I found this episode quite cathartic.
It's only somewhat related but hidden brain released an episode about passion in politics recently which I also found summed up some core problems with how we are framing discourse.
https://pca.st/episode/b2bc078b-f757-41fa-83d8-734cf37589d7
"Arthur Brooks is an economist who for 10 years ran the American Enterprise Institute, one of the most influential conservative think tanks in the world. He has come to believe there is only one weapon that can defeat our extreme political polarization: love."
It isn't clear to me what you are saying. Are you saying we are doomed because he's a conservative or because you have no faith we retain the ability love?
I get where he's coming from, but love is too freighted to really get traction. If you see love as meaning to be invested in the happiness and actualization of others, it's more practical on a lot of levels.
The contempt issue begins at the roots of identity, I think. When we're adolescents, we're a part of the world or society, but without the responsibility or authority of an adult. This makes us subject to it and a bit helpless (but for the benevolence of adults) until we find a way to become adults ourselves. Until then, we often assert ourselves though revolt and rebellion as victims of the forces we are subject to. Our adolescent mind exists as an island protected by its own defensive resentment and contempt against the forces it is only subject to, until it acquires the responsibility and resultant confidence to act directly on the world. We all emerge from it differently, if at all.
I'm saying the contempt is an adolscent urge that originates from believing we are a subject or victim of our circumstances. There are many situations where you really are a target, but I'd say there is no contempt without identifying first as a victim, and that necessary identity is a remnant of adolescence. The way to mitigate those adolescent remnants is by taking responsibility and ownership of your life, which coincidentally, happens to be a value at the core of conservative ethos Brooks advocates.
Treating people as undeveloped adolescents because they use disgust and contempt as an organizing social signal could seem to merely respond to contempt with sincere, even heartfelt condescention (the most insulting kind), and that would be all the more alienating and enraging, but it's toward discovering what the fundamental divide in the very axioms that inform our values is. When Brooks says we need "love," I think what he means is we need to feel loved, and by this, that there is some force in the world (or universe) that is invested in our growth and happiness, and believing we can both recieve and achieve it.
I hope this is a signal that Brooks has turned to activism and is working to spread the message of love within his party. I eagerly await examples of his success and wish him all the best.
seems like a good place to put this quote: "Justice is what love looks like in public." If this conservative economist wants to spread love, he can start by supporting economic policies that prevent the 1% from exploiting everyone else
Right because conservative = bad and deserving of contempt. This is exactly the type of kneejerk reaction that he is talking about. The 1% do just as well when Democrats are in office, but keep on playing the game ruled by tribe and emotion, see where that gets us.
To move wealth from the poor and the middle class to the rich is not what commonly is known as wealth redistribution. Even if it can mean that if you take the words literally.
I have not read Brooks, so I don't know if his stated position is that he is in favour of plundering the poor for the sake of the rich. I'd imagine that it isn't.
He does mention that there are systemic issues with the status quo, so I'm sure if you asked him if he was happy with how things are running I'm sure he'd have quite a list of things that he thinks could make the world better for everyone -- even if you might disagree with some of his solutions.
In the interview he says that democracy is the political version of capitalism/a market economy and I think that's key to interpreting him charitably. In his worldview many of the good things about democracy are the good things about capitalism, but they also share many of the same flaws. In systems that emphasises individual agency and are incentive based, his view is that contempt locks us into a vicious cycle that de-incentivizes leaders from actually providing a realistic way forward. I tend to agree, and I can hardly fault someone for trying to argue for the best version of their vision for society.
The Democratic Party is conservative by any popular measure outside of the insular American worldview. In many European countries, the Democratic Party’s politics would be considered far right.
I've often wondered about this- I mean the US has it's share of coffeehouse anarchists and redistributionists. The large size of the US and the political structure make it hard for e.g. a 'Pirate Party' representative to appear, even if there is the same amount of support per capita.
The implicit premise itself, that the Democratic political party is monolithic is false. It was an old Woodie Alan joke about not belonging to an organized political party and that is true to some extent - if your group is excluded from the GOP the DNC is the big tent. Before the 9/11 xenophobia US muslims were dominantly aligned with the Republican party, afterwards it was reversed. There are in fact many religious conservative demographics in the DNC for one.
Frankly self proclaimed leftists have a terrible habit of consent manufacturing - both from their own natural bubbles and echo chambers and ad nausuem rhetoric. There is tbe "implicit identity and support" which assumes that universal support of the working class is the natural status quo and any who disagree are puppets of the rich. This abstraction spares them from having to consider the actual opinions of the people who compose it. Their poor electoral performance in even their strongholds highlights that they are a noisy minority operating under the pretense of being a majority.
It is fiscally conservative, Democrats doesn't try to reduce the dominance of the 1%. It is however not socially conservative, they are probably among the most left wing in the world with respect to race if you only count popular parties. And since "far right" today is mostly used to describe racists they wouldn't considered to be "far right".
Instead in Europe the democrats would just be a typical right wing party. Meaning they are pro immigration to stimulate economic growth, pro healthcare for all etc.
The Democratic Party’s “fiscal” policies are a scourge on the very disproportionately impoverished African American population. Any suggestion that the Democratic Party has any sort of commitment to overcoming racial divisions in the US is undermined by that fact.
There is no such thing as a decoupled “fiscal” conservatism. Politics in practice are inseparable from their historical context and Democratic politicians know that. Their virtue appeals in the media are not supported by their politics but rather serve to distract from their politics. Their politics, in fact, are a conservative politics.
I think virtually every conservative party in Europe supports single-payer healthcare. That's a big one that would put the Democrats to the extreme right in Europe.
Maybe even more importanly, the way Democrat representatives seem to be able to enrich themselves from lobbying money etc, would be totally unacceptable most places in Europe. It would place them more in the class of Plutocrats than conservatives. Democrats tend to have far closer ties to Big Capital than even the most business-friendly conservatives where I live.
It seems to me that their focus on identity politics is a cover for doing very little to actually help the unprivileged, but instead doing the biddings of their donors.
> The Democratic Party is conservative by any popular measure outside of the insular American worldview
Its mostly a center-right / center-left coalition with the center-right currently slightly stronger (until very recently much stronger). While it leans right, it isn't coherently conservative, even by international standards.
So I guess bring up negative facts is now contempt? One party is very much in favor of a more level playing field, for the most part. One party is very much against it.
>One party is very much in favor of a more level playing field, for the most part. One party is very much against it.
I mean, I would hardly argue that the Democrats are "against" a level playing field, but it wouldn't be a stretch to say that they are opposed to such a premise. The fact is though, just because we both strongly dislike progressive ideology does not mean that we need to harp on their shortcomings at every opportunity.
In my mind, it is the constant put downs and negativity that breeds contempt. The thing of itself need not be the act, but merely foster such a stance.
Personally I find another factor of contempt is "failing a reverse Turing Test" where there is such high repetition and little thought that it seems as if they are organic spam bots. The inauthenticity and persistence grating seems to be a common thing given the contempt for Jehovah's witnesses, Hare Krishina's, multilevel marketers and others. Tech support forced into canned scripts are another such example - in computer science terms it seems that the low entropy becomed apparent and raises subconscious red flags.
The infamous "New World Order" conspiracy theorist archetype tends to be negative and full of put downs to their target de jure as the cause of all the world's evils. Even when it is horrifying it draws more of a watching a trainwreck style reaction.
Negativity and putdowns I would classify more as a breeder of disengagement. This is reflected by the impact of negative campaign ads being more reduced total votes than drawing more votes by looking good in comparison.
The problem with this line of thought is that it always becomes something for "the other" to do.
They need to compromise, they need to calm down, they need to love. And as long as they don't, we don't have to.
Not to mention those that equate compromise, civility, and love with getting their way without any sort of criticism. Then there's the issues where compromise isn't an option. If you want to kill everyone on the planet, and I don't want you to kill anyone. Killing half the planet isn't really a compromise I'm willing to entertain.
So sweet, I'm sure if we all loved each other and treated each other with respect, we'd all ride rainbows and shit ponies or whatever. But when we can't even agree on what love and respect even means, it's just kind of abstract, philosophical masturbation.
Arthur Brooks is speaking out now to get ahead of the shitstorm that people like Arthur Brooks created for themselves by being contemptuous of the rank and file American worker for decades. It's all peace and love and respect now that he's made a comfortable life for himself. And in typical AEI fashion, he's got a sense of history that mayflies would find appalling.
Politicians are disagreeing and failing to use nonsensical phrases like "my good friend from <insert location here>?" Anybody want to recite Alexander Hamilton's memoirs of his genial political disputes with Aaron Burr?
> Arthur Brooks is speaking out now to get ahead of the shitstorm that people like Arthur Brooks created for themselves by being contemptuous of the rank and file American worker for decades.
Sweeping generalizations such as "people like him" are bad, seems both contemptuous & a shallow examination.
It's not ok to attack others this way on HN, regardless of how wrong they are or you feel they are. It only makes everything worse, and we've had to ask you this kind of thing more than once before.
What's the Matter with Kansas? is a lovely example of contempt disguised as gentle inquiry, with a touch of worry over another, and it starts even with the title itself. "Why those poor, naive, uneducated conservatives in the flyover states, they simply do not understand that they are voting against their own interests." It's concern-trolling with a mask of pity.
Once you begin looking for it, you can see it more and more. On a rather left-leaning forum, an article appeared discussing authoritarianism and how pervasive it is in society. One commenter, without a hint of irony or self-awareness, wondered if there were some way to hook into this tendency to get people to get behind gun control or get vaccinated.
I will at least take naked, open contempt over that sort of thing.
I find those two forms of contempt to be equally frustrating, because (AFAICT) they have the same root cause:
Judging an un-nuanced, possibly straw-man version of another's views. Without any effort to check that they truly understand what the other person believes, let alone what reasons that person has for holding those views.
I've seen this from both conservatives and liberals, and especially from those with mass-media audiences.
It's impossible for us to understand the beliefs/priorities/values of others from any perspective other than our own. Actually, my conjecture is that the only way to see things from another perspective is to internalize some aspects that perspective.
Let's say Alice holds some internalized ideal of traditional family values, and Bob holds some internalized ideal of tolerance and inclusion of LGBT people. When Alice looks at Bob's views, all she sees is that it's an affront to an ideal that she cares about, and when Bob looks at Alice's views, all he sees is that it's an affront to an ideal that he cares about.
But how can Alice possibly understand Bob's point of view, unless she's able to tentatively drop her concern for traditional family values? I expect that even with effort to understand the other's perspective, unless that other perspective is internalized, Alice's thoughts on Bob's views will be centered around what she cares about: "I guess I understand what motivates Bob to hate family values", "I guess I understand what motivates Alice's bigoted views on LGBT issues", etc.
Building on my previous comment, I think it's more useful to say not that we caricaturize opposing viewpoints, but that we compress them using our own internal, lossy compression algorithms. And the original viewpoint is inaccessible to us; we only have access to the compressed representation that our minds generate.
It's nice to know the actual factual content of "What's The Matter With Kansas" is completely irrelevant. It doesn't matter who's correct, it matters who hurt their feelings. Which is pretty consistent - conservatives have become utterly disconnected from reality, and their absurd COVID policy has demonstrated what happens when reality doesn't give a crap how you feel.
You should know that this is what began to pry me away from being your basic leftist template. I said, "Wow, I better make sure I am not voting against my own interests. Wouldn't I feel like a fool if I supported people who had contempt for me."
After that, I would hear "Ugh, men are awful" in a curious new light. Or someone would say "White people ruin everything" and I would realize, hey, I'm white. This sort of thing began to add up and it became clear that "going left" meant supporting people who had contempt for me, purely on the basis of things like skin color and sex. Wow, I really have been going against my own interests, all this time. I am no better than those "fools" in Kansas.
Again, you're talking about feelings instead of policy. About "contempt" instead of dollars and rights and lives.
I can't help but see this as every bit as ridiculous as the anti-vaxxers who dig their heels in even as the people around them are dying, because they don't want to give in to The Left on vaccines.
Do you think the left is particularly supportive of men? ("In fact, more women as a whole now graduate from college than men ... This is a great accomplishment—not just for one sport or one college or even just for women but for America. And this is what Title IX is all about." President Barack Obama.) If they are not, then that is the error of What's the Matter with Kansas?, the error of supporting those who do not have your best interests at heart.
If feelings don't matter to you, then why are you engaging with a discussion about contempt?
I don't think this is a "feelings" thing. Being openly contemptuous of the people I'm trying to help raises legitimate questions about my motivations and honesty. If you see someone go around cracking homophobic jokes all the time, is it worth carefully considering their policy ideas on LGBT issues?
I guess I just don't care enough about whether or not a person, party, or politician has contempt for me. Whoever has the policy that will be best for the country and the population overall. (With the understanding that my best interests are not always the best interests of the overall country / population...)
>After that, I would hear "Ugh, men are awful" in a curious new light. Or someone would say "White people ruin everything" and I would realize, hey, I'm white. This sort of thing began to add up and it became clear that "going left" meant supporting people who had contempt for me, purely on the basis of things like skin color and sex.
See, I would stand up for social justice and protecting women and people of color. But women and people of color don't trust white men so instead, I'm going to not stand for these things instead.
Great logic there. I could tell that you used to be a real leftist template.
How about instead, you stand for women and people of color because it's the right thing to do? Regardless of how little they trust white men. Maybe, just maybe, try and understand why they wouldn't trust white men?
I was, Metafilter account and all. Got in trouble for getting a pro-choice piece published in the local rag when I was fifteen. But damn, I am not going to give energy to people who despise me due to the incidents of my birth.
You'll notice at no point am I saying to hate white men. At all. In fact I'm saying that despite people having valid reasons to not trust white men, we should still stand for them and watch out for their interests to. Which in fact, is the complete opposite of fomenting hatred.
"people have a valid reason not to trust _____ " is the very definition of prejudice, and synonymous with bigotry. Again: fill in the blank with any group just to stand witness. I hear the historic racialist explaining that Black/Japanese/Chinese/Albinos/whatever are untrustworthy. Plain old prejudice couched in modern clothing.
Except white men have historically and continue to oppress women and people of color. Black/Japanese/Chinese/Albinos have never oppressed white men in America. That's the huge difference you are (very purposely) missing.
Yes, I am intentionally ignoring your slander. There's not even measured statistical analysis here let alone causality, and even then, such analyses are often used to try to rationalize bigotry on the basis of some artifact. This is merely boring slander desperately trying to justify prejudice. Tiresome at best, but moreover used to rationalize truly horrific reality like genocide. Totally grotesque. "Not by the color of their skin but by the content of their character."
Ok, it's pretty obvious at this point that you are not actually trying to have a serious conversation. My slander? It's slander to say that white men have oppressed and often continue to oppress women and people of color? Ok my guy. Apparently history and paying attention to what is currently going on is slander. Stop your trolling.
Yes, this is slander based on skin tone: a very mundane bigotry meme repeated in history. This should have died out long ago, but here you are doing your best to perpetuate it for the ages. I have nothing further to add.
No, I'm saying you should still stand for women and people of color instead of acting like supporting people who support them is against your own best interests.
First, you edited your comment. Second, you conveniently omit the part where he says he does support disenfranchised people. Third and most importantly, you bizarrely substitute leftist contempt for actual trust. Personally I think this is a pretty selfish statement that involves casting your state of mind and perspective onto someone else with a very negative sentiment.
How about instead, you stand for women and people of color because it's the right thing to do? Regardless of how little they trust white men. Maybe, just maybe, try and understand why they wouldn't trust white men?
Please don't use HN for ideological flamewar, regardless of how wrong someone is or you feel they are. Even in this pretty hellish thread, your posts are standing out as aggressive. That's not cool.
If you're in favor of good causes, or you have better arguments, it's enough to represent those with good information.
One more point: your argument has very strong resemblance to that of a racialist trying to justify a belief system that is fundamentally rooted in stereotypes and hatred. Contrast that to the person who supports everyone irrespective of their visuals and self-identity.
Simply change the labels in your statement and you have textbook discrimination in every country and historical context. “Not by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.” You saying this now and in the US doesn’t make it less hatred-based or fundamentally unacceptable than it should be.
> How about instead, you stand for women and people of color because it's the right thing to do? Regardless of how little they trust white men. Maybe, just maybe, try and understand why they wouldn't trust white men?
Ok but tell me when in America have women and people of color ever oppressed white men? That's why "just change the label and it's totally racist bro" doesn't make any sense at all. Because it's been white men who have oppressed women and people of color. Not the other way around. It has never been the other way around. Ever.
The two sides don't react to contempt symmetrically. The left doesn't care if Trump insults them. It only has any bearing if it leads to policy changes they hate. The right, on the other hand, really, really hates to be made fun of, to the point where they'd rather destroy the country (see the Civil War or the Jan 6 insurrection) than leave an insult unaddressed. The right believes the left is as sensitive as they are to issues of honor, so they spend vast effort trying to own the libs. The left believes compassion, ideals, rational argument, and consideration of material self-interest are what motivate everyone, so they write endless tracts trying to prove their point, appealing to science and founding principles and so forth. The right finds this boring. The clever right find this a useful red cape to distract their enemies with. "Surely we must not nominate Supreme Court judges in an election year! It's a sacred principle! Oops, except let's nominate several now that it's our turn to nominate."
> The left believes compassion, ideals, rational argument, and consideration of material self-interest
My goodness.. this comment is so full of itself I can't even. Yes, us right wingers believe it's good to be uncompassionate.
> they write endless tracts trying to prove their point, appealing to science and founding principles and so forth
And yet, most left wingers are so disconnected from the reality of people on the ground it's frightening. For example, Portland decided to encourage blacks to get vaccinated by putting ads of black drag queens up. I can't think of anything stupider than the disconnect of left wing pundits from material reality.
> The left doesn't care if Trump insults them. It only has any bearing if it leads to policy changes they hate
The left screamed for years about Trump's manner of speech (not his content, simple the manner). For example, Trump's big talk on immigration through the southern border was met with outright hostility, despite the current administration now keeping the EXACT same plan (the remain in mexico policy). Or, for example, when Trump insulted Antifa, we had to hear on end how Antifa was just an idea, and how being against Antifa means you're a fascist or something.
> Portland decided to encourage blacks to get vaccinated by putting ads of black drag queens up.
This is called nutpicking. You claim this example is representative (and you claim you have adequately represented who did what for what purpose). I claim it is confirmation bias. We could settle this with statistics.
> The left screamed for years about Trump's manner of speech (not his content, simple the manner). For example, Trump's big talk on immigration through the southern border was met with outright hostility, despite the current administration now keeping the EXACT same plan (the remain in mexico policy). Or, for example, when Trump insulted Antifa, we had to hear on end how Antifa was just an idea, and how being against Antifa means you're a fascist or something.
Setting aside your characterization, which again I believe is self-serving and inaccurate, the point is the left weren't upset at being insulted, they were upset that Trump was using lies to justify harmful policy and to promote vigilante violence against various groups the right hates, including, strangely, anti-fascists. You haven't actually addressed this point.
Perhaps I wasn't clear, so, to restate my thesis: the right cares a lot more about contempt than the left. It bothers everyone to be insulted, but it bothers the right a lot more, to the point that revenge is more important to many of them than any policy goal. The right assumes the left thinks like them and acts accordingly. The left assumes the right thinks like them and acts accordingly. Each side misinterprets the other. Though, again, I don't think this is symmetrical either. I think the right misunderstands the left more than the reverse. So, for instance, the right assumes that the positions people on the left take are insincere "virtue signaling" because they can't believe someone would sincerely hold these positions. The left knows that arguing policy with statistics, studies, and appeals to claimed national values isn't going to work with most of the right, but they don't really have a better strategy.
> the right assumes that the positions people on the left take are insincere "virtue signaling" because they can't believe someone would sincerely hold these positions. The left knows that arguing policy with statistics, studies, and appeals to claimed national values isn't going to work with most of the right, but they don't really have a better strategy.
This is one of the more beautifully succinct ways I know of to describe this. The moral hole of the right wing (and, well, I'm sure 'iammisc will again rend their shirt, but I've read their comment history and I've spent plenty of time in that swamp more generally, I'm confident in my assessment on both scales) is such that it assumes their opposite numbers must share it because there is no way their epistemic closure can countenance any alternative. And as you say, the left absolutely understands that pointing out reality won't matter--but lacks the capacity to communicate because to do so abrogates our core values. (There is an obvious path to, say, socialism in America, if it's only for white people. We know, because our right wing like socialism-for-white-people. They will fight their representatives to defend it. It's when other people get hold of it that there are objections. And that's a bridge we certainly won't cross for them.)
The divide is inescapable. For a while we could hope that kids wouldn't share their parents' behavior, but--well. Gamergate happened, the MRA movement happened, and they funneled their dupes straight into the machine.
As a former liberal, I'm not rending anything. I just no longer buy the prevailing liberal narratives.
Only extremists describe those they disagree with as immoral people. I would never think that of my liberal friends or family. Misguided? Yes. Misinformed? Sometimes. Evil? Not any more than anyone else. It's the last point most leftists fail to understand in their zealotry.
Please don't take HN threads further into ideological flamewar. I realize the topic has a lot of ideological overlap, but that makes it more important to avoid flamewar and stay focused on what's intellectually interesting and curious.
Please don't take HN threads further into ideological flamewar. I realize the topic has a lot of ideological overlap, but that makes it more important to avoid flamewar and stay focused on what's intellectually interesting and curious.
> and their absurd COVID policy has demonstrated what happens when reality doesn't give a crap how you feel.
Then why are so many blue staters vacationing in florida and texas right now? Honestly, all my friends from california, many liberals, have all decided to move to Florida and tennessee. I'm so sick of this narrative. The COVID policy in red states has not led to drastically different outcomes, despite all insistence to the contrary
Please don't take HN threads further into political or ideological flamewar. All those flames burn the same, and they're destructive of the place we're trying to have here.
The goal is curious conversation. That means optimizing for interestingness—not for being right, and definitely not for smiting enemies.
Edit: you've done this repeatedly recently, and we've had to ask you multiple times before. Would you please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and take the intended spirit more to heart? We'd be grateful.
I can't help but think this sense is so prevalent on 'The Left' because they have established an image for themselves that is rational, empathetic, and humanist above all else. They actively frame their positions and actions in terms of "justice" and "fairness". They love to declare that "Reality has a well known liberal bias" and frame people who see the world different as rejecting reality itself. With motivations so unquestionably good, and so unquestionably rational, anyone who is in opposition to their proposals must have something wrong with them, no? How else could someone be opposed to such righteous actions? Well, the answer is that they have been deceived by Fox News, they are ignorant, they are voting against their best interest without realizing it, they are reactionaries, they have no empathy, or they are just plan bad people. Take your pick.
Likewise, it isn't the left's fault that conservatives routinely do deny real reporting on real events that actually happened as being reported by a liberal bias.
As loathe as people are to hear "both sides", 'The Left' absolutely does this as too. They just use different names and insinuations to communicate the same point, that sources presented by the other side is not to be trusted.
Remember when Biden claimed that COVID-19 was invented by the Republicans to make his presidency look bad?
Remember when Obama refused to acknowledge that Trump won the presidency and when CNN aired nonstop coverage from conspiracy theorists claiming that the entire election was fraudulent?
Remember when Obama claimed months in advance that any election in which a Democrat lost was necessarily fraudulent, and then incited a mob to take over the US Capitol building during the electoral vote count? And then when Obama refused to authorize the national guard to prevent US senators and house representatives from being taken hostage?
You're damn right -- they're both totally the same.
This is very likely to devolve into a partisan squabble, so I don't want to keep going back and forth on this. I was ready to cite examples of the left playing fast and loose with the truth but I sense it will just create hostility. If I pick only one example, it looks like I'm not prepared and have nothing substantial to counter with. If I list multiple examples, it will look like I came here prepared for a fight as a right wing partisan. How do you want to proceed, if at all?
Can you cite an example of left-wing news outlets playing "fast and loose" in a way that literally jeopardized the foundation of US democracy and incited mass violence?
Even if you think the investigation into Trump's ties to Russian influence was unjustified, it relied on democratically-elected representatives to impeach him, and it never undermined the rule of law itself.
I'm sure you can find examples with lesser consequences, but given the stakes, are those really relevant here?
It's easy to dismiss all such disagreements as being boiled down to partisanship, which is why it's more useful to look past the actions and focus on the outcome.
Violent rhetoric from politicians and their supporting news outlets has real consequences, and in this case the actions of one side are resulting in the potential for mass vigilante violence:
From Ethnic antagonism erodes Republicans’ commitment to democracy[1]
About half of all surveyed Republicans agreed with these points:
1. The traditional American way of life is disappearing so fast that we may have to use force to save it.
2. A time will come when patriotic Americans have to take the law into their own hands.
3. Strong leaders sometimes have to bend the rules in order to get things done.
4. It is hard to trust the results of elections when so many people will vote for anyone who offers a handout.
You start off with a premise that is not immediately obvious. You claim right-wing news outlets are jeopardizing the 'foundation of US democracy', but most right wingers would counter that democracy is not the foundational value of the United States, but rather, individual rights, that even democracy is subservient to the rights of the individual. For example, no matter how many people would vote for such an ability, a modern 'right winger' would reject the notion that the people should be able to buy others. Your insistence that democracy is being eroded by the right, is easily countered by most conservatives that individual liberty is being eroded by the left, and they can easily point to the coronavirus lockdowns which seem neverending, obviously overreaching, and -- given the vaccine -- also unnecessary. They can point to multiple examples of what they see as having their rights trampled over, such as being forced to participate in events they have moral concerns with, while facebook and Amazon and other large companies apparently have every right to kick off those they agree with from their multi-billion dollar platforms.
So the counter to your claim that the right is undermining democracy is that the left is undermining civil liberties.
I don't disagree with your description of right wingers saying that individual rights are foundational rather than democracy. I will point out that neoconservatives just spent $6T trying to export democracy to Iraq and Afghanistan rather than individual rights. Indeed, there is no second amendment in the Iraq constitution which we wrote.
Neoconservatives are not a meaningful cohort in the gop at this point. The nomination of Trump was the end of that chapter.
I think most people agree that Afghanistan And Iraq was a terrible idea. At least all the young conservatives do.
And I honestly think we shouldn't read too much into foreign policy. Both parties are happy to support all kinds of regimes that follow all kinds of anti democratic or anti individual rights ideologies, so long as it's in their perceived best interest of America.
>...most right wingers would counter that democracy is not the foundational value of the United States, but rather, individual rights, that even democracy is subservient to the rights of the individual...
That's a good point, but consider the following:
Civil liberties don't exist in a vacuum -- their definitions arise out of conflict among members of society. I.e., the individual, alone in nature, has no need for them. One of the functions of a government is to protect those liberties, especially among those in the minority.
Without trusted elections and therefore a sound democracy, elected officials have no legitimacy. Without a legitimate claim to power, they become tyrants, and the state loses its moral authority to uphold one person's civil liberties against another's. There is no longer any social consensus backing those decisions.
> Can you cite an example of left-wing news outlets playing "fast and loose" in a way that literally jeopardized the foundation of US democracy and incited mass violence?
Protests summer 2020? There was a huge surge covid a month after those protests everywhere in USA, even though it was summer and covid should have been low as everywhere else in the world during summers. All of the left wing politicians and news outlets scrambled to try to discredit this or hide it or find any flaws in that connection, but the connection is crystal clear. Those protests lead to hundreds of thousands of deaths.
>Those protests lead to hundreds of thousands of deaths.
This sounds like an opinion disguised as fact. If that wasn’t your intention then you’ll need to show peer-reviewed evidence of at the very least a strong association between those two outcomes.
Moreover, we’re specifically talking about lies perpetrated by the media that led to mass violence. The George Floyd protests weren’t fomented by media lies — you can go ask a poor black American if you want to know what’s going on.
>"in a way that literally jeopardized the foundation of US democracy"
What does this even mean? This is way too vague and nebulous to ever get a grip on. I'm guessing you're talking about members of House/Senate contesting the results of the election, which they had a right to do, and followed the constitutional procedure for. You could also say this relied on democratically-elected representatives and wasn't undermining the rule of law.
>"and incited mass violence?"
Again, what qualifies as "mass violence"? I assume you're alluding to January 6th, which I hardly consider "mass violence" as it was very much localized and was over within a few hours. Surely the summer riots are more deserving of a term like "mass violence", no?
If we're talking about vigilante violence / decentralized intimidation, Maxine Waters told people to harass Trump staffers: "“They’re not going to be able to go to a restaurant, they’re not going to be able to stop at a gas station, they’re not going to be able to shop at a department store... The people are going to turn on them, they’re going to protest, they’re going to absolutely harass them.”"
As for your four bullet points, I am confident you can get the same kind of result (eroded faith in Democracy) by tweaking the questions to appeal to the sensibilities of people on the left. Just imagine flipping a few them by asking if a liberal agrees with "The rights of women and minorities are disappearing so fast that we may have to use force to save them" and "It is hard to trust the results of elections when so many people have been victims of voter suppression".
>"You could simply have said, "I can't come up with any examples," and skipped all the rambling text."
This attitude is part of the reason why I didn't feel the need to paste a bunch of links. Not only am I certain you'd dismiss them as biased interpretations, you didn't even pick up on the fact that I was disagreeing with his premise. And, that I did provide an example with Maxine Waters calling for Trump Administration staffers to be harassed in public.
>What does this even mean? This is way too vague and nebulous to ever get a grip on.
No, the idea that democracy is undermined when citizens are told that their elections are no longer valid or trustworthy, and when politicians no longer respect the results of those elections, is actually very clear and straightforward. The legitimacy of those in power is upheld by the legitimacy of elections. Take away the latter, and what remains is tyranny.
>Surely the summer riots are more deserving of a term like "mass violence", no?
We're talking specifically about lies told by the media that resulted in mass violence. So, no.
>Maxine Waters told people to harass Trump staffers
Remember, we're speaking now in terms of actual outcomes. You'd need to point to demonstrable mass violence that resulted from her comments.
>I am confident you can get the same kind of result (eroded faith in Democracy) by tweaking the questions to appeal to the sensibilities of people on the left
I'm sure you've got a great imagination, but what counts is evidence. Given your confidence, surely you can find a study or poll somewhere to support that hypothesis. And given the vast sums of money behind right-wing think tanks and PACs, I would not expect such studies to be wanting for funding.
“When do we get to use the guns? ... That's not a joke. I'm not saying it like that. I mean, literally, where's the line? How many elections are they going to steal before we kill these people?”
> I was ready to cite examples of the left playing fast and loose with the truth but I sense it will just create hostility.
I mean, sounds like an excuse to not participate.
The question seems quite black and white.
We have a few classic lies:
* Obama is a Muslim from Kenya
* His wife is transgender
* Climate change is a hoax
* COVID is a hoax
* Climate change is a hoax
* There is not enough pollution in the world
* The Democrats are Communists
* The Democrats run an occult pederasty wing through Twitter
* Trump won the 2020 election
All of these are widely believed by Conservatives and all of these have been widely spread by Conservative speakers.
Can you find even one comparable lie to any of these spread by prominent Democrats (not some random Twitter account)?
"> I was ready to cite examples of the left playing fast and loose with the truth but I sense it will just create hostility.
I mean, sounds like an excuse to not participate."
Actually, I was exactly right. I'm sensing some hostility from you right now and I'm making the mistake of engaging when I should just let it go.
>"Can you find even one comparable lie to any of these spread by prominent Democrats (not some random Twitter account)?"
So on the one hand, the laundry list you gave is acceptable as "widely believed by Conservatives", but I have to provide counterexamples that are only restricted to "prominent democrats"? You also don't qualify what 'widely believed' means, so I can just as easily claim that people on the left widely believe other falsehoods. If it is so bad that some conservatives agree with the idea that "Democrats are Communists", is it not exactly the same thing as Democrats believing that "Republicans as Fascists"? This is a widely believed view by Progressives.
I'm not here to chuck a laundry list of "lies" at you. Quite frankly I see something like "Trump’s false or misleading claims total 30,573 over 4 years" and I roll my eyes. Am I seriously expected to believe that number is anywhere close to accurate? I dare say the majority of those are subject to interpretation, which we will not be doing here.
Tucker Carlson, Alex Jones, and Rachel Maddow have all used "No one could honestly believe that what we say is really true" as an argument in legal proceedings against them.
The specific details are Maddow was talking about a journalist from another network(OAN), and said something like "This person is literally paid by the Russian government to produce news stories". Maddow's team argued that it isn't slander because no reasonable viewer of her show would take that statement to be truthful despite the confident/clear language it is expressed in.
Krauss was in fact working for OAN and Sputnik at the same time and Sputnik is funded by the Russian government. Maddow even won attorney fees in that case. Rouz is a propagandist; quotes in the decision amply demonstrate that.
Quoting the appeals decision, The challenged statement was an obvious exaggeration, cushioned within an undisputed news story.
Equating Maddow’s exaggeration with Jones and Carlson is just rank bothsiderism.
If they actually are on the payroll, how is it an "obvious exaggeration" to say that they are getting paid by the Russian government? If something is demonstrably true, why would one need to hide behind the "No reasonable person would believe this to be true" defense?
Because that is the threshold question of any defamation case [1]. OAN lost that case and re-lost on appeal. Then in awarding Maddow attorneys fees, the court was saying OAN shouldn't have even filed the suit in the first place.
The question for you, the original question, is why would you consider her shorthand argument based on fact equivalent to what Alex Jones does?
Because when you're defending a lawsuit, you lay out multiple lines of defense. What we said was true, but even if it wasn't true, we had good reason to think it was, but even if we really didn't have good reason, we're just entertainment. That way you're not doomed if the court accepts some convoluted argument that what you said wasn't actually true.
That's a wonderful narrative, except that Fox News and other conservative orgs have repeatedly been proven to be really, really deceptive. How many conservative talking heads have had to defend themselves in court that they're not really news, but entertainers playing a silly character for laughs? How many right-wing radio shock jocks have died of COVID because they drank their own kool-aid on the subject of Vaccines?
Polls have shown that Fox News viewers believe more incorrect facts about current events than people who don't follow the news at all.
After we spend decades hearing about how Iraq has WMD's and was involved with Al-Qaeda, Obama's secretly a non-American Muslim, Anthropogenic Climate Change is fake, COVID is just a bad cold, vaccines are an evil conspiracy, publicly funded healthcare for Americans will result in "death panels" and so on and so forth... is it not reasonable for American progressives to accept that their political opponents are generally either malevolent or suckers?
At some point it's time to stop assuming good faith.
> What's the Matter with Kansas? is a lovely example of contempt disguised as gentle inquiry, with a touch of worry over another, and it starts even with the title itself
On the contrary. The title is from the 19th century, from an editorial asking why the populists in Kansas were so left wing, something the book goes into detail about in the second chapter.
I haven't read that book but I think you may be misassessing Thomas Frank, who of course is from Kansas and whose main interest is rehabilitating progressive populism. Wasn't the title ironic? Having read/heard other things, I assumed he was really trying to explain what was the matter with the people who ask that.
At some level I will be a permanent victim of movies and media, and as such there are absolutely politicians that I hate, but I've been trying to acknowledge to myself that, generally speaking, most of their voters mean well [1], even if they are voting for politicians that I think are disgusting. As such, I've tried to not "hate" them, even if I don't particularly like a good chunk of them either.
[1] Though I have to say that some of the "build the wall" rhetoric around immigrants has made me question this.
I'm not so sure about meaning well. If you read https://www.slatestarcodexabridged.com/I-Can-Tolerate-Anythi... , it feels like there's a lot of decisions nowadays that's taken because it will hurt/offend the "other team", with post-facto justification why the decision benefits "me/our side".
It seems like people have been losing their pride in their selves that now they're invested in their "football teqm" winning in the arena of politics.
Well, they take the perspective that the "other team" is hurting the country, so hurting them helps the country.
Almost all evil comes from the over-application of morality. "My team is good, and their team is bad, and it is good to hurt bad people."
The problem is that democracy depends on cooperation. If you insist on winning at all costs, the other side adopts your tactics and it becomes a no-holds barred power struggle.
Democracy is in short a system where people can struggle for power without killing or unjustly imprisoning each other.
> Well, they take the perspective that the "other team" is hurting the country, so hurting them helps the country.
It seems like the perspective gets taken to - as I write above - justify, after-the-fact, "why I've decided the same way my herd decided". There is a lot of grasping for easy answers ("Yeah, he must be being controlled by China, that's a good enough answer for me!") and cognitive dissonnace when challenged, that usually ends with people being angry so the challenger stops..
When you view something as extremely morally important, you're willing to cross a lot of moral boundaries and make a lot of rationalizations.
Full moral consistency is almost impossible: you're always balancing self-interests with other higher ideals, etc., and there's always some dissonance. This is just a more problematic example of people striking that kind of moral balance.
On that note, I recently found out about a term “Tittytainement”, coined by Zbigniew Berzinski, a national US security advisor in the 90s.
Message was that due to globalization, a 20/80 split in the job market was inevitable. So there needs to he work done on placating and nursing unrest by distracting people with movies, sports etc..
This was during the 1995 World State Forum. I tried to look up any more material whether that any concrete actions were taken place but couldn’t.
> Message was that due to globalization, a 20/80 split in the job market was inevitable. So there needs to he work done on placating and nursing unrest by distracting people with movies, sports etc..
This reminds me of the "entertainers" in the Civilization series, where you can convert some workers into professional entertainers who help alleviate discontent that would otherwise throw a city into civil disorder.
Interesting how "the market" has seemingly spontaneously created things like YouTubers, TikTokers, Instagram influencers, etc. Wherever there is money to be made, someone's there. Political news is hot in the attention economy? Macedonians make fake news sites with Google ads: https://money.cnn.com/interactive/media/the-macedonia-story/
That's a similar premise to the Roman notion of bread and circuses. Given the when for this that you provided, there was apparently a book in 1996 that describes the 20/80 society. The term "tittytainment" was, per wiktionary, coined by Brzezinski, but he was not in any kind of public office in the 1990s, he held the National Security Advisor position in the 70s.
It might help to see it as class based. I know I started to feel better about myself when I realized that, being well educated and in tech, I was part of the upper class in the US and it's not good to look down on those who are not.
>but I've been trying to acknowledge to myself that, generally speaking, most of their voters mean well [1], even if they are voting for politicians that I think are disgusting.
Some remedies:
(1) Actually talk to those voters and get to know them at a human level, don't just group them as an undefined mass of "people who vote badly".
(2) Try a mental game where you imagine your side has the wrong arguments or is talking from privilege, etc., and study what the other side is saying (even the naive people there, but even more so the smarter and less naive people there), trying to see how they are right. Find arguments why your (current) position is wrong.
(3) Then try for a month, to see all those sides (voters for R or D for example), as an outsider, who doesn't agree with either side. Check what people not belonging to either side have to say - e.g. political outsiders, academics doing a critique of both parties, pundits, commenters, and philosophers from a previous century not giving a damn for today's politics.
(4) Finally, see the ideas of today as from 2121, the same way we see the ideas of 1921 today. Then as from 3021 B.C. Don't assume a monotonic increase in agreement of the future with your current ideas, or the prevalent ideas of today, but that history goes back and forth in ideological fashions (including what's "good").
>[1] Though I have to say that some of the "build the wall" rhetoric around immigrants has made me question this.
Here are some examples of (2) in this case:
(1) Note that the idea of borders and citizenship is already the idea of a wall. And nobody, not even the "good guys" you voted for, ever challenged those.
(2) Note that the wall is defensive (we don't want no any more to come) and not actively harmful, then see how the good guy politicians that are feigning the idea unacceptable and inhuman, often advocate for foreign wars and interventions that actively harm millions.
(3) Note that those in favor of "building the wall" might have issues in their communities or work that e.g. a FAANG engineer might never experience as problems because they have different job prospects. Consider if your private interests were directly harmed by immigration (e.g. you are living in close quarters with poverty striken immigrants, taking to petty crime and so on, or because your low skill job industry prefers immigrants to lower costs and you're either out of a job or have your wages slashed).
And inversely, if you're say a Republican:
(1) Note that your family doesn't have very deep roots here. Just 400-200 years ago they passed some other people's non-wall (and killed a lot of them) to grap the land. If, say, you're a Kowalski or a Smith, you're not fooling anyone that you're the rightful owner of this land. B...tc please, your ancestors didn't come traversing the Bering Strait, you're not Clovis. If you're, like, second generation, your parents were bona-fide wall climbers. Perhaps they did it legaly through Ellis Island for example, but do you think they'd stopped if they were denied there, but had some other way in?
(2) Note that the Wall is established on land (TX, NM, FL, AZ, CA) stolen from the very country its people tries to keep out. It's even in the names of the states, all Spanish. Who are you fooling?
(3) Note that if you're out of a job, it might have more to do with clean shaven, suit wearing anglosaxon bosses preffering cheap immigrant labor, and less about the immigrants themselves. Plus, if those immigrants were legitimised, and given an easy way to citizenship, would they still be a cheaper option to undercut your wage?
I think what you're saying it totally reasonable, I don't think I disagree with any of it, except one small point in your edit about my note.
The thing I was referring to (and this is my bad for not being more clear) in regards to the "build the wall" rhetoric wasn't actually specifically about the wall exactly, but more of the surrounding anti-immigrant sentiment that followed. My wife (a Mexican immigrant) had to deal with an increased level of horrible stuff being said to her after the "build the wall" stuff started, and it did seem to correlate as a dogwhistle. That's why I said it gave me a bit of pause about the intentions of some voters: it really seemed to bring out the worst of people, and it did seem like there were a lot more "worst of people" than I thought. It didn't seem like a lot of them really cared about "a wall", they just didn't like people who didn't look like them.
> (2) Note that the Wall is established on land (TX, NM, FL, AZ, CA) stolen from the very country its people tries to keep out. It's even in the names of the states, all Spanish. Who are you fooling?
Well without the Gadsden purchase, Yuma and Tucson would still be in Mexico.
I appreciate when institutions (such as universities) ceremonially acknowledge the indigenous people whose land they occupy and never intend to return or pay rent on (often while running their own housing and office rental businesses on top of it.)
I have conservative members of my family, who I admittedly don’t talk to very often anymore, but when I do I do get a vibe that they believe what they’re saying. They genuinely think that Donald Trump really Made America Great Again, and that Joe Biden exist to destroy America.
I don’t agree with either of those statements, and I think their actions as a result of these beliefs are bad, but I do think they want things to be best for America, though I think they have a different definition of “best”
Obviously this is anecdata, but you asked why I believed this.
I whole-heartedly agree with you. People love to demonize who they disagree with, assuming that disagreement is just a proxy for the fact the others are idiots. In reality, it is merely that they hold different values, their source of true facts they believe in are different and prioritize different things.
Making decisions with global, or even national, ramifications is a complex thing, but people seem to take shortcuts when they decide if something is good or bad. In your example, people may think "Trump MAGAed" because "He's fighting China, China's been stealing our jobs, and we liked jobs.", although the way Donald did the tariff wars, it disadvantaged American companies and consumers, making the American economy/jobs situation that little bit worse. (At least Covid happened and it eclipsed the whole problem).
In life there are many things we want but don't know we want, or can't admit we want. We seek analogs and those analogs often scratch our itch but might not for other people, leading among other things to arguments about contradictory anecdotes.
We want to avoid people who are bad for us. If you treat them as dangerous, scary, or 'below you' it's fairly emotionally cheap for you to avoid everything about them, not just the badness. But ignoring 'dangerous' problems can just make them more dangerous.
What's notable is where you can see reality come crashing into people who treat policy like it's a simple team sport.
COVID doesn't care about your feelings, and the very real impact of higher infection rates and lower vaccination coverage is demonstrating who exactly has so dug-in on their position so far that they've become utterly disconnected from reality.
That doesn't necessarily break with my reasoning, right? They might still actually think that the vaccines are worse than the disease. Obviously they're wrong, and they should get vaccinated, but they might be fundamentally "good" but also misguided people.
I have my own hypothesis about the COVID vaccine denialism in particular, but I am afraid that it might come off as a bit too political for HN and Dang would lock the thread :).
The challenge is that historically the political mainstream has been endlessly assuming good faith on obvious bad actors, to the point that Trump's obvious racism was controversial to point out because he didn't literally dress up as a Klansman wielding a noose.
As a reaction to this problem you see the basic approach that the social justice wing has basically declared that intent doesn't matter. No more excuses.
And I'm getting to agree with them. If somebody is doing something destructive and the stakes are high, wasting time being nice about their feelings seems thoroughly counterproductive. COVID has made this problem deafeningly loud - whether the bad actors are crazy or grifters or misguided, polite deference to them on grave matters gets people killed.
Sorry for the second reply, but I wanted to elaborate on what I was saying.
I actually think we might agree on a bit more than you might think. I actually am in that social-justice camp that says "intent mostly doesn't matter". I don't have the ability to read minds yet, so I can't possibly really know anyone's intent, so I have to look at the reasonable consequences of their actions and judge from there.
That said, whether or not people are secretly klansmen or good deep down, they still exist, and they're still humans who deserve to have their voices heard at some level. While I don't think we should automatically assume good faith on every person speaking, I also don't think we should immediately discount it either. A lot of voters are just victims of bad publications, and I don't think any of us are fully immune to that. I'm sure there's a million dumb things that I believe; I try and catch them when I spot them, but I would hope that most people would give me the benefit of the doubt in assuming that my beliefs were honest, if dumb.
edit: Added a "don't" because my point was wrong without it.
> That said, whether or not people are secretly klansmen or good deep down, they still exist, and they're still humans who deserve to have their voices heard at some level.
They don't believe this of us, and this is why they win, and we lose.
> If somebody is doing something destructive and the stakes are high, wasting time being nice about their feelings seems thoroughly counterproductive
Playing devil's advocate here let's imagine that someone from a political party that is probably not yours (just guessing!) might use your same logic and apply it.
Abortions. They're killing people. High stakes? Check.
You don't have to agree with these definitions for people on the political right to define things this way. And were they to take their definitions and use your logical template and then react in the way you're suggesting might be OK with your definitions, what you're left with is something that looks an awful lot like the Texas abortion ban right now.
The point I'm trying to make isn't that you're wrong and bad and should feel bad. The point I'm trying to make is that a person needs to think very long and very hard about situations in which polite deference isn't warranted.
Because with the team sports politics we've got going on right now it's super easy for one side to look at the template the other side is using and reappropriate it for their pet issues and then things which are "settled" suddenly get very exciting indeed.
Can you share that hypothesis? You are obviously contributing to this thread in a balanced way and in good faith and I really want to hear it.
I know two anti-vaxxers.
One is not political at all but isn't that smart. Very nice and generous person. Bit prone to conspiracy thinking and bought into fake news on Rumble or something.
The other is very conservative and it's a team/tribe issue with him. He has a strong distrust of institutions that he thinks are run by leftists and would distrust anything they say.
Ok, just to be clear I want to preface this by saying "not all conservatives". I know plenty of conservatives who are lovely and intelligent people.
-------
Basically, I think that rabid anti-vax sentiment is a natural conclusion to roughly ~40 years of near-constant levels of conspiratorial thinking from conservative circles. I think folks like Jerry Fallwell started it, and subsequently Ronald Reagan and most of the conservative politicians after him followed. People like Jerry Fallwell more or less started the "satanic panic", and it started to become somewhat politically acceptable to just say that "the devil" was doing anything that they don't like. This went largely unchallenged in evangelical circles and the evangelicals took a huge turn towards the Republican party.
Fast forward to 2012, and now it's a debate about where Barack Obama was born. A "conspiracy" was just fabricated out of nowhere, and the president is required to show his birth certificate. This was somewhat made fun of, even Bill OReilly disputed it, but it was the first conspiracy that I had heard in my lifetime being taken seriously by at least some politicians.
Fast forward to 2016, and suddenly it seems that idiots like Alex Jones, who had previously been a goofball I would turn on to get a laugh, is being taken seriously by semi-prominent conservatives. PizzaGate was still somewhat of a fringe thing, but it was the first outright debunkable conspiracy that I could think of that people I actually knew who actually believed it.
Fast forward to ~2019, and a sizeable chunk of conservatives (to be clear, NOT a majority) were starting to take the QAnon nonsense seriously, setting the way for 2020, which allowed a basic stream of perpetual lies about COVID to be spread (and accepted) on 8kun. Suddenly, despite overwhelming evidence, we have to have debates on whether we should be taking COVID seriously. Any time Fauchi contradicted Trump, it was because Fauchi was an agent of Satan or something absurd.
I think anti-vaxxing is just the natural progression. There's been an entire generation who has been more-or-less unchallenged in their conspiratorial thinking, and basically anything can be a conspiracy theory. Since they already think that COVID was overblown to make Trump look bad, they subsequently have to think that anything that addresses covid must also be bad.
The left has its share of dumb things that it believes, but it's not nearly at the same level of what is predominant in conservative culture today.
That's really interesting. I would think that growing polarization specifically around education has something to do with the acceleration of conspiracy acceptance on the right that you've described.
Yeah, but even the polarization of education is still somewhat conspiratorial right? My grandmother believes that "public schools are liberal indoctrination camps" and that all education is effectively a plot against conservatives to turn kids into atheists.
While schools definitely do have a lefty-bent, the idea that it's some hyper-organized society designed to destroy the conservative parties in America is absurd to anyone who isn't predisposed to conspiratorial thinking.
There was a miscommunication. I meant that one of the biggest differences between Democrats and Republicans is the level of tertiary education, and this gulf has been widening over the last 20 years. Scott Alexander has written on this demographic shift
There's another part to this same equation: the "institutions" have very little credibility left. Whether it's about the health risks of tobacco, the environmental risks of fossil fuels, the addiction risks of opiates, the security of mortgage lending, or (recently added) the safety risks of flying, we constantly see the same pattern of officials being undermined by paid-for scientific studies that are aimed at undermining or thwarting policy.
Given that adversarial dynamic between business and policy, I can't bring myself to fault even a single person for refusing the vaccine (I can still fault someone for publicly speaking against vaccinating others on invariably shaky arguments though). There is no public institution that I would trust to act towards any common good, that's how much public trust has been eroded in the name of "good business".
I don't think it's quite that. IMO from knowing some anti-vaxx it originates from a rebellion against power more-so than any actual belief in conspiracy. It seems to come from being fed up with being told what to do AND from distrust in authorities (arguably warranted). Conspiracy comes as a post-facto rationalization for some as far as I've seen.
I believe policies like vaccine mandate and the overzealous anti-anti-vax crew are paradoxically aggravating the issue. Making it a partisan issue also seems to force people on the defensive and harden their (potentially unfounded) beliefs, forcing them into the "other camp."
EDIT: My hypothesis on why it comes more from right-wing rather than left-wing people is exactly that right-wing is anti-government power (or more freedom of individuals, usually).
That's the problem with "reality" - the reality you see is driven by the media that reports the reality to you. Presumably the media you read likes to run stories like "lots of cases in Florida" to score points against the "other team", while ignoring deeper analysis like the paper I linked.
I would expect areas of lower vaccination coverage to show higher hospitalization rates, not necessarily higher infection rates. Got any studies on that statistic perchance?
The infection rate is unreliable because it requires people allowing themselves to be tested when sick, and I would expect people that refuse to be vaccinated also refuse to be tested, on the same grounds.
Sure, it's pretty well established that the vaccines reduce severity of symptoms and risk of death. Just not transmission. It's an important distinction to draw, especially in the context of mandates.
Your suggested confounder is plausible, but I find the possible confounders in the other direction even more plausible:
- Many places have policies like "proof of vaccination /or/ positive test required", which would inflate the number of confirmed cases in less vaccinated areas.
- Someone with reduced symptoms due to vaccination is less likely to notice them and thus decide to get a test, or to have symptoms severe enough to be hospitalized and thus definitely get a test.
And then the really scary one:
- If vaccines hide symptoms but don't significantly reduce transmission, a vaccinated person is less likely to stay at home during an infection, increasing community transmission.
How can one break an addiction to contempt? The answer is dead simple.
Follow the Prince of Peace.
> Living the New Life
> Therefore, I say this and testify in the Lord: You should no longer walk as the Gentiles walk, in the futility of their thoughts. They are darkened in their understanding, excluded from the life of God, because of the ignorance that is in them and because of the hardness of their hearts. They became callous and gave themselves over to promiscuity for the practice of every kind of impurity with a desire for more and more.
> But that is not how you learned about the Messiah, assuming you heard about Him and were taught by Him, because the truth is in Jesus. You took off your former way of life, the old self that is corrupted by deceitful desires; you are being renewed in the spirit of your minds; you put on the new self, the one created according to God’s likeness in righteousness and purity of the truth.
> Since you put away lying, Speak the truth, each one to his neighbor, because we are members of one another. Be angry and do not sin. Don’t let the sun go down on your anger, and don’t give the Devil an opportunity. The thief must no longer steal. Instead, he must do honest work with his own hands, so that he has something to share with anyone in need. No foul language is to come from your mouth, but only what is good for building up someone in need, so that it gives grace to those who hear. And don’t grieve God’s Holy Spirit. You were sealed by Him for the day of redemption. All bitterness, anger and wrath, shouting and slander must be removed from you, along with all malice. And be kind and compassionate to one another, forgiving one another, just as God also forgave you in Christ.
- Ephesians 4:17-32 (HCSB)
I realize some of the people who might see this have had bad experiences with so-called Christians. I was a staunch Atheist for the vast, VAST majority of my life, specifically because of how some so-called "believers" had treated me when I was very young. I hated Christians so much I scared a preacher half to death, threatened to beat him up, and got him to run away in tears.
My own contempt, my rage, my unbridled hatred for people was off the charts. Anyone who didn't agree with me 100% on everything was an idiot, and I was not afraid to tell them so.
I'm saying all of this to say, if you resent me writing all of this, I get it. I really do. On a fundamental level, I understand that anger. But if you feel like you want to know the only answer to how to turn away from letting those controlling, destructive emotions from ruling your life; this anger that we all seem to be under the thumb of, then there is a very clear, obvious answer: God
Not just mere acknowledgement, or even a reverence for Him, but a stout willingness to obey His commandments and follow His teachings.
There's only one religion that tells you not just that it's wrong to murder, but that to hate someone in your heart is murder, and worthy of the same punishment. There is only one that holds everyone to that level of accountability.
>…He has come to believe there is only one weapon that can defeat our extreme political polarization: love.
Oh my, what a silly way to pitch a possible reader on your book.
There is a (VERY conservative) town in my state where every single employee of the local department of transportation has quit over the vaccine mandate. Now the former employees and their conservative allies are gleefully posting about how “the libs” won’t be able to use the nearby freeways due to lack of maintenance, and how “the libs” will have trouble driving around town because there will be no snow plow operators come winter.
Here’s the funny part: The conservative:liberal ratio there is about 50:1. This rural town is gleefully destroying its own infrastructure over some perceived culture war, fully knowingly. These people are willing to cripple their ability to leave their houses in order to “own the libs” even if they’re not even existent.
I do not think I could be convinced by some old guy that his newly-invented form of conservative Kumbaya will actually make it possible for these people to go to the pharmacy when it snows, or get fresh food from the grocery store.
Isnt this argument predicated on the supposition that the only reason they are opposed to coercive experimental gene therapy is because they want to "own the libs?"
I mean, maybe that's right but it seems unlikely when there are other much more obvious things to explain the reasons for the actions in question. That they then post hoc express schadenfreude for the party who they perceive to be responsible for the situation is evidence of the addiction to contempt the article refers to, sure. But I find it difficult to imagine they wouldn't prefer not to be coerced into experimental gene therapy even if it means they don't get the opportunity to "own the libs" in response.
I'm not sure if you're saying this is your opinion, but just to be clear: Vaccine mandates are not coercive, the vaccine is not experimental, and vaccines in general are not gene therapy.
To elaborate: You can consider work vaccine mandates to be similar to any other job requirement. The COVID vaccines have received a huge amount of studies and trials. And "gene therapy" usually refers to use of things like CRISPR-Cas9 or other methods of delivering DNA into the cell which are able to modify genes. mRNA vaccines do not modify genes. (I'm not a biologist so you should ask one if you want more information on this)
Yes, that is ultimately the end goal of the mandates, but the selling point of the mandates is that they are a tool to get people who would otherwise remain vaccinated to get vaccinated by introducing additional costs (ie. coercion)
Not sure where you heard that. Maybe that's a secondary goal that some would like to reach if they're trying to convince someone else to get the vaccine, but for a business the primary goal is to prevent unvaccinated people from entering that business so they avoid getting other coworkers and customers sick. Few businesses seem to want to carry the liability of causing a super spreading event. Edit: I believe some health insurance rates for businesses also go up when employees aren't vaccinated, so that can cause more of a problem too. Being in the ICU for two weeks on a ventilator is not cheap.
Please read my follow up responses where I explain it further. Also your comment doesn't really have anything substantial in it that I can respond to, you may want to note these parts of the HN guidelines:
"Be kind. Don't be snarky. Have curious conversation; don't cross-examine. Please don't fulminate. Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community."
"Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith."
Mandates are coercive by definition, that's the entire point of them, putting whatever magical word in front of them you like doesn't change that.
The medication to which the "Vaccine mandates" refer is not the same as traditional inactivated virus vaccines, and before this whole fiasco started, was always referred to as what it actually is which is gene therapy.
It doesn't matter how great or how well tested these things are, or how reasonable it is to take them, and that I will acknowledge goes into the realm of opinion and given how polluted that discussion is with political barracking yeah I'm not interested in having it at all, the simple underlying fact that they are actually coercive experimental gene therapy is exactly that, pure fact, not opinion at all.
I would not say anything you've said is facts, they're just incorrect statements. (Sorry to be blunt.) You're saying it's coercive when they're part of a job requirement? No, I explained this farther down. Please check my other post, thanks. If your presence being there is going to cause the company's insurance rates to rise to the point where they can't afford you anymore, then they're going to dismiss you. That's unfortunately the way it's been at a lot of companies I've seen for a very long time, for many other things besides vaccines as well.
Also that paper seems to suggest that mRNA could generally be used as a component in gene therapy. It does not say that mRNA vaccines are gene therapy. You're getting several things mixed up. Let me know if you want clarification, or if you want some helping finding a biologist or doctor who could answer more of your questions. But mRNA vaccines are probably not "coercive experimental gene therapy" unless you really want to stretch that definition.
Because the definition of coercion doesn't change when you put a bunch of qualifiers in front of it and say it's for the greater good. It's still coercion. Sometimes coercion is necessary, psychopaths will kill random people absent coercion not to do so for example, but it's still coercion that stops them from doing so.
Your objection basically boils down to "I don't like the way 'coercive experimental gene therapy' makes what my team is presently doing sound like". That's not an argument, it's just an attempt to force people not to use accurate language you disapprove of. Maybe coercive experimental gene therapy is exactly what's needed, just like coercive physical restraint is just what's needed when it comes to dealing with violent psychopaths. But in both cases, refusing to call a spade a spade doesn't change it from being a spade.
When you respond with stuff like "I wouldn't say any of that is a fact, merely incorrect statements" then you're begging your opposition to simply make the exact same statement back to you.
We are not in opposition, please stop. I really don't want to get into a heated argument with you, you and I both know that's not the way to convince anyone. Also I am not on any "team" and I don't represent anyone, these are my own statements. I'd appreciate it if you didn't make these assumptions about me, thanks.
I am sympathetic to people who can't get vaccines for medical reasons but there are companies that simply are not equipped to employ those people safely. There's nothing coercive about that, everything else you're saying about that is not related to what I'm saying. For a lot of these companies it's a matter of either they require the vaccine, or they go back to having long lines, reduced hours, occupancy limits, strict mask requirements, and other things that are inconvenient and cost money and hurt the business. This stuff is unfortunate because it also applies to immunocompromised people with whom the vaccine is not effective, I don't really know a solution that could work for them on a large scale.
Yes we are, you are continuously making the argument that if you can give good reasons for coercion, it is no longer accurate to refer to it as coercion. This is false.
Examples;
> For a lot of these companies it's a matter of either they require the vaccine, or they go back to having long lines, reduced hours, occupancy limits, strict mask requirements, and other things that are inconvenient and cost money and hurt the business.
> there are companies that simply are not equipped to employ those people safely.
And many other times.
Further, you're refusing to acknowledge that the vaccines under the vaccine mandates are experimental gene therapy, with the justification;
> Also that paper seems to suggest that mRNA could generally be used as a component in gene therapy. It does not say that mRNA vaccines are gene therapy.
The paper is from 2015, the "mRNA vaccines" were not a thing at the time and thus this paper discussing what mRNA gene therapy is would of course not refer to things not released for six years to come/ "mRNA vaccines" is just a new label on the underlying technology discussed in the paper, which they clearly point out is actually gene therapy.
Actually I have explained multiple times why it's not coercion and why your description is incorrect. Some companies simply are unable to safely employ people who are unvaccinated. If you feel you are opposed to me then I would ask that you stop that, it's going to prevent us from having a reasonable discussion. I will tell you right now, I am not in opposition to you, I just see you may have some misconceptions and I'd like to help clear that up, if you are willing to let me do so. If not then please mention that and we can end the conversation.
Otherwise I'll try to use an analogy. Would you call it coercion if a construction company had all its welding equipment malfunction, break, and become unsafe, and as a result had to let all its welders go? Or would you call it coercion if a trucking company refused to hire people that didn't have trucking licenses, on the basis that it wouldn't be safe for them to drive a truck that they weren't trained for? Or if you're a nurse and you get let go for not being vaccinated, in a hospital where the entire job description is that you can't infect the patients with more diseases?
On your comment about gene therapy, AFAIK mRNA vaccines are not a new label on the underlying technology there. They are a different technology from the purpose described in that paper. Please see my other comment for what is generally referred to as gene therapy. Again we can contact a biologist or doctor for more information about this if you'd like to do that.
"The FDA definition of gene therapy is as follows: '... modification of the genetic material of living cells. Cells may be modified ex vivo for subsequent administration to humans, or may be altered in vivo by gene therapy given directly to the subject. When the genetic manipulation is performed ex vivo on cells which are then administered to the patient, this is also a form of somatic cell therapy ... Recombinant DNA materials used to transfer genetic material for such therapy are considered components of gene therapy.' As RNA does not result in 'modification of the genetic material of living cells', one would anticipate that its administration will not be classified as a gene therapy in the United States."
Sorry but all you have done is repeat false claims and insisted with progressively more intensity that they're true. In light of that, I'm not interested in continuing this unproductive discussion.
Actually, there are no false claims. I have sourced my claims using sources that you previously quoted to me as being true, and I also asked you to clarify your claims with several questions that you didn't answer. I can provide more sources if you'd like that, or I can provide some more analogies if that helps explain it more. Just let me know if you change your mind, but I agree we will not have a productive discussion if either one of us is not agreeing to answer questions or be open to considering new sources and changing our minds. I personally would be open to all of that, so feel free to ask me any questions or share new sources if that will help you make it productive. But it may be more productive to just stop being hung up on that definition, you can check the paper you sourced for more details.
Definitions matter and if you change them arbitrarily in order to declare victory where none would exist if your incorrect definitions were not accepted, it is pointless to engage with you.
I didn't change anything. I clarified my definition several times, then I asked you for a clarification of your definition and you didn't give any. Coercion usually means when someone is pressured to do something via threats, and in all the examples I gave (including when it's related to vaccines) there are no threats or pressure to do anything. We can discuss this but you're not giving me anything to work with.
For gene therapy I think typically the goal of that is the opposite of vaccines. Similar vectors can be used (in this case mRNA encased in lipids) but everything else is different. With vaccines you're intentionally trying to provoke an immune response, but one that's weak enough so it doesn't harm the patient. In gene therapy, you usually want to avoid generating an immune response at all, so the body doesn't start attacking the modified cells.
IMHO making something part of job requirements is coercing, definitely. You may argue that the coercion is justified (just as many other mandates in job requirements coercing employees to do something they might not want to do) but it clearly is coercion, and it seems quite ridiculous to deny that the mandate was made with the intent to coerce people to vaccinate.
I didn’t mention anything about gene therapy or whatever other bananas theory that can be inserted into literally any conversation nowadays.
What I did bring up is the fact that people are willing to deny themselves, their families and neighbors the ability to leave their own homes to get food and medicine in order to “own the libs.”
While this sort of Markov-chain sounding word salad about… whatever, must indicate that people are passionate about… whatever, the fact of the matter is that sabotaging your own infrastructure out of ideology sounds kind of suicidal.
I honestly don’t get how I could personally rally behind people that would celebrate my righteous death from being stranded in the snow because I’d died owning the libs because uh… my ideology will have prevented theoretical vaccine deaths in the future? My actual, concrete, current life is literally worth less than… what? Some bogeyman that I read about on Facebook?
If I were genuinely that concerned about all these conspiracies and thought that my thoughtless death would make a difference, I’d self-immolate like the monks during Vietnam. Somehow curiously, these folks rather than doing that are taking the mighty stand of keeping kids from going to school, their neighbors going to work or their doctors, local business owners from opening etc.
Ironically, not plowing the streets creates the exact same (if not considerably worse) lockdown situation that these people have been mad about for 18 months. Ironically, it’s not the reduction of peoples freedoms that matter to these conservatives, it’s who gets to be the ones taking the freedoms away.
People will literally kill themselves and everyone around them in order to feel Right About Stuff.
“Love” isn’t an answer here. It’s a completely meaningless word put in a context to sound nice on a podcast to sell books to people who will never change their minds about any of this.
All you're doing here is re-stating your original argument, seemingly without actually understanding my criticism of it. I'm not sure what you're hoping to accomplish by that, but it strikes me as very strange.
Look, let's say we observe an employee and employer undertaking a discussion that goes something like this.
"Take this medicine"
"No I don't want to"
"Take it or else you're fired"
"I'm not going to take it, fire me if you have to."
"OK, you're fired"
"That's going to turn out poorly for the people who must now suffer the consequences of not having people available to do my job"
I don't understand how you jump to the conclusion that the reason the employee refuses to take the medicine is so they can have that last line of dialogue, rather than that they don't want to take the medicine.
>All you’re doing here is restating your argument without actually understanding my criticism of it.
My criticism of your argument is that it’s silly to decide that nobody in town can leave their houses during the winter because you don’t want to get a shot. Furthermore, it’s downright ghastly to gloat about the upcoming, totally avoidable, suffering that they’ll be imparting on people that _AGREE WITH THEM_ in order make their point and own the libs.
Pro tip: We might actually be having a two way conversation if your next response included words like “snow” or “plow” or “stranded in your house by no fault of your own.” But please go on with your regurgitated Facebook nonsense about experiments or whatever.
The only thing that’s important is that you’re right!
> My criticism of your argument is that it’s silly to decide that nobody in town can leave their houses during the winter because you don’t want to get a shot.
Once again, that's not what they're doing. "I'm not going to take the medicine so everybody has to stay inside" you will note was not part of the dialogue.
> Furthermore, it’s downright ghastly to gloat about the upcoming, totally avoidable, suffering that they’ll be imparting on people that _AGREE WITH THEM_ in order make their point and own the libs.
People have a history of hostility to those they perceive, whether rightly or wrongly, as unnecessarily depriving them of their livelihood.
> We might actually be having a two way conversation if your next response included words like “snow” or “plow” or “stranded in your house by no fault of your own.” But please go on with your regurgitated Facebook nonsense about experiments or whatever.
Sure, It doesn't matter what tasks the people under discussion are saddled with, up to and including dealing with snow, plowing, etc, and it doesn't matter what consequences the absence of their actions will result in, up to and including leaving people stranded in their house by no fault of their own. The logic still applies.
Not wanting to take medication is not the same as actively wanting to inflict misery on other parties, and equating the two as you are continuously trying to do is false.
Displaying hostility to parties responsible for hostile actions is about as newsworthy as "sun rises in morning". In fact the hostility you're displaying to them here is just as unsurprising and not the problem at all.
The issue is purely one of logic; you're equating motivation to refuse a medicine with wanting to provoke misery for an opposing party. Clearly no such motivation exists. If it did exist, they would not have needed to say "I don't want to take this medicine, fire me if you have to." they could just jump straight to the end and go on strike to "own the libs" and no other reason.
> Not wanting to take medication is not the same as actively wanting to inflict misery on other parties
Did you see the part where I was talking about gloating about the harm they’re planning on causing? It includes (as the majority of folks) people that share their political views. I get that it didn’t jive with your narrative but it’s a reality that I’m describing, so sorry about that.
Good job using the word “snow” in the middle of hand waving away actual material suffering while trying to accomplish… whatever.
Are you personally willing to be unable to leave your house because it’s important to you that the municipal workers won’t be vaccinated?
Refusing to take medicine is not the same thing as "planning on causing harm" no matter how many times you attempt to falsely equate the two things.
> I get that it didn’t jive with your narrative
Narrative has nothing to do with it, you can still believe what they're doing by refusing to take the medicine is the wrong choice and simultaneously acknowledge that their incorrect choice is not the same thing as the consequence levied upon them by a third party when they refuse to take the medicine.
> but it’s a reality that I’m describing, so sorry about that.
If you really think that's the case, then the inability to separate cause and effect is an enormous blind spot you should work on.
> Good job using the word “snow” in the middle of hand waving away actual material suffering while trying to accomplish
You were the one that insisted the word would change the underlying logical structure of the question, unsurprisingly it did not. That was my entire point all along.
> Are you personally willing to be unable to leave your house because it’s important to you that the municipal workers won’t be vaccinated?
That has absolutely nothing to do with the logical structure of coerced action resulting in a refusal and dismissal and the second order effects of that chain of events. But for the record, I am willing to suffer whatever consequences are necessary in order that the aggressive violation of individual bodily integrity and autonomy of peaceful people is unacceptable, up to and including the immediate destruction of the entire universe.
A universe where peaceful people minding their own business are not free to make their own choices is not worthy of existence. Cross that line and you've gone most of the way down the road of justifying the worst excesses of authoritarian abuse throughout history. There's a very good reason it's in the Nuremberg codes, it wasn't an accident to be revoked next time there's some "catastrophic emergency" going on. There are certain lines you do not cross and that is one of them.
> But for the record, I am willing to suffer whatever consequences are necessary in order that the aggressive violation of individual bodily integrity and autonomy of peaceful people is unacceptable, up to and including the immediate destruction of the entire universe.
This is the most psychotic take I’ve read on this topic. Not only are you willing to get stuck in your home so some stranger doesn’t have to get a vaccine, you’re willing to inflict that same suffering on an infinite number of people in order to get your way.
Considering “destruction of the universe” would include a lot of innocent deaths, your weird moralizing sounds even more like schizophrenic word salad. You literally advocate for murdering both those that agree with you and those that don’t, as well as yourself, because things aren’t the way you want them to be.
Let me guess, you’re in your mid teens and recently read The Fountainhead?
> This is the most psychotic take I’ve read on this topic.
The opposing position is ironically that of those who inflicted hundreds of millions of deaths, the largest cause of non natural death in fact, on the entire species in the previous century, so you'll excuse me if I take your view with several solar masses of sodium chloride.
> you’re willing to inflict that same suffering on an infinite number of people in order to get your way.
Exactly the opposite, I'm not willing to inflict any aggression on any number of peaceful people minding their own business, period.
> Considering “destruction of the universe” would include a lot of innocent deaths
Better dead than enslaved.
> You literally advocate for murdering both those that agree with you and those that don’t, as well as yourself, because things aren’t the way you want them to be.
I advocate for nothing, I merely do not accept that slavery is a valid institution, and it doesn't matter what you put in the alternative column against it. The alternative of violating the autonomy and integrity of peaceful people doing me no harm is once again, the worst possible outcome.
> Let me guess, you’re in your mid teens and recently read The Fountainhead?
Over 40, read it a long, long time ago, has nothing to do with my position on live free or die. Slavery is outright unacceptable. If you do not have the right to choose which drugs you must take, you are a slave. It cannot get more simple than that. That has nothing at all to do with the sensibility of taking the drugs in question, it has nothing to do with whether the drugs in question are good or bad. It could be the most obvious choice in the world, and the drugs in question could be a panacea that brings about a world utopia, and the logic of enslaving people would still be utterly unacceptable.
The ends do not justify the means. Multiple world changing extremely violent wars were fought over just these issues. Your side always lost.
This was not a controversial position for the past half century plus, the fact that it is now should make you very cautious. Although with bloody-handed "for the greater good" communism by another name in such vogue these days, I expect that it won't at all.
I'm sorry, I find this conversation extremely depressing and I'm going to leave it at that, you have a nice life.
EDIT; for the record, the disgusting strawmen in response to this message do not warrant their own response regardless of how idiotic they are. And I will not be providing one.
are incompatible statements. Either you are stating that you would prefer that people (other than yourself) die rather than being “enslaved” (having an employer exercise at-will employment) or you’re not.
The irony of literally calling for the deaths of people that don’t adhere to your specific set of beliefs while decrying “slavery” is genuinely hilarious.
What other bits of “slavery” do you think justify murdering people over? Seat belt laws? Age of consent laws? Prohibition of trading human organs?
Edit: I literally laughed out loud when I read the implication that I’m a communist because uh, I don’t think it’s a moral good to indiscriminately harm people as some sort of temper tantrum over a vaccine.
I genuinely hope that every person that chose to become unemployed because of their Facebook-informed selective definition of inflammatory words like “slavery” remain unemployed indefinitely. This will create more positions for vaccinated people.
Ironically, the “live free or die” folks really seem to think that the state owes them jobs and money, and the average citizen is obligated to suffer under their arbitrary rules that they make up on the fly. While you feel righteous, that feeling doesn’t actually mean that anybody has to listen to you or your ridiculous opinions, let alone act on them.
I understand that only Big Brain Geniuses ever arrive at fascinating unique positions like “everything I don’t like is slavery”, but even that caliber of dazzling wit doesn’t actually mean logical people will naturally agree with your Completely Objective Philosophy.
Real slavery is when I can’t force somebody to give me a job!
While it might be a silly way to pitch your book, I think your anecdote captures what he is saying pretty well. Rampant contempt is bad for everyone. It doesn't help you or the people for which you hold contempt.
If I am to believe that "every single employee of the local department of transportation" are somehow right in a (counterfactual?) different timeline, what are they really supposed to do? Take the vaccine for a greater cause and their worst dreams turn true?
It's not the employees that are destroying the aforementioned rural town, it's the DOT doing blatantly undemocratic things that their employees won't approve.
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[ 6.8 ms ] story [ 272 ms ] thread... in other words, we're all doomed.
The contempt issue begins at the roots of identity, I think. When we're adolescents, we're a part of the world or society, but without the responsibility or authority of an adult. This makes us subject to it and a bit helpless (but for the benevolence of adults) until we find a way to become adults ourselves. Until then, we often assert ourselves though revolt and rebellion as victims of the forces we are subject to. Our adolescent mind exists as an island protected by its own defensive resentment and contempt against the forces it is only subject to, until it acquires the responsibility and resultant confidence to act directly on the world. We all emerge from it differently, if at all.
I'm saying the contempt is an adolscent urge that originates from believing we are a subject or victim of our circumstances. There are many situations where you really are a target, but I'd say there is no contempt without identifying first as a victim, and that necessary identity is a remnant of adolescence. The way to mitigate those adolescent remnants is by taking responsibility and ownership of your life, which coincidentally, happens to be a value at the core of conservative ethos Brooks advocates.
Treating people as undeveloped adolescents because they use disgust and contempt as an organizing social signal could seem to merely respond to contempt with sincere, even heartfelt condescention (the most insulting kind), and that would be all the more alienating and enraging, but it's toward discovering what the fundamental divide in the very axioms that inform our values is. When Brooks says we need "love," I think what he means is we need to feel loved, and by this, that there is some force in the world (or universe) that is invested in our growth and happiness, and believing we can both recieve and achieve it.
"Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith."
"Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something."
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
He does mention that there are systemic issues with the status quo, so I'm sure if you asked him if he was happy with how things are running I'm sure he'd have quite a list of things that he thinks could make the world better for everyone -- even if you might disagree with some of his solutions.
In the interview he says that democracy is the political version of capitalism/a market economy and I think that's key to interpreting him charitably. In his worldview many of the good things about democracy are the good things about capitalism, but they also share many of the same flaws. In systems that emphasises individual agency and are incentive based, his view is that contempt locks us into a vicious cycle that de-incentivizes leaders from actually providing a realistic way forward. I tend to agree, and I can hardly fault someone for trying to argue for the best version of their vision for society.
Frankly self proclaimed leftists have a terrible habit of consent manufacturing - both from their own natural bubbles and echo chambers and ad nausuem rhetoric. There is tbe "implicit identity and support" which assumes that universal support of the working class is the natural status quo and any who disagree are puppets of the rich. This abstraction spares them from having to consider the actual opinions of the people who compose it. Their poor electoral performance in even their strongholds highlights that they are a noisy minority operating under the pretense of being a majority.
Instead in Europe the democrats would just be a typical right wing party. Meaning they are pro immigration to stimulate economic growth, pro healthcare for all etc.
There is no such thing as a decoupled “fiscal” conservatism. Politics in practice are inseparable from their historical context and Democratic politicians know that. Their virtue appeals in the media are not supported by their politics but rather serve to distract from their politics. Their politics, in fact, are a conservative politics.
Maybe even more importanly, the way Democrat representatives seem to be able to enrich themselves from lobbying money etc, would be totally unacceptable most places in Europe. It would place them more in the class of Plutocrats than conservatives. Democrats tend to have far closer ties to Big Capital than even the most business-friendly conservatives where I live.
It seems to me that their focus on identity politics is a cover for doing very little to actually help the unprivileged, but instead doing the biddings of their donors.
Its mostly a center-right / center-left coalition with the center-right currently slightly stronger (until very recently much stronger). While it leans right, it isn't coherently conservative, even by international standards.
I mean, I would hardly argue that the Democrats are "against" a level playing field, but it wouldn't be a stretch to say that they are opposed to such a premise. The fact is though, just because we both strongly dislike progressive ideology does not mean that we need to harp on their shortcomings at every opportunity.
In my mind, it is the constant put downs and negativity that breeds contempt. The thing of itself need not be the act, but merely foster such a stance.
The infamous "New World Order" conspiracy theorist archetype tends to be negative and full of put downs to their target de jure as the cause of all the world's evils. Even when it is horrifying it draws more of a watching a trainwreck style reaction.
Negativity and putdowns I would classify more as a breeder of disengagement. This is reflected by the impact of negative campaign ads being more reduced total votes than drawing more votes by looking good in comparison.
He is not just random conservative with unknown politics within spectrum of conservative voices. He is active player in politics and economy.
They need to compromise, they need to calm down, they need to love. And as long as they don't, we don't have to.
Not to mention those that equate compromise, civility, and love with getting their way without any sort of criticism. Then there's the issues where compromise isn't an option. If you want to kill everyone on the planet, and I don't want you to kill anyone. Killing half the planet isn't really a compromise I'm willing to entertain.
So sweet, I'm sure if we all loved each other and treated each other with respect, we'd all ride rainbows and shit ponies or whatever. But when we can't even agree on what love and respect even means, it's just kind of abstract, philosophical masturbation.
Politicians are disagreeing and failing to use nonsensical phrases like "my good friend from <insert location here>?" Anybody want to recite Alexander Hamilton's memoirs of his genial political disputes with Aaron Burr?
Sweeping generalizations such as "people like him" are bad, seems both contemptuous & a shallow examination.
If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
Once you begin looking for it, you can see it more and more. On a rather left-leaning forum, an article appeared discussing authoritarianism and how pervasive it is in society. One commenter, without a hint of irony or self-awareness, wondered if there were some way to hook into this tendency to get people to get behind gun control or get vaccinated.
I will at least take naked, open contempt over that sort of thing.
Or like, the notion of real Americams and those who live on cost as not counting as real.
Judging an un-nuanced, possibly straw-man version of another's views. Without any effort to check that they truly understand what the other person believes, let alone what reasons that person has for holding those views.
I've seen this from both conservatives and liberals, and especially from those with mass-media audiences.
Let's say Alice holds some internalized ideal of traditional family values, and Bob holds some internalized ideal of tolerance and inclusion of LGBT people. When Alice looks at Bob's views, all she sees is that it's an affront to an ideal that she cares about, and when Bob looks at Alice's views, all he sees is that it's an affront to an ideal that he cares about.
But how can Alice possibly understand Bob's point of view, unless she's able to tentatively drop her concern for traditional family values? I expect that even with effort to understand the other's perspective, unless that other perspective is internalized, Alice's thoughts on Bob's views will be centered around what she cares about: "I guess I understand what motivates Bob to hate family values", "I guess I understand what motivates Alice's bigoted views on LGBT issues", etc.
You should know that this is what began to pry me away from being your basic leftist template. I said, "Wow, I better make sure I am not voting against my own interests. Wouldn't I feel like a fool if I supported people who had contempt for me."
After that, I would hear "Ugh, men are awful" in a curious new light. Or someone would say "White people ruin everything" and I would realize, hey, I'm white. This sort of thing began to add up and it became clear that "going left" meant supporting people who had contempt for me, purely on the basis of things like skin color and sex. Wow, I really have been going against my own interests, all this time. I am no better than those "fools" in Kansas.
I can't help but see this as every bit as ridiculous as the anti-vaxxers who dig their heels in even as the people around them are dying, because they don't want to give in to The Left on vaccines.
Do you think the left is particularly supportive of men? ("In fact, more women as a whole now graduate from college than men ... This is a great accomplishment—not just for one sport or one college or even just for women but for America. And this is what Title IX is all about." President Barack Obama.) If they are not, then that is the error of What's the Matter with Kansas?, the error of supporting those who do not have your best interests at heart.
If feelings don't matter to you, then why are you engaging with a discussion about contempt?
See, I would stand up for social justice and protecting women and people of color. But women and people of color don't trust white men so instead, I'm going to not stand for these things instead.
Great logic there. I could tell that you used to be a real leftist template.
How about instead, you stand for women and people of color because it's the right thing to do? Regardless of how little they trust white men. Maybe, just maybe, try and understand why they wouldn't trust white men?
How about instead, you stand for women and people of color because it's the right thing to do? Regardless of how little they trust white men. Maybe, just maybe, try and understand why they wouldn't trust white men?
The horror!
If you're in favor of good causes, or you have better arguments, it's enough to represent those with good information.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
I just double checked, he definitely did NOT say that. At all.
> How about instead, you stand for women and people of color because it's the right thing to do? Regardless of how little they trust white men. Maybe, just maybe, try and understand why they wouldn't trust white men?
My goodness.. this comment is so full of itself I can't even. Yes, us right wingers believe it's good to be uncompassionate.
> they write endless tracts trying to prove their point, appealing to science and founding principles and so forth
And yet, most left wingers are so disconnected from the reality of people on the ground it's frightening. For example, Portland decided to encourage blacks to get vaccinated by putting ads of black drag queens up. I can't think of anything stupider than the disconnect of left wing pundits from material reality.
> The left doesn't care if Trump insults them. It only has any bearing if it leads to policy changes they hate
The left screamed for years about Trump's manner of speech (not his content, simple the manner). For example, Trump's big talk on immigration through the southern border was met with outright hostility, despite the current administration now keeping the EXACT same plan (the remain in mexico policy). Or, for example, when Trump insulted Antifa, we had to hear on end how Antifa was just an idea, and how being against Antifa means you're a fascist or something.
This is called nutpicking. You claim this example is representative (and you claim you have adequately represented who did what for what purpose). I claim it is confirmation bias. We could settle this with statistics.
> The left screamed for years about Trump's manner of speech (not his content, simple the manner). For example, Trump's big talk on immigration through the southern border was met with outright hostility, despite the current administration now keeping the EXACT same plan (the remain in mexico policy). Or, for example, when Trump insulted Antifa, we had to hear on end how Antifa was just an idea, and how being against Antifa means you're a fascist or something.
Setting aside your characterization, which again I believe is self-serving and inaccurate, the point is the left weren't upset at being insulted, they were upset that Trump was using lies to justify harmful policy and to promote vigilante violence against various groups the right hates, including, strangely, anti-fascists. You haven't actually addressed this point.
Perhaps I wasn't clear, so, to restate my thesis: the right cares a lot more about contempt than the left. It bothers everyone to be insulted, but it bothers the right a lot more, to the point that revenge is more important to many of them than any policy goal. The right assumes the left thinks like them and acts accordingly. The left assumes the right thinks like them and acts accordingly. Each side misinterprets the other. Though, again, I don't think this is symmetrical either. I think the right misunderstands the left more than the reverse. So, for instance, the right assumes that the positions people on the left take are insincere "virtue signaling" because they can't believe someone would sincerely hold these positions. The left knows that arguing policy with statistics, studies, and appeals to claimed national values isn't going to work with most of the right, but they don't really have a better strategy.
This is one of the more beautifully succinct ways I know of to describe this. The moral hole of the right wing (and, well, I'm sure 'iammisc will again rend their shirt, but I've read their comment history and I've spent plenty of time in that swamp more generally, I'm confident in my assessment on both scales) is such that it assumes their opposite numbers must share it because there is no way their epistemic closure can countenance any alternative. And as you say, the left absolutely understands that pointing out reality won't matter--but lacks the capacity to communicate because to do so abrogates our core values. (There is an obvious path to, say, socialism in America, if it's only for white people. We know, because our right wing like socialism-for-white-people. They will fight their representatives to defend it. It's when other people get hold of it that there are objections. And that's a bridge we certainly won't cross for them.)
The divide is inescapable. For a while we could hope that kids wouldn't share their parents' behavior, but--well. Gamergate happened, the MRA movement happened, and they funneled their dupes straight into the machine.
It is sad.
Only extremists describe those they disagree with as immoral people. I would never think that of my liberal friends or family. Misguided? Yes. Misinformed? Sometimes. Evil? Not any more than anyone else. It's the last point most leftists fail to understand in their zealotry.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Then why are so many blue staters vacationing in florida and texas right now? Honestly, all my friends from california, many liberals, have all decided to move to Florida and tennessee. I'm so sick of this narrative. The COVID policy in red states has not led to drastically different outcomes, despite all insistence to the contrary
The goal is curious conversation. That means optimizing for interestingness—not for being right, and definitely not for smiting enemies.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Edit: you've done this repeatedly recently, and we've had to ask you multiple times before. Would you please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and take the intended spirit more to heart? We'd be grateful.
Remember when Biden claimed that COVID-19 was invented by the Republicans to make his presidency look bad?
Remember when Obama refused to acknowledge that Trump won the presidency and when CNN aired nonstop coverage from conspiracy theorists claiming that the entire election was fraudulent?
Remember when Obama claimed months in advance that any election in which a Democrat lost was necessarily fraudulent, and then incited a mob to take over the US Capitol building during the electoral vote count? And then when Obama refused to authorize the national guard to prevent US senators and house representatives from being taken hostage?
You're damn right -- they're both totally the same.
Even if you think the investigation into Trump's ties to Russian influence was unjustified, it relied on democratically-elected representatives to impeach him, and it never undermined the rule of law itself.
I'm sure you can find examples with lesser consequences, but given the stakes, are those really relevant here?
It's easy to dismiss all such disagreements as being boiled down to partisanship, which is why it's more useful to look past the actions and focus on the outcome.
Violent rhetoric from politicians and their supporting news outlets has real consequences, and in this case the actions of one side are resulting in the potential for mass vigilante violence:
From Ethnic antagonism erodes Republicans’ commitment to democracy[1]
About half of all surveyed Republicans agreed with these points:
1. https://www.pnas.org/content/117/37/22752So the counter to your claim that the right is undermining democracy is that the left is undermining civil liberties.
I think most people agree that Afghanistan And Iraq was a terrible idea. At least all the young conservatives do.
And I honestly think we shouldn't read too much into foreign policy. Both parties are happy to support all kinds of regimes that follow all kinds of anti democratic or anti individual rights ideologies, so long as it's in their perceived best interest of America.
That's a good point, but consider the following:
Civil liberties don't exist in a vacuum -- their definitions arise out of conflict among members of society. I.e., the individual, alone in nature, has no need for them. One of the functions of a government is to protect those liberties, especially among those in the minority.
Without trusted elections and therefore a sound democracy, elected officials have no legitimacy. Without a legitimate claim to power, they become tyrants, and the state loses its moral authority to uphold one person's civil liberties against another's. There is no longer any social consensus backing those decisions.
Protests summer 2020? There was a huge surge covid a month after those protests everywhere in USA, even though it was summer and covid should have been low as everywhere else in the world during summers. All of the left wing politicians and news outlets scrambled to try to discredit this or hide it or find any flaws in that connection, but the connection is crystal clear. Those protests lead to hundreds of thousands of deaths.
This sounds like an opinion disguised as fact. If that wasn’t your intention then you’ll need to show peer-reviewed evidence of at the very least a strong association between those two outcomes.
Moreover, we’re specifically talking about lies perpetrated by the media that led to mass violence. The George Floyd protests weren’t fomented by media lies — you can go ask a poor black American if you want to know what’s going on.
What does this even mean? This is way too vague and nebulous to ever get a grip on. I'm guessing you're talking about members of House/Senate contesting the results of the election, which they had a right to do, and followed the constitutional procedure for. You could also say this relied on democratically-elected representatives and wasn't undermining the rule of law.
>"and incited mass violence?"
Again, what qualifies as "mass violence"? I assume you're alluding to January 6th, which I hardly consider "mass violence" as it was very much localized and was over within a few hours. Surely the summer riots are more deserving of a term like "mass violence", no?
If we're talking about vigilante violence / decentralized intimidation, Maxine Waters told people to harass Trump staffers: "“They’re not going to be able to go to a restaurant, they’re not going to be able to stop at a gas station, they’re not going to be able to shop at a department store... The people are going to turn on them, they’re going to protest, they’re going to absolutely harass them.”"
As for your four bullet points, I am confident you can get the same kind of result (eroded faith in Democracy) by tweaking the questions to appeal to the sensibilities of people on the left. Just imagine flipping a few them by asking if a liberal agrees with "The rights of women and minorities are disappearing so fast that we may have to use force to save them" and "It is hard to trust the results of elections when so many people have been victims of voter suppression".
This attitude is part of the reason why I didn't feel the need to paste a bunch of links. Not only am I certain you'd dismiss them as biased interpretations, you didn't even pick up on the fact that I was disagreeing with his premise. And, that I did provide an example with Maxine Waters calling for Trump Administration staffers to be harassed in public.
No, the idea that democracy is undermined when citizens are told that their elections are no longer valid or trustworthy, and when politicians no longer respect the results of those elections, is actually very clear and straightforward. The legitimacy of those in power is upheld by the legitimacy of elections. Take away the latter, and what remains is tyranny.
>Surely the summer riots are more deserving of a term like "mass violence", no?
We're talking specifically about lies told by the media that resulted in mass violence. So, no.
>Maxine Waters told people to harass Trump staffers
Remember, we're speaking now in terms of actual outcomes. You'd need to point to demonstrable mass violence that resulted from her comments.
>I am confident you can get the same kind of result (eroded faith in Democracy) by tweaking the questions to appeal to the sensibilities of people on the left
I'm sure you've got a great imagination, but what counts is evidence. Given your confidence, surely you can find a study or poll somewhere to support that hypothesis. And given the vast sums of money behind right-wing think tanks and PACs, I would not expect such studies to be wanting for funding.
https://twitter.com/existentialfish/status/14530202894077952...
“When do we get to use the guns? ... That's not a joke. I'm not saying it like that. I mean, literally, where's the line? How many elections are they going to steal before we kill these people?”
> I was ready to cite examples of the left playing fast and loose with the truth but I sense it will just create hostility.
I mean, sounds like an excuse to not participate.
The question seems quite black and white.
We have a few classic lies:
* Obama is a Muslim from Kenya * His wife is transgender * Climate change is a hoax * COVID is a hoax * Climate change is a hoax * There is not enough pollution in the world * The Democrats are Communists * The Democrats run an occult pederasty wing through Twitter * Trump won the 2020 election
All of these are widely believed by Conservatives and all of these have been widely spread by Conservative speakers.
Can you find even one comparable lie to any of these spread by prominent Democrats (not some random Twitter account)?
Trump is is in a category of his own.
* Here he is claiming to be the best at all these fields he knows nothing about: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5GqJna9hpTE * Here are his lies about COVID: https://doggett.house.gov/media-center/blog-posts/timeline-t... * Here's an approximate count of his lies over 4 years - https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2021/01/24/trumps-fa...
All of his lies have been strongly supported by Republicans
Can you find one Democrat a fraction as mendacious as Donald Trump?
I mean, sounds like an excuse to not participate."
Actually, I was exactly right. I'm sensing some hostility from you right now and I'm making the mistake of engaging when I should just let it go.
>"Can you find even one comparable lie to any of these spread by prominent Democrats (not some random Twitter account)?"
So on the one hand, the laundry list you gave is acceptable as "widely believed by Conservatives", but I have to provide counterexamples that are only restricted to "prominent democrats"? You also don't qualify what 'widely believed' means, so I can just as easily claim that people on the left widely believe other falsehoods. If it is so bad that some conservatives agree with the idea that "Democrats are Communists", is it not exactly the same thing as Democrats believing that "Republicans as Fascists"? This is a widely believed view by Progressives.
I'm not here to chuck a laundry list of "lies" at you. Quite frankly I see something like "Trump’s false or misleading claims total 30,573 over 4 years" and I roll my eyes. Am I seriously expected to believe that number is anywhere close to accurate? I dare say the majority of those are subject to interpretation, which we will not be doing here.
These are well-known...
> and Rachel Maddow
I couldn't find any such thing in the news. Source for that one?
The specific details are Maddow was talking about a journalist from another network(OAN), and said something like "This person is literally paid by the Russian government to produce news stories". Maddow's team argued that it isn't slander because no reasonable viewer of her show would take that statement to be truthful despite the confident/clear language it is expressed in.
Quoting the appeals decision, The challenged statement was an obvious exaggeration, cushioned within an undisputed news story.
Equating Maddow’s exaggeration with Jones and Carlson is just rank bothsiderism.
The question for you, the original question, is why would you consider her shorthand argument based on fact equivalent to what Alex Jones does?
[1] https://timesofsandiego.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/MADDO...
Polls have shown that Fox News viewers believe more incorrect facts about current events than people who don't follow the news at all.
For example:
http://publicmind.fdu.edu/2011/knowless/
After we spend decades hearing about how Iraq has WMD's and was involved with Al-Qaeda, Obama's secretly a non-American Muslim, Anthropogenic Climate Change is fake, COVID is just a bad cold, vaccines are an evil conspiracy, publicly funded healthcare for Americans will result in "death panels" and so on and so forth... is it not reasonable for American progressives to accept that their political opponents are generally either malevolent or suckers?
At some point it's time to stop assuming good faith.
On the contrary. The title is from the 19th century, from an editorial asking why the populists in Kansas were so left wing, something the book goes into detail about in the second chapter.
[1] Though I have to say that some of the "build the wall" rhetoric around immigrants has made me question this.
It seems like people have been losing their pride in their selves that now they're invested in their "football teqm" winning in the arena of politics.
Almost all evil comes from the over-application of morality. "My team is good, and their team is bad, and it is good to hurt bad people."
The problem is that democracy depends on cooperation. If you insist on winning at all costs, the other side adopts your tactics and it becomes a no-holds barred power struggle.
Democracy is in short a system where people can struggle for power without killing or unjustly imprisoning each other.
It seems like the perspective gets taken to - as I write above - justify, after-the-fact, "why I've decided the same way my herd decided". There is a lot of grasping for easy answers ("Yeah, he must be being controlled by China, that's a good enough answer for me!") and cognitive dissonnace when challenged, that usually ends with people being angry so the challenger stops..
Full moral consistency is almost impossible: you're always balancing self-interests with other higher ideals, etc., and there's always some dissonance. This is just a more problematic example of people striking that kind of moral balance.
Message was that due to globalization, a 20/80 split in the job market was inevitable. So there needs to he work done on placating and nursing unrest by distracting people with movies, sports etc..
This was during the 1995 World State Forum. I tried to look up any more material whether that any concrete actions were taken place but couldn’t.
This reminds me of the "entertainers" in the Civilization series, where you can convert some workers into professional entertainers who help alleviate discontent that would otherwise throw a city into civil disorder.
https://scholars-stage.org/xi-jinpings-war-on-spontaneous-or...
Interesting how "the market" has seemingly spontaneously created things like YouTubers, TikTokers, Instagram influencers, etc. Wherever there is money to be made, someone's there. Political news is hot in the attention economy? Macedonians make fake news sites with Google ads: https://money.cnn.com/interactive/media/the-macedonia-story/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Global_Trap
Some remedies:
(1) Actually talk to those voters and get to know them at a human level, don't just group them as an undefined mass of "people who vote badly".
(2) Try a mental game where you imagine your side has the wrong arguments or is talking from privilege, etc., and study what the other side is saying (even the naive people there, but even more so the smarter and less naive people there), trying to see how they are right. Find arguments why your (current) position is wrong.
(3) Then try for a month, to see all those sides (voters for R or D for example), as an outsider, who doesn't agree with either side. Check what people not belonging to either side have to say - e.g. political outsiders, academics doing a critique of both parties, pundits, commenters, and philosophers from a previous century not giving a damn for today's politics.
(4) Finally, see the ideas of today as from 2121, the same way we see the ideas of 1921 today. Then as from 3021 B.C. Don't assume a monotonic increase in agreement of the future with your current ideas, or the prevalent ideas of today, but that history goes back and forth in ideological fashions (including what's "good").
>[1] Though I have to say that some of the "build the wall" rhetoric around immigrants has made me question this.
Here are some examples of (2) in this case:
(1) Note that the idea of borders and citizenship is already the idea of a wall. And nobody, not even the "good guys" you voted for, ever challenged those.
(2) Note that the wall is defensive (we don't want no any more to come) and not actively harmful, then see how the good guy politicians that are feigning the idea unacceptable and inhuman, often advocate for foreign wars and interventions that actively harm millions.
(3) Note that those in favor of "building the wall" might have issues in their communities or work that e.g. a FAANG engineer might never experience as problems because they have different job prospects. Consider if your private interests were directly harmed by immigration (e.g. you are living in close quarters with poverty striken immigrants, taking to petty crime and so on, or because your low skill job industry prefers immigrants to lower costs and you're either out of a job or have your wages slashed).
And inversely, if you're say a Republican:
(1) Note that your family doesn't have very deep roots here. Just 400-200 years ago they passed some other people's non-wall (and killed a lot of them) to grap the land. If, say, you're a Kowalski or a Smith, you're not fooling anyone that you're the rightful owner of this land. B...tc please, your ancestors didn't come traversing the Bering Strait, you're not Clovis. If you're, like, second generation, your parents were bona-fide wall climbers. Perhaps they did it legaly through Ellis Island for example, but do you think they'd stopped if they were denied there, but had some other way in?
(2) Note that the Wall is established on land (TX, NM, FL, AZ, CA) stolen from the very country its people tries to keep out. It's even in the names of the states, all Spanish. Who are you fooling?
(3) Note that if you're out of a job, it might have more to do with clean shaven, suit wearing anglosaxon bosses preffering cheap immigrant labor, and less about the immigrants themselves. Plus, if those immigrants were legitimised, and given an easy way to citizenship, would they still be a cheaper option to undercut your wage?
The thing I was referring to (and this is my bad for not being more clear) in regards to the "build the wall" rhetoric wasn't actually specifically about the wall exactly, but more of the surrounding anti-immigrant sentiment that followed. My wife (a Mexican immigrant) had to deal with an increased level of horrible stuff being said to her after the "build the wall" stuff started, and it did seem to correlate as a dogwhistle. That's why I said it gave me a bit of pause about the intentions of some voters: it really seemed to bring out the worst of people, and it did seem like there were a lot more "worst of people" than I thought. It didn't seem like a lot of them really cared about "a wall", they just didn't like people who didn't look like them.
Well without the Gadsden purchase, Yuma and Tucson would still be in Mexico.
I appreciate when institutions (such as universities) ceremonially acknowledge the indigenous people whose land they occupy and never intend to return or pay rent on (often while running their own housing and office rental businesses on top of it.)
Can you give some sort of reason why you have this impression?
I don’t agree with either of those statements, and I think their actions as a result of these beliefs are bad, but I do think they want things to be best for America, though I think they have a different definition of “best”
Obviously this is anecdata, but you asked why I believed this.
We want to avoid people who are bad for us. If you treat them as dangerous, scary, or 'below you' it's fairly emotionally cheap for you to avoid everything about them, not just the badness. But ignoring 'dangerous' problems can just make them more dangerous.
Change which set of glyphs and discourse matters in politics, or put pressure on the labor market until it bears it no more (the source of contempt).
So much of this can be reasoned around simply as euphemism. Change the story, change the outcome.
COVID doesn't care about your feelings, and the very real impact of higher infection rates and lower vaccination coverage is demonstrating who exactly has so dug-in on their position so far that they've become utterly disconnected from reality.
I have my own hypothesis about the COVID vaccine denialism in particular, but I am afraid that it might come off as a bit too political for HN and Dang would lock the thread :).
As a reaction to this problem you see the basic approach that the social justice wing has basically declared that intent doesn't matter. No more excuses.
And I'm getting to agree with them. If somebody is doing something destructive and the stakes are high, wasting time being nice about their feelings seems thoroughly counterproductive. COVID has made this problem deafeningly loud - whether the bad actors are crazy or grifters or misguided, polite deference to them on grave matters gets people killed.
I actually think we might agree on a bit more than you might think. I actually am in that social-justice camp that says "intent mostly doesn't matter". I don't have the ability to read minds yet, so I can't possibly really know anyone's intent, so I have to look at the reasonable consequences of their actions and judge from there.
That said, whether or not people are secretly klansmen or good deep down, they still exist, and they're still humans who deserve to have their voices heard at some level. While I don't think we should automatically assume good faith on every person speaking, I also don't think we should immediately discount it either. A lot of voters are just victims of bad publications, and I don't think any of us are fully immune to that. I'm sure there's a million dumb things that I believe; I try and catch them when I spot them, but I would hope that most people would give me the benefit of the doubt in assuming that my beliefs were honest, if dumb.
edit: Added a "don't" because my point was wrong without it.
They don't believe this of us, and this is why they win, and we lose.
Playing devil's advocate here let's imagine that someone from a political party that is probably not yours (just guessing!) might use your same logic and apply it.
Abortions. They're killing people. High stakes? Check.
Abortions. They're killing defenseless humans. Destructive? Check?
You don't have to agree with these definitions for people on the political right to define things this way. And were they to take their definitions and use your logical template and then react in the way you're suggesting might be OK with your definitions, what you're left with is something that looks an awful lot like the Texas abortion ban right now.
The point I'm trying to make isn't that you're wrong and bad and should feel bad. The point I'm trying to make is that a person needs to think very long and very hard about situations in which polite deference isn't warranted.
Because with the team sports politics we've got going on right now it's super easy for one side to look at the template the other side is using and reappropriate it for their pet issues and then things which are "settled" suddenly get very exciting indeed.
I know two anti-vaxxers.
One is not political at all but isn't that smart. Very nice and generous person. Bit prone to conspiracy thinking and bought into fake news on Rumble or something.
The other is very conservative and it's a team/tribe issue with him. He has a strong distrust of institutions that he thinks are run by leftists and would distrust anything they say.
-------
Basically, I think that rabid anti-vax sentiment is a natural conclusion to roughly ~40 years of near-constant levels of conspiratorial thinking from conservative circles. I think folks like Jerry Fallwell started it, and subsequently Ronald Reagan and most of the conservative politicians after him followed. People like Jerry Fallwell more or less started the "satanic panic", and it started to become somewhat politically acceptable to just say that "the devil" was doing anything that they don't like. This went largely unchallenged in evangelical circles and the evangelicals took a huge turn towards the Republican party.
Fast forward to 2012, and now it's a debate about where Barack Obama was born. A "conspiracy" was just fabricated out of nowhere, and the president is required to show his birth certificate. This was somewhat made fun of, even Bill OReilly disputed it, but it was the first conspiracy that I had heard in my lifetime being taken seriously by at least some politicians.
Fast forward to 2016, and suddenly it seems that idiots like Alex Jones, who had previously been a goofball I would turn on to get a laugh, is being taken seriously by semi-prominent conservatives. PizzaGate was still somewhat of a fringe thing, but it was the first outright debunkable conspiracy that I could think of that people I actually knew who actually believed it.
Fast forward to ~2019, and a sizeable chunk of conservatives (to be clear, NOT a majority) were starting to take the QAnon nonsense seriously, setting the way for 2020, which allowed a basic stream of perpetual lies about COVID to be spread (and accepted) on 8kun. Suddenly, despite overwhelming evidence, we have to have debates on whether we should be taking COVID seriously. Any time Fauchi contradicted Trump, it was because Fauchi was an agent of Satan or something absurd.
I think anti-vaxxing is just the natural progression. There's been an entire generation who has been more-or-less unchallenged in their conspiratorial thinking, and basically anything can be a conspiracy theory. Since they already think that COVID was overblown to make Trump look bad, they subsequently have to think that anything that addresses covid must also be bad.
The left has its share of dumb things that it believes, but it's not nearly at the same level of what is predominant in conservative culture today.
While schools definitely do have a lefty-bent, the idea that it's some hyper-organized society designed to destroy the conservative parties in America is absurd to anyone who isn't predisposed to conspiratorial thinking.
Given that adversarial dynamic between business and policy, I can't bring myself to fault even a single person for refusing the vaccine (I can still fault someone for publicly speaking against vaccinating others on invariably shaky arguments though). There is no public institution that I would trust to act towards any common good, that's how much public trust has been eroded in the name of "good business".
I believe policies like vaccine mandate and the overzealous anti-anti-vax crew are paradoxically aggravating the issue. Making it a partisan issue also seems to force people on the defensive and harden their (potentially unfounded) beliefs, forcing them into the "other camp."
EDIT: My hypothesis on why it comes more from right-wing rather than left-wing people is exactly that right-wing is anti-government power (or more freedom of individuals, usually).
That's the problem with "reality" - the reality you see is driven by the media that reports the reality to you. Presumably the media you read likes to run stories like "lots of cases in Florida" to score points against the "other team", while ignoring deeper analysis like the paper I linked.
The infection rate is unreliable because it requires people allowing themselves to be tested when sick, and I would expect people that refuse to be vaccinated also refuse to be tested, on the same grounds.
Your suggested confounder is plausible, but I find the possible confounders in the other direction even more plausible:
- Many places have policies like "proof of vaccination /or/ positive test required", which would inflate the number of confirmed cases in less vaccinated areas.
- Someone with reduced symptoms due to vaccination is less likely to notice them and thus decide to get a test, or to have symptoms severe enough to be hospitalized and thus definitely get a test.
And then the really scary one:
- If vaccines hide symptoms but don't significantly reduce transmission, a vaccinated person is less likely to stay at home during an infection, increasing community transmission.
Further evidence for that hypothesis comes from comparisons of viral load in confirmed cases between vaccinated and unvaccinated people, which finds no significant difference: https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.07.31.21261387v...
https://twitter.com/CT_Bergstrom/status/1448892208191467520
Follow the Prince of Peace.
> Living the New Life
> Therefore, I say this and testify in the Lord: You should no longer walk as the Gentiles walk, in the futility of their thoughts. They are darkened in their understanding, excluded from the life of God, because of the ignorance that is in them and because of the hardness of their hearts. They became callous and gave themselves over to promiscuity for the practice of every kind of impurity with a desire for more and more.
> But that is not how you learned about the Messiah, assuming you heard about Him and were taught by Him, because the truth is in Jesus. You took off your former way of life, the old self that is corrupted by deceitful desires; you are being renewed in the spirit of your minds; you put on the new self, the one created according to God’s likeness in righteousness and purity of the truth.
> Since you put away lying, Speak the truth, each one to his neighbor, because we are members of one another. Be angry and do not sin. Don’t let the sun go down on your anger, and don’t give the Devil an opportunity. The thief must no longer steal. Instead, he must do honest work with his own hands, so that he has something to share with anyone in need. No foul language is to come from your mouth, but only what is good for building up someone in need, so that it gives grace to those who hear. And don’t grieve God’s Holy Spirit. You were sealed by Him for the day of redemption. All bitterness, anger and wrath, shouting and slander must be removed from you, along with all malice. And be kind and compassionate to one another, forgiving one another, just as God also forgave you in Christ.
- Ephesians 4:17-32 (HCSB)
I realize some of the people who might see this have had bad experiences with so-called Christians. I was a staunch Atheist for the vast, VAST majority of my life, specifically because of how some so-called "believers" had treated me when I was very young. I hated Christians so much I scared a preacher half to death, threatened to beat him up, and got him to run away in tears.
My own contempt, my rage, my unbridled hatred for people was off the charts. Anyone who didn't agree with me 100% on everything was an idiot, and I was not afraid to tell them so.
I'm saying all of this to say, if you resent me writing all of this, I get it. I really do. On a fundamental level, I understand that anger. But if you feel like you want to know the only answer to how to turn away from letting those controlling, destructive emotions from ruling your life; this anger that we all seem to be under the thumb of, then there is a very clear, obvious answer: God
Not just mere acknowledgement, or even a reverence for Him, but a stout willingness to obey His commandments and follow His teachings.
There's only one religion that tells you not just that it's wrong to murder, but that to hate someone in your heart is murder, and worthy of the same punishment. There is only one that holds everyone to that level of accountability.
Think it over.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
I dont have any hard proof of course, but this is how it is. No one cares if you're right if the opponent can be witty.
As proof Ill try to leave you with 2 videos, hopefully they are bipartisan enough:
1. https://youtube.com/watch?v=ErZCMcoC8X8 2. https://youtube.com/watch?v=aFQFB5YpDZE
Oh my, what a silly way to pitch a possible reader on your book.
There is a (VERY conservative) town in my state where every single employee of the local department of transportation has quit over the vaccine mandate. Now the former employees and their conservative allies are gleefully posting about how “the libs” won’t be able to use the nearby freeways due to lack of maintenance, and how “the libs” will have trouble driving around town because there will be no snow plow operators come winter.
Here’s the funny part: The conservative:liberal ratio there is about 50:1. This rural town is gleefully destroying its own infrastructure over some perceived culture war, fully knowingly. These people are willing to cripple their ability to leave their houses in order to “own the libs” even if they’re not even existent.
I do not think I could be convinced by some old guy that his newly-invented form of conservative Kumbaya will actually make it possible for these people to go to the pharmacy when it snows, or get fresh food from the grocery store.
I mean, maybe that's right but it seems unlikely when there are other much more obvious things to explain the reasons for the actions in question. That they then post hoc express schadenfreude for the party who they perceive to be responsible for the situation is evidence of the addiction to contempt the article refers to, sure. But I find it difficult to imagine they wouldn't prefer not to be coerced into experimental gene therapy even if it means they don't get the opportunity to "own the libs" in response.
To elaborate: You can consider work vaccine mandates to be similar to any other job requirement. The COVID vaccines have received a huge amount of studies and trials. And "gene therapy" usually refers to use of things like CRISPR-Cas9 or other methods of delivering DNA into the cell which are able to modify genes. mRNA vaccines do not modify genes. (I'm not a biologist so you should ask one if you want more information on this)
Wait, hold on. That's an actual argument you are making and not satire?
"Mandates are not coercive", that's a thought that actually went through your head and you thought, "Hmm, that sounds like a reasonable argument"?
"Be kind. Don't be snarky. Have curious conversation; don't cross-examine. Please don't fulminate. Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community."
"Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith."
Mandates are coercive by definition, that's the entire point of them, putting whatever magical word in front of them you like doesn't change that.
The medication to which the "Vaccine mandates" refer is not the same as traditional inactivated virus vaccines, and before this whole fiasco started, was always referred to as what it actually is which is gene therapy.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4817894/
It doesn't matter how great or how well tested these things are, or how reasonable it is to take them, and that I will acknowledge goes into the realm of opinion and given how polluted that discussion is with political barracking yeah I'm not interested in having it at all, the simple underlying fact that they are actually coercive experimental gene therapy is exactly that, pure fact, not opinion at all.
Also that paper seems to suggest that mRNA could generally be used as a component in gene therapy. It does not say that mRNA vaccines are gene therapy. You're getting several things mixed up. Let me know if you want clarification, or if you want some helping finding a biologist or doctor who could answer more of your questions. But mRNA vaccines are probably not "coercive experimental gene therapy" unless you really want to stretch that definition.
Your objection basically boils down to "I don't like the way 'coercive experimental gene therapy' makes what my team is presently doing sound like". That's not an argument, it's just an attempt to force people not to use accurate language you disapprove of. Maybe coercive experimental gene therapy is exactly what's needed, just like coercive physical restraint is just what's needed when it comes to dealing with violent psychopaths. But in both cases, refusing to call a spade a spade doesn't change it from being a spade.
When you respond with stuff like "I wouldn't say any of that is a fact, merely incorrect statements" then you're begging your opposition to simply make the exact same statement back to you.
I am sympathetic to people who can't get vaccines for medical reasons but there are companies that simply are not equipped to employ those people safely. There's nothing coercive about that, everything else you're saying about that is not related to what I'm saying. For a lot of these companies it's a matter of either they require the vaccine, or they go back to having long lines, reduced hours, occupancy limits, strict mask requirements, and other things that are inconvenient and cost money and hurt the business. This stuff is unfortunate because it also applies to immunocompromised people with whom the vaccine is not effective, I don't really know a solution that could work for them on a large scale.
Yes we are, you are continuously making the argument that if you can give good reasons for coercion, it is no longer accurate to refer to it as coercion. This is false.
Examples;
> For a lot of these companies it's a matter of either they require the vaccine, or they go back to having long lines, reduced hours, occupancy limits, strict mask requirements, and other things that are inconvenient and cost money and hurt the business.
> there are companies that simply are not equipped to employ those people safely.
And many other times.
Further, you're refusing to acknowledge that the vaccines under the vaccine mandates are experimental gene therapy, with the justification;
> Also that paper seems to suggest that mRNA could generally be used as a component in gene therapy. It does not say that mRNA vaccines are gene therapy.
The paper is from 2015, the "mRNA vaccines" were not a thing at the time and thus this paper discussing what mRNA gene therapy is would of course not refer to things not released for six years to come/ "mRNA vaccines" is just a new label on the underlying technology discussed in the paper, which they clearly point out is actually gene therapy.
It's coercive experimental gene therapy. Maybe it's good, maybe it's necessary, whatever. It's still coercive experimental gene therapy.
Otherwise I'll try to use an analogy. Would you call it coercion if a construction company had all its welding equipment malfunction, break, and become unsafe, and as a result had to let all its welders go? Or would you call it coercion if a trucking company refused to hire people that didn't have trucking licenses, on the basis that it wouldn't be safe for them to drive a truck that they weren't trained for? Or if you're a nurse and you get let go for not being vaccinated, in a hospital where the entire job description is that you can't infect the patients with more diseases?
On your comment about gene therapy, AFAIK mRNA vaccines are not a new label on the underlying technology there. They are a different technology from the purpose described in that paper. Please see my other comment for what is generally referred to as gene therapy. Again we can contact a biologist or doctor for more information about this if you'd like to do that.
Edit: The paper you posted has a good citation that explains it better. https://www.nature.com/articles/nrd4278
"The FDA definition of gene therapy is as follows: '... modification of the genetic material of living cells. Cells may be modified ex vivo for subsequent administration to humans, or may be altered in vivo by gene therapy given directly to the subject. When the genetic manipulation is performed ex vivo on cells which are then administered to the patient, this is also a form of somatic cell therapy ... Recombinant DNA materials used to transfer genetic material for such therapy are considered components of gene therapy.' As RNA does not result in 'modification of the genetic material of living cells', one would anticipate that its administration will not be classified as a gene therapy in the United States."
For gene therapy I think typically the goal of that is the opposite of vaccines. Similar vectors can be used (in this case mRNA encased in lipids) but everything else is different. With vaccines you're intentionally trying to provoke an immune response, but one that's weak enough so it doesn't harm the patient. In gene therapy, you usually want to avoid generating an immune response at all, so the body doesn't start attacking the modified cells.
What I did bring up is the fact that people are willing to deny themselves, their families and neighbors the ability to leave their own homes to get food and medicine in order to “own the libs.”
While this sort of Markov-chain sounding word salad about… whatever, must indicate that people are passionate about… whatever, the fact of the matter is that sabotaging your own infrastructure out of ideology sounds kind of suicidal.
I honestly don’t get how I could personally rally behind people that would celebrate my righteous death from being stranded in the snow because I’d died owning the libs because uh… my ideology will have prevented theoretical vaccine deaths in the future? My actual, concrete, current life is literally worth less than… what? Some bogeyman that I read about on Facebook?
If I were genuinely that concerned about all these conspiracies and thought that my thoughtless death would make a difference, I’d self-immolate like the monks during Vietnam. Somehow curiously, these folks rather than doing that are taking the mighty stand of keeping kids from going to school, their neighbors going to work or their doctors, local business owners from opening etc.
Ironically, not plowing the streets creates the exact same (if not considerably worse) lockdown situation that these people have been mad about for 18 months. Ironically, it’s not the reduction of peoples freedoms that matter to these conservatives, it’s who gets to be the ones taking the freedoms away.
People will literally kill themselves and everyone around them in order to feel Right About Stuff.
“Love” isn’t an answer here. It’s a completely meaningless word put in a context to sound nice on a podcast to sell books to people who will never change their minds about any of this.
Look, let's say we observe an employee and employer undertaking a discussion that goes something like this.
"Take this medicine"
"No I don't want to"
"Take it or else you're fired"
"I'm not going to take it, fire me if you have to."
"OK, you're fired"
"That's going to turn out poorly for the people who must now suffer the consequences of not having people available to do my job"
I don't understand how you jump to the conclusion that the reason the employee refuses to take the medicine is so they can have that last line of dialogue, rather than that they don't want to take the medicine.
Enlighten me?
My criticism of your argument is that it’s silly to decide that nobody in town can leave their houses during the winter because you don’t want to get a shot. Furthermore, it’s downright ghastly to gloat about the upcoming, totally avoidable, suffering that they’ll be imparting on people that _AGREE WITH THEM_ in order make their point and own the libs.
Pro tip: We might actually be having a two way conversation if your next response included words like “snow” or “plow” or “stranded in your house by no fault of your own.” But please go on with your regurgitated Facebook nonsense about experiments or whatever.
The only thing that’s important is that you’re right!
Once again, that's not what they're doing. "I'm not going to take the medicine so everybody has to stay inside" you will note was not part of the dialogue.
> Furthermore, it’s downright ghastly to gloat about the upcoming, totally avoidable, suffering that they’ll be imparting on people that _AGREE WITH THEM_ in order make their point and own the libs.
People have a history of hostility to those they perceive, whether rightly or wrongly, as unnecessarily depriving them of their livelihood.
> We might actually be having a two way conversation if your next response included words like “snow” or “plow” or “stranded in your house by no fault of your own.” But please go on with your regurgitated Facebook nonsense about experiments or whatever.
Sure, It doesn't matter what tasks the people under discussion are saddled with, up to and including dealing with snow, plowing, etc, and it doesn't matter what consequences the absence of their actions will result in, up to and including leaving people stranded in their house by no fault of their own. The logic still applies.
Not wanting to take medication is not the same as actively wanting to inflict misery on other parties, and equating the two as you are continuously trying to do is false.
Displaying hostility to parties responsible for hostile actions is about as newsworthy as "sun rises in morning". In fact the hostility you're displaying to them here is just as unsurprising and not the problem at all.
The issue is purely one of logic; you're equating motivation to refuse a medicine with wanting to provoke misery for an opposing party. Clearly no such motivation exists. If it did exist, they would not have needed to say "I don't want to take this medicine, fire me if you have to." they could just jump straight to the end and go on strike to "own the libs" and no other reason.
Did you see the part where I was talking about gloating about the harm they’re planning on causing? It includes (as the majority of folks) people that share their political views. I get that it didn’t jive with your narrative but it’s a reality that I’m describing, so sorry about that.
Good job using the word “snow” in the middle of hand waving away actual material suffering while trying to accomplish… whatever.
Are you personally willing to be unable to leave your house because it’s important to you that the municipal workers won’t be vaccinated?
Refusing to take medicine is not the same thing as "planning on causing harm" no matter how many times you attempt to falsely equate the two things.
> I get that it didn’t jive with your narrative
Narrative has nothing to do with it, you can still believe what they're doing by refusing to take the medicine is the wrong choice and simultaneously acknowledge that their incorrect choice is not the same thing as the consequence levied upon them by a third party when they refuse to take the medicine.
> but it’s a reality that I’m describing, so sorry about that.
If you really think that's the case, then the inability to separate cause and effect is an enormous blind spot you should work on.
> Good job using the word “snow” in the middle of hand waving away actual material suffering while trying to accomplish
You were the one that insisted the word would change the underlying logical structure of the question, unsurprisingly it did not. That was my entire point all along.
> Are you personally willing to be unable to leave your house because it’s important to you that the municipal workers won’t be vaccinated?
That has absolutely nothing to do with the logical structure of coerced action resulting in a refusal and dismissal and the second order effects of that chain of events. But for the record, I am willing to suffer whatever consequences are necessary in order that the aggressive violation of individual bodily integrity and autonomy of peaceful people is unacceptable, up to and including the immediate destruction of the entire universe.
A universe where peaceful people minding their own business are not free to make their own choices is not worthy of existence. Cross that line and you've gone most of the way down the road of justifying the worst excesses of authoritarian abuse throughout history. There's a very good reason it's in the Nuremberg codes, it wasn't an accident to be revoked next time there's some "catastrophic emergency" going on. There are certain lines you do not cross and that is one of them.
This is the most psychotic take I’ve read on this topic. Not only are you willing to get stuck in your home so some stranger doesn’t have to get a vaccine, you’re willing to inflict that same suffering on an infinite number of people in order to get your way.
Considering “destruction of the universe” would include a lot of innocent deaths, your weird moralizing sounds even more like schizophrenic word salad. You literally advocate for murdering both those that agree with you and those that don’t, as well as yourself, because things aren’t the way you want them to be.
Let me guess, you’re in your mid teens and recently read The Fountainhead?
The opposing position is ironically that of those who inflicted hundreds of millions of deaths, the largest cause of non natural death in fact, on the entire species in the previous century, so you'll excuse me if I take your view with several solar masses of sodium chloride.
> you’re willing to inflict that same suffering on an infinite number of people in order to get your way.
Exactly the opposite, I'm not willing to inflict any aggression on any number of peaceful people minding their own business, period.
> Considering “destruction of the universe” would include a lot of innocent deaths
Better dead than enslaved.
> You literally advocate for murdering both those that agree with you and those that don’t, as well as yourself, because things aren’t the way you want them to be.
I advocate for nothing, I merely do not accept that slavery is a valid institution, and it doesn't matter what you put in the alternative column against it. The alternative of violating the autonomy and integrity of peaceful people doing me no harm is once again, the worst possible outcome.
> Let me guess, you’re in your mid teens and recently read The Fountainhead?
Over 40, read it a long, long time ago, has nothing to do with my position on live free or die. Slavery is outright unacceptable. If you do not have the right to choose which drugs you must take, you are a slave. It cannot get more simple than that. That has nothing at all to do with the sensibility of taking the drugs in question, it has nothing to do with whether the drugs in question are good or bad. It could be the most obvious choice in the world, and the drugs in question could be a panacea that brings about a world utopia, and the logic of enslaving people would still be utterly unacceptable.
The ends do not justify the means. Multiple world changing extremely violent wars were fought over just these issues. Your side always lost.
This was not a controversial position for the past half century plus, the fact that it is now should make you very cautious. Although with bloody-handed "for the greater good" communism by another name in such vogue these days, I expect that it won't at all.
I'm sorry, I find this conversation extremely depressing and I'm going to leave it at that, you have a nice life.
EDIT; for the record, the disgusting strawmen in response to this message do not warrant their own response regardless of how idiotic they are. And I will not be providing one.
and
>I advocate for nothing…
are incompatible statements. Either you are stating that you would prefer that people (other than yourself) die rather than being “enslaved” (having an employer exercise at-will employment) or you’re not.
The irony of literally calling for the deaths of people that don’t adhere to your specific set of beliefs while decrying “slavery” is genuinely hilarious.
What other bits of “slavery” do you think justify murdering people over? Seat belt laws? Age of consent laws? Prohibition of trading human organs?
Edit: I literally laughed out loud when I read the implication that I’m a communist because uh, I don’t think it’s a moral good to indiscriminately harm people as some sort of temper tantrum over a vaccine.
I genuinely hope that every person that chose to become unemployed because of their Facebook-informed selective definition of inflammatory words like “slavery” remain unemployed indefinitely. This will create more positions for vaccinated people.
Ironically, the “live free or die” folks really seem to think that the state owes them jobs and money, and the average citizen is obligated to suffer under their arbitrary rules that they make up on the fly. While you feel righteous, that feeling doesn’t actually mean that anybody has to listen to you or your ridiculous opinions, let alone act on them.
I understand that only Big Brain Geniuses ever arrive at fascinating unique positions like “everything I don’t like is slavery”, but even that caliber of dazzling wit doesn’t actually mean logical people will naturally agree with your Completely Objective Philosophy.
Real slavery is when I can’t force somebody to give me a job!
It's not the employees that are destroying the aforementioned rural town, it's the DOT doing blatantly undemocratic things that their employees won't approve.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html