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The politicization of society is damaging liberal democracy

thomasprosser.substack.com

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Re: The politicization of society is damaging liberal democracy

#31

Post by mcphage »

Guthur wrote: post #17
1attice wrote: post #7

As a member of one of the minorities whose rights campaigns Prosser cites as ruining his footie, I'll say, apropos nothing, that it's much easier to talk about these issues with detached neutrality when you & your friends are not subject to monotonically increasing levels of stochastic domestic terrorism.

Sounds like you need to get new friends. We are all dealing with crap, we are all at the bottom of the pile getting the dregs from trickle down economic theory. It's not about one tiny fringe group, when we fight only for ever more specific fringe groups we ignore the injustice we are all subjected to.

> Sounds like you need to get new friends.

I don't think I understand—which friends are you suggesting that 1attice get rid of?

Re: The politicization of society is damaging liberal democracy

#32

Post by mcphage »

VerifiedJoseph wrote: post #24
mcphage wrote: post #15

> When public firework displays take positions on controversial issues, they provoke partisan reactions, poisoning debate further and turning aggrieved groups away from public spaces. Is support for Ukraine a controversial issue in the UK? In the US, support for Ukraine is pretty widespread.

According to Ipsos (Oct '22), "6 in 10 support Britain’s response to the conflict" and "7 in 10 continue to support economic sanctions against Russia - but some evidence support could wane if there are further energy price rises" https://www.ipsos.com/en-uk/public-continues-support-britain... Personally I wouldn't say support for Ukraine is controversial here in the UK.

> Personally I wouldn't say support for Ukraine is controversial here in the UK.

I wonder why the author singled it out an example of a controversial issue, then.

Re: The politicization of society is damaging liberal democracy

#33

Post by prohobo »

rayiner wrote: post #14

A lot of well meaning people are seriously damaging the country by injecting politics into spheres that the public broadly needs to perceive as “neutral” such as law and medicine. This is usually accompanied by efforts to reframe contentious policy debates as “non-political.” Which of course makes no sense because lots of things that aren’t political in the abstract quickly become political when it comes to people ad…

This happened with an open-source video game I wanted to contribute to, of all things...

I thought I'd found a welcoming community that was interested in building something cool, and I could learn some C# while contributing to something really unique and creative.

That turned out to be sort of right, but the senior maintainers decided that it's also cool to shove their politics down everyone else's throats and ban anyone who so much as sniffs at it.

They intentionally flag-wave their political stances in Discord to bait people into mentioning it, and if they don't like someone's thoughts they ban them and pat themselves on the back for ostensibly removing "toxicity" and "intolerance". When I asked them to stop doing that they tried to bait me into saying something they didn't like, and stated that their political views aren't political at all - more like natural law.

From my perspective, these people (regardless of political affiliation) act pathologically and crave the camaraderie and support of being part of an in-group, and enforce that in-group, because they probably feel generally insecure. They don't really understand the implications of their behavior, nor do they actually care about their supposed cause, they just want to feel in control and validated, and they found a venue for it.

To stop this pathological politicization you have to create an environment of security. That isn't going to happen any time soon, so I'm not sure what the point of any of this is - just avoid them and find/create communities that don't allow politics.

Re: The politicization of society is damaging liberal democracy

#34

Post by mcphage »

> Some retort that everything is political, but I do not see how activities such as birdwatching, sex and optometry are political in a meaningful sense. If one insists on the contrary, we return to similarities with totalitarianism.

But the author isn't talking about incidents in birdwatching or optometry—they're talking about large, expensive national celebrations. It may be hard to find the politics in birdwatching, but it's not hard to find the politics in holiday firework displays.

(And if the author can't see how sex can be political, I'm not sure they read their list of controversial incidents, or have paid attention to modern politics)

Re: The politicization of society is damaging liberal democracy

#35

Post by beyond_based »

prohobo wrote: post #33
rayiner wrote: post #14

A lot of well meaning people are seriously damaging the country by injecting politics into spheres that the public broadly needs to perceive as “neutral” such as law and medicine. This is usually accompanied by efforts to reframe contentious policy debates as “non-political.” Which of course makes no sense because lots of things that aren’t political in the abstract quickly become political when it comes to people ad…

This happened with an open-source video game I wanted to contribute to, of all things... I thought I'd found a welcoming community that was interested in building something cool, and I could learn some C# while contributing to something really unique and creative. That turned out to be sort of right, but the senior maintainers decided that it's also cool to shove their politics down everyone else's throats and ban an…

Which game? This sounds awfully familiar.

Re: The politicization of society is damaging liberal democracy

#36

Post by Guthur »

mcphage wrote: post #31
Guthur wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sounds like you need to get new friends. We are all dealing with crap, we are all at the bottom of the pile getting the dregs from trickle down economic theory. It's not about one tiny fringe group, when we fight only for ever more specific fringe groups we ignore the injustice we are all subjected to.

> Sounds like you need to get new friends. I don't think I understand—which friends are you suggesting that 1attice get rid of?

Surround yourself with people that share whatever your culture or sense of being is. You will feel far less alone and down trodden.

My home society had shops during my life time that had recruitment signs that said things like "Catholics need not apply" or not long before that signs that said "No dogs, no Irish".

But we are just fighting among ourselves for scraps. We are lied to continually and our ire is constantly misdirected.

Since Roman times the world has been ruled by oligarchies of one form or another. Those are the people who would never give you or I the time of day. We are nothing but cattle, locked in our homes, mass medicate and marched off to the slaughter fields.

Re: The politicization of society is damaging liberal democracy

#37

Post by JamesBarney »

0xcde4c3db wrote: post #25
tharne wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If the US had an equivalent of lib dems and/or proportional representation and/or ranked choice, would it still be so polarised I don't think this would be a panacea, but it would definitely help things quite a bit. The largest voting block in the U.S. isn't Democrats or Republicans, but voters that have chosen not to be affiliated with either party.

There are plenty of voters who are registered independent/unaffiliated, but most of them still lean strongly toward one of the major parties. The number of consistent swing/split voters is much smaller. Most analysis/commentary I've seen says that partisan differences in turnout are a much bigger factor in winning elections than appealing to the center.

> Most analysis/commentary I've seen says that partisan differences in turnout are a much bigger factor in winning elections than appealing to the center.

I've heard a lot of people say this, I've never seen any good data on this. Every analysis I've seen that compared how moderate and more extreme candidates did compared to the president consistently showed the moderates did better than the extreme. I'd be curious to see your analysis/commentary that shows the opposite.

Re: The politicization of society is damaging liberal democracy

#38

Post by TMWNN »

This first got really bad during the Trump presidency. One could be reading the least "political" article imaginable, and suddenly see something condemnatory about Trump that smugly assumes that everyone reading surely agrees. Nowhere was safe: Film reviews, book reviews, articles about cooking, travelogues, minor human-interest stories, you name it.

During the aforementioned Trump years I thought at times about creating /r/ihatetrumpbut, a subreddit for collecting articles/posts/comments in which the author felt the need to declaim "I hate Trump, but [something Trump/US government did may not necessarily be 100% fascist/evil/a bad idea]". Basically, a Lord's Prayer to preemptively avoid the devil's accusation of maybe possibly being a (shudder) Trump sympathizer in some small way. Hey, maybe I'll get more motivation to pull the trigger in November 2024!

Re: The politicization of society is damaging liberal democracy

#39

Post by rayiner »

yucky wrote: post #30
rayiner wrote: post #14

A lot of well meaning people are seriously damaging the country by injecting politics into spheres that the public broadly needs to perceive as “neutral” such as law and medicine. This is usually accompanied by efforts to reframe contentious policy debates as “non-political.” Which of course makes no sense because lots of things that aren’t political in the abstract quickly become political when it comes to people ad…

In case anybody misses your point, I'd like to add on to it by pointing to some scary changes at the American Bar Association - https://pacificlegal.org/american-bar-associations-equity-st... and American Medial Association - https://www.ama-assn.org/press-center/press-releases/ama-rel... among many others. It doesn't appear that this is a fixable problem now.

That’s a good example of how neutral institutions reframe contentious policy proposals as if they are universal values that are beyond debate.

“Equity” and “diversity” sound like something “non-political” that everyone can get onboard with. But in practice those terms are used to champion expressly race conscious hiring and promotion. That’s not only political and debatable, it’s unpopular among the very minorities on whose behalf it is invoked: https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2019/05/08/america...

Re: The politicization of society is damaging liberal democracy

#40

Post by rayiner »

1attice wrote: post #7

As a member of one of the minorities whose rights campaigns Prosser cites as ruining his footie, I'll say, apropos nothing, that it's much easier to talk about these issues with detached neutrality when you & your friends are not subject to monotonically increasing levels of stochastic domestic terrorism.

As a member of one of those minorities as well, I think that’s a lazy cop out and also in the long run bad for us.

It drove me nuts during the Trump era when non-Muslims acted like banning refugees from Muslim countries with high levels of terrorist activity was the same as discussing how to round up brown people into internment camps. You can’t piss on people’s leg and tell them it’s raining. Those were conversations that people in Muslim countries had also. Shouting down that debate won’t make the concerns go away, and will only lead to problems down the road.

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