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Some Americans are breaking out of political echo chambers

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Re: Some Americans are breaking out of political echo chambers

#621

Post by watwut »

slumdev wrote: post #513
laputan_machine wrote: post #426

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you give an example of the second type? I see this kind of strawman argument against centrism all the time, yet I rarely see "worst of both worlds" outcomes in a political sense

Most Americans support an abortion ban, but they also support exceptions for rape or incest. If the fetus is a human person with rights, there should be no exception. If the fetus is not a human person with rights, then restrictions of any kind are unjust. The provenance of the fetus has no effect on the moral liceity of killing it. It's a lazy opinion formed by appeals to emotion.

> Most Americans support an abortion ban

This is not true. They support restrictions that are way smaller then the "only rape" one.

Re: Some Americans are breaking out of political echo chambers

#622

Post by myko »

passivate wrote: post #600
myko wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> On the left, evidence of how much of the investigation into Russian collusion with Trump's election team was completely made up and water carrying by the media of Clinton's team's planted story has never been owned by the participants. This is bizarre. No such thing happened.

https://taibbi.substack.com/p/russiagate-is-wmd-times-a-mill... https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/01/03/dear-cnn-...

Those links don't disprove anything I've said on this subject in this thread.

Re: Some Americans are breaking out of political echo chambers

#623

Post by anm89 »

watwut wrote: post #564
anm89 wrote: post #346

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Attacking the center is always the craziest narrative to me. It's saying: not only is it not okay to disagree with me and be on the other side, it's also not okay to not passionately agree with my exact side. The only right way to view these complex issues is to sign your name to join my party and then hold the party line, and everything else is unethical. I can't imagine a more obnoxious political viewpoint than tha…

The middle between truth and lie is a lie. The middle between torture and fredom is less bad torture. I could continue, but that is the point.

All of humanity does not agree with your personal subjective assessment of "the truth", whatever that is supposed to even mean.

Re: Some Americans are breaking out of political echo chambers

#624

Post by andredz »

takeda wrote: post #339
munificent wrote: post #277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Most non-religious americans are something like Christian Atheists. They don't believe in a god, but their worldview, ethics, and cultural norms are still originating in Christianity. I like latkes and challah, but that doesn't make me Jewish. All groups influence culture and culture influences all individuals. But simply having adopted a piece of culture that came from some group does not make one a member of that…

To add to it, even the Christmas tree doesn't originate from Christianity. It was just adapted from a pagan tradition. The Santa Claus image was created by commercialism. The original saint Claus is celebrating on December 6 (or 7, don't remeber exactly) and that was a priest that anonymously was donating toys to children in orphanages and later was discovered. Easter Bunny is another commercialisation of a Christian…

With regards to the pagan origins of Christmas I learned quite a bit by reading some of the linked articles here (such as the one about Yule or about the Christmas tree): https://historyforatheists.com/2020/12/pagan-christmas/

Some quotes from the one about Christmas trees:

>People in the twenty-first century have this bizarre, instinctive notion that any custom we have today that we cannot rationally explain must be a survival of pre-Christian paganism. The idea of “pagan survivals” is so widespread that it has basically become the de facto explanation to any puzzling or peculiar tradition. People essentially just answer the question “Why do we decorate trees at Christmas?” with “I don’t know, so it must be paganism.”

>Most of the customs, traditions, and ideas we associate with the modern, secular Christmas are products of the past two hundred years. If you want to blame something for “ruining” Christmas and “taking Christ out Christmas,” you would be closer to the mark blaming twentieth and twenty-first century American capitalism than seventh-century BC Canaanite paganism (or whatever other variety of paganism you happen to fancy).

Re: Some Americans are breaking out of political echo chambers

#625

Post by watwut »

myfavoritedog wrote: post #587
anm89 wrote: post #346

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Attacking the center is always the craziest narrative to me. It's saying: not only is it not okay to disagree with me and be on the other side, it's also not okay to not passionately agree with my exact side. The only right way to view these complex issues is to sign your name to join my party and then hold the party line, and everything else is unethical. I can't imagine a more obnoxious political viewpoint than tha…

I agree with you in a lot of ways, although my problem with the center is: When Democrats want to blow out the budget by spending $10 trillion and then centrist Republicans say, "Okay, we'll do $5 trillion", there's nowhere to go besides further to the right. is to give either of those groups as little power as possible The only two groups that even talk about decreasing the power of all the extremists are Libertaria…

Historically, democrats make debt smaller and republicans larger.

Re: Some Americans are breaking out of political echo chambers

#626

Post by [deleted] »

throwaway8582 wrote: post #555
boredprograming wrote: post #445

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fox news personalities frequently allow Trump and his allies airtime where they lie about losing the election to Biden. I don't know how you get any less truthful than that

How about making up fake stories about Russian prostitutes and hackers to try and overturn the results of an election that didn't go your way? Anyone that wants to complain about Fox News and let CNN, MSNBC, NYT, WaPo, and the rest of the "mainstream" media outlets slide for printing that garbage after the 2016 election is not being intellectually honest.

[deleted]

Re: Some Americans are breaking out of political echo chambers

#627

Post by pmoriarty »

dahfizz wrote: post #467
XorNot wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This seems like an odd take to me. What is the point of film and fiction if not to see and experience things you otherwise cannot or would not? The question I have is what is being preserved by not having a diversity of backgrounds, ethnicities and belief systems in films?

Having "diverse" characters does not automatically make a movie more interesting. In fact, if you are relying on demographics (religion, race, sexuality) alone to make a character interesting, there is a very good chance the characters are flat, boring, and lazily written.

Of course having diverse characters does not automatically make a movie more interesting.

But interesting movies can be made about diverse characters as they can about homogeneous characters.

Only depicting homogeneous societies furthers ignorance and demonization of people who are different.

Showing more diversity, in interesting, authentic, and deep ways is one an important way we have of striving towards a society where we better understand and value one another, and get along.

Re: Some Americans are breaking out of political echo chambers

#628

Post by JAlexoid »

dragonwriter wrote: post #511
JAlexoid wrote: post #422

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're using conservativism vey much in American GOP understanding of the term, which has stopped being conservative a while ago. Conservativism is a relative position, but you can't be a conservative liberal. Economist literally had a massive article what is conservativism. And - SPOILER - UK Torries used to be conservative, while GOP has been reactionary/populist for a while now.

> Conservativism is a relative position, but you can't be a conservative liberal. As a relative politico-economic position, conservative is “defense of the position of status quo elites”. In a society with a capitalist (including most modern mixed) economy, “conservative” in the relative sense is always economically liberal, because the status quo elites in a capitalist society are those empowered by and dependent on…

> As a relative politico-economic position, conservative is “defense of the position of status quo elites”.

That's a very narrow understanding of conservativism.

> “conservative” in the relative sense is always economically liberal

Conservatives have often taken steps to restrict market forces, that forced radical changes. So no - you cannot generalize conservativism to "economically liberal".

But rather than listening to me, feel free to read up a scholarly article.

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/conservatism/

Re: Some Americans are breaking out of political echo chambers

#629

Post by joe_the_user »

prof-dr-ir wrote: post #33

> "Until you can passionately make arguments for both sides," she says, "you don't understand the issue." I think this is the key quote. It should really be taboo to have an opinion without an understanding of how the other side argues. (Ironically the search for counterarguments would often strengthen my position because they would turn out to be quite weak. Nevertheless I think that the exercise is important.) I th…

>> "Until you can passionately make arguments for both sides," she says, "you don't understand the issue."

> I think this is the key quote. It should really be taboo to have an opinion without an understanding of how the other side argues.

There's a difference between "understand" and "make a passionate argument for" a given position. It's become standard for just about any ideological position to claim that anyone who disagrees "doesn't really understand" and to primarily use extreme emotions paired with unverifiable claims. At what point does one "understand" in these conditions?

The idea that most issues today have two reasonable sides arguing is itself an ideology. Often there's not even one reasonable position.

Re: Some Americans are breaking out of political echo chambers

#630

Post by asdff »

spamizbad wrote: post #414
fartcannon wrote: post #36

There's a thing that happened with the Canada subreddit. It used to be kind of an interesting sub where youd get neat Canada-wide local stories (mostly Ontario) that were genrally pleasant. It was a nice place to visit after being inundated with American politics. Then, sometime in the early 10s and it gradually became very partisan and political. Which, to clarify, means it got substantially worse. It, like the comm…

A lot of "local" subreddits started declining around 2015. It's like all the local news website commenters discovered their local subreddits and started posting there.

I almost think it was these local news sites trying themselves to post on these subreddits. Looking at the histories of the people who actually post articles on a local subreddit, all they do pretty much is post articles. Who even does that? Either someone with some sort of complex to share every article they read on reddit, or an intern who is paid to post the article on social media and reddit is on that list. Even the LA Fire Department is active on reddit now. It's mainstream, and commercialized.
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