62% of Americans Say They Have Political Views They’re Afraid to Share
cato.org
cato.org
>Self‐ censorship is widespread across demographic groups as well. Nearly two‐ thirds of Latino Americans (65%) and White Americans (64%) and nearly half of African Americans (49%) have political views they are afraid to share. Majorities of men (65%) and women (59%), people with incomes over $100,000 (60%) and people with incomes less than $20,000 (58%), people under 35 (55%) and over 65 (66%), religious (71%) and non‐ religious (56%) all agree that the political climate prevents them from expressing their true beliefs.
Liberals are frequently unaware of their blind spots (but if you take care, they can be corrected). And then there's a swath of conservatives that don't think they're racist. If you should suggest it, it's too easy for them to dig themselves deeper into a hole.
All too frequently, I'll wish I stuck to non-political / comfortable topics – and remembered that political-correctness is there to protect me as an individual, so I can live in my bubble and get on with the day, even though PC-culture might be bad policy for society.
You are aware that the way you phrase it makes it sound like we all are?
I've recognized a few times that I say things in a way that makes people mad even though my original point was fine.
Ding ding ding! Yes. We all are. Conservatives and liberals.
Everyone is programmed with racist attitudes from the culture-at-large. Many or most never question these unconscious attitudes.
In my experience, folks who have been actively working on racism and social justice for years if not decades are the first to admit that they too carry racist, largely unconscious, beliefs and attitudes.
A lot of people don't seem to grok unconscious bias.
Genuine question, does this include black people?
Racism, also called racialism, the belief that humans may be divided into separate and exclusive biological entities called “races”; that there is a causal link between inherited physical traits and traits of personality, intellect, morality, and other cultural and behavioral features; and that some races are innately superior to others.
Everyone is born with original sin from being born from Adam and Eve. Many or most never question this concupiscence.
In my experience, folks who have been actively working on heresy and inquisitions for years if not decades are the first to admit that they too carry rebellious, largely hereditary, inclinations towards sin.
A lot of people don't seem to grok original sin.
As a christian I feel this is a major thing: the realization that you can be perfectly innocent in that you:
- didn't do anything that any law can punish you for
- wasn't aware of doing anything wrong as you were doing it
yet you are far from perfect and when you minutes/days/years later you realize despite your best intentions you still bragged/discriminated/were unfair/went too far/didn't go far enough/etc and you'll be sorry and wish you could do better.
To keep this interesting to everyone in this audience I think I'll avoid going further into the topic unless anyone asks but for anyone particularly interested I'll say that I think this is what Paul grapples with in in Romans 7.
https://activechristianity.org/who-will-deliver-me-from-this...
I started by reading the top but it actually covers a lot of the topics in this thread from a christian perspective.
We can't blame it all on culture when even six month old babies exhibit racism: https://www.utoronto.ca/news/racial-bias-may-begin-babies-si...
Why? Modern society is built on things that go against human nature: The national state, living till we're 80, flying, not killing people, monogamy.
I think you are making the classical moral mistake of assuming the natural state of things is the best state of things.
But I do appreciate that you called it out.
I grapple with being racist all the time. The way I climbed up was through a lot of institutions that racist. I grapple with my complicated place in the world, when I talk to my shrink, and not infrequently, because there's a lot of non-PC / uncomfortable things about it all too. I can't get away from both sides of the racism, because of the genes I was born with, so I have to talk about it with someone. If people don't like the whole politically-correct thing, well, this is it too.
My and I guess many others point in this thread is that a lot of people are running around alienating a lot of people who would be ashamed to even catch themselves thinking a racist thought by insisting they are "racist" since they might have implicit biases.
When someone points out something is racist, is your response to explain why it isn't or change?
You do realize you are taking a gigantic group of people and classifying them all as having some property without knowing the person at all, sounds discriminatory.
And realize you used the word conservative, not Republican, so don't base it on policy decisions that people support as we all known Republicans do not represent conservative policies in most cases you are concerned about. These are two different things which are not inclusive or mutually exclusive.
We've essentially split into two Americas, one red and one blue. The people in the middle (which I generally identify with) are left in the cold...and not only are left in the cold but are attacked by both sides for not abiding by the doctrine. Honestly, the Left is the worst at this. They will actively try to ruin your life over wrongthink. I am much more likely to share a controversial opinion with someone on the Right than on the Left. But it's both sides, a local race here has a Republican attacking another Republican...for endorsing Romney in 2012. It's like I'm living in a bizarro world.
Horseshoe theory is real.
Separately, not opposing the status quo is more like accepting it than supporting it, and these are all different.
Your lack of nuance rather proves the point of the great grandparent post.
> You could also be apolitical because you find all available options to be unacceptable
Is this apolitical, or is it having a politics that is not well represented? It seems more like the latter to me.
Being apolitical is implying that you think that it's good enough as it is to not care.
I think being apolitical is more about having an objective view and judging opinions based on merit rather than the political spectrum they originated from. Could also mean you're either are against all political views, or have none, but this last one seems less likely to happen in practice. People tend to have an opinion, more or less informed or objective as it may be.
Exactly. Anybody who earnestly tries to be informed will realize that there are limits to what they know and subjects for which they are not [yet] informed. There needs to be room for people to say "I'm not informed on that issue, so I don't have an opinion."
Their response was "I get paid per signature, will you sign it so I can make more money?"
My response, "That's an even worse reason, are you telling me someone buying this prop its way into the ballot?" He left at this point.
It is completely reasonable for someone to say they don't like the status quo but also are uncertain about whether a policy improves on the status quo due to their limited knowledge. If that isn't being apolitical we may as well strike the word from the dictionary. It is technically a political stance, but it is not forceful enough to be called support of anything.
I should add, this goes in both directions and I see it from both sides of the political spectrum. I consider myself an independent. I try to judge all issues individually and fall into different camps depending on what we're talking about, but political dialogue has become so toxic that I've gotten to the point where I just cast my vote and move on.
If you think you hold no political opinion this is usually a sign that you can afford to do so. Just like my grandfather who fought in the Wehrmacht and said afterwards that he wasn't convinced, he just went the easy way and didn't question his orders. Was that apolitical? I don't think so — it was more an excuse he told himself to avoid responsibility for what he helped create.
Sorry, but sometimes inaction is political, because it means you are willing to give the controls to the next person who grabs it as long as you don't think you will end up worse off. "I don't care what happens to anyone but me", may sound apolitical, but it really isn't.
Interestingly, both meanings are in the dictionary[1] and the argument that there is just one is either coming from ignorance or bad faith. The GP's "being apolitical just means you support the status quo" definitely looks like a troll. It uses "support" as "endure" (an unusual meaning in such a context) but implies "support" as "promote".
Back when I studied ethics we were talking about the famous trolly problem. The professor proposed multiple scenarios and after each asked the auditorium who would act and who wouldn't. I can vividly remember three points:
1. Even seemingly clear cut ethical questions weren't clear cut at all. Rarely as much as 80:20 more often 60:40
2. Doing nothing always gets a perk over doing smomething. If you do something you might have done the wrong thing and feel silly for it - if you do nothing it is easier to brush off.
3. When the professor rephrased a scenario in such a way that you had to take basically the same decision, but your role was more direct (instead of pulling a lever to sacrifice one person, you'd have to push them in front of the trolly) nearly nobody would do so.
These differences in perception of indirect and direct effect is what we use to excuse ourselves in cases where our inaction would have saved lives ("I could have easily pulled the lever and saved four lives" VS "I couldn't have pushed that person in front of the trolly, even if it would have saved lives").
Similarily my grandfather's generation would have said: "There was nothing I could have done to stop it anyways" - with the unspoken part beeing "without taking a personal burden". Note that we live in one of the few areas where people were hiding in the mountains to resist the Nazis and these were partely people he personally knew. So he knew one could do something, he just either didn't dare, chose to (conveniently for him) not think about it, or only felt sorry in hindsight.
As another data point: At least where I grew up not helping someone in need (e.g. of first aid) is a felony, as long as the circumstances allowed you to help. Not sure how this is in the US tho
Back to the trolley problem and the thesis of everything being a subject of politics as in politics as "the principles relating to or inherent in a sphere or activity, especially when concerned with power and status." and "a particular set of political beliefs or principles".
Is a rich aristocrat on the court of the french king who puts sticks down his throat so he can vomit and eat on while the poor starve at the gates apolitical? This aristocrat is completely minding his own business, might even be a very nice soul who never hurt a fly.
In my eyes there is rarely any way to act apolitical. Even if you exile yourself in the desert that would be a choice that e.g. influences your family. This influence on your surrounding world is what makes things political, because we constantly decide how to interact with the society around us. And it doesn't matter if you hold strong political opinions or are oblivious to everything, what you do is still a part of politics (e.g. by signaling others what is commonly accepted behavior and which your (polical) values are. Do you pull the lever and kill the man or do you let the five other people die? What if they are kids? What if they are old people? What if they are black?
Decisions like these are not arbitrary, they show us fundamental truths of how we think and work in relation to our surroundings, and this is – in my book – political.
Indeed. The premise of the problem is that you believe that a certain action will cause a certain effect and the actual effects of your actions do not matter as it's an ethical and not mechanical, medical or engineering problem.
>In my eyes there is rarely any way to act apolitical.
It is understood. I just wanted to make you aware that in some other people eyes it's bonkers.
And there were all kinds of ignorant kids, grew up in podunk poor towns, but still had an opinion about the civil and the uncivil. They were certainly political. And they volunteered to fight fascism and quite a lot of them died for it. Now, fascism is just name calling. It's not a real thing that exists, or could exist. It's just politics, which is also unimportant and mostly make believe. It's something that his site considers anti-intellectual.
So when people intentionally refuse to think and wilfully run from fundamental truth, the situation is pretty dire. Apolitical is indistinguishable from apathy. Perhaps some part of it's cognitive dissonance, that at least suggests there's an awareness of a conflict that matters enough to ignore because it's more comfortable.
Somebody needs to tell me what voting is supposed to be about, then.
Politics is about applying collective power from an entity funded by taxpayers. There is nothing political about the decision of whether or not to assist an elderly woman who is lost, or volunteer to coach a youth basketball team, or you know, just do decent things to make the world a better place that doesn't require the application of the collective power of our government institutions.
It reminds me of what happens to the numbers if we allow for 2 + 2 = 5 to be true. Effectively 1 will end up being equal to 0, and since every number multiplied by 1 is it self, and every number multiplied by 0 is 0, we end up with all numbers being equal to 0. Effectively rendering them useless.
Take for example how we got to religious freedom. In the past, if you were the wrong religion, you would be tortured and executed.
In a lot of places, this led to horrendous religious wars where literally millions of people died. In the end, we ended up with freedom of religion as a compromise. The state would no longer compel you to choose a religion.
Of course each religion thought they were right and the others were wrong. But they stopped using the power of the state to compel conversions. They would still proselytize and try to persuade other people to join their faith, but they stopped trying to use the power of the state to compel people. After that, religion became a lot more apolitical.
Sometimes begin apoliticial means you don't think it is worth using the power of the state to change the status quo. You may be against the status quo, and think debate or persuasion is more effective.
In addition, reference to the status quo in the quote is simplistic. A lot of times the status quo is like an armistice line between two warring sides. Many times the status quo includes things you are for and things you are against. Maybe the way the status quo is right now, the benefit of the things you are for, is greater than the burden of the things you are against. If you try to change the status quo, you may end up destabilizing the status quo so much, that when the new equilibrium is reached, you end up losing some of things you were for.
If a person feels strongly about some special political cause, fantastic, they ought to make their case convincingly. But the idea of castigating others for not putting in the time or enthusiasm to share their superior moral clarity is exhausting.
In other words, "you don’t have time or inclination to obsess about the political origins and implications of every atomic micro-decision in your day because doing so is a tremendously tedious and unproductive burden that frequently yields no meaningful insight or behavior change" is a lot of words to say that you support the status quo.
I think everybody does, on issues that aren't important to them.
There are loads of issues folks are just not engaged with enough to have a qualified opinion (their perspective not mine), which is fine. I view that as living in the status quo but not necessarily evidence of endorsing the status quo.
For instance, do we really expect your average citizen (American in this case) to have a thought out POV on qualified immunity? Policing tactics? Effective tactics to address diversity in the workplace? Herd immunity? Actuarial risk assessment of economic activity during the pandemic? If not are they supporting the status quo?
I think most people just shrug and I don’t blame them. Processing information in the era of the death of expertise has made even having an opinion right now an absolute hellscape.
Also - being apolitical is a political stance, in itself.
I'm sorry - once in a while bad things happen and a choice must be made.
(I understand the postmodern thrust here, and I actually to some degree agree with it, but at the limit this completely obliterates any pretense of objectivity - even within science.)
Centrists agree that choices need to be made. Centrists think that some of those choices should go in one direction, some in the other, and most in a direction not presented by either side. Centrists believe in logic, discourse, and evidence to get to choices, over ideology. Centrists believe in looking for solutions which work for everyone when possible. Etc.
Everyone hates centrists, since if you disagree on charters OR abortion OR charters OR race OR police OR .... with someone on the left or on the right, they think you're a horrible person. You'll always disagree on at least one axis.
Charter schools: They work great with proper checks-and-balances. They should be not-for-profits, follow extensive transparency laws, have salary caps, and strong civil rights protections. They should compete with public schools without restrictions beyond that. If public schools go under because of better competitors, more power to them!
Medicine: Works great pure free market. Works great purely nationalized. What we don't want is a complex network of regulations from lobbyists combined with mandatory insurance (whether by government regulation or by practicality). Both the far-right and the far-left solutions would work great! We've landed in a no-man's land in between.
Gun control: It's a reasonable policy, but rule-of-law should prevail. We've got a Constitution for a reason, and we should follow it, even if it feels unreasonable. If we disagree, we should amend it.
Race: The left is correct about most of the problems, and bonkers about most of the solutions. We need to have an open national discourse about changes, and to do that, we need free speech and to get rid of cancel culture. The left's oppression of free speech contributes to the systemic oppression they're trying to eliminate.
... and so on.
You don't need to agree with the above, but they're strong, principled stances, agreeing with neither side.
In my opinion, trying to be “centrist” is more of an aesthetic choice than actually related to ideology.
What I will give you is that any community where honest discussion of actual, specific issues is impossible is toxic... but in practice I see that critique most often wielded by dishonest provocateurs.
2) Each of those is an essay or two to justify. Of course they're not specific. This isn't a political essay. I'm giving examples -- enough to understand the gist, not the nuance.
3) In modern America, all of these views piss everyone off -- left AND right. If you articulate most of them, you'll get fired WHOEVER your boss is AND uninvited to the family dinner.
That this "critique [is] most often wielded by dishonest provocateurs" is precisely because everyone else is afraid to speak. In a functioning civic society, we'd have many opinions like the ones above, and we'd all discuss them and work towards the best solutions. I've found that the best solution to "dishonest provocateurs" is still to assume the best intentions until shown otherwise.
2. Not sure what your point is here - you originally pointed out why either right or left solutions would be good, but the compromise is bad.
3. I don’t think that’s true - believe it or not it is still possible to discuss actual issues. I certainly do, with people who disagree with me.
So... there are a few positions on which you might be a “moderate”, but I don’t see any argument actually presented for why centrist solutions are preferable to those backed up by an actual ideological goal.
Your definition seems to be "split the left-and-right down the middle." That's not the one I've heard or used.
That's okay; words are used differently in different places, but I'm not sure we're actually disagreeing as much as initial posts suggested. Most people I know who consider themselves "centrists" hold a mixture of left-wing and right-wing views. They don't just find the median opinions.
I think what you call "centrist," where I live would be called a "moderate."
* Charter schools: Politicians create charter school setups that don't have proper checks and balances and tend to completely shirk their responsibility to public schools in the process. Your statement isn't some fringe idea. It's just not why charter schools are pushed. If you take a look at what happens with charter schools you'd see why people get divided on them. We aren't presented with a rational system. We're presented with a system that gets hijacked to push religious schools and/or defund public schools without.
* Medicine: "Works great pure free market." - Citation Needed. No one will give us your far left solution.
* Gun control: In case you haven't noticed, we aren't allowed to question it. We aren't even allowed to study it. This game is rigged.
* Race: How does cancel culture play into this? I'm not allowed to find a different Applebees if the manager is a racist? "The left's oppression of free speech" - do tell.
Such systems are surprisingly efficient and often seem to work better than the lawyer- and lobbyist-designed mess of American healthcare.
I don't think you'd find very many people willing to agree those positions are centrist.
Which is fine. Your positions are your positions, and obviously you hold them because you think them to be reasonable. But "centrist?" I don't think so.
In general I think there's a tendency for politically engaged people to put "views I disagree with" in the "other" bin, and everyone defines "extreme" and "center" to reflect their particular idea of what the sane, morally correct opinion is. There were plenty of people on the left who seemed to think Warren (for example) was a centrist neoliberal sellout.
What's amazing about it is you can voice disagreement in just one place, and you're either a liberal snowflake or a Trump-supporting racist. It doesn't seem to matter which place you disagree, or whether your disagreement falls on the other side of the political spectrum.
I don't think the far-right solution ever worked great. ACA is far from perfect, but it is saving lives. But the problem with US health insurance goes far deeper than merely how you pay for it and who gets access to it; the entire system is run in a very non-transparent way in order to maximise profits. The goal of the current system is still profit, not healing people, and that's where it goes wrong.
It's good that you mention mandatory insurance by practicality, because that's really the case: only very rich people can pay medical costs out of pocket; to most people, medical costs are a life or death issue, so it can never be a truly free market. A healthy-in-between system would be private insurance in a strongly regulated system; this works in a lot of countries. It's the lawless free-for-all where it's fine to screw or misinform patients for profit, that doesn't work.
My primary "centrist" issue is probably abortion: in the US the discussion seems to be all-or-nothing: either all abortion is legal or all abortion is banned, no matter what. A sensible compromise would be to allow early term abortions (first trimester miscarriages are extremely common, the embryo is still in an early stage of development), while strongly regulating late term abortions (they're already rare, and are only necessary for extreme medical problems). Abortion as an alternative to contraception can be made unnecessary through better sex ed and better access to contraceptives.
People over-estimate the degree to which our political parties represent an inherently consistent set of policy ideas. For example, social liberalism and being pro-immigration are intertwined in the US. But the socially liberal women prime ministers of Denmark and New Zealand are also anti-immigration. About 1 in 6 Democrats believe abortion should nearly always be illegal. African Americans, who overwhelmingly vote Democrat, have a similar split to Republicans when it comes to same-sex marriage and whether belief in God is a necessary prerequisite to morality.
The political parties are a compromise amongst groups of people with heterodox views. They’re not something that ideologically must be bundled together.
(I'm not trying to be overly snarky here.)
I saw a remarkable illustration of this at a conservative event where a panel was discussing Bostock before the case was decided. The room was evenly divided, but with very strong opinions on both sides. There is a seed of a real conflict there. Textualism isn’t a robust foundation for the kind of broad structural changes social conservatives want. You need the conservative counterparts to liberal judges, who seek to vindicate broader principles gleaned from the law (except here to conservative ends).
In terms of larger ideology, a schism is brewing between social conservatives, nationalists, and pro-business conservatives, with Trumpism versus anti-Trumpism cutting across all those groups. (As you recall, while Republicans supported him, most wanted someone else in the primaries initially.) The differences are less extreme than in the Democratic Party—where you have Marxists and 2/3 of Wall Street under the same tent—but they divisions are growing.
How do you think a gay man is able to talk at RNC and them having "gay cure" support in their platform? Because when you put all of the different positions in one document - they tend to contradict the majority's views. (Outright ban on abortion is supported only by a third of republicans! SSM ban is also supported by a third.)
Independents are more liberal on the topic of abortion than democrats...
Random example: I should be able to argue for second amendment rights with out buying into isolationist trade policies. The way things are right now the two come bundled together and legislative votes are based on partisanship, not policy.
But of course this debate has been going on a long time. And maybe yours are the more recent words echoing a past hero's opinion.
In the words of MLK:
"First, I must confess that over the past few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro's great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen's Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to "order" than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: "I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action"; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man's freedom; who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a "more convenient season." Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection...."
I suppose it depends on whether you see current ills of society as at the level of segregation and outright violence against peoples (and need street-level action and peaceful revolution immediately), or more subtle things that affect everyone, like rich-vs-poor class differences growing (and are things to be solved through our deliberative political process).
But back to the point, the problem with shouting down anyone who doesn't agree with you and/or labeling people who are not 100% on board with you as the hidden "enemy", is that you will later find out you weren't winning as much as you thought based on the silence. And some of that silent segment will find they can only express themselves when standing alone, safe in the voting booth, and you get a result like we have had for the last couple years. Worse, those that could've joined your side are put off by the aggression and withhold their vote for you.
Yeah people don't like facing their complicity with the horror of the world, especially since it's not at all obvious how to fix it. It can feel like (and can actually be) pointless self-flagellation.
But it's not incorrect.
It's about making changes based on rationality rather than emotion and ideology.
This is inhuman. I cannot always be on - I am not a machine. I cannot be useful to anyone when I am torn into anxious shreds by knowing about everything that is wrong in the world all at once. Our brains were built for knowing what's "bad" on a local level - not on a global, ~7.8 billion people level. It is inhuman for you to insist that I jump at the bit every time "bad things happen."
I can only choose to pick certain hills which are most important to me, and I will die on them. You choose your things - you are welcome to die on them, too. Do not shame people for trying to survive this chaos that is bad enough with the world's population's problems, and amplified through social network's outrage machines that benefit from any (but especially psychologically traumatic) "engagement."
Try it out. Stops a troll cold.
“We are five days away from fundamentally transforming the United States of America.”
I will say I also don't care for the daily discourse and politicization of everything.
The context matters. The actual actions matter.
"The question each individual faces is 'Would you give up all the money in your IRA so that some old person you don't know will not die?"'
I think that question captures the essence of the situation better than the "haircut...lives" phrase.
Interacting with other humans inherently carries risk that you could harm others. I could get distracted by my children in the car and kill someone when I cross the center line.
That doesn’t make me evil or selfish for wanting to own a car and drive it.
It also doesn’t make someone selfish for wanting to support their family in normal commerce, in the rare chance that their very legal and very normal economic activity may inadvertently harm someone.
When all of our children become serial killers and cancer death rates rise we'll look back on this time as the worst decision the world has ever made. Being a human means excepting risk. You wake up everyday and take on risk. Yes some people are willing to take more risks than others. I'm an avid skydiver. To those people who don't like risk: Stay at home and get someone to deliver groceries and live your miserable life by yourself at home. Thanks.
And so yeah, that was a real choice that made. Like my friends and I had to decide if worth it to join the protests and we were pretty firmly on the side of this was too important to not do. And so you're absolutely right but I feel like it's hard to be measured when the argument is "look the left is going out to march in a civil rights protest but doesn't want hair salons or schools to open -- the hipocrits!"
There need to be some nuance here. I think most people agree that grocery stores and hospitals needs to be open and that chuck-e-cheese probably doesn't. I don't think it's at all hypocritical to take a stance in the middle. Of course there's going to be lots of disagreement about what falls on what side but that's the argument to have.
It's a poor comparison: the risk of transmission when gathering huge numbers of humans together is exponentially higher than leaving your home to buy groceries.
Have you seen the fly-by drone footage of Hollywood Blvd on July 7th of the BLM protests [1]? It was outrageously reckless and not just to the lives of the people who took part.
So yes BLM protests are high risk, but to the protesters they're also high reward if they manage to affect change which, largely, they are!
Reckless would be going to a music festival right now, and in my opinion, opening schools. The reward just isn't there. Kids will be happy to have an extra long summer break.
Such as - banning testing for COVID by nursing homes upon (re)admittance in NYC.
Here's one you can try in the current political climate: "Why don't you have ANY [insert minority] employees working in your organization?"
In our case (we have some minorities but not as many as HN would like).
Why: because they aren't available.
We have KPIs for HR and managers that strongly encourage it, but there just aren't more qualified women/black/etc coders.
Which, in our case, translates to less than 5 (but awesome, and highly regarded) black persons[0], about 30% women.
[0]: Note however that the demographic is quite different here in Norway. I know people here who never saw black people except on holiday until they were far beyond 20 years old. In their defense though: 1.) Part of why there are so few black peopøe here seems to be that keeping slaves hasn't been popular here for hundreds of years. 2.) Norwegians have accepted a lot of people from other countries over the years: Pakistani, Chilean etc, so I don't think it is about xenophobia.
If I put out a simple coding test and some people cannot crack it - I'm not going to check if my 2+2 test is unfairly biased towards people with red hair.
Did you know, for example, that even fairly wealthy black American families are less able to educate their kids to the same level as white American families? Because access to proper education and parental education levels matter a lot. Because kids growing up in poor areas will get lower levels of attainment. Because long term poverty matters.
Breaking that education barrier takes more than one generation.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/280232788_Race_Pove...
We are actively looking for them, employing them whenever possible[0].
[0]: I lost two female candidates I tried to hire, one because she wasn't fluent in a language that a majority of our customers use and one because HR didn't react in time and when she interviewed with us she was also on the way to her second interview at another company.
Both landed well-paying jobs shortly afterwards. I guess we are not the only company trying to look diverse.
There are so few black people around here that I guess the reason I don't see more black coders is just statistics.
Centrism is de-facto the status quo. Which, in current times, means support for the police as it exists, supports for business regulation as it exists, supports greenhouse gases and military conduct as it exists, supports the behavior and election processes of politicians as they exist, etc.
Its simply the privilege of the majority to be the "moderate" ones. To be radical is not to be good or bad, it just to be outside the norm. And it makes sense that those in the norm find those outside it dangerous and threatening, because... they want to be. Thats the whole point. Their time is wasted if the goal is not to become the new moderate, the new normal, the new center.
The "center" people are referring to here is a United States-centric form of liberalism. It's not any less "extreme" than communism, it's just the dominant political force and, as you say, has the privilege of positioning itself as the comfortable default. In reality, it's a fairly extreme commitment to a different set of principles.
Commoditization is just a fundamental result of math basically. Fundamentally there is still a cost to a commodities no matter what party pays for it to provide it or bar access through certain methods as illegitimate like it being illegal to buy organs from a donor for transplant.
Given that norms say nothing about it doesn't mean they are always but the possibility exists that the extremists really are too emotional and partisan, and getting what they wanted would be the proverbial dog catching the car and not knowing what to do with it or crashing it immediately.
I'm not sure what the solution is. On one hand, it was there all along, and political-correctness did not help it. On the other hand, racists everywhere have been empowered once again, and all manner of groups have to face stereotypes they've fought so hard over the years. I don't think the U.S. will really get its house in order until it becomes an issue of survival, and of geopolitical importance.
It's not hard to see his initial popularity as linked to this. That is, the vilification of having views that are not the same as the majority leading people to feel repressed, and them supporting someone that's unwilling to bend to that, even if they don't support every decision he makes or view he takes.
I don't want racists and white supremacists spreading their rhetoric, but I also don't want our society so constrained by mob mentality that having merely unpopular opinions have dire consequences. If we take it as a given that mob mentality (to this degree) is an emergent phenomenon because of our hyper connected world, and that too much mob mentality is causing the problem, how do you mitigate emerging phenomena when you can't really alter what it emerges from?
I'd also be happy if someone could convincingly refute that it's an emergent phenomena, or that mob mentality is the problem, since those seem intractable to me.
Either you're in favor of free speech or you're not. Republicans, Democrats, and, yes, Hacker News all participate in cancel culture in one way or another.
Sure there are bots, provocateurs, and anonymous trolls who have no intent on changing their beliefs. But, please, let the American people have enough credit to make decisions for themselves and see racists for who they truly are.
There was someone with a throwaway account that replied with the argument that "Free speech need not be absolute", and then started getting voted down.
What's truly ironic I feel is that in my world view, his speech would just sit there as an alternative viewpoint, read and disagreed with.
But in his world his viewpoint could made illegal (or in the HN world downvoted), based upon what might be perceived as the popular rhetoric of the day.
I'm actually fine with such views not being made illegal though - but I'm not fine with the premise that there should never be any social consequences at all for any ideology or viewpoint regardless of its nature or intent to do harm. Nor do I believe that the right to free speech means everyone must be forced to hear, seriously consider, host or publish that speech.
There are 300,000,000 million Americans each with his or her own free will and ability to determine right from wrong. So you're saying they are just sheep and do things blindly?
The real changes, the ones that lasted generations, the things that made America truly great, were done because free speech convinced people to change their minds.
No. Not only did I not say that, there's no reasonable way to infer that from my comment, and your doing so demonstrates an unwillingness on your part to argue in good faith.
That people are influenced by more than purely logical, didactic arguments should be self evident, nor does that fact make people sheep, it's simply human nature. We're not compilers, after all, we're primates with countless irrational biases hard wired into our brains. Anti-vaxxers, COVID-denialists, flat-earthers, conspiracy theorists of all stripes, the resurgence of discredited white supremacist and anti-semitic ideology under the politically correct guise of "racial realism" and the phenomenon of fake news spread by social media should be enough to demonstrate that falsehood can be more compelling than fact, and that facts alone are not sufficient to dissuade such people from their false beliefs, or stop their influence.
>The real changes, the ones that lasted generations, the things that made America truly great, were done because free speech convinced people to change their minds.
No they weren't. They were accomplished with speech and consequence, often long, violent, ugly protests and frequently civil unrest. America has only ever granted its inalienable rights to white Christian men by default - everyone else has had to fight tooth and nail for their seat at the table and for every scrap of human dignity they could take from the cornucopia of American liberty.
Women's suffrage was earned with speech and blood. African American rights were earned with speech and blood. LGBT rights were earned with speech and blood. Even recently, few outside of the black community really cared about systemic racist violence among the police, despite the black community speaking at length about it for years until they also started taking to the streets and burning shit down... then suddenly everyone else noticed and started listening.
Speech without the force of consequence is as useless as a toothless guard dog.
It's quite straightforward to draw this conclusion from the following portion of your previous comment:
>Unfortunately, in your world, the racists and white supremacists take over
How does a community 'take over' without expanding to at least a dominant minority? And how does the point being argued, allowing them to speak freely, enable that unless we're to assume that simply being exposed to that worldview will grow their ranks?
You argued:
A: Unfortunately, in your world, the racists and white
supremacists take over
B: In a democracy a majority of the people have to agree
that white supremacy should be the dominant principle for
governmental rule.
> No they weren't. They were accomplished with speech and consequence, often long, violent, ugly protests and frequently civil unrest.
Rosa Parks didn't throw a brick through a window. She refused to sit in the back of the bus. That started a boycott of the bus system, and it worked without bloodshed.
Sure blood was spilled in the civil rights marches but not because the people marching wanted it to be.
I Rosa Parks was radical whole her life. She was not proponent of super peaceful activism, she at the moment thought fighting would he strategically bad idea.
Had she been meek lady, there would be no protests.
She did lived at violent place at the time, did dealt with lynchings, beatings and legal protests up to that point. She did not had philosophy of peaceful activism above all.
While she was not violent, she was not proponent of peaceful above all protesting. That was Kings philosophy and even he was up to breaking law.
And the world would be a worse place without those laws. Any real discussion about free speech starts with the premise that not all speech can be free and the real questions is in the details of what speech should be free.
I don't want racist and white supremacists spreading their rhetoric, so I want societal pressure to continue to work as it does against those people. At the same time, I don't want merely unpopular opinions getting the full weight of societal pressure causing problems for people that merely want to discuss what are actually open questions.
Reducing this to simply a matter of free speech or not is missing the point. This is a matter of figuring out how to deal with the negative effects of free speech when we care enough about free speech that limiting it in some way is not on the table.
That ship has sailed.
> At the same time, I don't want merely unpopular opinions getting the full weight of societal pressure causing problems for people that merely want to discuss what are actually open questions.
Free speech isn't just about who gets to speak what, it's about who decides who gets to read/listen/watch what they want. That's basically the crux of censorship, right? I don't want mob induced censorship any more than I want government censorship.
In the end, cancel culture is people who choose not to use free speech to push their agenda, but instead threatens other's livelihood or shame critics of an unpopular position into silence.
That's called "living in a community". It's impossible to interact with other people without providing some level of acceptance or rejection of what they are doing, whether on purpose or accident, whether they interpret you correctly or not.
Even just walking away communicates something.this isn't always bad, it's how we enforce norms that are not laws. Lie or act in a way I do not approve of and I can choose to stop or limit my interactions with you, and I can express my opinion to others. I this way I am censoring you in a small way. It's how humans interact, and it's useful and good when used in moderation for good causes.
When not used in moderation, and when a million people jump on a single person and express enough displeasure to cause severe ramifications for relatively small offenses, then it's not good.
I don't want to see racist rhetoric in the same way I don't want to see poor behavior at others expenses. That is, I want it allowed, but for people to face somewhat appropriate ramifications for the offense, to discourage them from spouting it everywhere people do t want to see it. To be clear, I mean it in the literal, bit colloquial sense, in that it's a preference, not a call to censor others be preventing it entirely, as overreactions are what I'm arguing against.
Except cancel culture is anything but community driven. It's social media driven -- which in itself is a platform to get more views to sell you more ads. The more the platform can draw your ire, the more ads it sells, the more ire the platform spreads, etc.
The problem is that words aren't which we argue our politics by anymore. It's now who has the biggest weapon to personally destroy those that speak out.
We gotta break this stuff into more detail.
If you look at say, the start of #metoo, you see Harvey Weinstein, a man so powerful that the ordinary justice system could not touch him until essentially a Twitter mob took him down.
Now, public accusation is a crappy way to settle bad behavior, it's easy to channel this stuff in any direction a manipulator might choose. But people choose that rout of desperation, when the ordinary justice and more broadly ordinary government processes fail.
If we look at the Minneapolis Police Department in particular, we see a department with such a long history of corruption and even murder that the entire group should be fired. And moreover, all of Minneapolis civic government out side the police would like to do that - but are in fact powerless to do that through a web of laws the police have protecting their interests.
And this is the thing. You have powerful, unaccountable men and women whose acts provoke anger in many parts of the population. Then you have an angry mob which actually can't impose any significant change and once they get going can inflict collateral damage themselves - and maybe get met by a counter-mob. But after the upsurge, any reform is thin and the stage is set for the next event.
So, I'd say mobs and counter-mobs are problematic but the root is permanent unaccountable powers that can ignore whatever material grievances different groups have.
I don't think it's a foregone conclusion that the current mob mentality only came about because of unaccountable powers, or even if it did, that it will necessarily dissipate if those powers become and are held accountable. Some things are self-sustaining.
I don't think we can just look the other way because the negative behavior is caused by a feeling of rage and impotency. Should we try to fix the injustices that cause the feeling of rage and impotency? Yes. That doesn't mean we should also ignore the negative effects that rage and impotency results in, otherwise we'll be following a chain back forever.
I don't know who's "we" or who's looking the other way.
Everyone on every part of the political spectrum has one or more mob-tendencies they'd like to stamp out (or at least look like they're stamping out). And yet this situation continues. Indeed, it seems like the whole this different mobs gunning for each other.
It seems like one can't just take negative phenomena in isolation, say "that bad" and go get it. Or you can and everyone's doing it and things are still in a mess and you're part of the mess now.
You actually need positive, concrete alternatives to mob behavior. The problem in many ways is that the mob is also a lot of people, including other mobs, favorite enemy.
"We", as a societal group, whether that be "Americans" or "Westerners" or "Human beings". By looking the other way, I meant "assuming the problem will get better if the unaccountable powers are held accountable." People don't change their behavior overnight, even if it's unconsciously acting as a face in a mob they don't realize they're part of, and revolutions rarely result in a change that is positive in all aspects.
What if we trade unaccountable individuals (which sometimes were held accountable) for unaccountable mobs? I don't see one as necessarily better than the other, it's the prevalence and consequences of each that matter to me.
> Everyone on every part of the political spectrum has one or more mob-tendencies they'd like to stamp out (or at least look like they're stamping out). And yet this situation continues. Indeed, it seems like the whole this different mobs gunning for each other.
Yes, it's almost as if we've started identifying more with our subgroups than the larger group, and it's like multiple nations forced to coexist within the same borders of people we view as others. Like a digital Gaza Strip.
> It seems like one can't just take negative phenomena in isolation, say "that bad" and go get it. Or you can and everyone's doing it and things are still in a mess and you're part of the mess now.
Sure. That's the other end of the spectrum. I advocated for doing both. Address the root cause, also address the problem. If we accept that poverty increases crime, we shouldn't use that as an excuse to ignore crimes committed by the poor, and we shouldn't ignore that causal relationship and focus purely on policing and punishment.
> You actually need positive, concrete alternatives to mob behavior.
The whole point of my original comment is that I don't know what those are, but we need to find and/or advertise and explore any we can find because they are important.
kbenson:The whole point of my original comment is that I don't know what those are, but we need to find and/or advertise and explore any we can find because they are important.
Me: Well, all of the mechanism of modern democracy - a fair justice system, a congress representing the popular will, an executive branch primarily carrying out laws, a press that exposes flaws, etc are the ways modern democratic society has discovered for balancing interests.
In situations of imbalance, when things are not working, reforms within such a democratic capitalist society tend to come from elites because they hold power (with or without a popular mandate). We can see this in the Progressive Era, the New Deal, the Civil Right Movement. Protests may get things going but those with power have to enact legislation.
Today, it may sound harsh but America's elites allowed American institutions become something like a dumpster fire because the situation didn't bother them. I mentioned the Minneapolis city council, theoretically the representatives of the city, would like to fire the police but cannot. (Nearly) "everyone" have some solutions but they aren't able to exercise them.
At this point, I'd look at Ralph Nader's Only The Super Rich Can Save Us. Because everything points to the very rich having decisive power and this quite willing to let things fall to hell. We can hope these people realize that triumph over a flaming ruin might not actually help as much as they're imagine.
Well, I would say it didn't bother them initially, and it changed so fast that by the time it did bother them (if it does), it was too late. We're talking about a decade or less of time here, since that's about the period of time that social media has had major usage by a majority of people, and while there were less efficient precursor networks (such as radio and television), nothing really compares to the current immediate feedback look of of the current systems, where time for info to permeate a platform and then regurgitates and eaten again can be measured in minutes in some cases, but often in just a few hours.
I doubt even the people that "saw it coming" really understood where it would get to, and there's no concrete indication that we're at the peak (there's pushback, but that can be steamrolled for while).
Elites have more power, and can get stuff done because there's a purity of intent and will expressed by one person with power that's hard to match with many people pooling power... but then again, we're dealing with runaway feedback loops, so who knows what the public can do if a good meme is found.
> At this point, I'd look at Ralph Nader's Only The Super Rich Can Save Us. Because everything points to the very rich having decisive power and this quite willing to let things fall to hell. We can hope these people realize that triumph over a flaming ruin might not actually help as much as they're imagine.
I'd much rather have the stability of the 1990s or 2000s that what we seem to have now when considering my own situation, but I'm white middle class, and I imagine people that have felt disenfranchised their whole lives may see the balance of good and bad happening now a bit differently, and I'm not willing to say they are better off as they were in the 1990s or 2000s. I dunno.
It seems like you imagine that out-of-control social media is happening in a vacuum or can be fixed in a vacuum. It's not and it cannot.
I'm sure almost everyone would prefer not be (hopefully) living through a era in which things fall apart on a multitude of levels. But hey, we should try to do something and if we can't do something immediately, at least analyze it.
What are the various mobs you refer to?
I don't know that mobs are rational. Sometimes, I'm sure they will be pointing to a genuine injustice, but just as often as not, they're going to be a rampaging mob. I'm not 100% sure how I feel about this next claim, but I wonder that it's simply an accident when they get it "right."
Nonetheless, even the worst among us deserve representation and due process protections: which a mob cannot (and will not) give.
No one is arguing this. This is a strawman position no one actually holds.
Enforced tolerance is the only thing that is keeping really bad people comfortable at expressing their badness. (Suprisingly - the anti-discrimination applied to private businesses is the reason why people like Alex Jones can safely say whatever he wants and then get a free upgrade at Ramada)
https://news.gallup.com/opinion/polling-matters/268517/analy...
There is no new split into two Americas, there was always a split- between those who had political, cultural and economic power, and those that don't. The only difference now is that the people who are in the group with power aren't exclusively rich, white, conservative men.
We can go back, we can stop black people from getting loans and decent jobs, we can make all our women secretaries again, and I'm sure that will solve all our political ills.
I've never ruined anyone
Those are the very kind of toxic comments we need to get away from
The only sense in which horseshoe theory is real is that the rejection of the status quo tends to split someone in one direction or the other, and occasionally those new to alternative political ideologies will waffle or get shunted down different pipelines. Example: younger people going down the IDW pipeline who end up socialist once they realize the error. They don't return to dominant liberal narratives because they already figured out the ways in which they are toxic and false, and they also reject their previous pathway.
I can't imagine thinking that "bizarro world" is one in which people hold a larger diversity of opinion and criticize within a party.
This experience must vary a lot with your locale. I live in a medium sized town in Canada and feel very uncomfortable talking to my conservative, suburban neighbours about issues I strongly believe should be a priority for everyone. Like climate change.
They know that them and me don’t see eye to eye on these issues but I can’t bring it up in a way that I would with my left leaning friends and it pains me. Because it’s something that both sides of the political spectrum should be able to rally behind. Many conservatives here fancy themselves as sort of “salt of the earth people” so I don’t get the hostility towards some kind of conservation.
I think the Left is getting flak for doing the latter.
Yes, I had a direct experience of the latter when my car was keyed for having a “give peace a chance” bumper sticker during the times of the war on Iraq. And that’s in Canada, bear in mind.
Are we going to repeat the history in the US?
It's all sleight of hand, everybody gets fooled into a suckers rally that makes most current matters irrelevant. Ofc I hope I'm wrong, but just watch what they do.
1. If this was generally true the Wall street and Republicans started #metoo and I can't believe that.
> and there's nothing anybody can do about that now that it's gone too far.
2. This is not only pessimistic but too pessimistic and also counterproductive (unless one wish to drive society faster to the edge.)
> It's all sleight of hand, everybody gets fooled into a suckers rally that makes most current matters irrelevant. Ofc I hope I'm wrong, but just watch what they do.
Kind of agree. I guess if you made a real poll between Americans on if they wanted
1. Trump
2. Biden
3. A randomly selected choice between 5 men and 5 women that were decent, smart, had succeeded in life despite being nice
then I guess people would vote for 3 in the poll.
The American system seems to favour bad compromises lately.
In that case: have my apology and also know that I misunderstood you (and in that case: still don't understand you despite trying), so a little clarification might be helpful if you care :-)
It makes it unsafe to vote for your actual favourite candidate, because you don't get a second round... I always remind people that Maine's scandalous governor LePage never won 50% of the voter support and his first win was with merely 37% of the vote.
The issue is that many folks want to view others as $POLITICAL_PARTY first and human second.
Hell, half of conservative political rhetoric is distinguishing between real and fake Americans.
If I point a gun to your head do you think we can stand there and have a calm and rational discussion about whether I should pull the trigger? Of course not! You're going to fight to protect yourself.
Is there another universe where all the religious people are very pro-economic redistribution? That seems to be within reasonable interpretation of the teachings of Jesus.
Laws should made from purely utilitarian point of view, not the moral one. The reason why, for example, murder is illegal isn't because it's immoral, but because most people do not want to fall victim to such crime so they voted to make it illegal. Same for theft, or even such minor annoyances like fining someone for playing music too loud.
You are trying to draw a distinction between the "utilitarian" and the "moral". But, to quote the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy (IEP), "Utilitarianism is one of the best known and most influential moral theories" [1]. Claims about what is "utilitarian" are inescapably moral claims.
> but because most people do not want to fall victim to such crime so they voted to make it illegal.
In historical terms, that is quite false. In every democratic country, murder was already illegal for centuries (even millennia) before democracy was introduced. In fact, the earliest surviving legal text (the Sumerian code of Ur-Nammu, c. 2100–2050 BCE) criminalised murder, and predates the invention of democracy in ancient Athens (594 BCE) by approximately 1500 years.
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20200630100724/https://www.iep.u...
> Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.
And in a world where the choice is between Biden and Trump. It is increasingly tempting to vote for the Guillotine.
It didn't work so well the last few times it was used - the English revolution, the French revolution, the Russian revolution, all ended up in a bloodbath, next one more gruesome than the last. I urge you to reconsider.
Also I recommend "the revolutions" podcast: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mike_Duncan_(podcaster)
This is not necessary the case though, as seen after the Cuban or the Zapatista revolution in Chiapas, Mexico.
At some point revolution becomes necessary, and if democratic means remain unavailable, this revolution will be violent. Horrible people using the political turmoil will become a risk people are willing to take in this growing frustration.
Napoleon III would like a word with you.
Napoleon I, Emperor of the French (1804–1814)
Louis XVIII, King of France (1814–1824)
Charles X, King of France (1824–1830)
Louis Philippe I, King of France (1830–1848)
Napoleon III, Emperor of the French (1852–1870)
They still wanted a lot of changes to allow more freedom, restrictions and more transparency... just not necessarily a formal republic.
Think about this - in CATO's own Human Freedom Index half of the top 16 countries are monarchies.
1 New Zealand - monarchy 2 Switzerland - republic 3 Hong Kong (definitely not going to be in #4 now) 4 Canada - monarchy 5 Australia - monarchy 6 Denmark - monarchy 6 Luxembourg - monarchy 8 Finland - republic 8 Germany - republic 10 Ireland - repulbic 11 Sweden - monarchy 11 Netherlands - monarchy 13 Austria - republic 14 United Kingdom - monarchy 15 Estonia - republic 15 United States - republic
I'm not arguing either were good, just curious about your point of view here.
That said, the revolutionary spirit under Czar Nicolas II were completely rational, and understandable. The use of violence was needed because the ruling class was—unlike at the end of the Soviet Union—unwilling to make the revolution happen peacefully.
Nobody can tell the future. The fact that awful people might use the turmoil to seize power is not something that people are thinking about when they are trying to overthrow their current oppressors.
Or are you saying that you dislike Trump or Biden so much that you'd rather use violence to achieve what you desire?
Let's say you'd use Guillotine so Trump can step down, then should those who dislike democrats also use the same means to have Biden step down? And if someone tends to oppose what you do, you'd rather use Guillotine to resolve the difference?
I think it's pretty clear what kind of person you are.
If this were a real democracy, popular policies would be enacted, or at least be on the ballot. But this is not the case. As evident from the Black Lives Matter protest, riot seems to be the only avenue for change. And as popular policies keep getting put on the back burner while corporate interests keep getting the front seat regardless of who we vote, the illusion of democracy will frustrate more and more people. The more frustrated we get the more likely we will resort to violence.
I’m not saying that violence will lead to good outcome (it probably won’t; as history shows), but an ever angrier and more frustrated population will eventually use it if democratic means remain unavailable. That is more and more people will vote for the Guillotine if the only options on the ballots are: a) business as usual, or b) business as usual + hating minorities.
None of those things are supported by an overwhelming majority unless 3/5ths now constitutes “overwhelming”. Additionally, your view of what the issues are show how biased your approach is to begin with.
- Almost nobody has an issue with reducing police violence, but a bunch of people have issues with getting rid of the police.
- Almost nobody “wants foreign wars” but a bunch of people think military intervention is needed.
- Nobody is against taxing the rich, it’s already right in the tax code and the top 1 percent pays something like a third of all tax revenues already. What a bunch of people are against is arbitrarily raising their taxes further because of tall poppy syndrome.
- Reduce carbon emissions. Yes, but sadly not overwhelming majority still and even then, the “how” is critical and there is even less common ground there.
A functioning legislator discusses these nuances, and comes up with a legislation that enacts the policy such that most people can benefit from it. This is one of the benefits of having a diverse ruling class. No one person needs to know how a popular policy gets enacted, that is the purpose of representative democracy.
You're technically inaccurate because 58-60% is not an "overwhelming majority".
I'm not a US citizen (or resident), and I find it almost unbelievable and absolutely unacceptable that you don't have some form of universal healthcare, for example. I probably agree with you politically way more than I disagree with you, but the other posters points against you still stand.
EDIT: I realise my first paragraph here might sound a bit harsh, that was not my intention - my intention was to make it explicitly known to you such that you might take it to heart and it might possibly be helpful to you to realise.
The same applies to solving global warming. Carbon taxation was actually a feasible solution with conservative support. Now instead, a huge chunk of the liberal position has shifted to the green new deal, which is a jobs program and wealth redistribution scheme only orthogonally related to slowing global warming. Nuclear is another viable solution to global warming that nobody wants to touch because science is scary.
I personally want carbon tax and police abolition, but there is no consensus on either of these, and what I personally want doesn’t matter. I am not a dictator and the USA is not a dictatorship. It is the legislator’s job to gather what the people want, and find a way to deliver it in a way that will benefit the most. However the American ruling class is not even pretending to be interested in what policies the general population supports.
The average person might support all of those end results if the cost to get there were zero, i.e. if we could wave a magic wand.
However each one of those has a cost or tradeoff that a significant number - possibly majority - of people would be unwilling to accept.
This sentiment is a pretty on-the-nose example of the societal problem we're discussing.
If people in another country may be wrong and have to be taught what's right, well, how can people in another state avoid such error? How can people next door be always right, such as I am?
'Godless' non-religious people on the left are extremely 'moral' and burn people at the stake via deplatforming and cancelling.
Science and scientific culture of the last 50/100 years has helped, but even it's been hijacked by our monolithic emotional reality of tribalism and fear. Zooming out, scientific culture is a momentary lifting of a mountain one inch off the ground.
The development of human nature is frozen in time compared to the development of science. Science has caught up to it, and has hit a wall which scientific papers alone cannot move. In fact, the analogy of throwing wads of paper at a wall and expecting it to move. That's the impact it's having.
I fear there is not much we can do about human nature until we can physically change ourselves at the DNA level, to rid or regulate emotions like rage and disgust via CRISPR etc. There's pros and cons of being in the 'World State' or in the 'Savage Reservation'. (Brave New World reference.)
What changed then? A lot of things. We can talk about the financial decoupling and tech, of course. But that was also when imported oil became a concern. It was when international shipping settled on a standard intermodal container. It was when the drug wars started. And it was after major victories in the civil rights movement, and failures in Vietnam. There were winners and losers in these changes. The big winners were neoliberal-progressives who could shape all these influences into a new political alignment that pleased globalizing businesses and placated the masses. The losers were the remnants of the supremacist structure post-Reconstruction, who had fell into a decline with the Depression and war years, and saw collapse in the 60's. They were ushered towards religion, nostalgia narratives about the good old days, and apocalyptic fiction about the decline of the world and those few who would stand up to it.
The problem that the neoliberal structure faced was the one politicians always face: how to accommodate a divided electorate and keep one's career? The formula that emerged was to force the talking points into a narrower spectrum, a tactic refined over the course of decades. In this space, policy change is blocked where it hurts private property interests(as neoliberalism indicates), and the remainder is a set-aside for partisanship where professionals craft pro and contra arguments.
But the consequence of doing that is a build-up of pressure on both left and right, as everything gradually becomes a property issue and gets blocked or deferred. With no enfranchisement, both have radicalized - first the right, and then the left in reaction.
And that's the state of things. How does it end? With a new coalition that courts all the defining forces of this era effectively, guided by some overarching ideology. However, if we take this to be a cycle as in Strauss-Howe's theory, this is simply the beginning of the neoliberal decline, a period of crisis management and compromise, not the defining of that coalition.
This was literally Hitler's primary argument for establishing the Nazi Party in Mein Kampf in the way that he did. So at least a 100 years old.
Based on the results, there's a pretty strong argument that it's true.
Also the fact that people actually feel the need to have bans on talking about politics eg at the workplace doesn't seem like a good sign to me, and that's hardly new at all.
I don't know... I think discourse with real people in real life is still worth something.
The only thing I simply won't discuss with anyone, either online or not, is theology. It will never lead to anything good. I think everyone has to find their own way there.
Ultimately, yes, each person must arrive at their own personal set of beliefs and conclusions, if that's what you mean. But surely silent introspection without ever engaging with anyone else can only take one so far? Everyone is exposed to the ideas of others, and discussions often lead to epiphanies or meaningful progress in someone's own personal journey (conversations with counselors and therapists come to mind). Maybe experience will also teach me that theology/spirituality/some other prickly topic is just never worth discussing with anyone, but I also believe that it's possible to have productive discussions about a topic that is this close to what makes us human.
...Sorry, I just realized this post counts as discussing theology with you!
I can't imagine that there wasn't substantial amounts of this during say, the heights of McCarthyism or when gay-rights weren't as accepted. Not to mention another interesting meta question, are people nowadays more prone to share that they feel like they cannot express their opinion?
My grandparents for example have it so ingrained to not question religious belief that they probably wouldn't even perceive it that way. Or just women in general. The stereotypical "housewife" only a few decades ago wasn't participating in public discourse at all and certainly not expected to. With the exception of a few high profile intellectuals women were mostly excluded from political life. I have a hard time even comparing this to today.
In those days, you'd have to have someone want to bring it forth to the police or government for anyone to bother, and most people won't know about it until it hits the newspaper, if it does. But now it's the court of public opinion with instant judgement and you can be fired from your job, unfriended or blocked by half your friends, and everyone publicly disavowing any association with you before you even find out about it or have a chance to defend yourself. Which, from what I've seen, rarely makes a difference. The damage is already done and doesn't usually ever get undone.
Of course a bunch of people are going to keep their mouths shut on political views in this environment. They want to keep their career and friends.
Today, people interpret that to mean, in part at least, "broadcast on the Internet where I have no control over the audience and where it will be recorded digitally and available indefinitely".
10-20 years ago "saying" just meant verbalizing something around a handful of people you could see. You'd know who you were talking to, and if you said something dumb, human memory and time would soften its edges eventually.
Ask people in the 1990s if they would self-censor themselves when appearing on TV and they'd probably say yes at the same rate that people say they self-censor when "talking" today, in large part because computers are such a large medium of communication now.
"If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor" - Desmond Tutu
And being silent is not even an option, because now "silence is violence".
...but in many situations, that's accurate.
Someone who was 'neutral' in the civil rights era on the topic of Jim Crow would be implicitly supporting Jim Crow. Their neutrality implies tolerance of the injustice that was the state of things at the time.
No one is turning a blind eye to our society's problems. I think we're all just wondering what major justice it is we need to deliver.
> No one is turning a blind eye to our society's problems.
Is this a serious statement?
- James Baldwin
I think the key difference between Tutu's phrasing and "if you're not with me you're against me", is that the former presumes some people don't have the luxury of choosing sides and they are requesting support from people who do. If you are, for example, Black in the US, you can't really choose to not make racism a priority, since you will experience its effects whether you like it or not.
"If you're not with me you're against me" doesn't imply anything about the speaker's own agency. In that sense, I think it's a less compassionate thing to say, because the listener chould just as well ask them to change sides. Tutu's framing makes it clearer that not everyone has that freedom.
I don't really like this quote.
It starts off with a false premise, because neutrality is required in order to have justice. A neutral assessment of oppression is that it's wrong.
What Desmond Tutu is really getting at is that so-called "neutrality" which defends the status quo when the status quo is oppression is wrong. But that's not what actual neutrality would do.
And then the quote gets put forth to quash demands for actual neutrality as illegitimate, even when the people in need of it are the victims rather than the oppressors.
I mean that's just not true? There are quite a few subjects that are currently polarized where each side considers theirs to be just and enforcing it justice.
This seems like the opposite of the truth. Surely justice in most cases is looking at a dispute between two or more parties and deciding which party is right and which is wrong and to what extent. It’s very much the opposite of neutrality.
As a very basic example, neutrality in adjudicating a theft of property is to side with the thief and not demand the return of the property.
Perhaps more bluntly, are you yourself a Nazi, a Communist, or happy with where the US is politically? If you're none of the above (as you likely aren't), then you must be able to see that moderate views can still be left or right-leaning.
Maybe the kindest reading of your comment is that the average person that's overly critical on Facebook only sees in black and white, left vs right. And if so, we completely agree :)
This is nothing to do with the political climate of the US in 2020, it's very much to do with the fact that formative experiences early in my career very strongly influenced the prior that work and personal lives are streams that shall not be crossed, and coworkers are not to be trusted.
More money (for whom? and by what means?) is not always better.
But there's a difference between simplicity in jobs like flipping burgers vs finance, and that's power. If we work in a job that is both powerful AND simple (like many in tech & finance), it's likely many unintended externalities are being created.
Externalities, because they affect others, have strong political ramifications. So if you're working in a field with a lot of power, and you're having simple to nonexistent conversation about externalities, there's a good chance you're contributing to the problems you're trying to avoid discussing by virtue of wielding power blindly.
Perhaps those externalities would be better solved at their source of the workplace rather than let fester in the public sphere. This is a sort of 'ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure' argument for why its important that workplaces engage in these discussions, and why the shareholder value maximization approach is too reductionist for corporate entities of any meaningful size or power.
I would love to see better defined contacts or unionization.
Most of the stuff they push, I'm not opposed to in general. My opinions tend to be more focused on the libertarian implementation of achieving those things and adhering to rule of law. This tends to be aligned with the outcomes they say they stand for, but it's not the 'right' answer (liberal).
And don't even think about telling a joke that could even slightly be misinterpreted or overheard by a 3rd party. A guy from my building got fired for moving a diversity poster because somebody thought the action was offensive.
Cancel culture is tedious moralizing, but mostly a media spectacle meant to drive attention to various figures and platforms. The average worker has more to fear from those who sign their paychecks than anyone else.
A better solution is to stop deductions for employer-sponsored healthcare and shift the expense from the employer to the employee with a mandate that old employer health insurance premiums be passed on to employees as wages.
That deduction is the largest lever when it comes to the cost of health insurance (short of bad IP policy and regulation of pharma products).
Seems insane to me.
And setting aside the close-reading and the statistics, we should not be naive about his intention, which is to characterize Mexican immigrants as dangerous criminals. Again, should I have to wonder if my coworker believes this about me or my family?
Are you looking at illegal immigrants here, or just legal immigrants? Because it seems like this would be trivially false for illegal immigrants.
Also, the answer to your questions are predominantly no.
If you'd like to address my questions more specifically, I would be happy to read your response. But attempting to shut down my questions because you disagree with the direction you think they're heading is exactly what I thought we were opposed to.
Fundamentally I at least do not want to work with someone who is even still on the level of asking questions like "is racism bad?" or "do women deserve rights?". But a lot of people do do that. If I was hiring... I wouldn't want to hire people thinking like that. Its going to negatively impact what would almost certainly be a diverse group of people trying to cooperatively work together.
It only feels problematic because we each recognize both how biased against the worker the power dynamic in modern western society is and that the job is not merely "the thing you do during the day with your buds" but "the means by which you put food in your mouth and have a bed". If its only about the former breaking relations over political leanings makes perfect sense, for the latter its ruining someones life over "frivolous politics".
I'd rather be in the world where groups dissociate over ideological incompatibilities but where nobody is homeless or hungry for it than the one where ones need for food and shelter is an excuse to let toxic people make life worse for those around them.
At least for me that’s not the case at all.
I guess diversity includes everything but diversity of political opinion?
I know these are serious topics, but I hope we can all take a moment to have a laugh at this typo :).
If Person A can't work with Person B because they don't like their political opinions and Person B keeps their opinions to themselves while on the job, I'd be much more likely to get rid of Person A. I would see them as the person that is causing strife in the workplace, not the other way around.
I'll happely meet a co-worker over lunch/dinner to discuss things more deeply.
But since over time the workplaces is inevitably shaped by the society it is in, in my opinion we might as well try figure out ways to deal with broader issues while at work, instead of pretending they are isolated. (I'm not saying I have a good solution of how this would look like.)
I have noted that the 2 options when talking politics at work are that either 1. you'll disagree, or 2. you'll agree, and I'm not sure which option is worse.
Which migh sound bad but is actually a natural response to being forcefully fed extreme ends of political stances.
So the debate over media and internet missinformation might be for nothing. People adapt arround obstacles. In the end there could only be bots responding to bots and campaign members patting eachother on the back for the number of likes the bots generated.
Was this ever true? Do the majority of companies encourage talk about religion or the majority of churches encourage talk about politics?
The people react to stimuli like {media, campaigns, bots} just like they do any other marketing: there is a game theory response to stimuli. If they get overwhelmed on one platform, they will change habits (eg. move to a different platform, discuss only in person where there are no bots, discuss these topics less). I suspect campaigns have been around long enough that more people (with the help of information widely distributed on the internet) have gained a different tolerance to the same old campaign tricks.
So this data set might be an interesting preliminary trial, but releasing it as a finished study is either sloppy or malicious on the part of the Cato Institute.
Edit: Reading the other comments on here, I'm inclined towards malicious as it seems spun to create just the kind of rhetoric that we're seeing here.
The thing is, aside from traditional liberal and conservative views, it has been documented how the Internet gives play to a variety of essentially delusional belief systems; flat-earth, anti-vax, 5G fears, "crisis actor" conspiracies, etc. Basically, things that in earlier times someone might imagine one day but give up through realizing that their friends and neighbors might (correctly) think they were crazy if they continued to entertain such idea.
And this isn't to say such ideas are absolutely distinct from political ideas - just about any type of delusion is now given a particular kind of political spin since the committedly delusional are an easily directed group.
The situation is - once people got their ideas from the neighbors and maybe their schools and churches. Gradually, they came to also get their ideas from mass media. This was already somewhat artificial but at least it kept a single social authority. Now, people get their ideas from mass media and "the Internet"("dispersed", "narrow-cast" media), with mass media struggling to keep up some unity of beliefs (though mass media itself easily cast as a manipulator of its own sort).
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/education/education-news/...
But this is not really true, people arent as swayed as the internet likes to believe. It's a giant fabricated hive mind, where a ton of people feel adversarial towards the commonly held opinions, which are in fact, not commonly held.
The effect is likely more polarization since we cannot moderate each other’s opinions with stories of our own experiences.
To the extent “cancel culture” describes something new, it has not.
> It’s impossible to share views, even among coworkers you might consider friends, without serious risk to one’s employment.
It always has been, for certain views.
Which views are more safe and which are more dangerous has changed over time. People who think that it has suddenly become dangerous is people who have views that have recently become less privileged in this context.
I'm ideologically aligned with you, at least on this, and I would be afraid to speak openly. I think you are correct about this diagnosis.
It is sad that I can only be honest and say things such as "let's wait for the facts" under a nickname on some dark corner of the web.
However, I have tons of friends apart from the groups mentioned above; people that I appreciate, whom I have met through different hobbies or passions. None of these bonds have a connection to politics, but it is common for some of them to bring up political topics during these months. I reserve my opinions on these topics because I understand that there are a lot of emotions involved. Moreover, we all have biases. We are not at war, we just digress on the solutions the country needs.
When you ask respondents on political ideas, like voting rights, immigration, state welfare, infrastructure, etc, a much broader and more moderate viewpoint emerges.
Also there seems to be a more growing disconnect between people in power and the masses. I think as data science becomes a more developed craft, more people will become aware about the motivations of our political actors. Sensationalism and political correctness are usually signs of a deeper problem---
"I am a pro-choice atheist. When I lived in Ireland, one of my friends was a pro-life Christian. I thought she was responsible for the unnecessary suffering of millions of women. She thought I was responsible for killing millions of babies. And yet she invited me over to her house for dinner without poisoning the food. And I ate it, and thanked her, and sent her a nice card, without smashing all her china."
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/rkpDX7j7va6c8Q7cZ/in-favor-o...
>The political climate these days prevents me from saying things I believe because others might find them offensive
With the 62% includes anyone who "strongly agrees" or "somewhat agrees."
I would answer "somewhat agrees" to that question, not because I'm afraid to share my beliefs but that I don't want to discuss the topic or I'm not knowledgeable enough to have confidence discussing my beliefs.
If someone says something racist, they are exercising free speech.
If someone in return calls that out for being racist, and shames them, they are ALSO exercising free speech.
So long as the government does not punish either of them, noone's Free Speech is being compromised.
But the outcome of this exchange is that the first person is going to claim repression then vote in this survey and say they are afraid to share their political views.
Frankly, the only problem I see is people's inability to introspect.
Now, I simply can't picture the guy not being reelected, no matter how many poll aggregator I can see.
So, my rationalization is that polls are just getting it wrong, again, and are pretty much useless, but that the silent majority will, again, surprise everyone. We need brain scans rather than poll, quickly
Holy shit. Am I reading this right? 53% of Americans would support firing someone based on a donation to a presidential campaign? Later in the post it says this figure rises to 71% of people under 30.
I've always wondered how far this extends in the minds of people okay with this. If they found out in a year or two that someone donated to trump's campaign, does that justify firing too? I imagine this dystopia where someone gets fired for a donation, only for their new employer to find out about the donation and fire them too, and so on, leaving them either unemployable, or dividing employment along party lines.
-------
edit: Yes, it crossed my mind that we're assuming these are disjoint groups. We might be double counting the intersection of the two groups. The true total is the percent listed above minus the percent who support firing a Trump donor while also wanting to fire a Biden donor. I can't imagine the intersection being significant, so I left it out. I expect these figures are approximately accurate if the survey is accurate.
My conclusion above is independent of my own political views. Supposing I were a fervent Trump supporter, I should hope in that case that the Biden-firers are mostly non-partisan supporters of right-to-work laws rather than haters of my guy. Not saying I'd expect that to be true, just that I'd prefer it.
the Right powerstructure has convinced 50% of Americans that Biden will be the re-animated corpse of Stalin, and that he will sieze all private property and throw us all in gulags.
the net effect of this hyperpartisan polarization driven by fake news filter bubbles is that none of us can have a plain old reasonable discussion with each other, and agree to disagree about certain fundamentals, while finding a practical compromise going foward. being forced into being an extremist foot soldier of either Party or risk being destroyed by the partisans of the other Party is the worst lose-lose outcome of Prisoner's Dilemma.
i think the Deep State wants us divided and at each other's throats so that we don't team up and topple them.
The US isn’t a first world country anymore, it is devolving into a political and cultural mess.
Presumably there is some line that many of us would agree you can't cross but opinions will differ on where and what the line is.
For example, it might be your stance that all Trump supporters are racist. Would I hire someone who was openly racist? Absolutely not.
Is the reality that all Trump supporters are racists? No, probably not.
A counter-example, you believe that abortion is murder. Would you hire someone who supports murder? absolutely not.
Is abortion murder? Not definitively. It depends on your personal outlook.
Hiring/firing is just not an objective process anywhere, and you're going to be subject to the personal biases of the boss... and we're in particularly biased times. On the bright side, I suspect historical numbers would be worse... and at least it's not a civil war.
Are you against this in principle, for all possible presidential candidates regardless of how bad their views and policies and actions are (by your own definition of "bad")? Or do you just think that, right now, no major candidate is "bad enough" that you would advocate firing someone for supporting that candidate?
Not the GP, but of course yes. If someone is good enough for your political and legal system to advance his candidature at the elections and be voted by citizens, then who has the right to damage me for my legitimate political choice?
I don't see how an endorsement of a vile racist couldn't be seen as disqualifying for positions of authority.
The state defines a frame of things that are lawful and that every citizen should be able to perform in perfect safety. If you think that the laws of your country are not sufficient, then seek to change them; instead you seem to advocate for vigilante justice in the absence of shared and agreed upon rules.
Do you seriously not see the difference between, "this opinion should not get you thrown in jail" and "this opinion should not belong to someone in a position of power"?
In essence, the opinions of your opponents and enemies are just as valid as your opinions, no matter how much you dislike these opinions (it's plausible that they dislike your opinions just as much) and you should not get a veto to say that their opinions don't belong to someone in a position of power but your opinion can do so; people have the right to have their opinions represented in politics.
Fringe opinions deserve only trivial representation and that's what they get, but this article is about various mainstream opinions held by as much as 62% of people, it's obvious that most of these opinions should be allowed to belong to someone in a position of power.
I think that this is not true and that society and individuals can and should reserve the right to suppress intolerant ideologies.
A line in the sand of "we won't harass people because of their political views" generally works as protection against oppression, even if you have to include oppressive political views as well in that basket.
In essence, the choice in this matter is simply about escalation or living side by side with your political enemies by agreeing to specify where "the battlefield" is - IMHO, ideally, limited to debates and votes by elected representatives and discourse in media and social circles. If it's escalated to "let's fight our enemies" in the field of employment or providing services then it's not as bad as street fights (which were used in political 'discourse' a hundred years ago) but still going to lead to a lot of people harmed on both sides.
All modes of justification can be invoked fraudulently. This does not invalidate my mode of justification any more than it invalidates very basic uncontroversial modes of justification such as "we should reserve the right to use force to suppress murder." Sure, those in power can and do invoke that mode of justification fraudulently by falsely claiming that people are murderers and thus using violence against them. We do not throw up our hands and say "well, we cannot ever use that mode of justification, because who can really say for sure what is and isn't murder?"
> Trump reserving the right to suppress ideologies that are intolerant to "Blue lives matter" cause or conservative politicians reserving the right to suppress ideologies that threaten christian family values.
Just like my even simpler example above, this is not a problem for my argument. I can and do claim two things: that we are justified using violence to suppress intolerance, and that it's bad when people use violence to suppress things that they falsely claim are intolerance.
I understand, but how can the same state allow mobs and employers to harass people and sometimes destroy their lives because they do what the state allows? The state doesn't just declare freedoms, it protects them. For example, if the state doesn't throw you in jail for your opinions, can someone else do it without the state intervening?
> Do you seriously not see the difference between, "this opinion should not get you thrown in jail" and "this opinion should not belong to someone in a position of power"?
I see that the first statement comes from the state and it is valid for everyone; the second is subjective and is made by a group of people who have taken on themselves the role of judge, jury and executioner. Granted, it's a statement that is in your right to make; but if you act on it you can become responsible of harassment, stalking, mobbing.
What do you mean? Who among us gets to decide who is allowed on the ballot?
However I guess the keyword is can. Tolerance should be exercised from all sides and political ideas should not be a motivation in and by themselves. However it's also true that the CEO of a company is in some cases him/herself a political figure, so I guess it depends on the case.
That's certainly the case. And, at some level, a political figure doesn't get to have a private life beyond some constraints. In principle, this doesn't apply to lower-level employees--although in many cases those employees are public faces to the company as well. And companies will much more quickly dismiss individuals who become a headache for whatever reason than they will their CEO.
So, to be clear: intolerance should be frowned upon by default. The community can decide to be intolerant towards some things, but those things must be agreed, shared and made clear once and for all. And at that point, that agreed-upon intolerance becomes a law and can be actually enforced by the state itself.
However, I'm not sure what kind of "regulation" you're referring to, because if you mean that, say, only the government gets to decide when to use force to suppress intolerance, there's the obvious problem of "what happens if the government is intolerant?"
Well, I guess that at some point you have to accept one risk or another. Any system can fail in one way or the other.
I personally don't like laws limiting freedom of speech; but I also don't like angry mobs that openly and proudly exercise intolerance of anything that falls into their own entirely subjective definition of intolerance.
I would like the state to protect me from those who try to set the limits of freedom of speech as it suits them; but I understand that if the state wants to take from the people the power to silence unacceptable speech, then it must provide some minimum guarantee by taking it upon itself. Best of all would be no laws, but education and common sense, and of course tolerance, from all parts: but again, what do you do if that fails?
That and imagining it the other way around. I'm adamantly pro-choice and have donated to orgs supporting this. From the right wing perspective, I support literal murder. What better justification than that to fire me? The only reason I can think that I shouldn't be fired for being pro-choice is that, well, my worldview is the right one.
It seems like many people think that "political" actions should enjoy a special protection and that no such actions should ever draw any criticism or consequences. The same attitude is common for actions labelled as "religious." I reject that special status.
Yep and for the same reason free speech is protected. Because nobody can be trusted with being the arbiter of correct speech, or which candidate to support. Sure, it sounds good for extreme right-wing examples, but there's no guarantee you can limit it to the worst extremes once people have that arbitrary power. Might be your job the mob decides to go after some day, because you chose the wrong candidate to support, according to whatever criteria they're using.
Also because donating to a presidential campaign has nothing to do with their work performance.
As far as I know, in USA the employment discrimination laws draw a distinction between these classes (ethnicity and religion are protected classes, politics is not), however, my local laws and my personal moral compass puts them in the same basket; I'd consider someone being fired because they're, for example, a card-carrying member of the local radical communist party to be equivalent of firing someone because they're Jehovah’s Witness or have sexual practices of which the local church disapproves. They should be able to run as a candidate for that party in some elections while not having their employment threatened for that - this is needed to prevent e.g. the owner of a town-dominating factory from suppressing political opposition to the current elected town officials.
I support firing someone for supporting a harmful cause, and particularly from intolerant causes. If, for instance, you provide material support for stripping voting rights from a minority group, or denying hospital visitation rights to couples with a certain sexuality, I would support your employer firing you for that. That applies regardless of whether you’re providing that support via a political or religious group. Political and religious groups shouldn’t enjoy any special protection when they’re doing harmful and intolerant things.
I'm not sure why it was phrased that way. It seems to be hinting at wealthy people controlling the outcome of elections.
A: Support for liberty means I don't want to restrict who works with whom.
B: Veil of Ignorance means I don't want circumstances out of someone's control to result in use of A to discriminate in hire/fire.
C: Individual freedom is important.
D: Societal success is important.
The nuance is not quick-expressible in text, but that's the short form. I believe principles are only useful if they lead to desirable outcomes, so I have no problem special-casing exemptions to these, but I don't think political opinion is worth making a protected hiring class. This is a point where I disagree with California employment law (which does make political affiliation a protected class) and agree with Federal employment law which is more circumspect in its.
On the other hand, I wouldn't fire a person for political affiliation, generally. If it would almost certainly sink my business, then I would.
I read something where he thinks that the bias is even worse this time around, he's calculated Trump down by 3 points right now.
Do you mean Trump has less support this election by 3% compared to the last election?
This is why the future of the internet is going to be a closed end internet.
Something that isn't accessible by everyone.
Whether through paid entry, invitation, or geography, the future of the internet is going be more closed end than it is now.
The open ended internet of today will become a junk yard of spam and identity thieves in the future.
Early adopters and rich people were the first to get on the internet and they'll be the fist to get off of it too.
For something more private.
"Strong liberals" are apparently the only people who are proud enough about what they believe to be judged for it. Or maybe it's just impunity because it's illegal to fire people based on race, gender, and (often) sexual orientation, so they feel protected. Overt racists should lobby for similar protections, although I don't think they'll have a lot of luck.
The truth is that strong liberals have become extremely aggressive in intimidating and shaming anyone who disagrees with them in the modern era. And it's disturbing and completely corrosive, toxic and destructive.
I believe the U.S. needs its right brain and left brain to openly discuss and debate issues because neither side has a monopoly on morality or correctness.
Democracy doesn't die in darkness. It dies in uniformity. Have you ever lived in a one party country? It's the closest thing to hell on Earth.
The USA is a one party country -- it's just very good at marketing it as two parties. They never actually solve the problems they claim to care about -- they just keep using the same wedge issues for successive elections.
Until we actually have competition from other parties, the two party oligopoly (enforced by entrenched interests at the state level) makes our political system as useless as a one party political system.
It can be summarized as " Instead the iconoclast can choose what I think of as the Kolmogorov option. This is where you build up fortresses of truth in places the ideological authorities don’t particularly understand or care about, like pure math, or butterfly taxonomy, or irregular verbs. You avoid a direct assault on any beliefs your culture considers necessary for it to operate. You even seek out common ground with the local enforcers of orthodoxy."
SlateStarCodex has a related post on the concept titled "Kolmogorov Complicity...": https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/10/23/kolmogorov-complicity-...
I checked as late as a few days ago and it was still disabled ... and now it appears to be back ?
[EDIT 7/21: This post is now a month old, and I am cautiously optimistic that the Times has changed their mind. There is no further need to take any of the actions described below.]
but work is not the place to discuss politics or sex. it is dangerous to have an opinion on anything other than sports and even then only at the team level.
> Nearly two‐ thirds of Latino Americans (65%) and White Americans (64%) and nearly half of African Americans (49%) have political views they are afraid to share
According to the first chart, 42% of “strong liberals” feel like they can share their political views. That group is disproportionately white: https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2020/02/27/5-facts-abo.... So there are all these people of color who are substantially more afraid to share their political views than a group of disproportionately white liberals on the far left.
Reinforcing an assumption, useful for pandering, while with this information another approach could be possible
From a different item of the same piece, Black Democrats are less likely than White Democrats to prefer compromise with Republicans.
https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2020/02/27/5-facts-abo...
https://www.pewforum.org/fact-sheet/changing-attitudes-on-ga...
https://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2017/05/18/2-public-views-on...
The other issues, yeah, you're right. I don't really consider taxes a social issue, but I realized I forgot about gun control.
As I point out, with a source, in another subthread, Blacks are more supportive of abortion than the nation as a whole, and second only to Asians. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23936024
Even in your ancient (5 years after Roe!) piece, while Blacks were less supportive of abortion than average, they were also becoming supportive more rapidly than other groups. 40+ years later, that faster change has flipped the starting positions.
Blacks are the most supportive of abortion legality in most or all cases of any race other than Asians, so that's one issue that isn't race that Blacks lean to the left on.
https://www.prri.org/research/legal-in-most-cases-the-impact...