651–660 of 734 posts
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In your tweet, you immediately go to "well off white guys". The fact that you feel comfortable and proud to write like this in public, under your real name, perfectly encapsulates how far off the reservation you are.
And you, in reply, use "off the reservation"? I'm not sure you're in a position to cast the first stone...
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> Even correcting people who are clearly misinformed on clear matters of fact can cause offense. This resonates deeply. I'm at the point where "I'm entitled to my opinion!" is a great signal to change the topic, never to return to the topic of politics with that person ever again
When someone comes at me with "I'm entitled to my opinion!" I reply, "You're entitled to your INFORMED opinion!". I think since around 2008 with the rise of social media, so much of one's ego has been made public. More so than ever before. Its as if everyone is a public figure. Because of this, more people are incapable of accepting that they may be wrong, underinformed, or simply misinformed.
Now both those who support and those who disagree with masks think they are the informed party. I have disagreed with the reopening plan for my country, based on the science as I understand it (they didn't open up enough outside) and it now looks like I was right.
So the question is, who and how do you determine what constitute an informed opinion?
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Statistics do not prove intent, unless you want us to use the same data to prove that the Justice system is an order of magnitude more sexist than racist because 2000% more men are killed then women. The numbers for incarceration rates and sentencing disparities are similar damning. If we go by the data in the study, the likelihood of death by cop in the US is determined by age first, gender second, race third. If we…
Agreed, I think one of the ways the two camps talk past each other is using "racist" to refer to both the motive of individual actors and the systemic and cultural biases. Also yes, the judicial system is also sexist - police don't see women as being threats demanding lethal force, juries are more willing to see women as victims including of their circumstances. That's not the only reason for discrepancies, sociobiol…
If we look at age groups, 20-29 is the most common age for criminals to be found guilty by the justice system which matches the age when people exit from schools and have the lowest amount of income and highest rate of unemployment. High crime areas also tend to have a lower median age than low crime areas. For being shot by a cop, this age jumps a bit to 30-40, but I don't know why.
The general problem with this kind of statistics is that you will always end up with correlations that goes both way. If a country has a massive wave of refugees of a certain age, refugees with a lower social economic status that the existing population, you get an obvious correlation with social economic status, age and refugee status. At which point some statistician try to normalize values and those numbers suddenly becomes a discussion about which factors are considered and which ones aren't.
Is the justice system ageist, sexist, racist, and -phobic? When it tries to do a risk assessment based on little else than demographic data then yes.
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Do you find the small village pubs are open to left-wing viewpoints?
Generally in the pub you can air an opinion and have a quite heated debate about something then just move on and still be civil.
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Because everyone gets to see a Yes followed than a No video. Also, besides the classical "like button", there is a Respect button that signals that you are willing to open the door to the other side. Hence, the nuancing and approaching instead of flame wars
Why does your approach presuppose that there are only two sides to any given question?
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There are: 55k "Locomotive engineers and operators" (90% male) 1.7m "Chief executives" (70% male) 1.9m "Software developers" (80% male) 3.2m "Architecture and engineering occupations" (85% male) Maybe there is a lot of handwringing within the locomotive industry, but it really doesn't seem important enough for the rest of us to care about.
Sure. And there are fewer full-blown autistic people than there are people "on the spectrum". But it's a lot easier to study autism by looking at severe cases than it is to try to figure out what's biologically different about people who are "a little aspy". 92% of veterinarians are female 98.8% (!) of preschool and kindergarten teachers are female If you want to understand gender imbalance in employment, these are t…
That makes sense, but personally I think you should still focus on the "smaller issues" instead of just looking at the most extremes. People who are "a little aspy" may have similar biological causes as severe autism, but their social situations are much different. People with Aspergers may just require some minor accommodation to live their lives, but people with Autism may require a lot of care. The causes can be similar while the scale drastically changes the type of response.
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No the commenter picked racism as an example, because they think viewpoint diversity is not necessarily good. Big difference to your statement.
I'd say that's a rather charitable interpretation. "Not necessarily good"? Come on, this is the comment we are talking about: > I don't trust this article. The phrase "Losing viewpoint diversity" is of course crafted to make it sound like a chilling trend. Pretty clear what they want you to think about it. But if you drill into what that's referring to, whether you think it's a bad thing is entirely up to what you th…
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> Not only is there widespread assumption of racism being the motivation Well, is there?? Everybody I seem to interact with doesn't think so. Where are all those bogeymen chanting racism right away? Surely you can quote some sort of survey to back up your perception, right?
For starters, go search Twitter for 'George Floyd' - it's hard to find threads that /don't/ make it about racism to some degree or another. But even a cursory search on other sides yields oodles of results; here's some from just the first page or two of hits: "Racism killed George Floyd" - https://www.americantheatre.org/2021/04/15/day-after-day-rac... "George Floyd murder exposes rotten racism in the US" - https://w…
Twitter is not a representative slice of the population or its feelings, so that's why your premise is right out of the bat flawed.
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"However, I fear the repercussions of offending others who do not have an open mind." You're dead right and it's damned terrible. I long for both formal and informal debates on many topics but without my opponents becoming annoyed or offended (as so often they do nowadays). These days it seems almost impossible to debate any subject without upsetting someone. I now long for the type of television programs that I reme…
people have been programmed, on a massive scale, to react emotionally to certain learned key phrases and terms. when this automatic emotional reaction occurs, all logical processing ceases immediately, and the person you're talking to either immediately leaves the conversation (if you're lucky) or starts emotionally, verbally attacking you as though your non-conforming line of thought is a pathogen and their overreac…
get me right, language is deliberately abused to exercise power, to belittle others, by deliberately misgendering them or deliberately not using their academic title, etc.
However if I want to have a conversation about something of importance and my conversation participant is not there yet, should I not ignore misgendering or omission of academic titles or similar heckling from their side, simply to get into a conversation about the topic proper, and then, should the conversation participant surprisingly evolve into a conversation partner, then ask about pronouns, or academic title, or whichever language convention I prefer?
Why do I say this? If the other participant does not intend to evolve into a conversation partner, they will for lack of a better term jack off on heckling on the wrong pronoun or title or whatever it is that I may be asking for. I will never get to the core of what I want to discuss with that participant.
> people want to be told what to think, not how to think, as it's much easier that way.
Or people have forgotten how to have a proper conversation, an engaged dialogue about topics they disagree on, at least in parts.
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For the same reason I always look skeptically on other research about "polarization". The trend tends to be that in the past it was common for otherwise-sane people to advocate crazy stuff like bans on interracial marriage. Now the only people who are against interracial marriage are straight-ticket crazy people, and this sorting of society is superficially "polarization" but I can't find the negative in it, because…
> Now the only people who are against interracial marriage are straight-ticket crazy people, and this sorting of society is superficially "polarization" I'm not sure which metric of polarization is typically used in studies, but the situation you describe (vast majority agreeing, with a tiny minority in an extreme position) intuitively sounds like approaching consensus. Intuitively, with some survey measure of 0 to 1…
A world where 50% of people live at the North Pole, 50% at the South Pole and nobody at the equator, is polarized. So is a world where 90% of people live at the North Pole, 10% at the South Pole and nobody at the equator. Seems like "polarization" is about how many people live somewhere in between, rather than whether the groups at the poles are balanced or not.
Or even, that there exist places between the poles where people could be, even if they aren't. A world where 100% are at the North Pole, the South Pole exists but nobody is there, and between them is only water, is still polarized. The only place you can be, or go, is the two extreme positions. If the survey says "do you LOVE Politician X or HATE them?" and I can't be indifferent to them or mildly in favour or slightly against, it's a polarizing survey, isn't it?