Comment by rhapsodic | Hacker News Reader

Comment by rhapsodic | Hacker News Reader

It has been decades since the political left in the US has relied to any degree on reason and logic to bring people around to their way of thinking. It's basically been name-calling (that's RACIST!), public shaming via internet rage mobs, mockery, and now, physical violence to oppress people with whom they disagree.

And I think this has made them intellectually soft. Many of the younger ones don't know how to argue for their views intellectually because they've never had to.

A now-deceased friend who was an avowed socialist, who came of age in the late fifties/early sixties, absolutely loved to argue politics and ethics with avowed free-market capitalists like myself, and I enjoyed arguing with him. But I've found it impossible to have any discussions with any element of intellectual rigor with any of the 20- or 30-something Bernie Sanders supporters I'm acquainted with. Within minutes, they fall back on character attacks -- "that's racist!", "you're greedy and selfish!", etc.

And it looks like it will get a lot worse before it gets any better.

I find the opposite effect - liberals have thought much more deeply about their views, and conservatives often just parrot shallow talking points.

For example, a group of my progressive acquaintances has been debating in depth on the New Yorker's reporting over past few months, including especially the long piece on Hillary the week before the election. They have framed that discussion around progressive views on fairness of opportunity and fairness of wealth distribution.

The leading political progressives have the same depth of argument - listen to Obama's speeches, the speeches at the DNC, Bernie and Robert Reich, Kander on voting, Stiglitz.

In contrast the right is intellectually bankrupt. Michael Anton's articles motivated the right for the past few months and the articles are poorly argued flimflam. Heritage's chief economist is disingenuous and misguided. The chief GOP wonk in Congress, Paul Ryan, is a mediocrity who barely understands healthcare never mind economics. This is what happens when a party goes to war on expertise[1] (because expertise of course threatens their donors' ability to make huge amounts of money[2]).

1. https://global.oup.com/academic/product/the-death-of-experti...

2. http://www.vox.com/science-and-health/2017/3/10/14871696/sco...

Maybe (just a guess) it depends on where you are? I suspect if you live in a city which leans left, all the people who go with the flow and don't think too much about their views end up being on the left because that's everyone else. The people going against the grain at least have thought more deeply of their views.

And if you live in a majority red community, people who have left views will be the ones who have thought long and deep about their views.

The gop is soft, but arguing with the alt right is scary. They are extremely good debaters, very antifragile.

They are terrible debaters...what are you talking about? They literally use the word "cuck" that shows the level of their thinking...

They've certainly taken rhetoric classes. They just have the slight problem that they have near-zero facts on their side. Of course, they're decent enough rhetoricians to shift fully into meta-level philosophical sophistry when that gets brought up, but that's... not helpful against those of us who recognize sophistry as such.

Some might distinguish between leftists, and liberals.

The flipside of this is the reactionary multitudes who spout 'sjw' or 'virtue signalling' or 'socialist' when someone on the left questions the status-quo.

Its a problem on both sides.

>The flipside of this is the reactionary multitudes who spout 'sjw' or 'virtue signalling' or 'socialist' when someone on the left questions the status-quo.

A fair point, however, I think the only way to reverse the trend on the left is for the right to employ the left's own tactics back against them, in spades. The right needs to destroy the lives and careers of, for example, some university presidents who allow this sort of brutish behavior to go unpunished, sometimes even making excuses for it. Or go to war against companies who cave to the SJW demands. It has to be mutually-assured destruction, not one-sided.

I think you're painting the left as bad and the right as good. There are pretty clearly bad actors on each side, and each side is a broad church. I think its very apt that you use MAD as an analogy, because I'm analogously all for nuclear non-proliferation.

Yes, purges will help a lot, and definitely aren't exactly what a strawman Evil Reactionary Dictator would do /s.

So the alt right evolved because the gop was too weak. Pretty interesting. I've never thought of it like an arms race before.

It's not a "problem on both sides" when one side controls every branch of federal, state, and local government across the vast majority of the country, while the other can't seem to win an election against Donald Trump. Strength is not equivalent to weakness.

Totally agree with your sentiment but my initial point was made against the argument that the left was intellectually weak because some of its members shout down the opposition.

At this point, I would describe mainstream conservatism as intellectually weak, and mainstream liberalism as nonexistent. Conservatism has been tried, and the flaws of its current incarnation have shown up: socioeconomic inequality has reached and surpassed crisis levels. There is mass homelessness while houses lie empty, mass preventable sickness, mass socially induced drug-addiction, blue-collar underemployment while infrastructure rots, horrifying corruption and arrogance in government, and moral hazard and fraud in the financial sector. All of this, while we also live in a time of unprecedentedly low crime and social peace, because people mostly don't want to blindly lash out at a fellow citizen who did not cause their problems.

The time has come to put conservatism on the back-burner until we later encounter some problem against which it can serve as an effective tool.

And yet the opposition can barely muster the chutzpah to defend the Affordable Care Act, much less to create a 21st-century New Deal!

Worse, what are people focusing on? College students protesting! Can someone explain to me how stricter behavioral policing of college students is going to rebuild rusted bridges or install high-speed passenger rail? Who gets health-insurance out of telling college students to shut up?

Meanwhile, the President of the United States tweets us all "letters from grandpa" material he saw on blogs, while his party plots to realize an ideological utopia that would actually make us all worse-off. Why? Because college students! And fake protesters paid by George Soros!

This is insane. We have real issues that can't be solved with a hashtag, a tweet, or a cardboard sign.

> College students protesting!

Are you talking about Berkeley? I'm not sure a lot of those were college students. Nor were they protesting...

I was talking about Middlebury. And Hampshire. And Oberlin.

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