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

dynomight.net

31–40 of 388 posts

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

#32

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.

Become? I think one could argue it's less so than ever. Remember blasphemy and the inquisition? Do you think people were more tolerant prior to the 20th century, what about in the 1950s? I think until recently responses were pretty violent in some cases and could lead to quite some consequences. I don't really know, but I think it's worth considering.

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

#33
post #6

"Seek first to understand, then to be understood." -- habit #5 of the 7 habits of highly successful people

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 their neighborhood. While many neoconservatives support a ban on abortions, they wouldn't want low income, single mother housing placement shelters in their neighborhoods, with job training.

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

#34

> The Constitution doesn’t mention abortion. But what about privacy? Well, it doesn’t mention privacy either. That's not true - the 4th amendment protects against unreasonable search and seizure. The search part prevents the police from reading your mail or wiretapping your phones without a warrant (which declares the search reasonable), except illegally.

Well yes, but as much as I am a proponent of both the right to privacy and abortion, the latter doesn't really follow from the former. Just because one has a right to privacy, it doesn't follow that everything done in private is legal. Nor is abortion necessarily private - one could declare one is going to have one, or one could be visibly pregnant and then get an abortion. It would be a bizarre law if abortion was l…

>Just because one has a right to privacy, it doesn't follow that everything done in private is legal.

No one, anywhere, has ever argued that the right to privacy means everything done in private is legal. That is not even remotely close to what the debate is about.

You have constructed an impressively bad strawman.

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

#35

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.

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 met with unpleasantness.

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

#36
post #28

> There’s a certain phenomenon I often wonder about, one that only seems to occur with culture war topics. I mean, the term "culture war" itself is part of the "conservative" vocabulary in that issue. So I can see why the whole thing is not easy.

That's your own characterization, and not universal. I've personally seen the term more often in non-conservative forums and circles. Not that it matters to your point, which I get and agree with.

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

#37
post #6

"Seek first to understand, then to be understood." -- habit #5 of the 7 habits of highly successful people

Quoted post unavailable.

Not to mention it's awfully presumptive to apply it to people facing the issue. I.e., invariably its those who are pro-rights who are told to understand the other side; why? If you can't get pregnant, your opinion on abortion -necessarily- is secondary to those who can, and it's they who need to seek to understand (and, I would argue, that in the same way that "wisdom is knowing you know nothing", sufficient understanding means realizing you can't fully understand because it doesn't directly effect you; that doesn't mean you can't have an opinion, but it does mean you shouldn't be trying to enforce it upon those actually effected by it).

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

#38

> The Constitution doesn’t mention abortion. But what about privacy? Well, it doesn’t mention privacy either. That's not true - the 4th amendment protects against unreasonable search and seizure. The search part prevents the police from reading your mail or wiretapping your phones without a warrant (which declares the search reasonable), except illegally.

Well yes, but as much as I am a proponent of both the right to privacy and abortion, the latter doesn't really follow from the former. Just because one has a right to privacy, it doesn't follow that everything done in private is legal. Nor is abortion necessarily private - one could declare one is going to have one, or one could be visibly pregnant and then get an abortion. It would be a bizarre law if abortion was l…

I suggest that you are confusing “privacy” as it is colloquially understood with what is means as a legal principle.

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

#39
post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quoted post unavailable.

"It's hard to understand the most extreme position I can think up, which is held by such a small number of people that it's not even really worth discussing."

If the palatable position includes the extreme position, then it too is the extreme position.

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

#40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You failed at understanding the author.

I don't think factual inaccuracies should get a free pass under the principle of assuming good faith, because the principle of assuming good faith only applies to how ambiguous claims should be construed. There is no way to construe "the constitution does not mention privacy" as a correct statement.

Yes, as "the constitution does not explicitly mention privacy" or "... does not mention privacy by that term."
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