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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

#781

Post by shrimpx »

When we speak of centrism in terms of political parties, the implicit false assumption in some of this discussion is that Trumpism is a legitimate political position. These days when we talk about "the right" we largely mean Trumpism -- the GOP's new political stance (including Mitch McConnell, btw).

The idea of "centrism" makes no sense with Trumpism on one side. "Yes I am pro-democratic republic and I also want to be ruled by a dictator who hollows out and weaponizes public institutions and muzzles his enemies."

The center means there is common ground but Trump scorched the GOP's half of it. The only way I can envision a center is if the GOP figures out how to move beyond Trumpism and rebuild themselves into a conservative party. Currently the only people offering a shred of hope, by for example cooperating with the Democratic center, are the likes of Romney, who got booed offstage by GOP supporters.

Re: Some Americans are breaking out of political echo chambers

#782

Post by fleddr »

watwut wrote: post #721
anm89 wrote: post #623

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

If you are determined to pick middle of all issues, you are not superior neutral thinker. Instead, you are enabler for whoever is bigger lier or whoever is set up to cause more harm. People dont have to have same opinions as me. But the contemporary idea that if you position yourself in the middle you are doing good by definition is wrong.

I don't think a lot of centrists claim to be "doing good" just for being in the middle.

You can't read from this position the intent. It could be indifference about a topic, caring about it yet rejecting both extreme views, or somebody that did deeply study the topic and found the center to be just right.

Both rejecting centrism or glorifying it, makes no sense in any case.

Re: Some Americans are breaking out of political echo chambers

#783

Post by Impassionata »

NaturalPhallacy wrote: post #739
myko wrote: post #440

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This is just projection from the Left that is working so hard to cancel anyone who steps politically out of line. To be clear, the leader of the conservative party of the US recently attempted a coup.

> To be clear, the leader of the conservative party of the US recently attempted a coup. I simply can't imagine the level of bias and filter bubbled amount of media indoctrination it takes to say this with a straight face. The party of "freedom and guns" showed up with 500,000 people, left all their guns at home, but "attempted a coup"? Utterly ridiculous. This is what a coup looks like: https://www.occupy.com/sites/…

I can understand why you think the way you do and the way you construct your arguments, unlike some others in this thread, makes me believe you're genuine.

But I hope you can see that there are a large number of people who see a physical assault on the peaceful transition of power as a threat to the continuance of our government. An existential threat.

We are never going to change our minds on this and you have no right to ask us to overlook it because that's sort of like asking us to ignore an arsonist who we know set a fire, who has proclaimed the desire to set fires.

Violence was used to disrupt the peaceful transition of power. Violence was used to disrupt the peaceful transition of power. Violence was used to disrupt the peaceful transition of power.

How can you possibly ask people to look past this? With a straight face?

You're one of those people, I suspect, who gets tripped up on literal definitions of things. It doesn't matter what, specifically, is an attempted coup and what isn't. People will use imprecise terminology and if you want to talk politics you may just have to grow up about that fact.

Violence was used to disrupt the peaceful transition of power.

Re: Some Americans are breaking out of political echo chambers

#784

Post by anshorei »

gremlinsinc wrote: post #775
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…

[flagged]

And that's what we call "strawmanning".

Re: Some Americans are breaking out of political echo chambers

#787

Post by ajoy »

vsskanth wrote: post #8

I tried this experiment: read nytimes, wapo, fox, national review and politico. I wanted to get different perspectives. However, I encountered a bunch of issues: They dont talk about or even cover the same things, which makes it hard to compare liberal vs conservative perspectives. This is the most common form of bias I've come across. In the rare case they do cover the same thing, many articles either simply do not…

We (The Factual: https://www.thefactual.com) have been trying to solve this issue.

Our tech ingests articles from different publishers, groups them into topics based on the story they are covering, then analyze and score them based on how informative they are and present curated articles as best perspectives from left/right/center.

All of this automated and running continuously on our website : https://www.thefactual.com/news and also in our app : iOS (https://apps.apple.com/us/app/the-factual/id1537259360) and Android (https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=group.thefactu...)

Do check us out.

Re: Some Americans are breaking out of political echo chambers

#788

Post by fleddr »

x86_64Ubuntu wrote: post #745
NeutralCrane wrote: post #725

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> One aspect of centrism is that it's generally people who either benefit from or want to maintain the status quo, without incurring the conflict that comes with stating so. This absolutely is not true, it's simply the straw man that polarized extremists use to lampoon centrism. It's based on two faulty assumptions: 1. Centrists believe the right course of action is "in the middle" of both extremes on all issues. Thi…

So in the issues of chattel slavery, Jim Crow, anti-lynching laws, Voting Rights what position would a centrist have taken that wouldn't have explicitly maintained white supremacy?

This is the typical bait to attack centrism: moral coercion by framing an issue so that "NO" can never be an answer.

Centrism doesn't mean indifference regarding any topic, nor does it mean "meet in the middle" on any topic.

Re: Some Americans are breaking out of political echo chambers

#789

Post by asguy »

whimsicalism wrote: post #219
asguy wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Xmas is most certainly Christian. ... didn’t Xmas start being used exactly for that reason, i.e. to separate the event from religion. I didn’t grow up believing in Jesus, but I definitely believed in Santa Claus.

> ... didn’t Xmas start being used exactly for that reason, i.e. to separate the event from religion. No lol, that's just what Fox news said when they were talking about the "War on Christmas". It's a historical typographical thing where X was used as an abbreviation for Christ, you can look it up. Nothing about trying to separate it from religion.

Interesting. I don’t know about Fox news, but I do know some secular non-Christians that were using it that way.

Edit: Oh, and the Futurama episode. Does that count as Fox?

Re: Some Americans are breaking out of political echo chambers

#790

Post by aidenn0 »

Moodles wrote: post #452
mariodiana wrote: post #446

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Jonathan Haidt (who is mentioned in the article) did a study years ago. He separated a group of people into conservatives and liberals and then gave them a questionnaire on politics. Then he got a second group, separated them, and gave them the same questionnaire. Only he asked the second group of liberals and conservatives to answer the questionnaire the way they imagined the other side would. What he found was that…

Yeah, that doesn't surprise me at all actually. I'm sure both side demonize the other to some extent, and it's our natural reaction to look at them both as equally bad like we're disciplining two siblings or something, but it really seems that right now the left is more melodramatic in the demonization than the right. In my personal experience, quite a few people I've met seem to think if you disagree with them, you…

My wife (who is pretty far left), observed that Trump was actually many of the things that G.W. Bush was accused of being.

I think a major tenet of post-trump Republicanism is roughly: "We're going to be accused of being racist and conspiracy theorists by the left no matter what we do, so there is only an upside to openly courting those members of the electorate.

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