81–90 of 102 posts
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> it was always already the government’s money Sounds like you went to the same fallacious economic school Elizabeth Warren did
I'm not the one choosing to fetishize some government's money.
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Even among liberal-minded people, the politics and culture presented at colleges is exceedingly narrow. Regardless, colleges should deal with bad ideas by acknowledging and refuting them, not pretending they don't exist. I have a theory that people born after about 1980 don't really understand bigotry they just know there are certain things they can't say and certain things they should say. That leaves them ignorant…
"they just know there are certain things they can't say and certain things they should say" Ah the decades-old conservative "political correctness" culture war strategy (successful I might add). You'd have to be a complete idiot to make it through school and not realize why these "certain things" are offensive - OR you could be making a disingenuous argument because you support bigotry (my vote is on the latter). Wha…
So we need an intellectually-honest debate about what laws we want that we are actually willing to enforce.
Unenforced laws leaves many in a legal grey area which is not fair or just.
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"You can think BLM is a broken movement" I've read what conservatives write about BLM. Saying they call it a "broken movement" is the understatement and mischaracterization of the century. It's racism, pure and simple. If you are a racist, you're a scumbag, full stop.
And again, you've completely caricatured anyone with a more conservative view point. The vast majority of people who criticize BLM or any other leftist issue are not racists. They are people who see problems with a movement that has good intentions and terrible execution. Thats pretty much the standard conservative criticism of liberal politics: Good intentions, horrible execution that lots of times backfires. You ne…
The vast majority of right-wing criticism of BLM is grounded in (sometimes quite overt) racism, as is, frankly, much of the left-wing criticism of BLM.
It's true that criticism of certain things on the left is not dominantly grounded in racism; e.g., while capitalism certainly has racial impacts, the defense by the right of capitalism against socialism and other post-capitalist alternatives isn't grounded primarily in racism, nor is the right-wing assault on feminism grounded in racism.
That's not to say that the dominant basis of those right-wing positions isn't as bad as racism, but it's certainly different from racism.
> You need to realize that for the most part everyone wants the same things.
It may be that most everyone has similar values, but the thought leaders crafting and selling positions (on the right or the left or anywhere else) aren't a representative sample of the population, but a fairly narrow elite, and I guarantee you that the thought leaders of the right and left do not want the same things and differ only on means.
But I also think that the idea that everyone for the most part wants the same things is, at best, inadequately supported and contrary to the readily available indications. There is every indication that there are, on many politically salient issues, fundamental conflicts of basic values and goals, not merely on optimal mechanisms for achieving shared goals.
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And again, you've completely caricatured anyone with a more conservative view point. The vast majority of people who criticize BLM or any other leftist issue are not racists. They are people who see problems with a movement that has good intentions and terrible execution. Thats pretty much the standard conservative criticism of liberal politics: Good intentions, horrible execution that lots of times backfires. You ne…
> The vast majority of people who criticize BLM or any other leftist issue are not racists. The vast majority of right-wing criticism of BLM is grounded in (sometimes quite overt) racism, as is, frankly, much of the left-wing criticism of BLM. It's true that criticism of certain things on the left is not dominantly grounded in racism; e.g., while capitalism certainly has racial impacts, the defense by the right of ca…
Jonathan Haidt has done a lot of important work in this area, I recommend you check him out. Our moral foundations are based on: Harm/care, Fairness/reciprocity, Ingroup/loyalty, Authority/respect, and Purity/sanctity. Lefties really only care about the first two, conservatives care about all 5, and harm/care + fairness/reciprocity typically rank lower than the other values. Look at the FIRST comment on this thread. Then look at the list of values. It is really easy to see what our arguments are about once you know why people think the way they do.
I disagree strongly with your last point. Almost everyone wants to be happy, avoid suffering, have healthy and harmonious relationships, to live life as they choose, have a sense of purpose, etc. Our fights are typically about how to achieve that for every citizen. If you can find a LARGE population of people that does not want those things I will happily retract my statement.
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> The vast majority of people who criticize BLM or any other leftist issue are not racists. The vast majority of right-wing criticism of BLM is grounded in (sometimes quite overt) racism, as is, frankly, much of the left-wing criticism of BLM. It's true that criticism of certain things on the left is not dominantly grounded in racism; e.g., while capitalism certainly has racial impacts, the defense by the right of ca…
People most definitely DO NOT have similar values, and this almost entirely explains the left/right divide within the United States. Most Americans have been brought up to believe in shared beliefs like individual liberty, equality before the law, basic human rights, etc. This is the common vision we are striving to achieve. But beliefs are not the same as values. The divide comes in how we prioritize our values in a…
This is less true when you get beyond platitudes to what each one of those means in substance.
There is a very significant disagreement over what “liberty”, for instance, means, and over what things are “basic human rights”, among people who agree that “liberty” and “basic human rights” are important goals.
> But beliefs are not the same as values.
Well, beliefs include both fact and value beliefs, but the ones you enumerate are, in fact, values.
> The divide comes in how we prioritize our values in achieving those goals.
Values are root goals, not means of achieving goals.
> I disagree strongly with your last point. Almost everyone wants to be happy, avoid suffering, have healthy and harmonious relationships, to live life as they choose, have a sense of purpose, etc.
Taking that as true, for the sake of argument, that's not wanting the same things, even if people might use the same words. It is a different thing for Alice to be happy, avoid suffering, have harmonious relationships, live as she chooses, and have a sense of purpose than it is for Bob to have those things; it may even—depending on, e.g., what makes Alice and Bob each happy—be mutually incompatible things.
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You can't say that and keep Grover Norquist as a standard-bearer and treat "starve the beast" as a legitimate governing philosophy...
Why do you think Grover Norquist is a standard bearer for weberc2? You seem to be willing to lump all conservatives together, but not willing to listen at all...
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Exactly. Pretending there are two sides to this question is almost a paradigm example of what is wrong with American thought.
But if one candidate says we should exterminate the Jews, and the other candidate says we should NOT exterminate the Jews, they both deserve equal mindspace!
The story becomes even funnier if we consider how many of these people support BDS, which is aligned with people that literally do want to exterminate the Jews, and some (like Rasmeah Odeh) actually did murder the Jews, and some others (like Linda Sarsour) are only one enthusiastic handshake removed from ones that did, and wholeheartedly support them.
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>There is no legitimate "other side" to this argument, just hate. This is a perfect example of the problem, no intellectual capability to refute, resulting in a desperate resort to bigotry.
There's no intellectual argument to refute. Just the conservative trope "my opinions are being oppressed!" then when you ask about their conservative principles it basically boils down to justifying their racism/sexism or their own bigotry.
Congratulations, you failed the ideological Turing Test: https://medium.com/the-polymath-project/the-ideological-turi...
politically lopsided When the fuck did equal rights for minorities, women, and GLBTQ become "politically lopsided". We're talking about human rights here. There is no legitimate "other side" to this argument, just hate. This article is concern trolling 101.
Feminism had a time when it wall called equality feminism with the goal of promote the legal status of women as equal and undifferentiated from that of men. It was during this time many countries abolished and changed laws that distinguished between men and women, such as spousal support, divorce laws and custody of children, and more. Here in Sweden practically all such laws was abolished during this time, but then the 1980s and 1990s brought about a new focus in popular feminism called difference feminism and the idea of the gender being undifferentiated was abandoned. The feminist movement stopped working to remove such laws and is now considering that laws that favor women to be important to balance power between the sexes.
The common dismissed and ridiculed mens right movement is usually on "the other side" of the feminism movement. A common mens right argument is that the choice in pro-choice and planned parenthood should be applied to both men and women. Consent to parenting does not start from conception they say, and request that the choice given to women is made into a human right as far as possible. The feminist movement generally disagree.
Taking a look at other equal rights movements, laws that give special treatment to minorities based on religion has often a "other side" arguing that special treatment should be applied as a human rights or not at all. Such laws are never made into human rights, and thus we have members of Missionary Church of Kopimism and Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster trying to achieve this special status of equal rights among religions and rarely succeeding. As the side who is arguing for human rights they are sadly the "other side" to the more established equal rights for (popular) minority religions.
If you dislike the term "mens violence against women" and prefer to address the issue as domestic violence then you are sexist. Similar if you use the term "immigrants sexual violence against women" instead of talking about social economic status creating crime then you are a racist. They say that White Privilege is a good term while Black Crime is a bad term, and naturally this is what distinguish the correct political view and the wrong one.
Bring the laws and discussion back to be undifferentiated by gender, religion, race or ethnicity. Pure human rights. Such discussion should have no legitimate other side but for now most equal rights do not request this and thus the other side is very much legitimate.
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that the only diversity that administrators care about is diversity of (largely) indelible characteristics (skin color, sexual orientation, etc), instead of diversity of thought. I'd much rather go to a school where everyone looked the same but thought different, than a school where everyone looked different but thought the same.
You contradict yourself. You imagine a school where everyone looks the same but thinks "different", and yet by your own definition that school doesn't have any women, blacks, gays, etc. How would that work? Do you imagine an academy of straight white men, some of which serve as delegates for the types of thought that emerge from groups that aren't allowed to attend? Your line of reasoning is the perfect example of th…
The author of that comment does not want everybody to look the same, it was just a rhetorical device - the problem is not that people don't look the same, but that looks is everything that is considered. The opposite of "caring only about physical diversity" is not "demanding physical uniformity", it's "demanding diversity not only in genetic traits but also in other aspects". I am old enough to remember when the need for diversity was explained as "we need people of different background with different ways of thinking, because that would lead to greater intellectual outcomes as individual biases would be compensated and cancelled out". Now it's "we need people of different genetic background because if you don't agree with it than shut up, racist!". Somehow the old one was way more intellectually satisfying than the new one.