[flagged]
Modern progressives shut themselves off from any ideas they don’t already agree with, making it impossible for them to discern whether what they believe is true or not.
Of course this is also true of many religious conservatives. It’s just now equally true of those on the far left.
On any topic you want to pick it's typically the radical right wing who have their fingers in their ears.
This isn’t hard to grasp.
I don’t care about immigration either way, I don’t have an axe to grind.
I’m not reflecting this idea, of course, because I’m a progressive. It does seem a bit imaginary, though.
I consider myself to be a progressive and am more than happy to critique "lefty stuff" all day long. I know I'm not alone in that regard.
Try me.
Is climate change driven by human activity? Do males have a natural advantage in sports? Do vaccines cause autism? Does rent control make housing more available?
The major political tribes are full of BS, because politics mostly isn't driven by disagreements about facts but by conflicting material interests. Partisans believe whats convenient.
I won't argue about the other two, BUT.
We have facts for contact sports and for speed and strength sports, we've had these facts for millenia.
For the vaccine one, we also have facts. You're more likely to win the lottery than to get autism from them. I think they're probably the same odds as dying from a potted plant falling on your head while walking but anti vaxxers don't seem to be wearing helmets everywhere, that's so weird...
Citation?
That something like this might happen is not surprising. If you have two political groups and you assign both beliefs from a bag in a purely random process, odds are that one of the groups will end up with more true beliefs than the other, through no virtue of their own but through pure chance.
To your questions, the best explanations for climate change are human causes (and with very considerable evidence).
Women have higher pain tolerances and greater natural buoyancy, they are greatly advantaged at long distance cold water swimming. Many other sports require physical size and/or strength - so it does depend. Vaccines have no evidence of _causing_ autism, and the big paper that made that claim was retracted. I don't know about rent control and do not know what data exists.
Yeah, the answer of, yes, and here is all the evidence just doesn't seem to fly. I feel that trolling and trolls, and science illiteracy just have simply won the day.
FWIW, it's called the Firehose of Falsehood and the Soviets invented it.
https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/transgender-pronouns-fine-...
And Canada has similar (and far more widespread and severe) laws punishing people for expressing wrongthink about trans issues.
As far as I can tell the culture war is over since end of the pandemic - now the class war has begun, it’s going to be interesting
Hillary Clinton has made similar comments, saying "But I also think there are Americans who are engaged in this kind of propaganda, and whether they should be civilly, or even in some cases criminally, charged is something that would be a better deterrence, because the Russians are unlikely, except in a very few cases, to ever stand trial in the United States." But again, there is no First Amendment carveout for propaganda, Russian or otherwise.
There are some limits to protected speech, but they're rare and mostly limited to direct incitement of a crime or other threat.
One common error people make is that they think they can pick and choose beliefs and positions a la carte and expect them to remain stable as fixed parameters of the environment. But that's not how ideas work. They aren't static in this way. Rather, they function much like presuppositions that, over time, are worked out, dialectically, if you will. Society is like a machine that works out the consequences of ideas over time.
So, I always find it amusing when anyone appeals to some fondly remembered status quo that held in a prior decade, believing that all one needs to do is return to that status quo "verbatim" and all will be well, as if these things were just a matter of arranging the furniture a certain way. You can't roll back the clock, and if you could, you would only recreate a similar development that led to the undesirable state of affairs in the first place.
This isn't an argument for some kind of Big P progessivism, or against tradition, only an account of how cultures develop over time. In our case, by understanding the tensions and contradictions within the liberalism tradition, we can come to explain why Western societies have moved in a certain direction over the last 200 years. Heck, we can go back further to the influence of Luther, or even further to Ockham, without whose ideas liberalism would arguably not exist.
(I define here "liberal" and "liberalism" not in the lazy, colloquial partisan sense, as in "own the libs!" or "left wing", but the philosophical definition in the tradition of Hobbes, Locke, and others. In this sense, "we" are all liberals in the liberal West.)