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Our Culture of Contempt

nytimes.com

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Re: Our Culture of Contempt

#81

Post by justin66 »

logicchains wrote: post #19
aabeshou wrote: post #5

[flagged]

>The left, as I see it, gets and respects human vulnerability, and our need to depend on one another, and wants to build a just, equitable society where we can all fluorish. This is what people dislike about the modern left, when it makes the assumption that the intentions of its political opponents are bad just because they disagree on methodology. There are conservatives who genuinely want to build a just, equitabl…

>>The left, as I see it, gets and respects human vulnerability, and our need to depend on one another, and wants to build a just, equitable society where we can all fluorish.

>This is what people dislike about the modern left, when it makes the assumption that the intentions of its political opponents are bad just because they disagree on methodology.

The writing of the person you're responding to is so egregiously bad that it makes me want to kick a puppy, but your argument is really off base here. The rather Randian, post-eighties conservatism that's prominent today is antithetical to a recognition of "our need to depend on one another." As Thatcher said:

They are casting their problems at society. And, you know, there's no such thing as society. There are individual men and women and there are families. And no government can do anything except through people, and people must look after themselves first.

That's not a disagreement about methodology, that's a fundamental difference in outlook, not to mention intentions. It is not helping anything to say "hey, we all want the same thing amirite?"

Re: Our Culture of Contempt

#82

Post by wisty »

blueboo wrote: post #65
elefanten wrote: post #13

All political mud-slinging aside, all weighing and apportioning of blame withheld, the main suggestions of the article are worthwhile. 1. Don't allow yourself to slide easily or prematurely into contempt. We do it too often these days. 2. Disagree better. You can disagree, but make your case and engage in the responses. Rhetoric has a place but it's being overused.

Unfortunately that leaves one vulnerable to the arsenal of concern trolling. The problem is that these strategies only work if your conversation partner is doing the same in good faith. (This is precisely what Arthur Brooks would have us do, someone who deserves all of our contempt, ironically.) After all, it’s human nature to (often) entrench when faced with facts that challenge ones beliefs! And that dynamic is par…

IMO a lot of people mistake disagreement for "concern trolling".

"Oh my goodness, how can anyone be so stupid that they don't agree with my (somewhat statistically fringe) position, they must be a troll!"

Re: Our Culture of Contempt

#83

Post by burfog »

archgoon wrote: post #42
towaway1138 wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the uptick in politically motivated violence on the right I haven't looked closely, but it seems like the preponderance of such violence has been coming from the left these days (ignoring people with obvious mental health problems). Charlottesville is the obvious exception, but clearly overbalanced by the guy that attempted to assassinate a bunch of Congressmen at that ball game. Are there lots of examples I'm miss…

Pittsburgh massacre. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/27/us/active-shooter-pittsbu... Also, the bombs sent to a number of democrats, funders of democrats, and Trump critics: https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2018/10/25/bomb-timeli... That said, individual events aren't particularly helpful, the media might be omitting major events (or more likely, a lot of smaller ones). So you can refer to this study by the Cato…

Neither the Pittsburgh massacre nor the bombs have been proven to be from the right.

For the massacre, the killer actually hated Trump.

For the bombing, consider this: people who want to actually hurt their targets, rather than running a false-flag operation, tend to succeed.

Re: Our Culture of Contempt

#84

Post by logicchains »

justin66 wrote: post #81
logicchains wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>The left, as I see it, gets and respects human vulnerability, and our need to depend on one another, and wants to build a just, equitable society where we can all fluorish. This is what people dislike about the modern left, when it makes the assumption that the intentions of its political opponents are bad just because they disagree on methodology. There are conservatives who genuinely want to build a just, equitabl…

>>The left, as I see it, gets and respects human vulnerability, and our need to depend on one another, and wants to build a just, equitable society where we can all fluorish. >This is what people dislike about the modern left, when it makes the assumption that the intentions of its political opponents are bad just because they disagree on methodology. The writing of the person you're responding to is so egregiously b…

Recognition of "our need to depend on one another." is not the end goal of the average left-leaning person (or at least those I know), the end goal is for nobody to suffer through poverty/neglect. The average right-leaning person would also like nobody to suffer through poverty/neglect. The right just believes that government intervention won't help poverty, and that it destroys family and community bonds via the government stepping in to fulfil the roles previously played by family and community. The left believes government intervention is needed to fight poverty, and to fix the failures in family and government. I'm sure if you offered the average leftist the chance to live in a world where nobody lived in poverty, albeit one without "a recognition of our need to depend on one another" (whatever that means), they'd happily accept.

Re: Our Culture of Contempt

#85

Post by vidar »

tenaciousDaniel wrote: post #20
towaway1138 wrote: post #3

As a lifelong liberal, I've sunk into despair at the firehose of hatred coming from the left these days. And I talk to far fewer of my old lefty friends anymore--if they've made themselves awful, I just don't want to know. I'd prefer to remember them as they were. Maybe this is just a phase, but it feels like we're going to a place from which we won't return.

I graduated with a degree in art, which means all my old college friends are more left-leaning than is usual. I still keep in touch with many of them on Facebook, and the amount of absolute insanity coming from them is staggering and depressing.

Can you give some specific examples? (Live in Europe, curious to hear)

Re: Our Culture of Contempt

#86

Post by throw2016 »

This is rich coming from the head of AEI, an organization which is part of a network of think tanks funded by the likes of Koch that have been bootstrapped to promote corporate interests and a worldview where there is no society only 'wealth creators' and workers. [1]

Wendy Brown, Philip Mirowski and Nancy Maclean [2][3][4] have gone into immense detail on how these organizations are created and operated behind the scenes to fund and spread self serving ideology and propaganda.

They have huge problem with collectives of workers but see no problems with organizing themselves into 'groups' to not only lobby Congress, but sponsor university economics departments and hire thousands of people to push these self serving views in the press for decades on end. This itself compromises this project for untenable self serving hypocrisy. Its for individuals who buy into these narratives to question if organizing to promote and further their interests for decades is good for the wealthiest why is is not good for workers?

There are thousands of people whose job it is to come up with decontextualized words like 'wealth creators', 'job creators' to create a halo narratives for corporate interests and undermine society, citizenship, the social good, the environment that make 'wealth creation' even possible. So all those take a backseat to 'wealth creator' interests. Since you can't create wealth without society these two cannot be separated but since there are no civil, citizen or worker groups and structures to counter these anti-social narratives you don't get balance but a one sided self interested perspective.

In the AEI world the only thing that matters is people like Kochs business and personal interests and making sure government is not 'impinging on their freedom'. And to achieve this they propagate a fundamental anti-human narrative and create an environment where ordinary people and workers are held in contempt for even expecting living wages and conditions and their access to basic achievements of western democracy like education, health care and living conditions is consistently hollowed out to promote privatization and become 'entitlements'. And we are left with a decontextualized unstable individualized view of the world that exists in a collective but is forcefully detached into a context less existence.

[1] https://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/American_Enterprise_In...

[2] https://www.ineteconomics.org/uploads/papers/WP23-Mirowski.p...

[3] https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/undoing-demos

[4] https://www.theoryculturesociety.org/review-wendy-browns-und...

[5] https://history.duke.edu/book/democracy-chains

[6] Wendy Brown - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eowEmcS75JM

[7] Nancy Maclean - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tqQ_dIjr3uU

Re: Our Culture of Contempt

#87

Post by FakeComments »

_bxg1 wrote: post #30
towaway1138 wrote: post #3

As a lifelong liberal, I've sunk into despair at the firehose of hatred coming from the left these days. And I talk to far fewer of my old lefty friends anymore--if they've made themselves awful, I just don't want to know. I'd prefer to remember them as they were. Maybe this is just a phase, but it feels like we're going to a place from which we won't return.

I support most of the liberal platform, but in recent years a large portion of the party's base has turned into a cesspool of hatred, cynicism, and thoughtless reactionism. We used to be the party of idealism and belief in people's basic goodness. What the hell happened?

It became more important to hate white people and what they stood for than participate in Enlightenment culture, so they happily regressed to the cultural norms of, say, the Middle East or South America.

Multiculturalism and post-truth thinking was always insane nonsense, and the leftists have been drinking that koolaid for two decades, at least.

To hold up cultures that cut off clitorises in the bush and burn witches, or cultures which stone people and attack women with acid, or cultures which participate in unusual amounts of violence as co-equal to the culture which put us on the moon has consequences — but is a core part of a deeply racist leftist platform, that identifies racial groups with an essentialist culture, eg “black culture”, and views the co-existence of those “racially essential cultures” as the only means of racial co-existence.

As part of that, they formed alliances with questionable groups, such as the “black caucus”, which has long had links to black supremicists and have advocated for racist policies, and similarly sexist feminist groups, eg ones which advocate for female privilege in education even though men have trailed in college degrees since the 1980s.

So, basically, in the 1980s Democrats decided to build a party of racism and sexism to capitalize on social change, and we’re seeing the consequences a generation later.

People warned that this would be the outcome, but people were “right” and knew better.

Re: Our Culture of Contempt

#88

Post by s_m_t »

wisty wrote: post #82
blueboo wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfortunately that leaves one vulnerable to the arsenal of concern trolling. The problem is that these strategies only work if your conversation partner is doing the same in good faith. (This is precisely what Arthur Brooks would have us do, someone who deserves all of our contempt, ironically.) After all, it’s human nature to (often) entrench when faced with facts that challenge ones beliefs! And that dynamic is par…

IMO a lot of people mistake disagreement for "concern trolling". "Oh my goodness, how can anyone be so stupid that they don't agree with my (somewhat statistically fringe) position, they must be a troll!"

Supposed concern trolling first of all isn't even relevant here. A concern troll acts as if they fundamentally agree with you. So someone on the other side of the aisle can't really be said to be concern trolling because they would have substantive disagreements.

Re: Our Culture of Contempt

#89

Post by int_19h »

roenxi wrote: post #47
discard0000 wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Created a throwaway account for this. As a foreigner who has spent significant time living the US, indeed this seems like the kind of mealy-mouthed, somewhat vapid meta-commentary about "unity" that offers nothing more than some soundbyte call for some abstract value (in this case "better disagreement"). It doesn't address, for example, the fact that the two political factions in America now accept different versions…

> It doesn't address, for example, the fact that the two political factions in America now accept different versions of reality. This isn't an unusual state of affairs. Historically, western civilization has faced similar problems with, eg, Catholics vs Protestants (which was substantially worse than anything we have now). The US specifically isn't yet even as bad as it was in the Civil War. The C v. P issue deserves…

The problem is, as soon as one side starts doing that, the other side will try to outdo them next time they have a chance.

We're already seeing the collapse of many customary norms in Congress, for example.

Re: Our Culture of Contempt

#90

Post by consz »

burfog wrote: post #83
archgoon wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pittsburgh massacre. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/27/us/active-shooter-pittsbu... Also, the bombs sent to a number of democrats, funders of democrats, and Trump critics: https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2018/10/25/bomb-timeli... That said, individual events aren't particularly helpful, the media might be omitting major events (or more likely, a lot of smaller ones). So you can refer to this study by the Cato…

Neither the Pittsburgh massacre nor the bombs have been proven to be from the right. For the massacre, the killer actually hated Trump. For the bombing, consider this: people who want to actually hurt their targets, rather than running a false-flag operation, tend to succeed.

>For the massacre, the killer actually hated Trump.

That doesn't disprove that he was right wing.

>For the bombing, consider this: people who want to actually hurt their targets, rather than running a false-flag operation, tend to succeed.

Proof?

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