> The insidious nature of this question comes from the false representation as earnest, intellectual discourse. Many who ask it may truly believe they’re engaging earnestly, but their responses quickly reveal an angle more akin to religious police.
As you point out, nearly all of talkingtab's questions are loaded. At the very least, talkingtab essentially says outright what they expect the "correct" answer to be, e.g I'm baffled why talkingtab seems to think "inflation" is a "code word". I speak English, and inflation is "telling it like it is" based on the simple definition of the word.
As another example, for this question:
> Are common Americans paid a living wage? Can one person earn enough to have a family?
What happens if a response is "No, I don't believe that cashiers at McDonald's deserve to be paid a 'living wage', because I don't believe that job is intended to support a family on its own"? To emphasize, I'm not saying what the "right" answer is, but I do believe reasonable people can disagree over what constitutes a living wage and which jobs deserve to be paid it.
If anything, talkingtab's post just highlights to me the author's specific point about political "tribes" vs political views, and if anything has convinced me more that the author's view is spot on here.
So why are the questions “loaded”? Because as you can see with your own eyes, they have their own political agenda. Part of politics is defining what the the agenda should be—and what should be considered political.
As you can imagine, people who think they are arguing or fighting on behalf of people making a living wage etc. want to put that message out there. They are not discussing abstract concepts or competing in some open-mindedness competition or some rationality contest. It matters to them.
> If anything, talkingtab's post just highlights to me the author's specific point about political "tribes" vs political views, and if anything has convinced me more that the author's view is spot on here.
You are even more convinced. Yet there is nothing here that suggests that talkingtab is tribal in the sense of what the OP is talking about. None. Is this received opinion or opinion born from studying like a monk for 10 years? You don’t know.
You also say that talkingtab is presenting what the “correct” answer is. Yes, according to them. Again, is it really tribalism? Or is it conviction as well as the polemic tone of the whole comment? And having conviction doesn’t mean that you cannot conceive of people having other opinions, or being intellectually unable to present counter-arguments to their own position. Again, no proof of tribalism is presented.
And this focus on tribalism presupposes that the end goal is to find your tone. Alternatively you can look at their arguments. Maybe they want to change the flaws they perceive in the world.
Then find better friends. The author is essentially complaining about the quality of his friends.
This is sort of meaningless without citation of the bias you claim.
In case you're being serious: yes; you can find friends who won't shit on you for your views.
That said the Pinkertons were basically mercenaries akin to organized crime, so probably viewed things in terms of might makes right.
All of these pointed questions can also be disputed.
It took me 15 years to to remake my bed into somewhat rational arguments, and still I find lots of hay in there. Generally both sides, or all sides really, want the same things and disagree on how to get there. And the truth is there is almost never an obvious or clear way to get there. It's fractal pros and cons all the way down.
In what way? I turn on Fox sometimes and it's not that it's slanted, but it's just a stream of lies and BS. I've watched a bunch of Trump's speeches and in addition to being incoherent, he says the same lies and BS all the way down. Yesterday's tariff speech was a great example.
I don't consider myself progressive (though the MAGA right would think me so), but where do I go to try and 'remake [my] bed'?
By turning on Fox sometimes (provided it's not your main source) you might already not fall into the category of people not trying to remake their bed.
Listening to first-hand sources is the way, I guess, but also remembering they can be lying as well, so be vigilant.
CNN and NBC weren't always as bad as they are now, but their descent has been obvious and dramatic.
Some of them still employ democrats to some minimal extent, such as Jamelle Bouie at the NYT, but that's merely subterfuge, lest their bent be glaringly obvious.
If someone can name a large organization that is an exception to my first paragraph, I would be happy to learn of them.
No, that is just not true. For example, do you think Putin and his supporters wanted a functioning democracy in Russia and independent Ukraine? No, they wanted someone functioning as a dictator to restore Russia's cold war territory and influence, and they wanted to undermine western democracies that stood in their way.
History does not support your claim that everyone wants the same things. Some people want power and strong man to take over the government. We see that with the Trump administration. The religious conservatives want to use that to make America a Christian nation. The billionaire libertarians want to use it to deregulate their industries and run the government like a corporation. And Trump wants to act unilaterally to bring about his vision of being seen as some great figure. They have illiberal aims.
They also very obviously want different things compared to others.
Remember the goal here is not to become sympathetic to Trump, or Putin, or Sanders, or Netanyahu, or Islam. The goal is to have an accurate understanding of them, so that when you form arguments against them, you are actually attacking bedrock and not just straw.
Yes, but also we've seen how they've behaved in the past when they had vast political power in Europe. And we see what the goals of the Heritage Foundation is with Project 2025. There have always been a decent number of conservative Christians who want prayer, the bible and ten commandments in school. Who don't want legal abortion or gay marriage. And the more power they have, the more they would restrict. They also tend to believe in a lot of conspiracy theories, like the Democratic Party being controlled by satanists and communists, who have also infiltrated the "Deep State".
So you can imagine how those beliefs play out with enough political power.
Although there is a way to frame political alliances as a win-win when two parties increase their share at a cost of some other third party losing theirs.
Because of that, the arguments will always be straw-man, because people want to win resources, not to argue in good faith.
Any political issue can be framed in terms of zero sum game, if you look at the whole picture
This zero-sum narrative is only true in a world of no growth, where all resources are being fully utilized to maximum effect. That is very far from the world we live in, where there is enormous room for additional extraction, creation, and efficient utilization of resources.
Everything in the economy thats worth producing/consuming costs energy and labor. Energy and labor is not free.
You may be conflating win-win with debt-based growth, where economy can grow at the cost of running fiscal deficit and accumulating debt. Sure the economy and market can grow, but the debt will also grow and the inflation will cancel out the nominal growth
For a simple example, consider farming, where plants are used to harness the energy of the sun and capture it in a form useful to humans. Yes, there are inputs that go into it, but the output is more valuable (economically and otherwise) than the material input, because the plant also captured a bunch of solar energy that would have otherwise done nothing useful for anyone's economy. My economy has now grown, without having to take or go into debt from some other economy.
Even in a scenario where I do take on debt to get the materials/water/whatever, the value that is created is greater than the debt taken on. If it wasn't, then I wouldn't do it.
Humans create value by harnessing more energy and using it more efficiently for things that humans (and therefore economies) value. This is an ongoing process, with a long way to go.
In the same sense it’s true that there are only so many bushels of seed corn left after the winter. At the moment, we can squabble over how to divide the fixed supply. I could take all the corn, eat half, keep the rest for myself to plant this season. Or, if I’ve already got enough to plant all my land, and you’ve got more land and nothing else to do, I could invest some of my leftover corn with you and we can all have double the harvest in a few months… when the supply will have dramatically expanded, assuming I don’t treat it as a zero-sum game right now. Or I could focus on “winning” right now, and we’ll both be poorer after the harvest than we would have been otherwise.
While I agree that you could frame most any political issue in zero-sum terms, I feel like the blind spot is the same: it tallies the score based on assumptions fixed in time, and it takes a pessimistic view of cooperative potential, of humans’ power to influence the constraints themselves.
Everything in the economy thats worth producing/consuming costs energy and labor. Energy and labor is not free.
Any free lunch one can have in the economy is only possible in nominal terms, when your economy/market grows, but your sovereign debt and fiscal deficit also grows and in real terms, after inflation there is no real growth.
if you look at the core, the bottom of the economics it is just pure physics: The flow and exchange of energy and materials, labor and capital. The fight is over a distribution of the flows between various factions
If Musk et al get their wishes, and we become “spacefaring civilization” or whatever—aren’t the conceivable physical limits of known reality so far away as to be irrelevant?
And isn’t the story of the industrial era one of compounding productivity per unit of labor?
If you think this is a strictly right-wing characteristic you are hopelessly partisan.