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How can we break our addiction to contempt?

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Re: How can we break our addiction to contempt?

#121

Post by TomSwirly »

BitwiseFool wrote: post #104
mrtesthah wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you cite an example of left-wing news outlets playing "fast and loose" in a way that literally jeopardized the foundation of US democracy and incited mass violence? Even if you think the investigation into Trump's ties to Russian influence was unjustified, it relied on democratically-elected representatives to impeach him, and it never undermined the rule of law itself. I'm sure you can find examples with lesser…

>"in a way that literally jeopardized the foundation of US democracy" What does this even mean? This is way too vague and nebulous to ever get a grip on. I'm guessing you're talking about members of House/Senate contesting the results of the election, which they had a right to do, and followed the constitutional procedure for. You could also say this relied on democratically-elected representatives and wasn't undermi…

You could simply have said, "I can't come up with any examples," and skipped all the rambling text.

Re: How can we break our addiction to contempt?

#122

Post by googlryas »

TomSwirly wrote: post #117
googlryas wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tucker Carlson, Alex Jones, and Rachel Maddow have all used "No one could honestly believe that what we say is really true" as an argument in legal proceedings against them.

> Tucker Carlson, Alex Jones These are well-known... > and Rachel Maddow I couldn't find any such thing in the news. Source for that one?

The ruling(which Maddow won): https://timesofsandiego.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/MADDO...

The specific details are Maddow was talking about a journalist from another network(OAN), and said something like "This person is literally paid by the Russian government to produce news stories". Maddow's team argued that it isn't slander because no reasonable viewer of her show would take that statement to be truthful despite the confident/clear language it is expressed in.

Re: How can we break our addiction to contempt?

#123

Post by totony »

tombert wrote: post #78
fighterpilot wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you share that hypothesis? You are obviously contributing to this thread in a balanced way and in good faith and I really want to hear it. I know two anti-vaxxers. One is not political at all but isn't that smart. Very nice and generous person. Bit prone to conspiracy thinking and bought into fake news on Rumble or something. The other is very conservative and it's a team/tribe issue with him. He has a strong dis…

Ok, just to be clear I want to preface this by saying "not all conservatives". I know plenty of conservatives who are lovely and intelligent people. ------- Basically, I think that rabid anti-vax sentiment is a natural conclusion to roughly ~40 years of near-constant levels of conspiratorial thinking from conservative circles. I think folks like Jerry Fallwell started it, and subsequently Ronald Reagan and most of th…

I don't think it's quite that. IMO from knowing some anti-vaxx it originates from a rebellion against power more-so than any actual belief in conspiracy. It seems to come from being fed up with being told what to do AND from distrust in authorities (arguably warranted). Conspiracy comes as a post-facto rationalization for some as far as I've seen.

I believe policies like vaccine mandate and the overzealous anti-anti-vax crew are paradoxically aggravating the issue. Making it a partisan issue also seems to force people on the defensive and harden their (potentially unfounded) beliefs, forcing them into the "other camp."

EDIT: My hypothesis on why it comes more from right-wing rather than left-wing people is exactly that right-wing is anti-government power (or more freedom of individuals, usually).

Re: How can we break our addiction to contempt?

#124

Post by pierrebai »

tombert wrote: post #118
TomSwirly wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> most of their voters mean well Can you give some sort of reason why you have this impression?

I have conservative members of my family, who I admittedly don’t talk to very often anymore, but when I do I do get a vibe that they believe what they’re saying. They genuinely think that Donald Trump really Made America Great Again, and that Joe Biden exist to destroy America. I don’t agree with either of those statements, and I think their actions as a result of these beliefs are bad, but I do think they want thing…

I whole-heartedly agree with you. People love to demonize who they disagree with, assuming that disagreement is just a proxy for the fact the others are idiots. In reality, it is merely that they hold different values, their source of true facts they believe in are different and prioritize different things.

Re: How can we break our addiction to contempt?

#126

Post by BitwiseFool »

TomSwirly wrote: post #121
BitwiseFool wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>"in a way that literally jeopardized the foundation of US democracy" What does this even mean? This is way too vague and nebulous to ever get a grip on. I'm guessing you're talking about members of House/Senate contesting the results of the election, which they had a right to do, and followed the constitutional procedure for. You could also say this relied on democratically-elected representatives and wasn't undermi…

You could simply have said, "I can't come up with any examples," and skipped all the rambling text.

>"You could simply have said, "I can't come up with any examples," and skipped all the rambling text."

This attitude is part of the reason why I didn't feel the need to paste a bunch of links. Not only am I certain you'd dismiss them as biased interpretations, you didn't even pick up on the fact that I was disagreeing with his premise. And, that I did provide an example with Maxine Waters calling for Trump Administration staffers to be harassed in public.

Re: How can we break our addiction to contempt?

#127

Post by fighterpilot »

tombert wrote: post #88
fighterpilot wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's really interesting. I would think that growing polarization specifically around education has something to do with the acceleration of conspiracy acceptance on the right that you've described.

Yeah, but even the polarization of education is still somewhat conspiratorial right? My grandmother believes that "public schools are liberal indoctrination camps" and that all education is effectively a plot against conservatives to turn kids into atheists. While schools definitely do have a lefty-bent, the idea that it's some hyper-organized society designed to destroy the conservative parties in America is absurd…

There was a miscommunication. I meant that one of the biggest differences between Democrats and Republicans is the level of tertiary education, and this gulf has been widening over the last 20 years. Scott Alexander has written on this demographic shift

Re: How can we break our addiction to contempt?

#128

Post by newbie789 »

etherael wrote: post #90
newbie789 wrote: post #82

>…He has come to believe there is only one weapon that can defeat our extreme political polarization: love. Oh my, what a silly way to pitch a possible reader on your book. There is a (VERY conservative) town in my state where every single employee of the local department of transportation has quit over the vaccine mandate. Now the former employees and their conservative allies are gleefully posting about how “the li…

Isnt this argument predicated on the supposition that the only reason they are opposed to coercive experimental gene therapy is because they want to "own the libs?" I mean, maybe that's right but it seems unlikely when there are other much more obvious things to explain the reasons for the actions in question. That they then post hoc express schadenfreude for the party who they perceive to be responsible for the situ…

I didn’t mention anything about gene therapy or whatever other bananas theory that can be inserted into literally any conversation nowadays.

What I did bring up is the fact that people are willing to deny themselves, their families and neighbors the ability to leave their own homes to get food and medicine in order to “own the libs.”

While this sort of Markov-chain sounding word salad about… whatever, must indicate that people are passionate about… whatever, the fact of the matter is that sabotaging your own infrastructure out of ideology sounds kind of suicidal.

I honestly don’t get how I could personally rally behind people that would celebrate my righteous death from being stranded in the snow because I’d died owning the libs because uh… my ideology will have prevented theoretical vaccine deaths in the future? My actual, concrete, current life is literally worth less than… what? Some bogeyman that I read about on Facebook?

If I were genuinely that concerned about all these conspiracies and thought that my thoughtless death would make a difference, I’d self-immolate like the monks during Vietnam. Somehow curiously, these folks rather than doing that are taking the mighty stand of keeping kids from going to school, their neighbors going to work or their doctors, local business owners from opening etc.

Ironically, not plowing the streets creates the exact same (if not considerably worse) lockdown situation that these people have been mad about for 18 months. Ironically, it’s not the reduction of peoples freedoms that matter to these conservatives, it’s who gets to be the ones taking the freedoms away.

People will literally kill themselves and everyone around them in order to feel Right About Stuff.

“Love” isn’t an answer here. It’s a completely meaningless word put in a context to sound nice on a podcast to sell books to people who will never change their minds about any of this.

Re: How can we break our addiction to contempt?

#129

Post by BitwiseFool »

TomSwirly wrote: post #120
BitwiseFool wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is very likely to devolve into a partisan squabble, so I don't want to keep going back and forth on this. I was ready to cite examples of the left playing fast and loose with the truth but I sense it will just create hostility. If I pick only one example, it looks like I'm not prepared and have nothing substantial to counter with. If I list multiple examples, it will look like I came here prepared for a fight as…

I'm not an American, but this is silly. > I was ready to cite examples of the left playing fast and loose with the truth but I sense it will just create hostility. I mean, sounds like an excuse to not participate. The question seems quite black and white. We have a few classic lies: * Obama is a Muslim from Kenya * His wife is transgender * Climate change is a hoax * COVID is a hoax * Climate change is a hoax * There…

"> I was ready to cite examples of the left playing fast and loose with the truth but I sense it will just create hostility.

I mean, sounds like an excuse to not participate."

Actually, I was exactly right. I'm sensing some hostility from you right now and I'm making the mistake of engaging when I should just let it go.

>"Can you find even one comparable lie to any of these spread by prominent Democrats (not some random Twitter account)?"

So on the one hand, the laundry list you gave is acceptable as "widely believed by Conservatives", but I have to provide counterexamples that are only restricted to "prominent democrats"? You also don't qualify what 'widely believed' means, so I can just as easily claim that people on the left widely believe other falsehoods. If it is so bad that some conservatives agree with the idea that "Democrats are Communists", is it not exactly the same thing as Democrats believing that "Republicans as Fascists"? This is a widely believed view by Progressives.

I'm not here to chuck a laundry list of "lies" at you. Quite frankly I see something like "Trump’s false or misleading claims total 30,573 over 4 years" and I roll my eyes. Am I seriously expected to believe that number is anywhere close to accurate? I dare say the majority of those are subject to interpretation, which we will not be doing here.

Re: How can we break our addiction to contempt?

#130

Post by bellyfullofbac »

asdfman123 wrote: post #43
bellyfullofbac wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not so sure about meaning well. If you read https://www.slatestarcodexabridged.com/I-Can-Tolerate-Anythi... , it feels like there's a lot of decisions nowadays that's taken because it will hurt/offend the "other team", with post-facto justification why the decision benefits "me/our side". It seems like people have been losing their pride in their selves that now they're invested in their "football teqm" winning i…

Well, they take the perspective that the "other team" is hurting the country, so hurting them helps the country. Almost all evil comes from the over-application of morality. "My team is good, and their team is bad, and it is good to hurt bad people." The problem is that democracy depends on cooperation. If you insist on winning at all costs, the other side adopts your tactics and it becomes a no-holds barred power st…

> Well, they take the perspective that the "other team" is hurting the country, so hurting them helps the country.

It seems like the perspective gets taken to - as I write above - justify, after-the-fact, "why I've decided the same way my herd decided". There is a lot of grasping for easy answers ("Yeah, he must be being controlled by China, that's a good enough answer for me!") and cognitive dissonnace when challenged, that usually ends with people being angry so the challenger stops..

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