> Yes, because they are liberal only by name not concept. Liberalism is based on tolerance and civil society as the space of freedom.
Exactly. We tend to conflate "left" with "liberalism" because historically in the West these two things have gone together. However, they don't have to, and in recent years they have decoupled. The left (at least in the U.S.) has became increasingly illiberal to the point where they now openly argue for censorship (e.g. anything not of or by the worldview is labelled as "dangerous misinformation"). The right does this too, but they don't seem to be as good as the left at couching it in altruistic language, so it tends not to gain as much traction.
In Europe, left was always more marxist so liberalism never really got batched with the left, it was more center/right. But in the US liberalism was as left as you got, so naturally all left will be 'liberalism' at least by name no matter how the content mutates.
The sad part of all of this is that the folks pushing the polarization in the U.S., the Trumpy right, and the progressive left, represent an extreme minority of the population. If either of these two groups had an any level of self awareness, they'd realize that no one wants them around.
If the US had an equivalent of lib dems and/or proportional representation and/or ranked choice, would it still be so polarised? Sure, a 2-party state is preferable to a 1-party state, but that's a pretty low bar.
> If the US had an equivalent of lib dems and/or proportional representation and/or ranked choice, would it still be so polarised
I don't think this would be a panacea, but it would definitely help things quite a bit. The largest voting block in the U.S. isn't Democrats or Republicans, but voters that have chosen not to be affiliated with either party.
There are plenty of voters who are registered independent/unaffiliated, but most of them still lean strongly toward one of the major parties. The number of consistent swing/split voters is much smaller. Most analysis/commentary I've seen says that partisan differences in turnout are a much bigger factor in winning elections than appealing to the center.
> Most analysis/commentary I've seen says that partisan differences in turnout are a much bigger factor in winning elections than appealing to the center.
I've heard a lot of people say this, I've never seen any good data on this. Every analysis I've seen that compared how moderate and more extreme candidates did compared to the president consistently showed the moderates did better than the extreme. I'd be curious to see your analysis/commentary that shows the opposite.
I shouldn't have phrased it as "appealing to the center", but rather something like "appealing to true independents" or "appealing to swing voters". There is significant ideological breadth within the parties, and it's clear that appealing to more center-leaning voters can be a winning strategy, but that's less because there's a big chunk of the electorate composed of nonpartisan centrists and more because the most extreme candidates also tend to polarize and demotivate parts of their own party coalition while unifying and motivating the opposing party. Swing voters are far from nonexistent, it's just that their numbers are small compared to partisan (again: not necessarily registered party-affiliated) voters unless you define "swing voter" incredibly broadly [1]. Capturing their votes is clearly good for a campaign, but only if it can be in a way that is also sensitive to their partisan voters.
> There are plenty of voters who are registered independent/unaffiliated, but most of them still lean strongly toward one of the major parties
Just because a person consistently votes for one party does not mean they like that party or agree with its platform. In many cases, they consistently vote for the same party because they see it as the least worst option.
In neither case did he get even a simple majority of the votes. He won/almost won due to a quirky US presidential system that overrepresents small population states.
Ok, but it’s not like he got 10% of the vote. In my mind, there isn’t that big of a difference between say 45% and 55% when drawing conclusions about society.
Still, I’m not sure I would consider everyone who voted for Trump as part of the “Trumpy right” any more than I would consider myself part of the radical left just because I voted for Biden.
When you have two choices in a polarized country, one of them is going to win and the other is going to "almost win". That's what makes this situation so ugly.
A moderate has more to do with a mindset and epistemological stance than it does with specific views. A moderate, regardless of where they stand on a particular issue, will ask themselves "What if I'm wrong?", or "Wow this issue is very complicated, I'm not 100% certain on the answer".
Extremists, by contrast, tend to be absolutely certain of whatever opinion they happen to hold at the moment and nothing can shake them of that. There has been a lot written about the alleged differences between the conservative mind and the liberal mind, but I think that completely misses it. Extremists, even those on opposite ends of the political spectrum, have a lot more in common with one another than they do with moderates and other normal people.
This is just the "enlightened centrism" theory I think. There's no inherent virtue in neutrality between abstract issues. And acknowledging uncertainty or being flexible to reevaluation doesn't necessarily lead you to neutrality either.
You're also trying to frame it so that anyone who does consistently choose a side is inherently an extremist, and that these two extremes are "liberal" and "conservative."
The idea that political extremes are more similar to each other than to a moderate position is called horseshoe theory, and it has very little support among political scientists. It doesn't even apply in this case because, again, the two "sides" in american politics aren't even opposite extremes. In most peer countries the democrats would be solidly center-right and the republicans are off to their right. On the far left is a gaping hole where communists, anarcho-syndicalists, revolutionary socialists etc would be.
In practice people who call themselves moderate are usually consistently aligned with one of the two major parties, they just don't want to incur the social costs of that alignment in at least one context. Or and relatedly, they want to present themselves as being morally and intellectually superior to both, too "enlightened" to be duped into taking sides like inferior thinkers.
There's nothing wrong with understanding yourself and your world well enough to pick a side on an issue, or find allies for it. Again the self-questioning you describe isn't unique to centrists nor the reason for their centrism.
My positions are extreme, as are those of many of my friends and associates. We doubt too. Yet we find that we must act anyway, and risk being wrong or foolish.
I don't think it's normal people pushing the polarization, at least not in the root cause analysis. The political parties are playing the meta-political game of continuing to exist and the game theory there is to slice and dice the electorate along advantageous lines in every voting district/region. The more divisive an issue, the more predictable and reliable as a tool for staying in power.
Political parties have no external goals; they are self-interested and use the people within them to achieve that goal by offering carrots (which result in fulfilling the external values of normal people) or sticks (which punish defection or opposing party members).
Progressivism and conservativism are not opposed on a single axis. Political parties lay claim to and label particular issues which benefits both major U.S. parties in the long run by giving them each a grab bag of issues for a particular set of voters. This is why, for example, guns and wombs have opposite signs in the personal-freedom axis for both parties. As long as the shared belief exists that an issue "belongs" to "one side" it remains useful as a political tool but nearly worthless as a policy tool for normal people.
Finally, it is not the extremes leading this charge. The core DNC and RNC execute this strategy because they are locked in a struggle for survival. The DNC and RNC have successfully used the threat of the least-aligned party to trap moderate and progressive voters within the party structures. Non-partisan primaries and ranked-choice/runoff voting are starting to show moderate success (AK and NH) at changing the game theory to favor politicians who compromise on multivariate issues versus enforcing party platforms.
> Beyond that, a growing number of us have realized that democracy is incompatible with freedom.
That's an interesting mindset, in theory, but not very grounded in reality. Being a democracy is no guarantee of freedom, but it has let more people live in more freedom than any other system. (The great danger is that tyrants convert democracies into pseudo-democracies, keeping the trappings while removing the freedom, and that makes democracies look bad to those who are unaware.)
Seriously, if you've got a system that leads to more freedom, put in into practice somewhere, and show us how it works in the real world. If you can consistently deliver for several decades, we might start to listen.
> Once you accept that, the absurdity of politicians claiming to speak for large swaths of your country is just comical.
Politicians speak, not for the population, not even for everyone who voted for them, but for everyone who agrees with the politician on that particular point.
> Downvoters are free to explain why unimpressive people have any say over how you think or how you should behave.
I'm having a hard time understanding what you're trying to say here. But it sounds like you're saying that, in a democracy, "unimpressive people" have a say because they get to vote. Well, I don't know anybody who lets voters decide how they think. How they behave? Well, votes lead to laws, so, yeah. But in a non-democracy, someone was still going to be making the laws, and almost certainly that would be someone who is not you. So it seems to me that you're always going to have other people having a say over how you should behave. (And, in a non-democracy, they can be a lot more serious having say over how you think, too.)
The phrase "unimpressive people" I find a bit disturbing. It sounds like you're looking down on them, that there's some contempt there. Frankly, that does not make your position more persuasive.
You make good points, but I think we would diverge in that I think the western democracies have already crossed into the pseudo-democracy trap and are already tyrannies. However, I want no part of oppressing anybody because I don't find myself to be exceptionally impressive, so don't look at me to come up with a better system of oppression.
People go along with this idea of democracy because they believe (read: they've been told) that the possibility of freedom and prosperity exists if they are simply able to convince enough of their unimpressive friends to vote hard enough for the correct team. It's absurd.
My belief is simply that nobody else speaks for me. I'm not responsible for the depravity that arises from democracy, just as I'm not responsible for the depravity that arises from authoritarianism. It's all the same thing.
Having said that, I could probably be convinced to follow a truly heroic and impressive person if one were to ever appear. Jesus seemed like a good fit, but the mediocre leaders running his local government killed him because he was a pain in their asses.
> I think we would diverge in that I think the western democracies have already crossed into the pseudo-democracy trap and are already tyrannies.
I disagree, but less strongly than I wish I did. You could be right. Even if you're wrong now, you could be right soon.
> People go along with this idea of democracy because they believe (read: they've been told) that the possibility of freedom and prosperity exists if they are simply able to convince enough of their unimpressive friends to vote hard enough for the correct team. It's absurd.
Agreed. There was a reason that the original American idea was for a strictly limited government. The current belief seems to be that freedom is getting the government to do what you want to "the others".
> My belief is simply that nobody else speaks for me. I'm not responsible for the depravity that arises from democracy, just as I'm not responsible for the depravity that arises from authoritarianism. It's all the same thing.
I agree or disagree, depending on the specifics of how you mean this. In both cases the depravity comes out of the selfishness in people; so far I agree. If you mean that democracy and authoritarianism are equally depraved, then no, I don't agree. (If you mean authoritarianism and "fake democracy" authoritarianism are equally depraved, then maybe I do agree.)
Re your last paragraph: You know, following Jesus is still an option today. (I mean, his goal then wasn't political power, but you sound like that fits you...)
As a member of one of the minorities whose rights campaigns Prosser cites as ruining his footie, I'll say, apropos nothing, that it's much easier to talk about these issues with detached neutrality when you & your friends are not subject to monotonically increasing levels of stochastic domestic terrorism.
We're all subject to injustice and can and absolutely find solidarity within that.
It's also true that injustice and danger is not evenly distributed, and it's shitty and dismissive to pretend that it is. Far right extremist violence against queer people is absolutely a thing and it has been increasing for several years now, for example. How many of your friends have been killed violently by extremists in the last two years? If it's zero you maybe should just stfu about the injustice we're all subject to, in this context.
Surround yourself with people that share whatever your culture or sense of being is. You will feel far less alone and down trodden.
My home society had shops during my life time that had recruitment signs that said things like "Catholics need not apply" or not long before that signs that said "No dogs, no Irish".
But we are just fighting among ourselves for scraps. We are lied to continually and our ire is constantly misdirected.
Since Roman times the world has been ruled by oligarchies of one form or another. Those are the people who would never give you or I the time of day. We are nothing but cattle, locked in our homes, mass medicate and marched off to the slaughter fields.
As a member of one of those minorities as well, I think that’s a lazy cop out and also in the long run bad for us.
It drove me nuts during the Trump era when non-Muslims acted like banning refugees from Muslim countries with high levels of terrorist activity was the same as discussing how to round up brown people into internment camps. You can’t piss on people’s leg and tell them it’s raining. Those were conversations that people in Muslim countries had also. Shouting down that debate won’t make the concerns go away, and will only lead to problems down the road.
Banning refugees from those countries by itself wasn't perceived that way.
Publicly promising that you're going to ban all Muslims from the US and then immediately afterwards banning travel from some predominately Muslim countries and telling your supporters that you fulfilled your promise was.
A lot of well meaning people are seriously damaging the country by injecting politics into spheres that the public broadly needs to perceive as “neutral” such as law and medicine. This is usually accompanied by efforts to reframe contentious policy debates as “non-political.” Which of course makes no sense because lots of things that aren’t political in the abstract quickly become political when it comes to people advancing specific remedies or ways of restructuring society.
That’s a good example of how neutral institutions reframe contentious policy proposals as if they are universal values that are beyond debate.
“Equity” and “diversity” sound like something “non-political” that everyone can get onboard with. But in practice those terms are used to champion expressly race conscious hiring and promotion. That’s not only political and debatable, it’s unpopular among the very minorities on whose behalf it is invoked: https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2019/05/08/america...
This happened with an open-source video game I wanted to contribute to, of all things...
I thought I'd found a welcoming community that was interested in building something cool, and I could learn some C# while contributing to something really unique and creative.
That turned out to be sort of right, but the senior maintainers decided that it's also cool to shove their politics down everyone else's throats and ban anyone who so much as sniffs at it.
They intentionally flag-wave their political stances in Discord to bait people into mentioning it, and if they don't like someone's thoughts they ban them and pat themselves on the back for ostensibly removing "toxicity" and "intolerance". When I asked them to stop doing that they tried to bait me into saying something they didn't like, and stated that their political views aren't political at all - more like natural law.
From my perspective, these people (regardless of political affiliation) act pathologically and crave the camaraderie and support of being part of an in-group, and enforce that in-group, because they probably feel generally insecure. They don't really understand the implications of their behavior, nor do they actually care about their supposed cause, they just want to feel in control and validated, and they found a venue for it.
To stop this pathological politicization you have to create an environment of security. That isn't going to happen any time soon, so I'm not sure what the point of any of this is - just avoid them and find/create communities that don't allow politics.
> To stop this pathological politicization you have to create an environment of security.
But in your example, the problem was the person in charge. If it's your community, then by all means, create the right environment. But if it's a situation like your example, then what? You, the random newcomer, can't really alter the environment very much. You can stay and accept it, or you can leave, but the environment is already problematic. Now what? How can you un-politicize such a community, when you aren't the leader?
> A lot of well meaning people are seriously damaging the country by injecting politics into spheres that the public broadly needs to perceive as “neutral” such as law and medicine. This is usually accompanied by efforts to reframe contentious policy debates as “non-political.” Which of course makes no sense because lots of things that aren’t political in the abstract quickly become political when it comes to people advancing specific remedies or ways of restructuring society.
And there are people who pretend that progressive changes to society are inherently political, and also imply/openly advocate that conservative keeping of status quo isn't. Just because status quo benefits them doesn't mean that keeping it, is rational non-political option.
Humans have an inherent status quo bias and will perceive changing the status quo differently than maintaining the status quo. “Infrastructure” institutions, such as law and medicine, which depend on broad public support and the perception of neutrality, thus cannot be seen as actively seeking to change the status quo. Of course, they must also not be seen as resisting changes to the status quo from non-infrastructure sectors of society. Put differently, stable democracy calls for a well policed distinction between sectors of society that lobby for change, and sectors of society that are expected to neutrally referee, or provide expert guidance, without being agents of change themselves.
Do you have in mind something like what happened with tobacco in the 60s, when the Surgeon General documented negative health effects publicly and extensively, but ultimately stopped short of recommending any action against it? In my experience, most people see the little label on cigarette packs as grossly inadequate.
Problem with maintaining status quo is that for example someones pay may be the same or can grow a little while economy grows around them, they end up having relatively less and they can afford less. So status quo may squeeze people dry, while they still have things they don't want to loose. And they will loose them maybe not today, but definitely tomorrow.
> When public firework displays take positions on controversial issues, they provoke partisan reactions, poisoning debate further and turning aggrieved groups away from public spaces.
Is support for Ukraine a controversial issue in the UK? In the US, support for Ukraine is pretty widespread.
Ukraine is widely supported vs Russia but I guess he’s saying that just because it’s popular doesn’t make the point morally correct in the context of what he’s saying.
The LGBTQ+ is currently controversial in the context of the erosion of women only spaces and rights in the face of certain pressure groups.
According to Ipsos (Oct '22), "6 in 10 support Britain’s response to the conflict" and "7 in 10 continue to support economic sanctions against Russia - but some evidence support could wane if there are further energy price rises"
> There should never have been a war, and there should have been a cease fire by now.
>Does that opinion make me anti-Ukraine?
Neither of those facts make you anti-Ukrainian. However, if you think the road to accomplishing that is to have Ukraine surrender, rather than Russian stop invading—that would make you anti-Ukrainian. I do note that you deliberately left out under whose terms a cease-fire should be signed, however.
One could develop mechanisms, that make the ability to compromise and negotiate outcomes, a requisite to holding offices, even after elections. This could for example happen, by the small minority parties (who are usually filtered out in most democracies) negotiating the voices they represent to another party that will enter representation, in return for representing a certain view-point.
This would prevent votes from being lost and would make the ability to compromise and "secure" these votes more important then populist behavior.
Sorry, but this article is 90% word salad and the other 10% seems to be saying things that most people would disagree with but in the most indirect language possible.
I'm not against using precise words when they are helpful. But sometimes I see people using complex language to obfuscate the message instead of clarifying it, and as far as I can tell that's what is happening here.
When the meaning of an essay is confused and unclear, either a) I'm just not smart enough to understand it or b) the author is a poor communicator. B is much, much more common.
> Some retort that everything is political, but I do not see how activities such as birdwatching, sex and optometry are political in a meaningful sense. If one insists on the contrary, we return to similarities with totalitarianism.
But the author isn't talking about incidents in birdwatching or optometry—they're talking about large, expensive national celebrations. It may be hard to find the politics in birdwatching, but it's not hard to find the politics in holiday firework displays.
(And if the author can't see how sex can be political, I'm not sure they read their list of controversial incidents, or have paid attention to modern politics)
This first got really bad during the Trump presidency. One could be reading the least "political" article imaginable, and suddenly see something condemnatory about Trump that smugly assumes that everyone reading surely agrees. Nowhere was safe: Film reviews, book reviews, articles about cooking, travelogues, minor human-interest stories, you name it.
During the aforementioned Trump years I thought at times about creating /r/ihatetrumpbut, a subreddit for collecting articles/posts/comments in which the author felt the need to declaim "I hate Trump, but [something Trump/US government did may not necessarily be 100% fascist/evil/a bad idea]". Basically, a Lord's Prayer to preemptively avoid the devil's accusation of maybe possibly being a (shudder) Trump sympathizer in some small way. Hey, maybe I'll get more motivation to pull the trigger in November 2024!
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[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 103 ms ] threadExactly. We tend to conflate "left" with "liberalism" because historically in the West these two things have gone together. However, they don't have to, and in recent years they have decoupled. The left (at least in the U.S.) has became increasingly illiberal to the point where they now openly argue for censorship (e.g. anything not of or by the worldview is labelled as "dangerous misinformation"). The right does this too, but they don't seem to be as good as the left at couching it in altruistic language, so it tends not to gain as much traction.
Liberalism is no more. It was replaced by neoliberalism. Under it you have as many liberties as you can afford to buy and/or defend.
Lagniappe: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earl_Warren#Election
I don't think this would be a panacea, but it would definitely help things quite a bit. The largest voting block in the U.S. isn't Democrats or Republicans, but voters that have chosen not to be affiliated with either party.
I've heard a lot of people say this, I've never seen any good data on this. Every analysis I've seen that compared how moderate and more extreme candidates did compared to the president consistently showed the moderates did better than the extreme. I'd be curious to see your analysis/commentary that shows the opposite.
[1] https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/just-how-many-swing-vot...
Just because a person consistently votes for one party does not mean they like that party or agree with its platform. In many cases, they consistently vote for the same party because they see it as the least worst option.
It’s gross.
That fact supports the "no one" generalization.
Still, I’m not sure I would consider everyone who voted for Trump as part of the “Trumpy right” any more than I would consider myself part of the radical left just because I voted for Biden.
Extremists, by contrast, tend to be absolutely certain of whatever opinion they happen to hold at the moment and nothing can shake them of that. There has been a lot written about the alleged differences between the conservative mind and the liberal mind, but I think that completely misses it. Extremists, even those on opposite ends of the political spectrum, have a lot more in common with one another than they do with moderates and other normal people.
You're also trying to frame it so that anyone who does consistently choose a side is inherently an extremist, and that these two extremes are "liberal" and "conservative."
The idea that political extremes are more similar to each other than to a moderate position is called horseshoe theory, and it has very little support among political scientists. It doesn't even apply in this case because, again, the two "sides" in american politics aren't even opposite extremes. In most peer countries the democrats would be solidly center-right and the republicans are off to their right. On the far left is a gaping hole where communists, anarcho-syndicalists, revolutionary socialists etc would be.
In practice people who call themselves moderate are usually consistently aligned with one of the two major parties, they just don't want to incur the social costs of that alignment in at least one context. Or and relatedly, they want to present themselves as being morally and intellectually superior to both, too "enlightened" to be duped into taking sides like inferior thinkers.
There's nothing wrong with understanding yourself and your world well enough to pick a side on an issue, or find allies for it. Again the self-questioning you describe isn't unique to centrists nor the reason for their centrism.
My positions are extreme, as are those of many of my friends and associates. We doubt too. Yet we find that we must act anyway, and risk being wrong or foolish.
Political parties have no external goals; they are self-interested and use the people within them to achieve that goal by offering carrots (which result in fulfilling the external values of normal people) or sticks (which punish defection or opposing party members).
Progressivism and conservativism are not opposed on a single axis. Political parties lay claim to and label particular issues which benefits both major U.S. parties in the long run by giving them each a grab bag of issues for a particular set of voters. This is why, for example, guns and wombs have opposite signs in the personal-freedom axis for both parties. As long as the shared belief exists that an issue "belongs" to "one side" it remains useful as a political tool but nearly worthless as a policy tool for normal people.
Finally, it is not the extremes leading this charge. The core DNC and RNC execute this strategy because they are locked in a struggle for survival. The DNC and RNC have successfully used the threat of the least-aligned party to trap moderate and progressive voters within the party structures. Non-partisan primaries and ranked-choice/runoff voting are starting to show moderate success (AK and NH) at changing the game theory to favor politicians who compromise on multivariate issues versus enforcing party platforms.
Once you accept that, the absurdity of politicians claiming to speak for large swaths of your country is just comical.
Downvoters are free to explain why unimpressive people have any say over how you think or how you should behave.
That's an interesting mindset, in theory, but not very grounded in reality. Being a democracy is no guarantee of freedom, but it has let more people live in more freedom than any other system. (The great danger is that tyrants convert democracies into pseudo-democracies, keeping the trappings while removing the freedom, and that makes democracies look bad to those who are unaware.)
Seriously, if you've got a system that leads to more freedom, put in into practice somewhere, and show us how it works in the real world. If you can consistently deliver for several decades, we might start to listen.
> Once you accept that, the absurdity of politicians claiming to speak for large swaths of your country is just comical.
Politicians speak, not for the population, not even for everyone who voted for them, but for everyone who agrees with the politician on that particular point.
> Downvoters are free to explain why unimpressive people have any say over how you think or how you should behave.
I'm having a hard time understanding what you're trying to say here. But it sounds like you're saying that, in a democracy, "unimpressive people" have a say because they get to vote. Well, I don't know anybody who lets voters decide how they think. How they behave? Well, votes lead to laws, so, yeah. But in a non-democracy, someone was still going to be making the laws, and almost certainly that would be someone who is not you. So it seems to me that you're always going to have other people having a say over how you should behave. (And, in a non-democracy, they can be a lot more serious having say over how you think, too.)
The phrase "unimpressive people" I find a bit disturbing. It sounds like you're looking down on them, that there's some contempt there. Frankly, that does not make your position more persuasive.
People go along with this idea of democracy because they believe (read: they've been told) that the possibility of freedom and prosperity exists if they are simply able to convince enough of their unimpressive friends to vote hard enough for the correct team. It's absurd.
My belief is simply that nobody else speaks for me. I'm not responsible for the depravity that arises from democracy, just as I'm not responsible for the depravity that arises from authoritarianism. It's all the same thing.
Having said that, I could probably be convinced to follow a truly heroic and impressive person if one were to ever appear. Jesus seemed like a good fit, but the mediocre leaders running his local government killed him because he was a pain in their asses.
I disagree, but less strongly than I wish I did. You could be right. Even if you're wrong now, you could be right soon.
> People go along with this idea of democracy because they believe (read: they've been told) that the possibility of freedom and prosperity exists if they are simply able to convince enough of their unimpressive friends to vote hard enough for the correct team. It's absurd.
Agreed. There was a reason that the original American idea was for a strictly limited government. The current belief seems to be that freedom is getting the government to do what you want to "the others".
> My belief is simply that nobody else speaks for me. I'm not responsible for the depravity that arises from democracy, just as I'm not responsible for the depravity that arises from authoritarianism. It's all the same thing.
I agree or disagree, depending on the specifics of how you mean this. In both cases the depravity comes out of the selfishness in people; so far I agree. If you mean that democracy and authoritarianism are equally depraved, then no, I don't agree. (If you mean authoritarianism and "fake democracy" authoritarianism are equally depraved, then maybe I do agree.)
Re your last paragraph: You know, following Jesus is still an option today. (I mean, his goal then wasn't political power, but you sound like that fits you...)
We are all dealing with crap, we are all at the bottom of the pile getting the dregs from trickle down economic theory.
It's not about one tiny fringe group, when we fight only for ever more specific fringe groups we ignore the injustice we are all subjected to.
It's also true that injustice and danger is not evenly distributed, and it's shitty and dismissive to pretend that it is. Far right extremist violence against queer people is absolutely a thing and it has been increasing for several years now, for example. How many of your friends have been killed violently by extremists in the last two years? If it's zero you maybe should just stfu about the injustice we're all subject to, in this context.
I don't think I understand—which friends are you suggesting that 1attice get rid of?
My home society had shops during my life time that had recruitment signs that said things like "Catholics need not apply" or not long before that signs that said "No dogs, no Irish".
But we are just fighting among ourselves for scraps. We are lied to continually and our ire is constantly misdirected.
Since Roman times the world has been ruled by oligarchies of one form or another. Those are the people who would never give you or I the time of day. We are nothing but cattle, locked in our homes, mass medicate and marched off to the slaughter fields.
It drove me nuts during the Trump era when non-Muslims acted like banning refugees from Muslim countries with high levels of terrorist activity was the same as discussing how to round up brown people into internment camps. You can’t piss on people’s leg and tell them it’s raining. Those were conversations that people in Muslim countries had also. Shouting down that debate won’t make the concerns go away, and will only lead to problems down the road.
Publicly promising that you're going to ban all Muslims from the US and then immediately afterwards banning travel from some predominately Muslim countries and telling your supporters that you fulfilled your promise was.
It doesn't appear that this is a fixable problem now.
“Equity” and “diversity” sound like something “non-political” that everyone can get onboard with. But in practice those terms are used to champion expressly race conscious hiring and promotion. That’s not only political and debatable, it’s unpopular among the very minorities on whose behalf it is invoked: https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2019/05/08/america...
I thought I'd found a welcoming community that was interested in building something cool, and I could learn some C# while contributing to something really unique and creative.
That turned out to be sort of right, but the senior maintainers decided that it's also cool to shove their politics down everyone else's throats and ban anyone who so much as sniffs at it.
They intentionally flag-wave their political stances in Discord to bait people into mentioning it, and if they don't like someone's thoughts they ban them and pat themselves on the back for ostensibly removing "toxicity" and "intolerance". When I asked them to stop doing that they tried to bait me into saying something they didn't like, and stated that their political views aren't political at all - more like natural law.
From my perspective, these people (regardless of political affiliation) act pathologically and crave the camaraderie and support of being part of an in-group, and enforce that in-group, because they probably feel generally insecure. They don't really understand the implications of their behavior, nor do they actually care about their supposed cause, they just want to feel in control and validated, and they found a venue for it.
To stop this pathological politicization you have to create an environment of security. That isn't going to happen any time soon, so I'm not sure what the point of any of this is - just avoid them and find/create communities that don't allow politics.
But in your example, the problem was the person in charge. If it's your community, then by all means, create the right environment. But if it's a situation like your example, then what? You, the random newcomer, can't really alter the environment very much. You can stay and accept it, or you can leave, but the environment is already problematic. Now what? How can you un-politicize such a community, when you aren't the leader?
And there are people who pretend that progressive changes to society are inherently political, and also imply/openly advocate that conservative keeping of status quo isn't. Just because status quo benefits them doesn't mean that keeping it, is rational non-political option.
Is support for Ukraine a controversial issue in the UK? In the US, support for Ukraine is pretty widespread.
https://www.ipsos.com/en-uk/public-continues-support-britain...
Personally I wouldn't say support for Ukraine is controversial here in the UK.
I wonder why the author singled it out an example of a controversial issue, then.
Does that opinion make me anti-Ukraine?
Russia should have never invaded I agree, but it's up to Russia to leave now.
No one can stop Russias war but Russia.
Ceasefires also just help Russia so what you should really want is a quick decisive defeat of Russia by Ukraine.
>Does that opinion make me anti-Ukraine?
Neither of those facts make you anti-Ukrainian. However, if you think the road to accomplishing that is to have Ukraine surrender, rather than Russian stop invading—that would make you anti-Ukrainian. I do note that you deliberately left out under whose terms a cease-fire should be signed, however.
The editorialized title ("the politicization of society is damaging liberal democracy") frankly doesn't do the article any justice.
This would prevent votes from being lost and would make the ability to compromise and "secure" these votes more important then populist behavior.
I'm not against using precise words when they are helpful. But sometimes I see people using complex language to obfuscate the message instead of clarifying it, and as far as I can tell that's what is happening here.
When the meaning of an essay is confused and unclear, either a) I'm just not smart enough to understand it or b) the author is a poor communicator. B is much, much more common.
But the author isn't talking about incidents in birdwatching or optometry—they're talking about large, expensive national celebrations. It may be hard to find the politics in birdwatching, but it's not hard to find the politics in holiday firework displays.
(And if the author can't see how sex can be political, I'm not sure they read their list of controversial incidents, or have paid attention to modern politics)
During the aforementioned Trump years I thought at times about creating /r/ihatetrumpbut, a subreddit for collecting articles/posts/comments in which the author felt the need to declaim "I hate Trump, but [something Trump/US government did may not necessarily be 100% fascist/evil/a bad idea]". Basically, a Lord's Prayer to preemptively avoid the devil's accusation of maybe possibly being a (shudder) Trump sympathizer in some small way. Hey, maybe I'll get more motivation to pull the trigger in November 2024!