I wonder if the progressive left realize that the inevitable reaction to sacrificing all reason at the altar of progress, is a rise to the right
PS. Sorry for the poor sentencing structure, not as fluid in English as I used to be
PS. Sorry for the poor sentencing structure, not as fluid in English as I used to be
Labor protections are a major plank of the left and should Damore win it would further help enshrine those labor protections in tort and give the left firepower to say "Look, these laws protect conservatives too! Just look at Damore!" The right, historically, prefers an environment where employment is fully at-will and at the discretion of the employer: this lawsuit undercuts that view. I think some see this as the left being "hoisted by one's own petard" but it's not like liberals are going to turn around and abandon labor rights as a reaction to Damore... quite the contrary.
I see Damore's lawsuit as a byproduct of the diminished political conviction of the contemporary right. As a self-described classical liberal, Damore should, in theory, treat his employment as at-will as that is consistent with his stated political ideology. This is in large part why the left continues to win, and why the right acts more and more like the left: When faced with adversity, the right adopts left-wing views to score modest Pyrrhic victories, thus normalizing left-wing views.
The one area where the right isn't doing this stuff is abortion: an area where the right seems to be gaining ground. Women's access to abortion has been declining (unfortunately, IMO) in many states.
I wish Mr. Damore the best of luck in his endeavours. Employment discrimination lawsuits are really difficult to win in court, even if it seems "open and shut" to a layperson. Complicating matters, it looks like Google's lawyers are raring for a fight... many businesses just settle even if they feel they'll be cleared in court.
That's hard to see in the U.S., with the Republican's shift far to the right and overwhelming political domination (control of the White House, both houses of Congress, the Supreme Court, and in over 30 state both houses and the Governor's mansion), and with neo-fascism and white nationalism, once way beyond the pale, now trendy.
Also it's hard to see in Europe, where neo-fascist and white nationalist parties actually have seats in national legislatures, even run some executive branches, and include the Foreign Minister of the UK.
In the US things are more complicated: we have gerrymandering which keeps the house Republican despite Democratic candidates winning more votes overall. We have governors that were largely propped up with corporate money. The supreme court is large a side-effect of those structural issues (Obama would have picked a liberal judge of the dems had the house in '16)
Besides you don't think there are workplaces where it's a blackmark to be a progressive? Why don't you come over to some finance jobs?
You are putting quite a lot of meaning into my sentence that isn't there, projecting is never useful in a discussion.
Okay.
>I said that currently the progressive-left is sacrificing reason and that it will lead to a rise to the right.
No they're not. How is it that you think the 'progressive-left' is sacrificing reason?
To broaden the discussion a bit, I think that generally there is a trend of the 'progressive-left' censoring things they don't agree on.
But, reason supports freedom of speech and of ideas. It does not support censorship. It supports even the free expression of even the most odious ideas, so that they may be addressed rationally. The only exceptions to this are very few and involve our human weakness of certain speech in close physical quarters or when packed into physically close groups being able to rise above speech to reach the level of overriding the rational faculties of the listener. That's where things like not shouting 'fire' in a crowded theater lie. It results in a biological disabling of the forebrain when immediate physical mortal danger is at play. That can never, ever, ever happen when a statement is read. Not from a poster, paper, book, pamphlet, and certainly not from a screen.
There is an interesting argument to be made, though it is not really being made by any significant number that I've encountered, that the psychological manipulations of social media - the intentional things they do to optimize driving people to more extreme opinions and inundating people with false information in order to maximize engagement at the expense of absolutely anything else - might need to be treated differently, but even there the issue is not the speech. It's the manipulative analysis and other practices.
I don't even think the real primary motivation of most censorship of repugnant ideas online is motivated by a belief like "these ideas are wrong and we must not expose people to them, else they may adopt them". I think the mindset is more along the lines of "these ideas are wrong... I feel. But I cannot actually justify. And I fear if someone challenges me to dispute them, I will fail."
Reason also supports an absolute hard line distinction between the real and the fictional, a line which is increasingly ignored, though I chalk that up to factors that mostly go across political divisions. Both sides attribute the negative traits and consequences of real examples of things to images of those things without a second thought, conflating imagery and reality to a degree that it really makes me wonder if they could even explain what the difference is... or if they believe there is any difference.
Where do you want to start?
- They actively contributed to an increased homicide rate and made neighborhoods more dangerous for minorities by pushing a false anti-police narrative, engaged in anti-police protests, sentiment, and actions. Their actions resulted in a pullback in policing in dangerous neighborhoods and massive spikes in crime rates. This is a view shared by many minorities, who wish for the police to return to their neighborhoods, so that they can feel safe. Source? How about the right-wing rag NPR:
https://www.npr.org/2017/12/31/574824963/baltimore-residents...
- They actively push pseudo-social science into fields where rigor, exactness, and soundness is most important, such as engineering, where errors can have catastrophic consequences:
http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/19378629.2017.14...
- They viciously attack on ideological grounds any attempts at objective assessment when the statistics do not fit their narrative. Examples? There are hundreds, but how about professor David Gillhorn at the University of Birmingham, who says math serves "white interests" and:
“frequently encode racist perspectives beneath the facade of supposed quantitative objectivity.”
- They have, particularly on college campuses, collectively lost their minds. Please see the Evergreen State College incident, along with dozens of others.
- Most of their social science experiments are absolute junk:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis
Do you want me to keep going?
Yes, I'd really like to gather all this up and look into it.
Do they believe in climate change? Do they vote for Trump? Do they think universal health coverage is more efficient? etc. What kind of concrete things do they support/oppose?
The word "Liberal" and it's various derivations are all over the place generally though for weird historical reasons.
With the little letters, the split between conservative and liberal normally comes down to how the "rules of the game" are seen. Little-c conservatives are willing to cheat and change the rules of the game and do whatever necessary for their tribe to win. Little-l liberals are not willing to cheat, and see the 'rules' being fair as more important than whether their tribe rules supreme or not. There's lots of research supporting a notion that this sort of divide is very real in people, potentially even biological in origin (though I do not personally believe we are even capable of determining something like that yet), and active successful exploitation of the idea by advertisers, politicians, and others seeking to influence the public for one reason or another.
I've got a degree in political science, and I would not agree that it captures the historical or current import of those terms well either in terms of overt ideology or underlying motivation. Both conservatives and liberals have (classically and currently) seen their views as vindicating the proper view of individual rights, advancing the best interest of the common society, and advancing the best interest of the individual; of course, liberals and conservatives have very different views of what individuals rights are and what the good of the individual and community consist in; the liberal view favors flatter, broader distribution of political and economic power, and detachment of power from inherited station; the conservative view favors a narrower concentration of power in those viewed as best equipped to apply it, and views inherited traits as often central to that qualification.
Also, this idea that finance is a cult of old stodgy conservatives is hilarious and patently untrue. Finance folks are usually comprised of wealthy and well-educated people living in major urban areas, particularly NYC, inline with the demographics of coastal liberals. Most are some form of libertarian, and generally progressive on most social issues. Blankfein (CEO of Goldman Sachs) is a registered Democrat, Jamie Dimon (CEO of JP Morgan) is a democrat, James Gorman (CEO of Morgan Stanley) regulrarly gives money to democrats and contributed to Hillary Clinton (1), as does Michael Corbat, the CEO of Citigroup.
(1) https://www.campaignmoney.com/political/contributions/james-...
(2)https://www.campaignmoney.com/political/contributions/michae...
Former Goldman banker here, I'm calling bullshit on this point. In mainstream Wall Street you can be super left-wing and do just fine with office politics.
Sure, "some finance jobs" are at small funds run by cranky old rightwing baby boomers who get their news from Drudge, but it's a real stretch to say that having strong leftwing views would be a meaningful impediment to a great career on the Street. I can think of many specific examples both at GS and elsewhere.
The team I was working with during Brexit was very pro-remain, for instance, and that tends to be largely (but not exclusively) a position more popular on the left.
This is interesting to me as one of the underdiscussed parts of the Google-Damore memo is the part where he says "yes, the right-wing are stupid and irrational about climate change, which is obviously true, but the left-wing are also anti-science about this stuff". He supported this both-sides-are-the-same type argument (at least in an earlier version, I noticed the link seems to not be there in all of them) with a link to a piece by John Tierny, in which half the word count was dedicated to supporting climate change denial, and building a case that the left-wing was stupid for thinking it occured.
So even within the (broadly defined) right, you have disagreements on basic facts and reason.