Progressives should worry more about their favorite scientific findings
smallpotatoes.paulbloom.net
smallpotatoes.paulbloom.net
I'm not faulting anyone, it's the nature of the beast. It's messy.
I reserve judgment there as well.
However, I would bet my last dollar that liberals and conservatives are both significantly "stupider, more biased, and more fearful" than actual progressives. In America, half the population identifies with neither tribe. We possess almost no representation in media or politics, which leads to conflations like in tfa.
The media and political scene in the US is basically 99.999% fear-based. I guess it's so pervasive that many don't see it, like fish not knowing they're wet. But once you put on these sunglasses man...
I would say that it's only half based on fear. The other half is ego/pride/sense of superiority. It's the classic propaganda recipe: the hated outgroup is simultaneously a real threat that must be acted against quickly, yet laughable - worthy of scorn, mockery and pity. And you can see it in the example under discussion: describing "conservatives" as "stupider, more biased, more fearful, or in some other way psychologically inferior to liberals" is clearly not meant to make said "conservatives" seem scary to said "liberals".
(The rest is not really a reply to you, but tangentially related)
I've only been here a couple of months, but I've noticed that submissions like this one often seem to get flagged and killed quickly, whereas accounts that routinely post politically agitating (especially US-specific) content with an opposed perspective (and often worse argumentation) seem to be well respected.
That said, "progressive" seems to have become about as inaccurate and arbitrary label as "liberal" now. As a Canadian with visions of actual social progress (building more livable communities, effective transit, expanded and responsive health care, economic security, sensible consumerism, efficient use of resources...) it's seriously irritating for me (and has been for over a decade) how a particular brand of identity politics has been able to get itself labelled "progressivism" in the US and then seep into the Canadian political discourse. Not to mention the way the terms "progressive", "liberal" (and "Democrat") get conflated with each other all the time, or treated as scale degrees. The American two-party system (it's a miracle that more than two parties can still get seats in the House of Commons) has pushed everyone into accepting an entirely false model of the political space (with far too few dimensions), and then reified it by offering candidates who exist within that space.
These are not at all my "favourite scientific findings" - and I think people who think like me deserve the label of "progressive" far more than the people who are shopping those findings around.
Those things are very easily manipulated with fear. Those who feel safe and are confident in themselves, without delusion, have neither use or need for ego trips and superiority complexes.
> describing "conservatives" as "stupider, more biased, more fearful, or in some other way psychologically inferior to liberals" is clearly not meant to make said "conservatives" seem scary to said "liberals".
I would argue that's exactly what it's meant to do. It's quite sensible to be wary of stupid scared racists, and liberal commentators are well paid to manipulate that fear in their audience. "Othering" a group is step one of creating fear.
> These are not at all my "favourite scientific findings" - and I think people who think like me deserve the label of "progressive" far more than the people who are shopping those findings around.
Yeah, exactly. Unfortunately, genuine 'progressives' have just about zero say in America's media landscape and political structure, by design and great effort. Therefore we have little say in what words mean once they reach mass consciousness. See: "terrorist" [peaceful student protesters, environmental activists], "torture" [not a big deal any more apparently], "woke" [as an insult], etc etc.
> See: "terrorist" [peaceful student protesters, environmental activists], "torture" [not a big deal any more apparently],
I feel like these complaints are out of date. It reminds me of how I felt in the Bush era. Euphemisms for "torture" are plentiful (e.g. "enhanced interrogation") because the word still has power. Fewer people seem to be branded "terrorists" now than then.
>"woke" [as an insult]
The sense of the term "woke" that the broad public first saw, was an attempt to allude to broad, far-reaching problems without feeling any need to evidence them, and to hold people accountable for a) the sins of others, on the basis of their group identity; and b) unequal outcomes of a system which doesn't involve actual malice on anyone's part. Further, it was a slang term appropriated from another culture, by activists who would ordinarily say it's morally wrong to do that. The eventual ridicule of the term was entirely predictable and consequential, and I have no problem with it, to say the least.
They're not complaints - they're recent examples of how words have been twisted. Pointing out dislikable things that happened to illustrate a point is not the same as complaining about them.
> Fewer people seem to be branded "terrorists" now than then.
For the last year, peaceful protesters have been called terrorists / sympathizers in record numbers. An entire country, babies and all, has been smeared as 'terrorist', thereby giving a thin cover for Western leaders to ignore their obligations under international law.
> Euphemisms for "torture" are plentiful (e.g. "enhanced interrogation") because the word still has power
I'm not arguing these words don't have power. Just that we (the people) don't have deciding power over their meaning. When the 6 companies who own 90% of all media decide to change a word, they can do so very effectively.
It wasn't a natural collective decision that turned actual torture into "enhanced interrogation", while environmental protesters became "terrorists". Those decisions came from the top down. And it worked. Many people got more upset about washable paint on a glass case than they did about our brazen support for internationally condemned atrocities.
... As for the word woke, again, there was a top-down, highly intentional (and obvious, tbh) mis/reinterpretation in order to disarm the word. Which in your case has clearly worked. "Woke" was one of the clearest examples of a word being twisted in record time.
Where, precisely, would I have to have been to observe a different usage? And what precisely do you think that usage entailed?