Why is it traitorous to understand the people you disagree with?
dynomight.net
dynomight.net
For a number of reasons, we seem to have reached the point where hyperbolic, emotional statements get attention and calm, rational discussion is ignored.
A world where everyone is trying to position themselves as the persecuted, besieged voice of reason defending simple truth against irrational attractors, does not leave much room for common ground.
It's interesting to note that the author does seem to have had anyone accuse him of being "traitorous" for trying to understand. He just asserts this strawman to paint those who might disagree as unreasonable and then bemoans his asserted lack of common ground.
I wish I could say this is an online phenomenon, and it's obviously much worse online, but it clearly has leaked into the offline world.
Are you saying the author lacks credibility because they themselves do not show evidence of it happening to them? I'm confused, because the first and second sentences in your reply appears to acknowledge/agree with the author's conclusion. If you believe the author's complaint is legitimate, why claim they're making a strawman?
We seem to often portrait ourself to be in a completely irrational victims position (like the headline) which usually doesn't exist. this makes finding the common ground for a discussion challenging.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sElz_P6QsZo (ignore the inflammatory title and intro screen)
Civility and decorum are what is missing today. And if it was taught in our schools today, and valued in society at large, maybe it we could still have debates like this.
Thank you for point this out.
But, it still is an example of civil discourse. Another is Friedman arguing (civil, but a little more tense) with a young Michael Moore. (they do talk past each other a little)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bb7Fi8I-qOk (ignore inflammatory title/intro again)
That's what got us Joe Biden, who mostly has the same policies as Donald Trump, is a democrat who has always been a lot like a pretty conservative republican, but says nice things and only sniffs girls' hair instead of grabbing by the _____. Downvote for that if you like but the lesser of two appalling characters is still appalling.
What's missing is a deeper understanding of issues, a willingness to understand not the other side but all sides of an issue, and a recognition that meeting in the middle is deciding not to decide. We need brains, backbones, and a willingness to avoid partisanship.
"Education" means "leading", think "as if hand in hand, in time": it is a matter (in this case) of transmission through /example/ - not of passing information. Then, you can bring awareness to it: and awareness raising passes through showing that one way is higher and the other is low.
You must live that example.
The rarer the example, the greater the evidence of a social crisis. Some noticed, the crisis in higher culture is surely a damage, but it is that in the common culture of pyramidal society (the brother, the teacher etc.) that is mining the texture.
> maybe... we could still have debates like this
Some people are getting warier, as if in the terms legendarily attributed to Mark Twain: "Don’t argue with a fool, or the listener will say there is a pair of you". To debate, you need adequate interlocutors - if Umberto Eco imagined discussing with a six years old (a "new modern possibility"), he wanted the different credentials to be patent.
But actually, the matter has never been that simple. I have recently seen the initial part of the "Gore Vidal vs William Buckley" movie, Best of Enemies (Gordon; Neville, 2015) and I found the first debate immediately embarrassing.
It was "mud wrestling in a suit" - a pretense of civilization revealing very low urges in action; large investments in refinements spent to trick the surface. I could analyze, and I could have already written a short essay from reading your question to submitting the post, but insistence on the low unfortunately also promotes it.
If you want to take a look at it, it is on YT.
Lest you think there is something uniquely "evil" about Republicans, here's a bit of recent (but overlooked) history from the Washington Post: "Democrats were for occupying capitols before they were against it"
> 10 years ago, Democrats embraced the left-wing mob that occupied the state Capitol in Madison. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) praised the occupiers for an “impressive show of democracy in action” and tweeted as they assaulted the Capitol that she continued “to stand in solidarity” with the union activists.
Some highlights from the article:
> The small contingent of capitol police was quickly overwhelmed. Protesters ripped the hinges of an antique oak door at the State Street entrance and streamed inside.
> The police retreated in the face of the horde, giving up the first floor, then the second, [as protestors] began searching for the Republican senators who had dared to defy the will of the unions.”
> police sneaked them out through an underground tunnel to a government building across the street. But a Democratic representative posted on social media that the Republican senators were escaping through the tunnels, so when the senators came up into the lobby, the mob was there waiting for them.
> The senators hid under a stairwell, out of view, while the police ordered a city bus to pull up in front of the building. Officers then formed a human wall on the sidewalk, parting the sea of protesters and creating a pathway for the senators to reach the bus.” Once the senators were on board, “the mob on the street began punching the windows and shaking the vehicle. … The police told the senators and staff inside to keep their heads down in case a window shattered.”
> Thankfully, no one was killed. But during the course of the occupation, Walker received a steady stream of death threats against him and his wife, including one that promised to “gut her like a deer” and one threatening to kill his sons. Police found dozens of .22-caliber bullets scattered across the Capitol grounds. The occupiers drew chalk outlines of fake dead bodies etched with Walker’s name on the floor, and carried signs that read “Death to tyrants,” “The only good Republican is a dead Republican” and one with picture of him in crosshairs with the words, “Don’t retreat, Reload.”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/01/14/democrats...
It is a very different thing, and not at all comparable.
Rational and nuanced discussion requires patience, tolerance, energy, and a big heart to sometimes acknowledge that one is wrong. It's just so much easier to be angry, to be righteous, and to destroy the "enemies".
“Anger with its poisoned root and honeyed tip.” — the Buddha
Anger is enticing. Anger gives you excitement. It makes you feel powerful and righteous. It’s not just easier to be angry, it’s alluring.
Once you understand the online social media through this lens, everything is easily explained, from how people converse and decide to ostracize people who don't agree right from the get go, to how websites are designed to drive user engagement.
In other words, it's not just about tribalism and a sense of belonging, it's also about lobbying for the positions and attitudes you hold and pushing out those you disagree with. You don't actually care much about the specific person you're talking to: you're performing for an audience.
In a sense, we've all become politicians.
The issue isn't that people don't understand arguments, it's that they misrepresent them. A rational, reasoned, mature, back-and-forth debate on abortion won't get you views and clicks, so of course no one does it. Panem et circenses.
† And of course Casey, which reaffirmed Roe.
Its very shittiness is why we can't realistically fix it. We've been relying on courts really stretching reasoning on the constitution to its breaking point, just to be able to have a mostly-modern state & economy, in terms of function and outcomes, and it's been like that for most of a century. Maybe it would've been better if the courts hadn't done that and had instead forced us to a crisis point much sooner, so we'd have to actually fix our governmental system, but who knows what suffering that might have caused.
Concerted attempts to change the course of the courts might finally bring us that crisis, though. We'll see. If they're maximally successful, I think it'll have to, because the US is gonna go downhill fast if kinda-shaky 20th century rulings supporting broadened federal power are wiped out en masse.
I agree that a "Union of States," being profoundly anti-federalist, is a pretty shit way of running a homogeneous world power with a shared language, shared culture, and (for the most part) shared ideals.
The US fundamentally changed after the Civil War (which was probably the breaking point of anti-federalism) but unfortunately the Constitution didn't change along with it.
We have a shared cultural history, but we can't even come close to a consensus on its interpretation.
To regulate commerce with foreign nations, and among the several states, and with the Indian tribes;
https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/commerce_clause
Abortion tends to be single state centric, meaning the person getting the abortion and the abortion clinic are in the same state. Because of this, the federal government couldn't pass a law that only affects intrastate commerce.
At least that's my understanding of it.
FWIW, qualified immunity was also an immunity created from whole cloth by the Supreme Court. Apparently interpreting new "laws" like this was popular from the court in the 1960s and 1970s. Much of today's police brutality and lack of accountability stems from this decision.
Given that expansive interpretations of the commerce clause seems to be the status quo, doesn't that suggest that a federal abortion law is possible? It should be easy for lawyers and politicians to find some tortured meaning of interstate commerce that includes a woman getting an abortion in her own state. They seem to do this sort of thing all the time.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Minimum_Drinking_Age_...
"If you want Medicare funding, you will..." could easily backfire, given that conservatives are not fond of that program either.
> Abortion tends to be single state centric, meaning the person getting the abortion and the abortion clinic are in the same state. Because of this, the federal government couldn't pass a law that only affects intrastate commerce.
It's not this straightforward. One of the initial challenges to the 1964 CRA was that intrastate racial discrimination fell outside of the purview of the Federal government; SCOTUS has consistently determined that state acts may not restrict rights where interstate activity is likely (e.g. motor lodges, economic activities near state borders, etc.).
On net, I think the 9th Amendment provides perfectly sufficient cover for a right to abortion, and that it would be reasonable to interpret the nonenumeration clause in a similar manner to the commerce clause (i.e., permitting federal law where required to protect rights that individual states might wish to infringe). But that's a parallel justification.
It's not controversial to the layer of government to which derives power from it, certainly. I think politicians in states have issues with it when it's convenient.
>I think the 9th Amendment provides perfectly sufficient cover for a right to abortion, and that it would be reasonable to interpret the nonenumeration clause in a similar manner to the commerce clause (i.e., permitting federal law where required to protect rights that individual states might wish to infringe). But that's a parallel justification.
I think it will until states start banning abortion, which is their right (assuming Roe is overturned). I don't think the federal government will have power to override the decision of the states. It would be nice to see a strong interpretation for the 9th amendment come into action though. It might finally end moral crusades like the drug war.
The true simple solution would have been to codify the right to an abortion in federal law, as candidate Obama promised to do but President Obama failed to even attempt. Recently I’ve been introduced to the hypothetical that maybe the Democrats didn’t really want to do that because fear mongering about Republicans overturning Roe was such an effective fundraising tool. I wouldn’t be surprised if that was the case.
You need 60 votes in the senate to pass anything unless you eliminate the filibuster (the so called nuclear option). Obama had 60 Democrats exactly which means if even a single Democrat was willing to vote against a federal right to abortion law Obama couldn't have done it.
First, they only had 59% of the House, not enough to overcome filibuster.
Second, they did have 60% in the Senate, but only for a few months in 2009, and it's not obvious that it was an "overcome filibuster on federal abortion laws" 60%. 2009 was the year Al Franken won a Senate seat in Minnesota after a recount and a Minnesota Supreme Court case, so he wasn't seated until late April. A couple of months later, Ted Kennedy died and was replaced by an interim appointee; Scott Brown, a Republican, won the special election to replace him that winter. They also had Arlen Specter - a Republican - caucusing with them to make that 60. He was a "pro-choice but personally opposed" legislator and may not have voted with the Democrats on this issue.
So yeah, they didn't try. But I think it's very likely they didn't try because they felt strongly that they would not be successful.
Citation needed. Also, would love to see how you are defining "serious non-partisan legal scholar." Seems like a whole bunch of adjectives you can use to disregard someone. As it stands, you can literally be talking about one person and be telling the truth depending on how you define those words.
RBG was a brilliant legal mind and invoking the Equal Protection Clause (which is what she argued for) would have been orders of magnitude more robust than invoking some vague "right to privacy" that's barely in the Constitution to begin with.
Citation needed.
You can only understand people when you're clear-headed, i.e. your "rational you" is the one in control. With these issues, people have either natural or nurtured emotional ties. To such an extent that the topic itself shuts of their rationality, and they revert back to blanket statements ("I can't argue with you because you believe X", or just plain profanities). Mix this in with tribality, and you've got a good recipe for no ability to reconcile two different opinions.
There's also the fact that people generally don't want to reconcile. When it comes to charged topics, it is a bare-faced lie to want reconciliation. What each side wants is the other side to relent. I think the term "culture war" is actually pretty accurate, there's no interchange of ideas. It's just seeing who can shout the other into submission.
It's worth considering that this problem isn't necessarily symmetrical around the centre of the political axis. There have been experiments done on this that show conservatives understand the left far better than the other way around. They come up with a large set of "How much do you agree with on a scale of 1-10" type questions on political topics. Then they recruit people from across the political spectrum (self rated) and split them into four groups. Two groups are asked to fill out the survey in the usual way, directly about their own opinions. The other two are asked to answer the survey as they imagine someone from the other side would answer. Then the answers are lined up to see how good each group was at predicting the answers of the other. The results are always the same: conservatives can play 'pretend leftie' much better than the other way around.
I'm always quite suspicious of social science these days but the methodology in this type of experiment seems simple enough that there can't be much hiding in it, except maybe, the exact nature of the questions used. This experiment has been replicated however.
This provides empirical support for what has probably been the real world experience of many of us, that people on the right are much more willing to interact with and be exposed to left wing views than the reverse. Example: I've encountered people in the past who threw tantrums at work because they discovered that someone else was reading right wing news websites (in their own time). The idea of a conservative person going to HR and filing complaints about other employees because they read the Guardian is laughable, and it's not because the Guardian is somehow better or more moral than other newspapers (very much not so). People on the left are just drastically more afraid than normal people of exposure to non-left wing thought, and this problem gets worse the further left you go. This is also why communist countries always rely heavily on censorship and speech control.
Unfortunately the experiments can't illuminate why this effect exists, only proving that it does. The rest is in the realm of speculation. They do leave one clue though: the left wing participants usually fail to predict right wing responses because they're picking answers much more extreme than those people actually hold.
That's not true - the 4th amendment protects against unreasonable search and seizure. The search part prevents the police from reading your mail or wiretapping your phones without a warrant (which declares the search reasonable), except illegally.
is a reasonable interpretation in context … and coincidentally, exactly what the author is arguing, once you get beyond the quoted part.
I think this whole subthread is being too hard on a snippet.
No one, anywhere, has ever argued that the right to privacy means everything done in private is legal. That is not even remotely close to what the debate is about.
You have constructed an impressively bad strawman.
I think there’s a good argument that abortion should be allowed under the 13th amendment but that seems like someone would yell at me if I said that.
“2. Whether Petitioners’ criminal convictions for adult consensual sexual intimacy in the home violate their vital interests in liberty and privacy protected by the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment?"
To spell it out: "adult consensual sexual activity" is not even remotely close to "everything".
You're also wrong on abortion. Directly from Roe v. Wade:
"The privacy right involved, therefore, cannot be said to be absolute. In fact, it is not clear to us that the claim asserted by some amici that one has an unlimited right to do with one's body as one pleases bears a close relationship to the right of privacy previously articulated in the Court's decisions. The Court has refused to recognize an unlimited right of this kind in the past."
"We, therefore, conclude that the right of personal privacy includes the abortion decision, but that this right is not unqualified and must be considered against important state interests in regulation."
Can you tell me where you got the idea that "it's quite similar to the current reason abortion is legal"?
None of these are arguing everything done in private should be legal. Even the most extreme argument (not accepted by SCOTUS) is that things you do to your own body are protected.
But if you do something (say, fraud), in private, no one is arguing you should have a right to privacy.
Here are some that are at odds with what you are saying:
"The privacy right involved, therefore, cannot be said to be absolute. In fact, it is not clear to us that the claim asserted by some amici that one has an unlimited right to do with one's body as one pleases bears a close relationship to the right of privacy previously articulated in the Court's decisions. The Court has refused to recognize an unlimited right of this kind in the past."
"We, therefore, conclude that the right of personal privacy includes the abortion decision, but that this right is not unqualified and must be considered against important state interests in regulation."
Did you read the article? Its whole point is that Roe is a dubious application of privacy, even if you support the ruling’s conclusion.
I assumed from your confident tone, and insistence that the parent comment was a strawman, that you would be able to shed more light on this topic. At least, that’s where I would be if I used that tone.
Let's look at fraud. Who do you think is arguing that fraud is illegal if done in private. Can you link me to any example anywhere on any medium?
Which part of the article do you think is relevant here? I have read many books by actual constitutional law scholars on these cases. I don't understand what you think I'm supposed to see in a 1,000 word blog post by a random non lawyer that doesn't know anything in particular about constitutional law.
>I assumed from your confident tone, and insistence that the parent comment was a strawman, that you would be able to shed more light on this topic.
I'm not just insisting it's a strawman. It is a straw man. Can you link me to any argument made by anyone ever on any medium that is even remotely close to what he is saying? (that everything done in private, say, fraud, murder, arson, etc.) should be legal?
It wasn't a strawman (I do not claim anyone argued everything in private is legal), it was reductio as absurdum - taking the privacy argument to its logical limit. If a right to privacy makes abortion legal because it is private, why does this apply only to abortion? Actually, only to a subset of abortion, since "this right is not unqualified and must be considered against important state interests in regulation".
You quoted the court saying this is "not unlimited" and about "personal privacy" (distinguished from 'general' privacy?). How does any of this follow from "security against unreasonable search"? Or do I misunderstand, and they derived this right from some other amendment or combination of amendments?
The reasoning, so far as I understand it, is tortured at best, so I'd be grateful if you could clarify the court's logic for me.
Yes, they derived it from the 14th Amendment's Due Process clause.
In all other contexts I know of, the 4th amendment does not grant anyone rights to do things that would otherwise be illegal. It sets careful restrictions on the governments ability to investigate. In other words, the government is prohibited from doing things we consider to be a burden upon people whom the government lacks sufficient reason to suspect. However, given a sufficient reason to suspect them of a crime the government can then fulfill due process and continue in it's investigations of those suspected crimes.
So lets by very precise here. Lets take some action a person might engage in, lets call it 'throwing strings', which is just made up nonsense. To be informative here, we will say that the constitution does not have anything to say regarding throwing strings, and that state or local governments can outlaw it as they see fit. However, in the existence of a right to privacy the act of throwing strings becomes a right under the constitution.
How can a right to unreasonable search and seizure (or however other way privacy is derived) possibly create a right to openly and notoriously throw strings?
People don't talk about it a lot, but the miscarraige rate is something like 10-20%. You probably know at least a handful of women who've experienced one. It's fallacious to conclude somebody had an abortion because they're no longer pregnant but don't have a baby.
As far as I can tell, nothing. They never said, "anyone who's visibly pregnant and then later on visibly not-pregnant had an abortion."
> Nor is abortion necessarily private [...] or one could be visibly pregnant and then get an abortion.
You wouldn't know that person had an abortion unless they told you. But then you might as well simply say "An abortion isn't private if the woman tells everyone she had one", which is the same as "one could declare one is going to have one" so I think that's not what was meant.
The fourth amendment, much like the third, was passed in response to an explicit practice that occurred during the pre revolutionary period, and sought to remedy it.
Specifically when you look at all of the cases over time defining actions as speech.
Is abortion a form of free speech? possibly!
It’s a very straightforward jump from the text of the fourth amendment to a right to privacy, but at the end of the day, the amendment itself does not actually say there is a right to privacy.
Papers in particular is important because it is quite literally in reference to information. To this day information has to be acquired legally in order for it to be admissable in court.
Like, if they ruled tomorrow that abortion until birth is legal, but the mother and father must spend a week attending 8 hours of daily counseling before being allowed to abort and then must spend a month after to mentally recover (thus effectively making them unable to work for that period), wouldn't you consider that to be effectively the same as banning abortion?
I would consider it to be equivalent, as making something unreasonably difficult to do is effectively the same as a ban, particularly for more economically vulnerable people, after all, even if abortion were banned in the entire US, for the rich it just means taking time off to go to another country and having a 'miscarriage' before coming back, while for the poor it means resorting to more dangerous methods.
> Everyone has the right to education. Education shall be free, at least in the elementary and fundamental stages. Elementary education shall be compulsory. Technical and professional education shall be made generally available and higher education shall be equally accessible to all on the basis of merit.
I know USA hasn't ratified these so USA doesn't think this is a right, but most of the world do. It is fine to force people to get vaccinated, but it isn't fine to deny human rights to those who don't get vaccinated. The reason is obviously that they want to force everyone to get vaccinated, but they can't so instead they just deny human rights to those who don't get vaccinated. Why do it in such a roundabout way, when the constitution obviously didn't intend for the federation to make such laws?
This is something only engineers are able to believe.
I cannot claim to understand philosophy but I can claim to understand law, and it is _not_ like mathematics. Human discretion is paramount to the system, and laws are written in such a way that humans reinterpret them afterwards, as influenced by their own cultural and social bias. How is this like mathematics? Do you need a jury to decide if a theorem is true?
I have met many engineers who treat law as if it is supposed to be exact and mathematical. They become very annoyed when it does not conform to this view, or when laws aren't written in an even more detailed, step-by-step breakdown. That is not how it works. There's a reason there's discretion in the system, if you try to regulate something as inherently chaotic as human behaviour with inflexible rules, you get crypto.
Edit: changed example
* It doesn't really work like that today anyway; it's a decision tree of "schools."
> What you're talking about has nothing to do with what philosophers do, which is talk about how things ought to be.
How is that of any use? It's not like people are going to drop what they're doing and change their morals because ethics professors said so. That would be ridiculous.
> Your metaethical position is just one among very many and there are arguments for and against it and all the others. It's not special.
You can say that against anything, really.
I'm sorry, deleted my original comment. I totally misread you.
> How is that of any use? It's not like people are going to drop what they're doing and change their morals because ethics professors said so. That would be ridiculous.
Yeah, that's a question a lot of people have, but it does happen. People do read Aristotle and change their mind. People go to them with questions and they influence other academics. Overall, I'd say it's mostly not very successful and they're mostly ignored...
> You can say that against anything, really.
I meant to emphasize argumentation here, but also the lack of consensus. There's consensus in many fields, even in on many issues in philosophy.
However, I would argue moral philosophy is inherently built on unprovable axioms. The criticism "used to justify whatever they want" is actually a necessary feature to morality, because the whole point of morals is that not everyone shares your morals. If they were shared by everyone, they would just be objective truths.
Nobody wrings their hands that a murderer doesn't share the unprovable moral axioms of those who oppose murder. If a somebody refuses to comply with the anti-murder laws, then force is is used to stop him. Problem solved, no need to consult the philosophers.
I would argue a great many locales in the USA are full of moral dissonance, and this is one of the major things holding us back from having strong communities.
I.E., very few people get upset if you say "the sky is not blue", as this is non-threatening to their beliefs and they can verify the truth themselves.
But state "your political position X is based on this specific false premise of Y", if someone holds this position strongly but cannot justify it will often trigger an emotional and often irrational defense.
This is silly folk psychology. There are many reasons people get upset when people contradict them, raging from respect issues to believing that such contradictions are actual mortal dangers. People get quite upset when you disagree with their belief that all people have a right to life and counter with the proposition that the group they belong to should be exterminated, for example. It has nothing to do with their alleged inability to debate you. It's that you've indicate you're a threat to their life. People get quite upset when you strawman them or condescend or patronize in your response. There's a whole rainbow of reasons to get upset and very few of them are about some inability to debate you.
This is what I showed to be false in my previous comment.
I know this is a subtle distinction, but it was my actual point.
I'm saying the following is false in all discussions, that's all:
> when people get defensive it's almost certainly based on something incongruous between their beliefs and actions
During the defensive act (usually an expression of anger or less often hurt) the single event turned out almost always to be because one of the people in the discussion held a belief that was found on something unsupportable/ unsubstantiated in the context of the discussion, and the opposing view brought this to light.
The defensive person (often times myself) backed their position (action) based on their beliefs, but was confronted with contradictory information. (ie, they could simply not "defend" their position in light of the other information.)
Keep in mind, the truth of a situation was often irrelevant as I found my self defensive even I only _thought_ I was being shown to be wrong (ie, my actions didn't support by beliefs at the time, but later proved otherwise), and I found this with other people as well.
Again, this is only my immediate surroundings and tests I have run. The reason I know the other side is that in nearly every instance I followed up with the other person to find out what happened, what went wrong for the very purpose of understanding what caused the defensive behavior.
Consider running a test...
Next time you run into a situation where something goes wrong, someone gets defensive (easiest to analyze yourself, because you have all the evidence available) compare what you/they said/did with what they actually believe about the event.
I've frequently worked out great personal issues with people doing this, but sometimes people get more upset and simply do not want to bring something up that is a contradiction for themselves.
A simple example of this idea is politics, when someone expresses a belief like "all life is sacred", and then they are asked about person's life they detest, when pressed on the matter, they will get defensive. Their actions (words they express) are incongruous with their beliefs are what caused their reaction.
Another example is unprofessional behavior, when someone shouts at another person in a meeting, and you point out their actions, they will often state "I wasn't shouting" immediately, or raise some other similar defense.
Challenge anyone with evidence that contradicts them on any belief they hold, and if they can't defend against your proofs, almost everyone gets defensive, as if you are attacking _them_. (some people need to value the belief highly, otherwise they won't even discuss it with you) I have yet to meet a person that I have not seen this behavior in under these circumstances. (I bring up contradictory info a lot as part of my work and personal life) Maybe psychopaths or sociopaths?
Whatever dude :) That's just anecdotal. My counterexamples prove you wrong. What you said was false :P
Kind of like how when someone's complaining to you about a problem and they get angry when you keep pestering them with solutions, because they aren't looking for a solution and just want someone to vent to.
No, you can also refute the premises/axioms and there other ways to do that than needing to demonstrate inconsistency.
The fact that people act out of mostly inscrutable, heuristic biological interest as a form of moral empiricism, does in fact count as out of bounds. I'm allowed to have a moral system that compels me not to reproduce, for instance. It's just not terribly likely (although not impossible) to be an effective reproductive strategy.
If you want to have a completely unrelated discussion about this, I'm more than willing, but I think you should probably refine the proposition "Private property exists".
Empiricism, likewise, is an axiom that goes. That which I observe exists, and then if you would like to keep that axiom, you're going to have to throw away anything else that is shown to be inconsistent as a result. Which is in bounds.
> That which I observe exists
This isn't even close to what empiricism is. You named a (very poor) ontological principle. Empiricism is a set of epistemological principles.
Second point: That is most definitely what empiricism is. Moreover, I have just given you a set of epistemological beliefs. It's a set with a single element, and it in fact characterizes empiricism. I don't know what else to tell you.
The point was that the axioms we used changed. Read further back up the thread. You're off track.
> Second point: That is most definitely what empiricism is. Moreover, I have just given you a set of epistemological beliefs. It's a set with a single element, and it in fact characterizes empiricism. I don't know what else to tell you.
No, please take an introduction to philosophy. Empericism is an epistemology, it has nothing to do with what exists which is an ontology. Ffs open Wikipedia or something. This is embarrassing Dunning-Kruger effect here.
A person can be 99% correct on the issue, and you coming in, and find a single, tiny, irrelevant flaw or absurd edge case does not overrule the 99% correctness of the original position.
Instead of that, it is perfectly possible to compare and differentiate between people who are mostly right, and people who are very wrong on most of it.
> their entire moral philosophy [..] is exclusively used to justify whatever they want
Unless by "want" you mean "selfishly desire or selflessly believe is the morally right thing", and not the common use of only "selfish desire".
Have you not examined your beliefs at all? No 100% consistent belief system has even been invented, because the different principles that allow advanced society to exist conflict with each other - duty to the collective, freedom, equality, etc.
Should the tolerant, tolerate people who are Nazis?
Should people be forced to serve in the army against their will to defent freedom?
Should you have the freedom to choose the more expensive lawyer, and if so should the law apply equally to the rich and the poor?
the examples go on forever.
You can have no belief at all about abortion. In that case, you are free to choose one as an axiom, although you are also free to not choose. If you choose a belief about abortion as an axiom and the result is that you end up believing both a thing and its negation, then you will need to abandon one of the necessary premises for that construction.
The point of a belief system is to be of practically usefull in life, not to.. whatever are we achieving here exactly?
This misunderstands the role of a Constitution. One of the central points of a Constitution is to mark certain things off-limits to democracy. People cannot debate with each other and vote for legislators who will pass laws that are forbidden by the constitution. It doesn't matter how many of them want to, or how solid the argument is. The Constitution says "nope, don't care, you cannot do that".
Even if every single voter in a state wanted to prevent anyone from ever saying "Turtles Suck!", the state cannot pass such a law. Even if there is vigorous disagreement over whether or not people should be allowed to say "Turtles Suck!", the Constitution says "don't care. You cannot pass a law prohibiting this."
So in the case discussed at the top of the article, the core question is whether the Constitution allows states to pass laws that ban abortion.
Roe said that the Constitution does not allow them to do so, because <reasons> (not meant sarcastically, just not worth enumerating them here).
As long as the Constitution is understood in that way, it makes no difference how much debate and disagreement there is about such laws: the Constitution says "you cannot pass laws that function in this way."
Now, of course, currently SCOTUS appears to be ready to present a different understanding of the Constitution in which it does not prevent states from passing laws that ban abortion (or otherwise restrict it). That makes no difference to the central point: if the Constitution is understood to prevent legislation that restricts behavior, the level of disagreement in society about that behavior is of no legal consequence.
This only applied to federal portion of "democracy" until the 14th amendment which added restricting the states re Bill of Rights. 14th wasn't adopted until 1868. I don't think it's that central.
> The Due Process Clause prohibits state and local governments from depriving persons of life, liberty, or property without a fair procedure. The Supreme Court has ruled this clause makes most of the Bill of Rights as applicable to the states as it is to the federal government, as well as to recognize substantive and procedural requirements that state laws must satisfy. -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourteenth_Amendment_to_the_Un...
The Constitution is primarily about limiting the powers of the Federal government vis a vis State government, and then both vs people. As outlined by the 10th amendment.
> The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.
The government can't pass laws against "Turtles Suck!" because that power is not granted them. It is reserved to The People. This is why "people" like youtube and twitter and cancel culture are free to censor and ban.
> The government can't pass laws against "Turtles Suck!" because that power is not granted them.
I find this way of explaining things somewhat disingenuous. Very few powers are delegated to the federal government, but all of those that are are (because of the limitations of language) sufficiently ambiguous that they can interpreted as allowing all manner of legislation and regulation.
> > One of the central points of a Constitution is to mark certain things off-limits to democracy.
> This only applied to federal portion of "democracy" until the 14th amendment which added restricting the states re Bill of Rights. 14th wasn't adopted until 1868. I don't think it's that central.
(1) you're suggesting that before the 14th amendment, a state could pass a "law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances." ? That seems preposterous.
(2) It seems generally accepted that the supremacy clause of Article VI of the constitution is the basis for the US Constitution covering state law.
(3) we live in 2022, and the US Consitution is as-it-is-today. The fact that something may have been added via an amendment (though above I dispute this) doesn't make it more or less "central".
The words immediately preceding your quote are "CONGRESS shall make no ...", and so "preposterous" seems a bit too strong, doesn't it? In case anyone is curious, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Amendment_to_the_United_... says
> Beginning with Gitlow v. New York (1925), the Supreme Court applied the First Amendment to states—a process known as incorporation—through the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.
(Fun facts: "Gitlow was the first major First Amendment case that the American Civil Liberties Union argued before the Supreme Court." Also, although Freedom of speech was incorporated in this case, Gitlow's conviction was nonetheless upheld.)
You're welcome to read more about it yourself at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incorporation_of_the_Bill_of_R... . Therein, you'll find references to fun cases like Barron v. Baltimore (1833), finding "State governments are not bound by the Bill of Rights" before the 14th amendment, and United States v. Cruikshank (1876), finding "The right of assembly under the First Amendment and the right to bear arms under the Second Amendment are only applicable to the federal government, not the states" even after the 14th amendment.
You may also find Article III of the Constitution of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts (1780) interesting:
> As the happiness of a people, and the good order and preservation of civil government, essentially depend upon piety, religion and morality; and as these cannot be generally diffused through a community, but by the institution of the public worship of God, and of public instructions in piety, religion and morality: Therefore, to promote their happiness and to secure the good order and preservation of their government, the people of this commonwealth have a right to invest their legislature with power to authorize and require, and the legislature shall, from time to time, authorize and require, the several towns, parishes, precincts, and other bodies politic, or religious societies, to make suitable provision, at their own expense, for the institution of the public worship of God, and for the support and maintenance of public Protestant teachers of piety, religion and morality, in all cases where such provision shall not be made voluntarily.
When do you think Massachusetts stopped taxpayer funding of churches?
That said, my point (3) still stands.
Also, according to:
https://www.mtsu.edu/first-amendment/article/1533/barnes-v-f...
MA stopped funding churches in 1833, significantly before the passage of the 14th amendment.
Just occured to me ... this just isn't the case for state constitutions. They serve the precise same role: marking out what is off-limits to "regular" democratic processes. To the extent that state and federal constitutions do not agree, there's some space for conflict and litigation there (or at least, there was), but the principle of A constitution (vs. "The Constitution") remains the same.
Absent that, not so much.
My solution to fostering cooperation is to switch to a voting system other than first past the post, so that political parties can be elected that are too small to have a majority on their own and must cooperate to govern, but that's just my opinion and I'm not sure it'll work at this point
It clearly isn’t
It should be something more like: “how has general discourse become so polluted and toxified in its perceptions for it to appear that the following statement yields any factuality” …
I guess that doesn’t quite have the same ring to it though.
Try saying you doubt the safety and effectiveness of COVID vaccines.
The reaction is the same.
Hardly, since it was my point. Doing anything other than that would in fact be off topic in this branch of the thread.
see also: 'When are you going to stop beating your wife?'
It's subversive and a direct influence on how politics are taken. You can be against unnecessary medication and be called an anti-vaxer. You can doubt a scientific conclusion without being anti-science.
You just cannot defend yourself against these accusations because they're triggers which purposely end discussions. These phrases are directly linked to terms which are generally universally agreed upon to be good natured. "Safe", "experts", "effective", "empathetic".
It's an attack on the language so that discourse is controlled and effectively one sided.
It’s a ‘group purity’/‘rank discipline’ thing humans do when they feel threatened.
You’ll see plenty of folks now going after anyone claiming they are ‘apolitical’ or moderate/not on a side.
It results in folks having to pick sides publicly, but often the folks who agree with the opposition being silenced and often just voting the way they feel in quieter ways, while pretending to go along. de-facto boycotts (with no explanations), voting certain ways (Trump, whatever) without telling anyone they did it, etc.
the only people willing to stand up and espouse it publicly are those that feel they can profit off those unwilling to say it themselves or for whom due to mental defect or wealth or whatever they feel invulnerable to backlash.
I’ve personally seen groups in person do the same, but it takes somewhat extreme circumstances or toxic cultures.
I think it’s a reflex that comes out of the us vs them and ideological splintering inherent from a culture war. Which is what is happening in the US.
Broadly, it’s rural vs urban values colliding, and rural communities feeling the effects of severe brain drain and decreasing populations and wealth.
With the large shift of folks from the cities to more remote areas from Covid + Remote work, I expect it won’t go as well longer term either as a lot of the echo chamber online seems to think. There will be mixing, but people tend to get more conservative after awhile in those areas too.
Just like the 70’s with free love and hippies transitioned into the 80’s being about money money and more conservative politics, times are a changing.
Now suppose that you are asked to decide where exactly that line is, taking into account this knowledge from the Oracle. But, imagine that at some point in the future, the Oracle might reveal where the line should have been drawn, and if your guess is a higher number than the Oracle's, then you are retrospectively guilty of manslaughter of all the zygotes/babies that were aborted at an age between your number and the Oracle's.
I suspect that in this hypothetical scenario, you would pick "a five-cell zygote should be protected from abortion" as the line.
Someone could probably run the numbers and work out where the line should be drawn to balance out the costs of over- and under-estimating, given a uniform random distribution for where the Oracle's line could be.
Bodily autonomy is probably a weak argument, because it assumes that the fetus isn't a living human being deserving of the same protections against slaughter that you and I enjoy.
If it is, bodily autonomy doesn't justify murder.
If it's not, then protecting it from abortion is absurd.
In neither case though, is bodily autonomy a compelling argument.
You seem to be saying that "personhood" should be the deciding factor of abortion rights, but "personhood" is never going to be resolved to everyone's satisfaction. Bodily autonomy can and should be.
We all just want to go about our lives within being forced by law to sacrifice our rights to our bodies.
My thing with the hypothetical kid needing a kidney wasn't that a parent refusing to donate would be a good person, it was that by principle of law it would be immoral to force them to do it. That was taking the "pro-life" perspective all the way to "it's a whole-ass person" and showing that the concept of bodily autonomy still protects the parent, even if you don't agree with what they do. I don't mind if you think I'm a monster for getting an abortion, I just want to ensure that that choice is there for those who want or need it.
I get that it's a really intense issue for a lot of people, but all I wish is that folks didn't feel like whether someone else carries their pregnancy to term is a criticism of what they've done or want to do. It's truly not. I know for myself I have a list a mile long of reasons I would never carry or raise a child; some are personal and some aren't, but I am still happy when my loved ones welcome a new member into their family.
Bodily autonomy is usually clear in most instances, but it might be overridden by personhood, so it doesn’t help resolve the debate to everybody’s satisfaction.
1) trying to convince or manipulate someone else or themselves to their benefit, either to agree with them (which feels good), or do something they want (which feels good)
2) self awareness, especially on self mental health, is in extremely short supply.
I used to be pro-choice. I think a lot of women (and men) are because of the fear they might be in a position of needing an abortion themselves, or other abstract/potential concerns. Framed as a right to body autonomy, pro-choice seemed the obvious position of any feminist, and how could you possibly believe otherwise?
Then I was in the position of having to make the decision myself. Now, years removed, I still don't feel comfortable posting details online, even under a pseudonym. But suffice to say my partner and I were in a position of having to decide whether to terminate a pregnancy that we had really wanted, due to unexpected medical news. Suddenly all those clever pro-choice arguments seemed hollow, now that we were in the position of making the decision ourselves. This was a real thing. She had a heartbeat. We watched her move and react on the ultrasound. We had, for weeks, imbued our hopes and dreams into this unborn child. We could terminate, but it'd be our call. We'd be pulling the trigger. In that moment I finally understood and emotionally connected with the pro-life position and "abortion is murder!" slogans.
Now I recognize it is a much more complex, multi-faceted issue than I ever previously thought. Every now and then I look and my daughter and think: I almost killed you. How could I have possibly done that? I get the arguments on both sides of the issue, and I don't think that there is any simple solution. It now frustrates me to no end to see people being very loud and very vocal about what are essentially straw man versions of the opposing side's arguments, and vilifying anyone who thinks differently or has lived a different experience. Whatever happened to civil society?
Note that I am not saying that abortion should be illegal or unavailable. We still put serial killers to death, pull the plug with advance directives, allow for self defense, and we ought too allow abortions when the fetus hasn’t cross the threshold into being a human being (which is when?!?) or in carved out exemptions like rape, incest, life of the mother, etc. As far as I’m aware this is a rather centrist position.
The point of my story of my lived experience is that it made me realize the mainstream “pro-life” position is not trying to attack the autonomy of the woman (which is a straw man caricature of their view) but to be the defender of the baby, of which they feel needs but is lacking equal protection under the law.
That didn’t make me pro-life, and I don’t think I said I was. I said it is complicated and nuanced, and I can see the arguments made in good faith on both sides. It is easy to attack a straw man. It is much harder to reconcile with the steel-manned belief of the other side and not walk away without some certainty shaken. I still feel women deserve to have a right to an abortion when needed, but it is also not an unconditional right: society is allowed some say in determining rules and guidelines, just like other medical practices which affect the life of another are regulated. This isn’t a defiance of your bodily autonomy as a woman; it’s recognition that the child growing inside you is (after some point) a distinct human being with its own right to bodily autonomy. “Your right to swing your fist ends at my face” and all that.
Here is the thing, the majority of people who actually reason and think about these topics have heard the same arguments now for 20 years or more. There is nothing new being said, there is no movement on the position of people on either side, and thus there is no more discussion. All you see is propaganda, which I don't care to engage with. So I vote and donate so that "my side" wins and that's that.
Adopting a Least Convenient Possible World principle makes the questions even harder. If you could push a button to have a Star Trek style transporter instantly and painlessly teleport the fetus into an artificial womb, should you still be allowed to kill it instead?
I think it's better to just accept that abortion is prematurely terminating a life and thus the primary consideration should be the cost the parents and/or society can pay. Can society afford the cost of raising unwanted children and of the cycle of abuse that often comes along? and similarly, can society afford the cost of the lifestyle that makes people choose abortion to focus on other things? These things are much easier to discuss. As a 'bonus' this framework also handles the justification for countries which have legal abortion except with restrictions like barring abortions after sex determination.
There seems to be a large agreement that abortion within the first trimester is acceptable, so I think that while it's terrible that it has to happen, society on average currently puts the line between the first and second trimesters for where the costs of both sides balance out, such that even if the fetus could be teleported into an artificial womb, an unconditional abortion should be acceptable. I think the artificial womb point only works if it also somehow erases society's burden of raising the child.
I used to think that "abortion is rarely a happy decision but is still sometimes necessary" was the consensus position so it was pretty odd to me when I first became aware of the state of debate over it in the US.
I guess since this is your opinion I can't say it's wrong, but I can strongly suggest that this opinion is wrong. Is abortion the killing of a child? If it is not then why does a state like California have laws written about double homicide that say:
> defines murder as the unlawful killing of a human being or a fetus with malice aforethought. [0]
If we already have laws like this in a state as liberal as California, then clearly the argument that an abortion is murder is reasonable.
Put another way, would you tell a mother grieving for her miscarriage that she didn't actually lose a child? She just lost a fetus after all, so it's not like there's much to grieve about.
Or would you say that a woman that had her unborn baby killed while having some sort of altercation or accident isn't entitled to prosecute the perpetrator? If she has the right to pursue legal action against somebody, then there is clearly some sort of "precedent" about an unborn child having rights. This is an argument that can and should be explored further instead of dismissed since it's a "touchy subject". The law is full of hard truths, and it's our responsibility to explore these to make sure we're not carrying out injustice.
[0]: https://www.ncsl.org/research/health/fetal-homicide-state-la...
These sorts of inconsistencies in the law can easily be sorted out. If the fetus is not a human with rights yet then if another person terminates it (against the mothers wishes) then you've clearly harmed the mother. This is literally the same argument for abortion, under some development threshold of X months, its called healthcare.
As I said, this same discussion has happened for the last 20 years. I'm never going to be swayed to your side on this. Maybe this is all novel for you. But nothing you said is new to me and I just don't care to debate it or discuss it. I completely understand you point of view, but I disagree and will continue to disagree and fight for women's health and rights.
I think that California treats killing a pregnant woman as double homicide to make it a harsher punishment rather than the other way around.
>Put another way, would you tell a mother grieving for her miscarriage that she didn't actually lose a child? She just lost a fetus after all, so it's not like there's much to grieve about.
I think it's slightly ironic you would suggest this, because my position is based on the belief that abortions are often just as emotionally difficult for parents as miscarriages. In which case it's equally insensitive to tell a woman who just had to abort a child from rape (or alternatively, due to a life threatening condition) that she is a murderer.
To further clarify my position, we can look at the two answers to the question "Is it murder to kill a fetus?":
1. It is murder. In this case, the surface level position would be that abortion should be illegal. But then we get to details and usually people are fine with allowing it in certain cases. Thus making murder acceptable in specific circumstances, making abortion about which circumstances are acceptable.
2. It isn't murder. In this case, the surface level position would be that abortion should be legal. But then we run into the examples you presented. Thus once again making abortion about which circumstances are unacceptable.
So in the end, as far as abortion is concerned, it does not matter if it is or is not murder, because the specific issue to be figured out is which circumstances are acceptable/unacceptable in a practical way (rather than the unrealistic ideological proposals that usually fly around due to the simple answers to "Is it murder to kill a fetus?" both being very extreme).
I think reading through a lot of these other comments definitely got to me, and put me in a negative emotional state by the time I got to your comment. But after a couple hours, and re-reading your comments it seems like you're taking a well balanced approach, and I think that I could learn a thing or two from that :)
After all, no matter how much we teach safe sex, some people will still make mistakes and often pro-lifers treat having to raise the child as a fitting punishment for the parents, which obviously isn't all that respectful of the child's life either.
And yes, I can understand getting into that mindset, which is why I generally avoid these discussions (on reddit for example) :)
It gets pretty frustrating to see people emotionally arguing for extreme positions without attempting to at least understand the other position's emotions.
There's no dots to connect between one thing and the other. Someone can be a hardcore Catholic and invent an abortion device or an atheist could come up with a fancy new way of manufacturing crosses. Their stance on religion is irrelevant.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Catholic_clergy_scient... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_lay_Catholic_scientist...
I mean, the term "culture war" itself is part of the "conservative" vocabulary in that issue. So I can see why the whole thing is not easy.
Similarly the term political correctness was initially a term used in jest by the left I think.
I have an aunt who for economic reasons moved to what she called ‘Trump country’, and she legitimately feared for her life. She got death threats on Facebook when she tried to argue with some of her neighbors on ideological lines. She fell and hurt herself really badly, and everyone pitched in and has been helping her recover though.
I haven’t seen it used much anywhere else with any regularity, but I have no interest in following any propaganda outlets anywhere and gave up regularly reading any news 6 months or so ago.
You're describing today's conservatives. Liberals seem to be always willing to entertain the discussion of basically anything. It's sort of a core tenet of liberalism... Open discussion and debate.
Where liberals shut discussions down is when they ask for evidence or at least sound reasoning and aren't presented with anything. That's the logical point where you can't really discuss something anymore.
I've seen conservatives get extremely frustrated that liberals won't entertain their religious myths or traditions as justification for any given policy. "They just don't listen!" No, the conservative just revealed that the entire basis for whatever they believe in isn't founded in reality. No amount of arguing is going to sway them so there's no point in discussing it anymore... "Agree to disagree" is about as far as you can go.
I'm not sure that is true anymore. Liberals have extremist wings (like Antifa) just like conservatives do. People making liberal arguments now spew the same venom that only conservative groups did 10 years ago. At least in my experience.
I think part of the problem is the news likes to take extreme examples of anything and present it as the norm. I have discussions over policy with people all the time and they are quite enlightening.
OK where's the anti-fascist extremism here in the US (which is the relevant region of this discussion) that's shutting down discussions?
If you look at Wikipedia's extensive (but non-exhaustive) page about Terrorism in the United States there's just a single entry for an Antifa activist:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terrorism_in_the_United_States
...but there's a number of entries for:
* Anti-abortion violence
* Antisemitism
* Right-wing and anti-government extremism
* White nationalism and white supremacy
https://www.advocate.com/law/2022/3/29/16-states-pushing-don...
So again, definitely not a "both sides" issue. Bringing up Antifa as some sort of equivalency is absolutely ridiculous.
Similar to the older and more rural generation in Russia, what they see on all the media they know is cherry picked examples of the craziest most outlandish behavior they are told is ‘the others’, and which shows things that they often had to turn down or wish they could do, but sacrificed to make something that ‘worked’ in their environment.
And because they can’t know something they are not exposed to or shown, and it is a convenient tool by politicians to stoke up anger, resentment, etc. and these areas are quite poor and have lost most of their young people but still have economic and voting power….
On the liberal side, it’s getting more strident as conservatives have been getting some of what they want, and the media and feed algorithms are more than happy to play the same outlandish examples of ‘the others’ and tell them how at risk everything is (which is not false many times!), which just goes to more extremism.
The conservative base has in been more violent in large part I think because they’ll fall back on what traditionally works instead of trying to reason with folks to get what they want. Especially if it sounds terrible.
Personally, I’m a realist and try to look beyond whatever someone claims to want or be able to deliver to the long term track record it has of success, and what the trade offs are. Because there are always trade offs.
Having babies and giving birth sucks for instance, and doing a decent job as a parent requires long term sacrifice, physical and earnings, and a huge amount of time and energy spent towards stuff that is incredibly valuable and necessary in the long term for everyone but is also often incredibly unpleasant in the short term. For instance, Thu and Fri last week I spent mopping up projectile vomit and scrubbing diarrhea out of the carpet because my youngest got sick from daycare.
Having fun instead sounds way better!
A society without children however is dead in a generation or two. And someone has to do the work.
If someone won’t do what you want because it sucks for them, what would the person trying to make it happen do? Especially someone without a lot of resources? Well, they make it so they don’t have a choice to do it, if they can.
Even if that means banning all the fun things you’d otherwise be doing.
The cities don’t understand, because the cities have too many people. The rural areas understand, because everyone who could left for the city.
Repeat for all the major hot button topics.
I said extremist wings, not terrorist. Correct me if I'm wrong, but it sounds like you are defending left wing extremism by pointing out that there is more right wing extremism. I don't dispute that there is more right wing extremism, but you seem to be ignoring left wing extremism. I'm of the opinion that extremism and violence for any cause is unjust.
>There's not really, "both sides" here. Today's conservatives (aka "the right") seem to have a monopoly on violence as well as "shutting down discussion"
Only if you completely ignore the actions of one side. There were quite a few left wing extremist actions in 2020 during the BLM/police brutality protests, including rioting, arson, and CHAZ. You might believe in what they are fighting for (as do I) but I certainly don't condone some of the tactics employed.
>Today's conservatives (aka "the right") seem to have a monopoly on violence as well as "shutting down discussion" of various topics...
As I pointed out, they certainly don't have a monopoly on violence, unless you are intentionally ignoring it. You might want to check your biases and understand that extremism on either side stands to destabilize our civilization and push us into barbarism. You shouldn't excuse or ignore either.
Antifa[1] generally aren't Liberals, except in the overly-broad definition where anyone who opposed fascism is antifa. American Antifa is based on the German Antifa, which is explicitly leftist and anticapitalist, and the majority of self-identified American Antifa are the same.
GP is talking about political Liberalism[2], of which open discussion is a core tenet. US politics has muddied the term "liberalism" to be essentially meaningless, but as far as words have actual meanings, GP is correct.
(The word you're looking for might be "progressives", if you're trying to describe "people left of what the US calls conservatives")
It's really not though. Here are some issues off the top of my head that many modern liberals, at least on the internet, have no desire to honestly discuss. By discuss I mean listen and consider and understand the other side's opinion in good faith:
- Abortion
- Effectiveness of gun control
- Maybe Trump wasn't a Russian asset
- Transexual rights v. women's rights
- Drug Policy
- Benefits of free market capitalism
I think liberals see conservatives as a caricature of that conservatives actually are and vice versa. It reminds me of the same propaganda/caricatures that the US used during WWII to try to make the Japanese and German armies look foolish and weak.
Based on everything I've seen on the internet, that's a definition that sets the bar so high it's almost comical. Especially when it comes to "culture war" topics like you've listed. Very, very few individuals are willing to actually try to understand what their opponents believe, on either side of the issue, and the exceptions are truly exceptional.
That being said, the Liberal concept of "open discussion" doesn't require anyone to actually understand their opponents'' positions. In fact, it implicitly discourages it. That's because the purpose of open debate, according to Liberal ideal, is to allow "everyone's voice to be heard" in the "marketplace of ideas" so that "the best ideas will naturally float to the top". If one really believes that their idea is the best, they have a vested internet in making sure it is heard loudly and frequently in that market. You're correct that this has led to polarization, because that is precisely a failure mode of these Liberal ideals.
A couple of side notes:
- "Liberal" isn't a synonym for "Democrat", nor is it a strict antonym of "conservative". A lot of the Republican platform is and has been Liberalism/neoliberalism (though this has lessened in the past few decades, especially in the post-Trump era). Indeed, lots of (pre-Trump) Republicans are Liberals/neoliberals, though many would be offended to be called that due to the aforementioned American muddying of the term. (Don't ask me to define the distinction between classical- and neo- liberalism, though, it never had a fully accepted distinction)
- "Transexual" hasn't been the preferred term for over a decade. That and the fact that you listed it in opposition to "women's rights" makes me think that you aren't actually coming to these discussions to "understand the other side's opinion in good faith", on that idea or others, and that might be affecting your perception of what these "liberals on the internet" are willing to do.
Neoliberalism is an economic policy favored by both parties, it's not a socialistic policy. It leans towards unfettered capitalism. This philosophy is why we have things like outsourcing, globalization and NAFTA, things that significantly disadvantage the American worker. I didn't understand it for a while myself.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neoliberalism
>"Liberal" isn't a synonym for "Democrat", nor is it a strict antonym of "conservative".
Yes, as I understand it, liberalism is change, conservatism is status quo. Personally I'm liberal on some policies and conservative on others. To me conservative could simply mean, "I haven't heard a good plan yet, I'll wait until I hear one." On the topics I'm conservative on, I could be persuaded to change if a plan was actually presented, rather than a vague concept (like universal healthcare, UBI, student loan debt forgiveness, etc). The only candidate in recent memory who ever discussed and laid out a plan was Bernie, and I thought it was good, well thought one one that I could support. The only issue is it would have to be a gradual implementation as to not upturn the economy. Unfortunately our current implementation of quasi-universal healthcare seems to be benefit the medical and insurance industry far more than the citizenry, though there are good things about it for the citizenry as well.
>"Transexual" hasn't been the preferred term for over a decade. That and the fact that you listed it in opposition to "women's rights" makes me think that you aren't actually coming to these discussions to "understand the other side's opinion in good faith"
I don't keep up on the latest trends of vernacular, they change like the tides. I'm also older, so people tend to stick with the terms they learn. (i.e. Blacks, vs African Americans, vs Colored People (bad) vs People of Color (good?!), and other labels that go back even further). Out of curiosity, what is the current preferred nomenclature for what used to be "transexual?" Also, who decides? Isn't that what the T in LGBTQ stands for? You should let them know they need change their acronym.
FWIW, just because your circle of people want to call potato chips "crisps," doesn't mean you should expect everyone to immediately switch, or even know you've decided to describe something differently. You certainly shouldn't assume they aren't coming in good faith because they don't keep up with your group's trends, that seems fairly egocentric. An example of this would be, "You called Pluto a planet, therefore you aren't arguing in good faith about science." Seems a strange conclusion when put in a different perspective. Instead of discussing the topic, you shut down the conversation because I used a term that was common only 10 years ago. That somewhat proved my original point, though I don't believe that was your intention.
Anyway, I seemed to have gotten side tracked in the long and rambling post. I think my original point was liberals have extremists too, and liberals aren't as open to discussion as they used to be and are quick to find reason to shut down discussion (like not using the current, possibly obscure nomenclature). Extremism isn't a political condition, it's a human condition and should be shunned regardless of political goal.
The preferred term is "transgender", or just "trans (people)". Which might not seem like a huge distinction, but most of the people you'd be having a discussion consider "transexual" to be at least mildly offensive, due to various implications that aren't important to go over here. The point is that very few people use it except for much older trans people, aside from much older trans people who you likely won't find on the internet much.
There's nothing inherently wrong with using the antiquated term - the euphemism tread is a real phenomenon, as you pointed out. But using a term that almost no one on the other side uses (and claiming no knowledge) is an indication that you haven't actually put in much effort at all in listening to and understanding the other side. Especially when your defense amounts to "I haven't checked for 10 years". When your specific criticism of liberals is that they don't "listen and consider and understand", if you and the peoples' arguments you view don't even spend enough time looking at the opposing viewpoints to be aware of which terms they'd generally prefer not to be referred to by, I would hope you can see why the people opposing them wouldn't be motivated to do the same.
I didn't say these "shut down the conversation" (in fact, I think I spent enough words elaborating on everything else that that is a particularly unfair and non-understanding accusation), but rather to illustrate the reasons why you're saying the polarization you do.
That being said, I am shutting down the conversation here, since I don't want to get into another HN comments flame war, and I've already pushed that line an unwise amount. You're welcome to reply further and get in the last word, if you'd like.
If you're interested in continuing this topic, I'd urge you to read Scott Alexander's blog posts on Steelmanning and the culture war, as he has much smarter and more articulate things to say about it than I do. I linked one of them elsewhere in this thread, I think it's the most relevant:
https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/30/i-can-tolerate-anythin...
or any of his other top posts
Yes, now that you said it, I remember.
>But using a term that almost no one on the other side uses (and claiming no knowledge) is an indication that you haven't actually put in much effort at all in listening to and understanding the other side.
It's not the other side to me, I'm all for equal civil rights of all people. I'm vehemently against violence or bullying against other people and believe people should be given the benefit of the doubt and judged by the actions of their character. My only concern with any aspect of the trans movement is people born as males and aging past puberty competing with females in female sports. I don't think it's fair to females, they are just too strong biologically. Females have been fighting for rights for over a century now and this particular aspect seriously encroaches on that. We have men's and women's sports for a reason. It can also be extremely dangerous in contact sports.
https://www.sportskeeda.com/mma/news-when-transgender-fighte...
I'm sure I got some of the nomenclature wrong, but you get the idea.
>That being said, I am shutting down the conversation here, since I don't want to get into another HN comments flame war, and I've already pushed that line an unwise amount. You're welcome to reply further and get in the last word, if you'd like.
I understand, I was about to do the same. Thanks for the decency in our discussion, I learned some stuff.
SF is a prime example of when someone can use reason and argument and ‘helping others’ to convince people to do things that just don’t actually work.
Conservatives definitely have a bent that most intellectuals and folks in tech find offensive, and for reasons that are often due to fundamental differences in worldview and environment.
But a lot of the rational arguments for things going on right now, for those who have actual experience in the real world, are bullshit if you start challenging the assumptions. But that is hard, be will get you nailed. And frankly, no one like that is going to try to do that right now because it isn’t even about rationality. It’s a different set of beliefs and feelings with attached justifications.
But, any sizable group of people randomly selected will have similar differences. The reason we have social rules, is people have found over time when to talk and not talk about certain topics ,because for a society to function, we need to agree to some common ground and not actively antagonize each other over these fundamental differences.
Because you can’t reason someone out of a position they didn’t reason themselves into, and very, very few people have actually reasoned themselves into much of anything.
No amount of talking is likely to change anyones mind about these things.
For instance, I believe that the best way to resolve a problem is to talk openly about it, directly discuss the range of impacts this problem will have, discuss our own capabilities and successes/failures in resolving the problem openly, and then prioritize it against other open problems and likely risks.
That makes me great for engineering leadership it turns out. Near as I can tell, also emergency response.
It apparently makes me absolutely terrifying to a decent swath of the population, especially when they are screwing up and don’t know how to stop.
So I’ve learned that I need to not do this to certain people if I want them to not run away screaming. It also means I’ve learned some people are useful to partner with and some people are radioactive bad to do so with.
And in a society, especially a country so diverse and over such an area, that means picking which fights to have, and dialing back the rhetoric, but that requires both sides to do that.
If one side won’t, then it is a war. No one can maintain sensible boundaries with appeasement - which is fundamentally different than compromise.
Then again, I suppose I have an availability bias. I only see the term used by people I'm paying attention to.
That's why.
And I think the bigger problem is that we allow people to have nonsense opinions in polite society. The idea that human life begins at conception and that undifferentiated cells are human life worth more than the life of the mother is just garbage. That isn't really defensible. And that isn't my problem and I'm not going to be particularly apologetic about it and I don't need to see eye to eye with anyone else. They constructed this ridiculous argument that I can never in a million years agree with and so I won't. I literally can't compromise with that position, and it is a position that I would argue is crafted deliberately to avoid compromise. Ain't my problem. And if you're going to argue that it should be my problem and that I don't get how we need civility and tolerance I think you're the bigger problem.
Keep punching the wrong direction though.
And where's the outrage over the anti-abortion activists painting their opposition as supporting abortion uncritically into the third trimester? There's nobody reasonable out there who believes that. Yet you'll find people who find abortion troubling and want it done quickly and can't agree with it being in the third trimester except to save the life of the mother who consider themselves to be against abortion. They're actually pro-abortion/pro-choice because that's the way everyone thinks. Make it quick and easy and get it done in the first trimester ASAP (and use contraception so ideally it never gets there and stop using the rhythm method or pulling out because that's how you wind up needing abortions, and use the morning after pill in the case of contraceptive failure or rape). Most pro-abortion/choice people already ARE at the compromise point between the two extreme endpoints of the possible debate.
It's one thing to wish people were more rational and less tribal. But to really not understand human nature after the last decade? The author is either naive beyond absurdity or feigning ignorance as a different form of virtue signaling.
Group consensus is not about intellectual correctness, obviously. Groups are about evolution, as is belonging to them and seeking just that. We collectively subscribe to them because that's the emerged mechanism by which we modulate decision making where the direct representation of individual takes is not feasible. Individual takes matter not when the subject at hand isn't actually about the subject, but about winning at life.
As a person with close friends and family members on opposite sides of the culture war, this is the explanation that resonates most to me.
Maybe I misunderstand the court's rationale, but it seems really flimsy to hang abortion on "privacy" in this way.
> We need not resolve the difficult question of when life begins. When those trained in the respective disciplines of medicine, philosophy, and theology are unable to arrive at any consensus, the judiciary, at this point in the development of man's knowledge, is not in a position to speculate as to the answer.
Whatever your thoughts on abortion, this seems poorly reasoned. Legalizing abortion implies asserting that life begins after some date. If first trimester abortions are legal, then it seems to imply that the law views human life (and thus human rights) as beginning sometime after the first trimester.
I think you mean, "human life" not just "life". Because as far as we know life began about 4.2 billion years ago.
With that out of the way we must now talk about, "what makes human life special?" and "at what point does it become special?"
> With that out of the way we must now talk about, "what makes human life special?" and "at what point does it become special?"
Ugh, I'd rather not. There's no good reason to dive into this, and it always ends in ugly eugenics territory. E.g., "Just hear me out, what if the mentally disabled aren't really people?". I'd prefer to keep a wide berth around that--the great thing about human rights is that (apart from the abortion issue) every human gets them.
If it's the latter then it's probably just some missing social skills. At least that's my take speaking from personal experience.
The title is “why does x happen”.
The content is:
I believe foo. Evidence behind why author believes foo.
Here is an arbitrary list of 6 behavioral responses to foo: [a b c d e x]. X happens which is a bad thing.
There is no critical analysis or evidence substantiating the 6 responses, nor how/why response x happens. In other words, there’s no intellectual rigor behind the title’s claim, nor do I have any inclination to believe the author’s claim as true after reading it.
>Why is it traitorous to understand the people you disagree with?
It's not. Many people[1] spend a great deal of time studying the rhetoric and activities of people who oppose abortion. They have studied them far more than you.
>For better or for worse, the vast majority of people I know favor Roe v. Wade. Still, I think I understand the view of people on the other side.
You give two possible reasons for opposing Roe v. Wade, one of which rejects the legal argument as fundamentally arbitrary, and one of which is based on the idea that a human life, with all the rights and dignities that it is entitled to, begins at conception.
This falls into a common trap, which is treating "culture war" disputes as being fundamentally about abstract philosophical debates. This ignores the important parts of the dispute, which concern women's sexuality and the role of (conservative, patriarchal) religion in public affairs. It also ignores the mountains of bad faith and hypocrisy in the anti-abortion movement, including but not limited to a lack of interest in "saving" IVF embryos, bizarre ignorance of the female reproductive system, a refusal to acknowledge the circumstances under which people have late-term abortions, active opposition to medically-accurate sex education and easier access to contraceptives, and a lack of concern for what happens to babies after they're born.
>As far as I can tell, my object-level views on “when abortion should be legal” are close to the median in my (leftist-dominated) corner of the universe. Yet, except with close friends, I’d be scared to say what I think above.
Scared of what, exactly? When you publicly make bad arguments, you should expect public criticism.
The only reason I can see that someone would get mad at you is that you are treating abortion rights as a bloodless, impersonal affair. This is a very practical issue with very real, very serious consequences for the women involved. Most women do not want to engage in an abstract debate about whether they should be forced to carry a dead fetus to term[2].
If you want to discuss how all this relates to jurisprudence and philosophy, you can certainly do that. It's not wrong, and you're not wrong for wanting to ask questions and start discussions on those subjects. But it's important to be clear that such discussions are (almost) totally separate from the practical questions of how overturning Roe v. Wade will actually affect American women. Conflating the two buries the practical questions, and only benefits people who would prefer that the practical questions are ignored.
[1] The Slacktivist blog is a good place to start. Search for articles about abortion. Those articles will have many links to other people examining anti-abortion views. https://www.patheos.com/blogs/slacktivist/
[2] Not hyperbole.
Thank you for summarising exactly what I was thinking - the justifications people will give publically are not the same as justifications people discuss in private.
This is most obvious in a debate about climate change, where no-one ever says 'I (errorneously) think it will not affect me personally, I don't want to pay for fixing the problem, and I don't care about poor farmers in bangladesh dying'.
Instead it will be some more socially acceptable line of argument, about science not being settled, technolgy not being there yet, or whatever.
Or in immigration - noone ever says: 'they are bringin in culture I am uncomfotable with', instead they will argue about economy or crime, which is more 'socially acceptable' line of argument.
OP laments that people who are bodily affected by these abortion rules aren't willing to have an abstract debate about the constitutional definition of privacy. Of course constitutional lawyers can construct plausible arguments that move privacy protections around. The debate can be imagined, even constructed, but it's irrelevant to the actual power struggle that's playing itself out.
The move by the court was a political one. The angles have been worked by a donor class and a compliant Senate for a decade and more. The consequences of this ruling will be unpopular and will result in needless suffering and (obviously) lawbreaking. "Fuck that noise" is a perfectly legitimate response, under the circumstances.
The fact that most commenters here can't see what's going on --- as opposed to the "logical" thing they wish were going on --- is one of the major blind spots of this discussion board.
Sure, Roe v. Wade might or might not be a great legal decision. However, if it is not, why are conservative state governments racing to introduce new laws to ban abortion, punish anyone who helps someone have an abortion, and ban forms of contraception. Further, why is no one discussing other, similar decisions? Sure, Griswold is part and parcel the argument over Roe v. Wade, and Loving is verboten while Clarence Thomas is on the court, but there have been many other decisions based on the "specious" right to privacy. Why are none of them being picked apart with the same sharp instruments as Roe?
The answer is that "it's a poor constitutional decision" is a red herring. "When does life begin" is even irrelevant. If you want to understand the people you disagree with (and, yes, I think that is a very good idea), and you disagree with American conservatives, you need to understand that they do not like the way society has changed since 1960---some much further back than that---and many are willing to do or say anything in order to roll back those changes. (And yes, I mean that. The American left has a lot of idiocy, but the vast majority of bad faith arguments, including that Christianity and conservatism are oppressed minorities, come from the right. (https://www.cato.org/sites/cato.org/files/2020-07/Good_Faith...))
While you're discussing the legal niceties of Roe v. Wade, keep in mind that it, abortion, and sexuality in general are just the edge of the wedge; there are many other policies on the list that even you might be attached to.
It’s not.
> Somehow, it feels like a huge social blunder to even demonstrate that I understand their positions.
The author then constructs six models to explain his emotions to himself.
As for Roe v. Wade, I think the problem with reading the 14th Amendment as protecting a right to privacy is that the 14th isn't enough. We should be invoking the 9th Amendment as well, which explicitly covers unenumerated rights.
> The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.
This amendment exists specifically to counter the sort of mindset that thinks that rights come from God or the government, and that the Constitution wasn't written to enumerate and thus limit the powers of the Federal government.
This is wrong. When precedent is overturned, it's because the law struck down was never consistent with the amendment(s) at issue.
Segregation was not perfectly consistent with the 14th Amendment prior to Brown v. Board, it was never consistent with it, from the time of its passage. The court upheld it in Plessy v. Ferguson not because it was okay then and the 'living document' subsequently changed and it became not-okay, but because the court made a glaringly wrong decision in Plessy v. Ferguson.
So if a future court overturns Brown v. Board, then it means that segregation is consistent again (and always has been)? How is this not exactly the kind of capriciousness that TFA is illustrating?
This is a fundamental misunderstanding of the problem that gives way to much credit to the court. The question isn't about legality or the constitution it's about politics and power. The conservative legal movement has spent decades working to take away the right of women to choose. They've been explicit about this. McConnell stacked the court by refusing to even hear from Garland then jamming in Barrett at the last moment. The reason Roe vs Wade is being overturned isn't because it is flawed but because they finally got not just a conservative majority but an extremely conservative supreme court majority
A lot of people claimed they didn't really mean it when they said they wanted to ban abortion and that they were just taking advantage of socially conservatives for the votes but when the politicians/judge politicans are themselves socially conservative why would you think they don't believe in it? And now we have the unsurprising result.
I wish we wouldn't dress it up in irrelevant theoretical conversations about what the constitution says
If you understand, you don't oppose as fierce as you are obliged to as a good herd member. You may vent the wrong tunes.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/30/i-can-tolerate-anythin...
But if you were to gauge the sizes of the groups based on MSM and social media, you would think pro-lifers were much smaller of a group, and dominated by men. This is a strategy to convert the other side into the "outlier model" so that it is justified to not make any attempt to hear them. This strategy appears to be super effective... of amplifying some causes and downplaying other causes, so much so, that it should have its own category in the models section.
0. https://news.gallup.com/poll/244709/pro-choice-pro-life-2018...
Because one of the most common talking points is that "they just want to control women's bodies".