are still in a mess and you're part of the mess now.
You actually need positive, concrete alternatives to mob behavior. The problem in many ways is that the mob is also a lot of people, including other mobs, favorite enemy.
"We", as a societal group, whether that be "Americans" or "Westerners" or "Human beings". By looking the other way, I meant "assuming the problem will get better if the unaccountable powers are held accountable." People don't change their behavior overnight, even if it's unconsciously acting as a face in a mob they don't realize they're part of, and revolutions rarely result in a change that is positive in all aspects.
What if we trade unaccountable individuals (which sometimes were held accountable) for unaccountable mobs? I don't see one as necessarily better than the other, it's the prevalence and consequences of each that matter to me.
> Everyone on every part of the political spectrum has one or more mob-tendencies they'd like to stamp out (or at least look like they're stamping out). And yet this situation continues. Indeed, it seems like the whole this different mobs gunning for each other.
Yes, it's almost as if we've started identifying more with our subgroups than the larger group, and it's like multiple nations forced to coexist within the same borders of people we view as others. Like a digital Gaza Strip.
> It seems like one can't just take negative phenomena in isolation, say "that bad" and go get it. Or you can and everyone's doing it and things are still in a mess and you're part of the mess now.
Sure. That's the other end of the spectrum. I advocated for doing both. Address the root cause, also address the problem. If we accept that poverty increases crime, we shouldn't use that as an excuse to ignore crimes committed by the poor, and we shouldn't ignore that causal relationship and focus purely on policing and punishment.
> You actually need positive, concrete alternatives to mob behavior.
The whole point of my original comment is that I don't know what those are, but we need to find and/or advertise and explore any we can find because they are important.
kbenson:The whole point of my original comment is that I don't know what those are, but we need to find and/or advertise and explore any we can find because they are important.
Me: Well, all of the mechanism of modern democracy - a fair justice system, a congress representing the popular will, an executive branch primarily carrying out laws, a press that exposes flaws, etc are the ways modern democratic society has discovered for balancing interests.
In situations of imbalance, when things are not working, reforms within such a democratic capitalist society tend to come from elites because they hold power (with or without a popular mandate). We can see this in the Progressive Era, the New Deal, the Civil Right Movement. Protests may get things going but those with power have to enact legislation.
Today, it may sound harsh but America's elites allowed American institutions become something like a dumpster fire because the situation didn't bother them. I mentioned the Minneapolis city council, theoretically the representatives of the city, would like to fire the police but cannot. (Nearly) "everyone" have some solutions but they aren't able to exercise them.
At this point, I'd look at Ralph Nader's Only The Super Rich Can Save Us. Because everything points to the very rich having decisive power and this quite willing to let things fall to hell. We can hope these people realize that triumph over a flaming ruin might not actually help as much as they're imagine.
Well, I would say it didn't bother them initially, and it changed so fast that by the time it did bother them (if it does), it was too late. We're talking about a decade or less of time here, since that's about the period of time that social media has had major usage by a majority of people, and while there were less efficient precursor networks (such as radio and television), nothing really compares to the current immediate feedback look of of the current systems, where time for info to permeate a platform and then regurgitates and eaten again can be measured in minutes in some cases, but often in just a few hours.
I doubt even the people that "saw it coming" really understood where it would get to, and there's no concrete indication that we're at the peak (there's pushback, but that can be steamrolled for while).
Elites have more power, and can get stuff done because there's a purity of intent and will expressed by one person with power that's hard to match with many people pooling power... but then again, we're dealing with runaway feedback loops, so who knows what the public can do if a good meme is found.
> At this point, I'd look at Ralph Nader's Only The Super Rich Can Save Us. Because everything points to the very rich having decisive power and this quite willing to let things fall to hell. We can hope these people realize that triumph over a flaming ruin might not actually help as much as they're imagine.
I'd much rather have the stability of the 1990s or 2000s that what we seem to have now when considering my own situation, but I'm white middle class, and I imagine people that have felt disenfranchised their whole lives may see the balance of good and bad happening now a bit differently, and I'm not willing to say they are better off as they were in the 1990s or 2000s. I dunno.
It seems like you imagine that out-of-control social media is happening in a vacuum or can be fixed in a vacuum. It's not and it cannot.
I'm sure almost everyone would prefer not be (hopefully) living through a era in which things fall apart on a multitude of levels. But hey, we should try to do something and if we can't do something immediately, at least analyze it.
What are the various mobs you refer to?
I don't know that mobs are rational. Sometimes, I'm sure they will be pointing to a genuine injustice, but just as often as not, they're going to be a rampaging mob. I'm not 100% sure how I feel about this next claim, but I wonder that it's simply an accident when they get it "right."
Nonetheless, even the worst among us deserve representation and due process protections: which a mob cannot (and will not) give.
No one is arguing this. This is a strawman position no one actually holds.
Enforced tolerance is the only thing that is keeping really bad people comfortable at expressing their badness. (Suprisingly - the anti-discrimination applied to private businesses is the reason why people like Alex Jones can safely say whatever he wants and then get a free upgrade at Ramada)
The fact that most of these "views" are things that are false to the fact - like "climate change is a Chinese hoax" or "vaccines are bad" or "Obama is a Muslim married to a transsexual" - this doesn't bother you even a little?
What this demographic wants is to be able to have false, hateful, destructive beliefs, and suffer no consequences from their abhorrent ideas.
Sorry. The First Amendment guarantees people only the right to spew ignorant hateful shit, it doesn't guarantee that we have to take that hateful ignorant shit seriously.
https://news.gallup.com/opinion/polling-matters/268517/analy...
There is no new split into two Americas, there was always a split- between those who had political, cultural and economic power, and those that don't. The only difference now is that the people who are in the group with power aren't exclusively rich, white, conservative men.
We can go back, we can stop black people from getting loans and decent jobs, we can make all our women secretaries again, and I'm sure that will solve all our political ills.
I've never ruined anyone
Those are the very kind of toxic comments we need to get away from
The only sense in which horseshoe theory is real is that the rejection of the status quo tends to split someone in one direction or the other, and occasionally those new to alternative political ideologies will waffle or get shunted down different pipelines. Example: younger people going down the IDW pipeline who end up socialist once they realize the error. They don't return to dominant liberal narratives because they already figured out the ways in which they are toxic and false, and they also reject their previous pathway.
I can't imagine thinking that "bizarro world" is one in which people hold a larger diversity of opinion and criticize within a party.
This experience must vary a lot with your locale. I live in a medium sized town in Canada and feel very uncomfortable talking to my conservative, suburban neighbours about issues I strongly believe should be a priority for everyone. Like climate change.
They know that them and me don’t see eye to eye on these issues but I can’t bring it up in a way that I would with my left leaning friends and it pains me. Because it’s something that both sides of the political spectrum should be able to rally behind. Many conservatives here fancy themselves as sort of “salt of the earth people” so I don’t get the hostility towards some kind of conservation.
I think the Left is getting flak for doing the latter.
Yes, I had a direct experience of the latter when my car was keyed for having a “give peace a chance” bumper sticker during the times of the war on Iraq. And that’s in Canada, bear in mind.
Are we going to repeat the history in the US?
It's all sleight of hand, everybody gets fooled into a suckers rally that makes most current matters irrelevant. Ofc I hope I'm wrong, but just watch what they do.
1. If this was generally true the Wall street and Republicans started #metoo and I can't believe that.
> and there's nothing anybody can do about that now that it's gone too far.
2. This is not only pessimistic but too pessimistic and also counterproductive (unless one wish to drive society faster to the edge.)
> It's all sleight of hand, everybody gets fooled into a suckers rally that makes most current matters irrelevant. Ofc I hope I'm wrong, but just watch what they do.
Kind of agree. I guess if you made a real poll between Americans on if they wanted
1. Trump
2. Biden
3. A randomly selected choice between 5 men and 5 women that were decent, smart, had succeeded in life despite being nice
then I guess people would vote for 3 in the poll.
The American system seems to favour bad compromises lately.
In that case: have my apology and also know that I misunderstood you (and in that case: still don't understand you despite trying), so a little clarification might be helpful if you care :-)
It makes it unsafe to vote for your actual favourite candidate, because you don't get a second round... I always remind people that Maine's scandalous governor LePage never won 50% of the voter support and his first win was with merely 37% of the vote.
The issue is that many folks want to view others as $POLITICAL_PARTY first and human second.
Hell, half of conservative political rhetoric is distinguishing between real and fake Americans.
If I point a gun to your head do you think we can stand there and have a calm and rational discussion about whether I should pull the trigger? Of course not! You're going to fight to protect yourself.
Is there another universe where all the religious people are very pro-economic redistribution? That seems to be within reasonable interpretation of the teachings of Jesus.
Laws should made from purely utilitarian point of view, not the moral one. The reason why, for example, murder is illegal isn't because it's immoral, but because most people do not want to fall victim to such crime so they voted to make it illegal. Same for theft, or even such minor annoyances like fining someone for playing music too loud.
You are trying to draw a distinction between the "utilitarian" and the "moral". But, to quote the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy (IEP), "Utilitarianism is one of the best known and most influential moral theories" [1]. Claims about what is "utilitarian" are inescapably moral claims.
> but because most people do not want to fall victim to such crime so they voted to make it illegal.
In historical terms, that is quite false. In every democratic country, murder was already illegal for centuries (even millennia) before democracy was introduced. In fact, the earliest surviving legal text (the Sumerian code of Ur-Nammu, c. 2100–2050 BCE) criminalised murder, and predates the invention of democracy in ancient Athens (594 BCE) by approximately 1500 years.
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20200630100724/https://www.iep.u...
> Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.
And in a world where the choice is between Biden and Trump. It is increasingly tempting to vote for the Guillotine.
It didn't work so well the last few times it was used - the English revolution, the French revolution, the Russian revolution, all ended up in a bloodbath, next one more gruesome than the last. I urge you to reconsider.
Also I recommend "the revolutions" podcast: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mike_Duncan_(podcaster)
This is not necessary the case though, as seen after the Cuban or the Zapatista revolution in Chiapas, Mexico.
At some point revolution becomes necessary, and if democratic means remain unavailable, this revolution will be violent. Horrible people using the political turmoil will become a risk people are willing to take in this growing frustration.
Napoleon III would like a word with you.
Napoleon I, Emperor of the French (1804–1814)
Louis XVIII, King of France (1814–1824)
Charles X, King of France (1824–1830)
Louis Philippe I, King of France (1830–1848)
Napoleon III, Emperor of the French (1852–1870)
They still wanted a lot of changes to allow more freedom, restrictions and more transparency... just not necessarily a formal republic.
Think about this - in CATO's own Human Freedom Index half of the top 16 countries are monarchies.
1 New Zealand - monarchy 2 Switzerland - republic 3 Hong Kong (definitely not going to be in #4 now) 4 Canada - monarchy 5 Australia - monarchy 6 Denmark - monarchy 6 Luxembourg - monarchy 8 Finland - republic 8 Germany - republic 10 Ireland - repulbic 11 Sweden - monarchy 11 Netherlands - monarchy 13 Austria - republic 14 United Kingdom - monarchy 15 Estonia - republic 15 United States - republic
I'm not arguing either were good, just curious about your point of view here.
That said, the revolutionary spirit under Czar Nicolas II were completely rational, and understandable. The use of violence was needed because the ruling class was—unlike at the end of the Soviet Union—unwilling to make the revolution happen peacefully.
Nobody can tell the future. The fact that awful people might use the turmoil to seize power is not something that people are thinking about when they are trying to overthrow their current oppressors.
Or are you saying that you dislike Trump or Biden so much that you'd rather use violence to achieve what you desire?
Let's say you'd use Guillotine so Trump can step down, then should those who dislike democrats also use the same means to have Biden step down? And if someone tends to oppose what you do, you'd rather use Guillotine to resolve the difference?
I think it's pretty clear what kind of person you are.
If this were a real democracy, popular policies would be enacted, or at least be on the ballot. But this is not the case. As evident from the Black Lives Matter protest, riot seems to be the only avenue for change. And as popular policies keep getting put on the back burner while corporate interests keep getting the front seat regardless of who we vote, the illusion of democracy will frustrate more and more people. The more frustrated we get the more likely we will resort to violence.
I’m not saying that violence will lead to good outcome (it probably won’t; as history shows), but an ever angrier and more frustrated population will eventually use it if democratic means remain unavailable. That is more and more people will vote for the Guillotine if the only options on the ballots are: a) business as usual, or b) business as usual + hating minorities.
None of those things are supported by an overwhelming majority unless 3/5ths now constitutes “overwhelming”. Additionally, your view of what the issues are show how biased your approach is to begin with.
- Almost nobody has an issue with reducing police violence, but a bunch of people have issues with getting rid of the police.
- Almost nobody “wants foreign wars” but a bunch of people think military intervention is needed.
- Nobody is against taxing the rich, it’s already right in the tax code and the top 1 percent pays something like a third of all tax revenues already. What a bunch of people are against is arbitrarily raising their taxes further because of tall poppy syndrome.
- Reduce carbon emissions. Yes, but sadly not overwhelming majority still and even then, the “how” is critical and there is even less common ground there.
A functioning legislator discusses these nuances, and comes up with a legislation that enacts the policy such that most people can benefit from it. This is one of the benefits of having a diverse ruling class. No one person needs to know how a popular policy gets enacted, that is the purpose of representative democracy.
You're technically inaccurate because 58-60% is not an "overwhelming majority".
I'm not a US citizen (or resident), and I find it almost unbelievable and absolutely unacceptable that you don't have some form of universal healthcare, for example. I probably agree with you politically way more than I disagree with you, but the other posters points against you still stand.
EDIT: I realise my first paragraph here might sound a bit harsh, that was not my intention - my intention was to make it explicitly known to you such that you might take it to heart and it might possibly be helpful to you to realise.
The same applies to solving global warming. Carbon taxation was actually a feasible solution with conservative support. Now instead, a huge chunk of the liberal position has shifted to the green new deal, which is a jobs program and wealth redistribution scheme only orthogonally related to slowing global warming. Nuclear is another viable solution to global warming that nobody wants to touch because science is scary.
I personally want carbon tax and police abolition, but there is no consensus on either of these, and what I personally want doesn’t matter. I am not a dictator and the USA is not a dictatorship. It is the legislator’s job to gather what the people want, and find a way to deliver it in a way that will benefit the most. However the American ruling class is not even pretending to be interested in what policies the general population supports.
Your claim is ridiculous
The average person might support all of those end results if the cost to get there were zero, i.e. if we could wave a magic wand.
However each one of those has a cost or tradeoff that a significant number - possibly majority - of people would be unwilling to accept.
This sentiment is a pretty on-the-nose example of the societal problem we're discussing.
If people in another country may be wrong and have to be taught what's right, well, how can people in another state avoid such error? How can people next door be always right, such as I am?
'Godless' non-religious people on the left are extremely 'moral' and burn people at the stake via deplatforming and cancelling.
Science and scientific culture of the last 50/100 years has helped, but even it's been hijacked by our monolithic emotional reality of tribalism and fear. Zooming out, scientific culture is a momentary lifting of a mountain one inch off the ground.
The development of human nature is frozen in time compared to the development of science. Science has caught up to it, and has hit a wall which scientific papers alone cannot move. In fact, the analogy of throwing wads of paper at a wall and expecting it to move. That's the impact it's having.
I fear there is not much we can do about human nature until we can physically change ourselves at the DNA level, to rid or regulate emotions like rage and disgust via CRISPR etc. There's pros and cons of being in the 'World State' or in the 'Savage Reservation'. (Brave New World reference.)
What changed then? A lot of things. We can talk about the financial decoupling and tech, of course. But that was also when imported oil became a concern. It was when international shipping settled on a standard intermodal container. It was when the drug wars started. And it was after major victories in the civil rights movement, and failures in Vietnam. There were winners and losers in these changes. The big winners were neoliberal-progressives who could shape all these influences into a new political alignment that pleased globalizing businesses and placated the masses. The losers were the remnants of the supremacist structure post-Reconstruction, who had fell into a decline with the Depression and war years, and saw collapse in the 60's. They were ushered towards religion, nostalgia narratives about the good old days, and apocalyptic fiction about the decline of the world and those few who would stand up to it.
The problem that the neoliberal structure faced was the one politicians always face: how to accommodate a divided electorate and keep one's career? The formula that emerged was to force the talking points into a narrower spectrum, a tactic refined over the course of decades. In this space, policy change is blocked where it hurts private property interests(as neoliberalism indicates), and the remainder is a set-aside for partisanship where professionals craft pro and contra arguments.
But the consequence of doing that is a build-up of pressure on both left and right, as everything gradually becomes a property issue and gets blocked or deferred. With no enfranchisement, both have radicalized - first the right, and then the left in reaction.
And that's the state of things. How does it end? With a new coalition that courts all the defining forces of this era effectively, guided by some overarching ideology. However, if we take this to be a cycle as in Strauss-Howe's theory, this is simply the beginning of the neoliberal decline, a period of crisis management and compromise, not the defining of that coalition.
> They will actively try to ruin your life over wrongthink.
In most cases, the wrongthink is someone saying something so horrible that most people are disgusted.
A small number of these cases are definitely an overreach.
On the other hand, the Republicans have allowed 140,000 people to die horribly, with hundreds thousands more on the way, and most of these deaths were completely avoidable: https://www.statnews.com/2020/06/19/faster-response-prevente...
This is what baffles me about Americans. "Well, the Ds were rude to some people, and the Rs killed a hundred thousand American. I can't see the difference!"
I feel identical, but apparently mirrored politically to you. So in the spirit of charity, how do you feel the R side has gotten more conservative? I don't even need sources, just your perspective.
Since Reagan, the Republican Party has moved very far to the right, focused primarily on lowering taxes for the rich, undermining the social programs they used to support, creative gerrymandering, and suppressing votes they don't like (often black votes).
Under Reagan there was still some sanity and reason behind it and especially under George HW Bush, but since Newt Gingrich, the party seems to have abandoned all common sense, embraced lies to justify war under Bush jr, and with Trump, it's just all lies for the sake of lies, with every remaining principle they used to have thrown out of the window, with the lone exception of power for its own sake, and hurting people they disagree with.
McCain and Romney seem(ed) to be the last of the old guard that still care (somewhat?) about basic honesty.
Though I guess the move towards the current insanity has nothing to do with anything resembling conservatism or "right" anymore. But the party has definitely changed beyond recognition. And I do think it started with Nixon's Southern Strategy, which was already about sacrificing principles for power. The first step on a very long slide down.
The problem isn't giving both sides the chance to speak, it's pretending that the ideas are equal and giving them equal weight. For example, wearing masks, washing hands, and social distancing as ideas for fighting the pandemic are not similar to drinking bleach and bathing in UV light. Yet both ideas get equal coverage and equal weight, as if they are both valid methods of dealing with the pandemic. This is why we cannot discuss politics and why Americans have to hide their views. People who can think will not put up with the stupidity of the idiotic ideas people who can't think put forward. How can you have a conversation with an idiot who thinks it's a good idea to drink bleach? Or one who thinks corona is spread by 5G towers. There is nothing to talk about. And the idiot cannot converse back either. They are likely unable to actually understand the situation so any evidence provided goes above their head.
Eventually, the idiots move to one side, the rest move to another, and it becomes an intractable problem. That's what we're seeing now in America. The institutions that are led by idiots have failed horribly, often on purpose: White House, Senate, CDC, FDA, Florida, Texas, Arizona, etc. But of course, this is all taboo to discuss in the first place. Politics are taboo in America. That's why no one talks about any issues and why we truly are a "shithole country," as the president called it.
It's a very difficult bind, because the media has fully bought in.
Democrat officials in multiple states encouraged people to attend large gatherings in Asian neighborhoods to "fight racism" when the pandemic was getting started. So it goes far beyond being "rude to some people". Both sides have made huge mistakes, and it appears that the foreign press is giving one side a pass.
This is going to change rapidly over the coming days, as the virus is rapidly growing the south.
According to JHU, for confirmed cases (not deaths, as in your comment): AZ (#3), FL (#5), MS (#8), AL (#9), SC (#10). (50/50) In approx. another week, GA (currently #11) will probably also become #10.
I've been deriving this data from the JHU data (which is on GitHub) myself for a while now: https://imgur.com/a/RpjEm9Z ; the full chart is remarkably busy, and not that great. I mean to try to clean it up into something more usable, but I've been swamped with my day job all week.
I expect deaths will generally follow in the coming weeks, regrettably. There might be some variance, of course, between states in deaths-per-captia, and that is a graph I've been meaning to make (since that might show something interesting about which states are better dealing with infections), especially after Chris Wallace's interview with Trump, and the remarks the President made there.
Apparently LA (#1) has a Democrat. Huh.
This was literally Hitler's primary argument for establishing the Nazi Party in Mein Kampf in the way that he did. So at least a 100 years old.
Based on the results, there's a pretty strong argument that it's true.
Also the fact that people actually feel the need to have bans on talking about politics eg at the workplace doesn't seem like a good sign to me, and that's hardly new at all.
Which migh sound bad but is actually a natural response to being forcefully fed extreme ends of political stances.
So the debate over media and internet missinformation might be for nothing. People adapt arround obstacles. In the end there could only be bots responding to bots and campaign members patting eachother on the back for the number of likes the bots generated.
Was this ever true? Do the majority of companies encourage talk about religion or the majority of churches encourage talk about politics?
The people react to stimuli like {media, campaigns, bots} just like they do any other marketing: there is a game theory response to stimuli. If they get overwhelmed on one platform, they will change habits (eg. move to a different platform, discuss only in person where there are no bots, discuss these topics less). I suspect campaigns have been around long enough that more people (with the help of information widely distributed on the internet) have gained a different tolerance to the same old campaign tricks.
Says people on both sides, unbeknownst to them as they neg the centrist who has the audacity to analyze policies important to them at that point in time.
I don't know... I think discourse with real people in real life is still worth something.
The only thing I simply won't discuss with anyone, either online or not, is theology. It will never lead to anything good. I think everyone has to find their own way there.
Ultimately, yes, each person must arrive at their own personal set of beliefs and conclusions, if that's what you mean. But surely silent introspection without ever engaging with anyone else can only take one so far? Everyone is exposed to the ideas of others, and discussions often lead to epiphanies or meaningful progress in someone's own personal journey (conversations with counselors and therapists come to mind). Maybe experience will also teach me that theology/spirituality/some other prickly topic is just never worth discussing with anyone, but I also believe that it's possible to have productive discussions about a topic that is this close to what makes us human.
...Sorry, I just realized this post counts as discussing theology with you!
> Nearly two‐ thirds of Latino Americans (65%) and White Americans (64%) and nearly half of African Americans (49%) have political views they are afraid to share
According to the first chart, 42% of “strong liberals” feel like they can share their political views. That group is disproportionately white: https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2020/02/27/5-facts-abo.... So there are all these people of color who are substantially more afraid to share their political views than a group of disproportionately white liberals on the far left.
Reinforcing an assumption, useful for pandering, while with this information another approach could be possible
From a different item of the same piece, Black Democrats are less likely than White Democrats to prefer compromise with Republicans.
https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2020/02/27/5-facts-abo...
https://www.pewforum.org/fact-sheet/changing-attitudes-on-ga...
https://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2017/05/18/2-public-views-on...
The other issues, yeah, you're right. I don't really consider taxes a social issue, but I realized I forgot about gun control.
As I point out, with a source, in another subthread, Blacks are more supportive of abortion than the nation as a whole, and second only to Asians. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23936024
Even in your ancient (5 years after Roe!) piece, while Blacks were less supportive of abortion than average, they were also becoming supportive more rapidly than other groups. 40+ years later, that faster change has flipped the starting positions.
Blacks are the most supportive of abortion legality in most or all cases of any race other than Asians, so that's one issue that isn't race that Blacks lean to the left on.
https://www.prri.org/research/legal-in-most-cases-the-impact...
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/education/education-news/...
I can't imagine that there wasn't substantial amounts of this during say, the heights of McCarthyism or when gay-rights weren't as accepted. Not to mention another interesting meta question, are people nowadays more prone to share that they feel like they cannot express their opinion?
My grandparents for example have it so ingrained to not question religious belief that they probably wouldn't even perceive it that way. Or just women in general. The stereotypical "housewife" only a few decades ago wasn't participating in public discourse at all and certainly not expected to. With the exception of a few high profile intellectuals women were mostly excluded from political life. I have a hard time even comparing this to today.
In those days, you'd have to have someone want to bring it forth to the police or government for anyone to bother, and most people won't know about it until it hits the newspaper, if it does. But now it's the court of public opinion with instant judgement and you can be fired from your job, unfriended or blocked by half your friends, and everyone publicly disavowing any association with you before you even find out about it or have a chance to defend yourself. Which, from what I've seen, rarely makes a difference. The damage is already done and doesn't usually ever get undone.
Of course a bunch of people are going to keep their mouths shut on political views in this environment. They want to keep their career and friends.
"Strong liberals" are apparently the only people who are proud enough about what they believe to be judged for it. Or maybe it's just impunity because it's illegal to fire people based on race, gender, and (often) sexual orientation, so they feel protected. Overt racists should lobby for similar protections, although I don't think they'll have a lot of luck.
The truth is that strong liberals have become extremely aggressive in intimidating and shaming anyone who disagrees with them in the modern era. And it's disturbing and completely corrosive, toxic and destructive.
I believe the U.S. needs its right brain and left brain to openly discuss and debate issues because neither side has a monopoly on morality or correctness.
Democracy doesn't die in darkness. It dies in uniformity. Have you ever lived in a one party country? It's the closest thing to hell on Earth.
The USA is a one party country -- it's just very good at marketing it as two parties. They never actually solve the problems they claim to care about -- they just keep using the same wedge issues for successive elections.
Until we actually have competition from other parties, the two party oligopoly (enforced by entrenched interests at the state level) makes our political system as useless as a one party political system.
- Average US white IQ 99, average US black IQ 85-90, average US asian IQ 105.
- Death rate from anorexia, 0.02%. Death rate from obesity, 8%.
- Gays/lesbians as percentage of US population: 4-5%. Transgenders, 0.6%.
All of those are correct. Watch this get modded down.
A huge number of white people (and a distressing number of nonwhites) believe in racist pseudoscience, and are justifiably afraid of expressing that view in polite company. If one of my employees said "whites are on average more intelligent than blacks," either in the office or on Facebook, I would fire them, even if it's probably true that most whites feel this way. If I had an employee that held such views, then darn right they should be afraid to talk about it.
The Cato poll indicates that the biggest difference in "self-censorship" occurs among conservatives. I suspect this is because most conservatives know that supporting Donald Trump is morally indefensible, and don't want to talk about why exactly they are still voting for the most corrupt president in American history.
And that the way the survey is phrased clearly hints that conservatives are being silenced while "Strong liberals stand out as the only political group who feel they can express themselves"
Ironically, a survey on the political spectrum depicts such spectrum as "liberal vs conservative". Excellent display of Overton window at work.
I wonder if "hacker" news is going to downvote me to hell for saying this.
neither Biden or Trump have as much power as our Media Overlords have fooled us into believing. The President is largely the head cheerleader of Team America. they can tweet, they can give a speech, but they cannot control the Deep State one iota. Back in 2009, I remember Obama said one of the most insightful things Ive heard any President say. He said the FedGov is like a ship and all he can do is turn the rudder to aim us in a given direction, but we wont arrive for 10 or 20 years.
personally, i think MAGAtards are just as blind as DemonRats. i guess that opinion means i have to be extra careful expressing my views at work, because i'll get Canceled by both the Left and the Right for heresy against their UniParty-WarParty othodoxy.
honk. honk.
When you ask respondents on political ideas, like voting rights, immigration, state welfare, infrastructure, etc, a much broader and more moderate viewpoint emerges.
Also there seems to be a more growing disconnect between people in power and the masses. I think as data science becomes a more developed craft, more people will become aware about the motivations of our political actors. Sensationalism and political correctness are usually signs of a deeper problem---
It is sad that I can only be honest and say things such as "let's wait for the facts" under a nickname on some dark corner of the web.
However, I have tons of friends apart from the groups mentioned above; people that I appreciate, whom I have met through different hobbies or passions. None of these bonds have a connection to politics, but it is common for some of them to bring up political topics during these months. I reserve my opinions on these topics because I understand that there are a lot of emotions involved. Moreover, we all have biases. We are not at war, we just digress on the solutions the country needs.