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Why is it traitorous to understand the people you disagree with?

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Re: Why is it traitorous to understand the people you disagree with?

#101

Post by EddieDante »

If you understand the people you disagree with, you might find yourself changing your mind and agreeing with them, if only on one or two points. This is how I went from being a half-assed Randroid to a half-assed libertarian socialist. I wasn't willing to take Ayn Rand's word about socialism and anarchism as gospel -- or that of her anointed prophet Leonard Peikoff.

As for Roe v. Wade, I think the problem with reading the 14th Amendment as protecting a right to privacy is that the 14th isn't enough. We should be invoking the 9th Amendment as well, which explicitly covers unenumerated rights.

> The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.

This amendment exists specifically to counter the sort of mindset that thinks that rights come from God or the government, and that the Constitution wasn't written to enumerate and thus limit the powers of the Federal government.

Re: Why is it traitorous to understand the people you disagree with?

#102

Post by MockObject »

havblue wrote: post #89
blueberrychpstx wrote: post #10

Titles like this irk me. It clearly isn’t It should be something more like: “how has general discourse become so polluted and toxified in its perceptions for it to appear that the following statement yields any factuality” … I guess that doesn’t quite have the same ring to it though.

You understood the point though. Abortion is a third rail political topic so for most unenlightened people on either side of the issue, there is no middle ground.

The extreme positions are "a four-cell zygote should be protected from abortion", and "a baby being born may be aborted". Most citizens are in the middle ground.

Re: Why is it traitorous to understand the people you disagree with?

#103

Post by ouid »

guerrilla wrote: post #97
ouid wrote: post #53

Morality and law both work like mathematics. This means that my beliefs are constructed, and once I have a construction, the only in bounds way to convince me to change my mind about them is to show me that my beliefs are inconsistent. Moreover, understanding someone who has already demonstrated an inconsistent belief system is easy. They believe X because they believe something and its negation, and at least one of…

> the only in bounds way to convince me to change my mind about them is to show me that my beliefs are inconsistent No, you can also refute the premises/axioms and there other ways to do that than needing to demonstrate inconsistency.

Oh really? Would you like to provide an example of this?

Re: Why is it traitorous to understand the people you disagree with?

#104

Post by dane-pgp »

astrange wrote: post #74
nicoburns wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it? I strongly disagree with such a position. But it seems clear to me that many such people: 1. Believe that the foetus is alive (and often also that it is human) 2. Believe that life is sacred or otherwise precious. 3. Believe that the foetus's right to life outweighs the mother's right the self-determine use of her body. I can understand how one can have a thought process like that even if I think it's wrong in…

People certainly do believe these things and I don’t know if it’s even something they can be “logically” wrong about. Where they are factually wrong is that they think they’re traditional but these are fully modern ideas. The actual Jewish tradition is against several of those; the actual Christian tradition may be for them, but the idea that you should actually read the Bible, know what an official position is, or d…

> The actual Jewish tradition is against several of those

I think that Josephus, the first-century Jewish historian, would have something to say[0] about that:

“The law, moreover, enjoins us to bring up all our offspring and forbids women to cause abortion of what is begotten, or to destroy it afterward; and if any woman appears to have so done, she will be a murderer of her child, by destroying a living creature, and diminishing humankind,” (Josephus, Against Apion Book 2, Chapter 25, Section 202).

> And Protestants weren’t against abortion until recently, because they defined themselves as against Catholicism.

That's like saying that Protestants didn't believe in God until recently, because they defined themselves as against Catholics who are theists. Do you have any example of historic Protestant teaching that approved of abortion?

[0] https://carm.org/abortion/abortion-and-the-early-church/

Re: Why is it traitorous to understand the people you disagree with?

#105

Post by aendruk »

MockObject wrote: post #75
corrral wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm pro-choice, but from what I can tell, the pro-choicers who are eager to post about it on the Internet have no clue whatsoever about the actual positions of the people they're arguing against. They're also weirdly-big fans of very weak pro-choice arguments. It's really frustrating. Attempts to explain the other side, or to knock down bad arguments from "my" side so better ones can replace them, are indeed often me…

This has been my experience as well. I found myself arguing against the awful logic of my own side, more than the other side at all.

I’m interested to know if there’s a term for this phenomenon. I too find myself frequently engaging “against” my own side, out of a sincere desire to strengthen it and a sensitivity to how its weaker arguments reflect poorly on me.

Re: Why is it traitorous to understand the people you disagree with?

#106

Post by alkaloid »

conorcleary wrote: post #46
MockObject wrote: post #17

It is frustrating. I am on one side of the abortion debate, but I understand the other side, yet I have no success in even explaining it to my side.

Religion is like a firewall keeping logic out based on old rules and whitelists.

You know followers of "religion" invented empiricism (and logic and rhetoric, etc.), right?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roger_Bacon

Re: Why is it traitorous to understand the people you disagree with?

#107

Post by dj_mc_merlin »

ironmagma wrote: post #80
dj_mc_merlin wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Morality and law both work like mathematics. This is something only engineers are able to believe.

Not true at all. It's something philosophers and mathematicians have explored. Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DlQaP4c_Jxk

I think you're conflating the philosophy of mathematics with describing the entirety of philosophy (or even just morality) using mathematics.

I cannot claim to understand philosophy but I can claim to understand law, and it is _not_ like mathematics. Human discretion is paramount to the system, and laws are written in such a way that humans reinterpret them afterwards, as influenced by their own cultural and social bias. How is this like mathematics? Do you need a jury to decide if a theorem is true?

I have met many engineers who treat law as if it is supposed to be exact and mathematical. They become very annoyed when it does not conform to this view, or when laws aren't written in an even more detailed, step-by-step breakdown. That is not how it works. There's a reason there's discretion in the system, if you try to regulate something as inherently chaotic as human behaviour with inflexible rules, you get crypto.

Re: Why is it traitorous to understand the people you disagree with?

#108

Post by FooBarBizBazz »

UnpossibleJim wrote: post #33
ramesh31 wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quoted post unavailable.

It's also hard to understand why a fetus is to be protected but homeless children and people shouldn't be sheltered or fed, wars shouldn't be protested and education shouldn't be funded, but here we are. Political tools are used as wedge issues, not as logical thinking points. "Not in my back yard" is a wonderful summation of this. While many upper class liberals support more homeless shelters, they don't want one in…

Only the Catholics are consistent here, and only some of them.

Re: Why is it traitorous to understand the people you disagree with?

#109

Post by astrange »

lostcolony wrote: post #92
astrange wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People certainly do believe these things and I don’t know if it’s even something they can be “logically” wrong about. Where they are factually wrong is that they think they’re traditional but these are fully modern ideas. The actual Jewish tradition is against several of those; the actual Christian tradition may be for them, but the idea that you should actually read the Bible, know what an official position is, or d…

Oh, it's logically wrong on a number of levels. If they believe all three of these things, as well as the unsaid and equally necessary fourth that it is the government's job to enforce them regardless of the will of the people, then they must also believe - It is the government's job to ensure -everyone- receives necessary care. That means, minimally, food, shelter, healthcare, regardless of your work situation, age,…

It’s fairly common to believe you shouldn’t kill people but have no responsibility to keep them alive.

Actually, believing they’re the same thing is more like EA utilitarianism, isn’t it? Almost noone has that philosophy and most would find it repulsive.

Re: Why is it traitorous to understand the people you disagree with?

#110

Post by ironmagma »

ouid wrote: post #86
ironmagma wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Generally agree and find the same. However, I would argue moral philosophy is inherently built on unprovable axioms. The criticism "used to justify whatever they want" is actually a necessary feature to morality, because the whole point of morals is that not everyone shares your morals. If they were shared by everyone, they would just be objective truths.

different starting points can yield different results without producing a fundamental problem. It's like the score in a video game. But it is bad if a starting point can yield any result, or a result and its negation, at that point you provably might as well believe anything.

The score in a video game is like the sum of edge costs in a path within a graph. A "morality" is the entirety of the graph, the whole system. So it's apples to oranges.
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