Why I don't discuss politics with friends
shwin.co452 points by shw1n a day ago
452 points by shw1n a day ago
For all of the author's bloviating and self-congratulating navel gazing, the article manages to largely overlook values, the only mention of them being to dismissively reduce them to irrational tribalism.
In truth, values and ethics are fundamental to effectively discussing politics. After all, all political decisions are ultimately about how we want to shape the world that we as humans live in. There can be no agreement about economic policy without a shared understanding of the ultimate goal of an economy. No agreement about foreign relations without a shared understanding of the role of nations as representatives for groups of humans, and how we believe one group of humans should interact with another group of humans through the lens of nations.
For the last 20 years at least, the leadership of the two main political parties in the US have largely invested in messaging around the values that they represent. The policies are different too, but over time we've gone from a world where there were at least some cases where the two parties had different policies for how to reach the same goals, and into a world where the parties policies are aiming to realize fundamentally different visions of the world, based on fundamentally different values.
In this world, asking "who did you vote for" isn't a matter of tribalism, but it is a (good) proxy for asking someone "what are your values". If you discover that someone has completely different values from you, then discussing policy isn't going to be useful anyway, because there's no way you'll agree on a single policy when you have different fundamental values.
> the parties policies are aiming to realize fundamentally different visions of the world, based on fundamentally different values
This is an incorrect and cynical statement. I understand why you feel this way (for one thing, it's the exact type of language coming out of many of each party's idealists) but it's simply false.
One party supports gun rights while the other supports gun control. Those aren't values. Democrats want to pursue safety from guns. Republicans want to pursue safety from tyranny. Both sides care about personal safety.
Abortion rights is about personal liberty. Gun rights are also about personal liberty. Both sides care about personal liberty.
The competing talking points aren't always conveniently about the same issue though. For Democrats their border policies are about compassion and human rights. For Republicans their border policies are about domestic prosperity.
Do Republicans care about human rights? Yes. Do Democrats care about domestic prosperity? Yes. To pretend otherwise is to willfully push apart the tribes in your own mind, and to trivialize the perspective of the opposition.
The real problem is the one you are contributing to: the unwillingness to empathize. Empathy is the only way to come to a compromise. With a little empathy you might even find that you have to compromise less because you might actually convince someone of your argument, for once.
Abortion rights is about religion-as clear a difference in values as one can have.
Imho opinion, what you are describing are republicans of the past. As parent says, there used to be shared values. Two of the shared valued were peaceful transition of power and respect for the rule of law / division of power between executive, legislative and judiciary.
Imho the values of MAGA republicans are clearly distinct from GWB republicans (even if it may be precisely the same voters). Specifically the two values described above are no longer shared values.
I believe there are more, but for the two values above we have irrevocable proof.
This was true a decade ago. It is no longer true.
The modern Trump controlled Republican party is not a party that cares about personal liberties. It is a fascist, authoritarian project that is toying with straight up Nazism. They are explicitly pulling from the Nazi playbook in their language and strategy of attack on the rule of law. Someone who supports that party is supporting a completely different set of values from someone who opposes it.
That said, that party is also backed by a powerful and effective propaganda machine that has successfully pulled the wool over many people's eyes such that they don't fully realize what it is they are supporting.
The left has called every Republican presidential candidate a Nazi/fascist/authoritarian since Ronald Reagan.
I think you'll find there are just as many people who are going feel exactly the same way regarding the Liberal / Democrat politicians and voters.
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This was true a decade ago. It is no longer true. The modern [Democrat party] is not a party that cares about personal liberties. It is a fascist, authoritarian project that is toying with straight up [Communism]. They are explicitly pulling from the [Marxist, Communist] playbook in their language and strategy of attack on the [rule of law, democracy, freedom]. Someone who supports that party is supporting a completely different set of values from someone who opposes it.
That said, that party is also backed by a powerful and effective propaganda machine that has successfully pulled the wool over many people's eyes such that they don't fully realize what it is they are supporting.
----
I can't say I would disagree with the rewritten version either. In fact it would be hard to argue its not true, considering Democrat politicians have stated as much explicitly.
I consider this type of thinking to be a form of tribalism because you're essentially saying there are two tribes. Each tribe has specific values.
A person's values are not a dichotomy (i.e. republican or democrat). You simply cannot put people into two buckets that define their overarching moral compass.
A person can be transphobic but support abortion so they have always voted Democrat...or hate everything about Republican values except they got burned by Obamacare so they vote Republican. There is virtually an infinite level of nuance that can be a deciding factor in why someone votes for someone.
> person can be transphobic but support abortion so they have always voted Democrat
The term you're looking for is political coherence, i.e. the degree to which you can predict a person's views based on knowing their view on one issue. Political elites tend to be highly coherent. If you know a Congressperson's views on guns, you probably know them on abortion and corporate taxes.
In the real world, however, votes tend not to be politically coherent. Instead, what we see in a hyperpartisan polity, is that a diverse set of views collapses after an issue achieves partisan identity status. Talking about a thing through a partisan lens is what causes the partisan collapse. Hence the effects of mass and then social media on the quality of our discussions.
(And I agree with OP that the author's "I'm above politics" stance is naively immature.)
> Political elites tend to be highly coherent
Coherence might not the word you're looking for. The policies of political parties and groups are born out of historical circumstances and the diverse coalitions they represent. Political elites are "coherent" in the sense that you can expect them to consistently follow the party line, and thus infer all of their views just by knowing one of their views.
The party line, i.e. platform of the Democratic and Republican parties, or any other large political party in the world, is, by itself, nothing coherent though. Many of their policies and claims do not make any more sense besides each other than they would make against each other. Realignments on issues are pretty common across the world. What is left-wing in one part of the world at one point of time might be rightist across space and time.
This is a difference in the subject of coherence.
Logical coherence refers to the variation and predictive power of the reasoning.
Coherence can also be used to describe the variability and predictability of positions or states themselves.
If you measure the characteristics of some photons in a coherent laser, you know what the other photons are doing. They are predictable using a model.
Logic is a poor predictive model for politics. Tribe identification is a strong predictive model for politics
> transphobic but support abortion so they have always voted Democrat
This is the NYT if you want a high-profile example of this existing in the real world.
I worked with a guy who was a goldmine of odd but sincerely held political opinions that subverted the usual narratives. He was (I guess still is) gay but believed that trans people shouldn't serve in the military because he saw that they didn't get the treatment they needed. He wanted everyone to have guns as a protection against crooked cops-- he was from a small town. He was against single-payer healthcare because he thought the government would use it as a political weapon. He was was in theory anti-union because he thought union benefits should just be turned into labor protections for everyone instead of just being for union jobs and supported them only as a stopgap. He was pro-solar/wind and had an electric car not for any environmental reason but because he didn't want to be reliant on the greedy power company.
To me that just sounds like someone who arrives at his political views by thinking rather than blindly adopting whatever his peers believe. It's only odd because it's (sadly) rare these days.
i mean, his views don't sound too odd. he sounds like a communist who's got a dim view of reform or socialism as a means to communism.
> In this world, asking "who did you vote for" isn't a matter of tribalism, but it is a (good) proxy for asking someone "what are your values".
I strongly disagree. In this duopoly of a political system, most people on both sides are just picking the lesser of two evils. Meanwhile, we are creating an alarmingly decisive political society by choosing not to associate with those who vote differently than us. Perhaps most importantly, we lose the opportunity to actually shift the political positions of others (and ourselves) by not engaging in healthy and non-judgmental political discussions with our friends and neighbors, ultimately increasing polarization even further.
Not everyone is voting based on their values—some are simply voting their wallets or the special interests they align with. Someone who is pro-choice, pro-LGBT, and pro-immigration may very well vote Republican because they work in the US Automotive industry, and so do their friends and families and people who they care most about. It doesn’t necessarily mean their core values are different than yours, but instead maybe simply just their priorities.
> pro-choice, pro-LGBT, and pro-immigration may very well vote Republican because they work in the US Automotive industry, and so do their friends and families and people who they care most about.
What you care most about is a statement of values.
That's why I love claiming to be a third-party voter so much. It breaks their brains and their response informs whether or not they are worthy of my respect.
I would say that the partial counterpoint to that is, for most people their values are also largely tribe based, in that their values are not purely fixed, but rather tend to adapt to loosely track the tribal consensus. Very few are the ones willing to stick to their convictions under pressure.
There are clearly some (many?) shared average axiomatic values that seem to be common between very different cultures/religions (although individuals vary much more significantly), but it's much easier to obsess on the places we differ.
Where I strongly disagree is the idea that groups with different fundamental values can't necessarily find common policy ground. A good example is Basic Income, where you can find agreement between groups on opposite sides that both embrace the idea, but for very different value-driven reasons. In many cases, you can also agree to disagree, and just keep your collective hands out of it (eg. separation of religion and state).
I think the assumption that political parties represent two completely distinct sets of values is overly simplistic. In reality, there's a significant amount of overlap between them—what often differs is the style of messaging and the framing of ideas.
Personally, I find it hard to fully identify with either the left or the right. I share beliefs and values from both sides, depending on the issue. This makes it difficult to adopt a clear-cut political label, and I think that's true for many people.
Politics today often feels more like a battle of narratives than a clash of core principles / values.
p.s. my perspective is non-US one.
> For the last 20 years at least, the leadership of the two main political parties in the US have largely invested in messaging around the values that they represent.
The largest two U.S. parties have been heavily minmaxing the propaganda they release to divide districts on the most effective issues they can convert into election wins. Their values are "get elected to office" but the propaganda can't be so straightforward because there aren't a lot of voters who are easily converted by that directness.
Voters have values; political parties and candidates have propaganda. Game theoretically the winning move is to compete on comparative advantage of an issue within a voting district; because (for example) Democratic voters are split on the death penalty it's a very useless propaganda point for the party as a whole [0]; sticking to one side or the other would lose more elections than it would win. Note that this is very different from ranking the importance of values and focusing on the most impactful to real people; the (implicit) hope is that by focusing on effective propaganda issues then some values may be preserved through the election process. In practice politicians also horse-trade for future party political capital in preference to espoused values.
One fundamental problem is that without a parliamentary style of government where coalitions are required to form a functioning legislature the usefulness of values in elections is greatly diminished. If I may say, the Republican party has done the best at shedding the illusion and explicitly transferring power to the party itself to enforce the values held by one man, which is the ultimate game-theoretically strong position for a political party. Disconnecting the ultimate value-judged outcomes of elections from the political machinations that win them has been incredibly damaging to democracy.
[0] https://www.salon.com/2024/08/31/the-end-of-the-abolition-er...
I reject this idea, someone voting for the "least worst candidate" does not wholly endorse everything they stand for
As someone said in this thread, in the US two-party system, coalitions are formed before the vote vs after in other countries
The whole purpose of this piece is to precisely encourage pointed discussion about values directly and skip the proxying
"someone voting for the "least worst candidate" does not wholly endorse everything they stand for"
yes but somebody voting for the "most worst candidate" is not somebody who's values should be trusted
and if someone opposite the aisle from you believes the same thing about you, there's zero chance to flip them
with direct discussion about values, it's possible
basically all comes down to "are you open to the chance you're wrong"
you could view that chance as low as 0.001%, but it shouldn't be 0
People frequently have a gap between their values and their politics, and talking about both can reveal the cognitive dissonance.
If they engage with politics as tribalism, and you talk to them about a policy their tribe implemented that conflicts with their values, this is useful.
The very idea of “least worst” is very subjective. In their eyes, if they disagree with you, it is who’s values should not be trusted.
> I reject this idea, someone voting for the "least worst candidate" does not wholly endorse everything they stand for
The thing about values is that they don't just capture the notion of what we thing is right or wrong, but also which things we value over other things. In an extreme case, two people can agree on 10 out of 10 different ideals or ethical stances and still have different values and support different parties because of how they rank those things.
In that case who you think is the "least worst" is also a reflection of values, as is declaring both sides to be the same, or opting out altogether. They all represent both what things you value and how much you value them.
> In that case who you think is the "least worst" is also a reflection of values
perceived values -- if someone has the same values and rankings as you, but was exposed to different information, then with this logic you'll never be able to find out or flip them
as I said to the other commenter, basically all comes down to "are you open to the chance you're wrong"
you could view that chance as low as 0.001%, but it shouldn't be 0
> leadership of the two main political parties in the US have largely invested in messaging around the values that they represent
I'd say they invest in messaging around the values they want voters to believe they represent.
i.e., marketing and ensuing reality diverge regularly with politicians, regardless of affiliation.
> "who did you vote for" isn't a matter of tribalism, but it is a (good) proxy for asking someone "what are your values"
You should test this hypothesis by talking to someone for 10 minutes, then guessing who they voted for.
My hypothesis is you wouldn't do better than 50/50.
The hypothesis is that knowing a person's voting activity helps one to predict that individual's values. I don't think the parent is claiming that the values that might be revealed by a 10 minute conversation are a predictor for voting activity. I think there's a distinction, since people can - and, in my perspective, often do - misrepresent or misidentify their true values in their conversations with strangers. I am assuming that people act on their true values, not necessarily those that they advertise, when they fill out ballots.
"If p then q" does not imply "If q then p."
Besides, there's a ton of easy ways to beat 50/50 odds without explicitly asking who they voted for. You can ask whether they graduated from college, and that will get you to something like 55/45 or 60/40. If they're white and they did not graduate from college, or if they're not white and they did graduate from college, your odds of guessing right are something like 2:1.
Studies have also found (somewhat weak) correlations between some of the Big Five personality traits and political identification: people who score highly on conscientiousness are more likely to be right-leaning, while people who score highly on openness to experience are more likely to be left-leaning.
> "If p then q" does not imply "If q then p."
My original comment is challenging whether "p then q" is valid in the first place by asking if the inverse would be true as a thought experiment. (Neither is true IMO)
Just because someone has certain values doesn't mean they vote a certain way.
Just because they vote a certain way doesn't mean they have certain values.
"p" (who you voted for) and "q" (your values) are largely independent for a large percentage of voters.
The is a really good, IMO, Saturday Night Live skit about this where the contestants try to guess Republican or not of various people. Some of the bits do a great job of pointing out how some of the values people claim to believe in are only applied selectivity when it benefits their side.
I was talking to a very drunk Republican girl the other day. We were having a small argument about why we would send medical support to Africa for AIDS. Her argument was something about fixing America first (I was also drunk).
I asked if she regretted her vote for Trump after several people she knew lost their government contracting jobs, and she said "No, fuck that guy, I didn't vote for him."
> The policies are different too, but over time we've gone from a world where there were at least some cases where the two parties had different policies for how to reach the same goals, and into a world where the parties policies are aiming to realize fundamentally different visions of the world, based on fundamentally different values.
What difference do the parties have? They are both the 'corporate party' maximizing shareholder profit at all costs including killing brown people overseas or murdering Americans at home if they cant pay for healthcare.
> In truth, values and ethics are fundamental to effectively discussing politics.
People generally haven't formed strong opinions on most issues, and defer to party or a leader they like for the remaining. They'll still happily argue about it for the post part, unfortunately.
You can see this effect after some elections where people "fall in line" with their party's new presidential candidate on some issue.
> People generally haven't formed strong opinions on most issues, and defer to party or a leader they like for the remaining.
I call this "politics as religion".
Remember you cannot reason someone out of a position they never reasoned themselves into. Route around the damage and make them irrelevant.
> to realize fundamentally different visions of the world, based on fundamentally different values
I think your use of the word "world" is telling.
Trump, the Republicans, and the global right are focused on their citizens.
The Democrats and the global left are more focused on the world and their role in it.
It's no longer just two approaches on how we can have the strongest economy. Each party has a weighting for how much to consider every issue across the world.
For example, there are people who would be happy with less growth, lower income, but more action on climate change.
The two sides dont actually have different values, they have small wedge issues that unscrupulous individuals/groups over-exaggerate for their own gain. Im center left but still see myself in Trump supporters, were basically the same people who basically want to live our lives
This makes 0 sense. Democrat and Republican "values", to the extent they are even real, no way represent the full spectrum of values one can have.
Further, the Democratic party has a 27% approval rating and the Republican party had like 47% and I bet its falling. So even within your narrow framework this is a bad proxy because both are clearly unpopular.
Even the language that the different parties use is targeted at certain sets of values; Arnold Kling wrote this short book on the subject ("The Three Languages of Politics"): https://cdn.cato.org/libertarianismdotorg/books/ThreeLanguag...
"The Righteous Mind" by Jonathan Haidt is another, more nuanced (and complicated), but extremely interesting take on the subject of how values drive political affiliation.
Framing has always been used in political debate just to target certain values; what may have changed (or not) is as a deliberate tactic to keep people divided: folks who do not speak the same language cannot communicate.
On a lot of issues, I think 80% of folks are in 80% of agreement, but the partisans (whether politicians or activists) are framing the issue to prevent that consensus, because the partisans want something in the 20% that 80% of folks don't agree with.
Kling and Haidt would agree with your respective paragraphs, though they do add a lot of color, and their books are worth reading.
> For the last 20 years at least, the leadership of the two main political parties in the US have largely invested in messaging around the values that they represent.
Except that the "values" each promotes are often inconsistent with other "values" they promote, sometimes to the point of absurd irrationality, e.g. marijuana vs tobacco or alcohol.
And other "values" are completely independent, but correlate so highly that "tribalism" is a much better explainer, e.g. abortion and guns.
> and into a world where the parties policies are aiming to realize fundamentally different visions of the world, based on fundamentally different values.
That's not new.
On a very high level, the two major parties do want everyone to be healthy, wealthy and wise -- the issue is that they disagree on what those words mean, and what should be sacrificed (and by whom) to achieve it, which means the two major parties have always had very different visions of the future.
> If you discover that someone has completely different values from you, then discussing policy isn't going to be useful anyway, because there's no way you'll agree on a single policy when you have different fundamental values.
And that right there is a call to tribalism: Don't bother with Those People, They Have Different Values, They Aren't Like Us.
> Don't bother with Those People, They Have Different Values, They Aren't Like Us
I didn't say that you shouldn't bother with people. I said that discussing _policy_ is not useful if you don't agree on _values_. It's the wrong level of abstraction. To put it in a plain analogy: discussing the best route to get to your destination isn't useful if you don't agree on where you are going.
If you want to engage with someone with different values, then the values are where you need to start. If you want to engage with someone on the best way to get somewhere, you need to start by making sure you both agree on where you want to go.
> In this world, asking "who did you vote for" isn't a matter of tribalism, but it is a (good) proxy for asking someone "what are your values".
Only if you ascertain the (inverse of the) mapping of values -> vote correctly, and it's definitively not what the parties or the tribes themselves profess.
For myself [0], I sympathize with many of the issues Trump ran on while finding most of the Democratic platform cloying and hollow. But I value effective policy, being accountable to intellectual criticism, and a generally open society far far more. (And at this point in my life, a healthy dose of straight up actual conservatism, too!)
[0] and while it might seem needlessly inflammatory to include this here, I think it's unavoidable that people are going to be trying to read partisan implications from abstract comments regardless.
> it is a (good) proxy for asking someone "what are your values". If you discover that someone has completely different values from you
No, it’s a prejudice. People have a very short analysis and are generally not ready for their beliefs to be discussed.
Most people believe the definition of left is “good” and right is “bad”. Like, they literally believe this is how people identify their side. “Oh yes you’re rightwing, that’s because you don’t mind being selfish, self-serving, evil even. That’s your conception of the world.”
Not at all. I’m social, therefore I am right-wing. I care about women’s rights, therefore I am right-wing. I want poor people to get help, therefore I am right-wing. The left wing has a pro-immigration “at all cost” policy and it means women are raped. It’s systematic and part of what authors aren’t jailed for. The left has a pro-poor policy and therefore poverty develops while leftwing electoralites have unsanctioned lavish parties with the commons’ money (lavish parties ala Weinstein for which metoo stories surface a dozen years later).
Leftists can’t fathom that I have literally the same pro-women anti-poverty values as they have. If anything, leftists judge (and pre-emptively sanction!) people on prejudice.
I'm not a leftist. Your leader and his allies are a danger to democracy. I don't get this from the Democratic Party, or ANTIFA, or Bernie Sanders. I get it from paying attention to what Trump and his administration have been doing.
Values are largely posturing. Push comes to shove most people don't really care about what they say they care about. Tribal heuristics of trust are way more important.
The crucial question is what is "politics"? Are personalities politics? No. Are parties? No. Are inflammatory issues about race, sex or gender or political correctness or immigration? No!
Here is politics:
Are common American citizens able to afford and obtain reasonable health care?
Are common Americans paid a living wage? Can one person earn enough to have a family?
Do our children have a reasonable opportunity to grow, have a productive life and have a family if they want one?
Is the financial situation getting better for Americans or is the difference between earnings and expenditures growing larger. (Hint do we use code words like 'inflation' instead of calling it like it is).
A functioning democracy requires that the common people are enable to formulate and enact laws that they believe are in their best interests. Do the majority of the laws enacted in all the states meet this requirement?
A functioning democracy requires that the common people are able to use the law and courts to right wrongs. Are the common people able to use/afford access to the courts when wrongs are committed.
Do the common news media act as a forum for the common concerns and issues of the People. (Here's looking at you NYT).
Cuo Bono? If the laws passed are not in the interests of the People, and the courts are not accessible by People, who benefits? If the news media are not a forum for the interests of the People, whose interests do they represent. (Here's looking at you Jeff Bezos).
If advertising funds our primary sources of news, whose interests are represented.
Those are simply things you should discuss with your friends. They are questions not answers. This is not rocket science.
These are real problems. But they are also loaded questions, if someone asked me these at a party I would view them as looking for confirmation, and not seeking truth. There's nothing wrong with that, but the author's goal is curiosity and truth seeking, and I'm skeptical that most of these questions align with that goal.
The ironic thing to me is that the author essentially makes this the main point right from the get go:
> The insidious nature of this question comes from the false representation as earnest, intellectual discourse. Many who ask it may truly believe they’re engaging earnestly, but their responses quickly reveal an angle more akin to religious police.
As you point out, nearly all of talkingtab's questions are loaded. At the very least, talkingtab essentially says outright what they expect the "correct" answer to be, e.g I'm baffled why talkingtab seems to think "inflation" is a "code word". I speak English, and inflation is "telling it like it is" based on the simple definition of the word.
As another example, for this question:
> Are common Americans paid a living wage? Can one person earn enough to have a family?
What happens if a response is "No, I don't believe that cashiers at McDonald's deserve to be paid a 'living wage', because I don't believe that job is intended to support a family on its own"? To emphasize, I'm not saying what the "right" answer is, but I do believe reasonable people can disagree over what constitutes a living wage and which jobs deserve to be paid it.
If anything, talkingtab's post just highlights to me the author's specific point about political "tribes" vs political views, and if anything has convinced me more that the author's view is spot on here.
> the author essentially makes this the main point right from the get go
Then find better friends. The author is essentially complaining about the quality of his friends.
My read is that talkingtab’s agenda here is to focus the conversation on what politics is. Rather than being this thing you discuss with people (or not) it’s about injustice against the majority. So why does that get brought up? Because with the OP it’s easy to end up concluding that politics to the average person is something you choose to idly or deliberately or max-brainpower chatter with other people about. Then it can be easily thought that it’s just about differing policy positions. But talkingtab is saying that it’s more confrontational than that.
So why are the questions “loaded”? Because as you can see with your own eyes, they have their own political agenda. Part of politics is defining what the the agenda should be—and what should be considered political.
As you can imagine, people who think they are arguing or fighting on behalf of people making a living wage etc. want to put that message out there. They are not discussing abstract concepts or competing in some open-mindedness competition or some rationality contest. It matters to them.
> If anything, talkingtab's post just highlights to me the author's specific point about political "tribes" vs political views, and if anything has convinced me more that the author's view is spot on here.
You are even more convinced. Yet there is nothing here that suggests that talkingtab is tribal in the sense of what the OP is talking about. None. Is this received opinion or opinion born from studying like a monk for 10 years? You don’t know.
You also say that talkingtab is presenting what the “correct” answer is. Yes, according to them. Again, is it really tribalism? Or is it conviction as well as the polemic tone of the whole comment? And having conviction doesn’t mean that you cannot conceive of people having other opinions, or being intellectually unable to present counter-arguments to their own position. Again, no proof of tribalism is presented.
And this focus on tribalism presupposes that the end goal is to find your tone. Alternatively you can look at their arguments. Maybe they want to change the flaws they perceive in the world.
The strawmanning of arguments from both sides is so intense that most people lay in a bed composed entirely of strawman arguments. I firmly blame the media above all for this, but individuals carry a burden to for not trying to remake their bed.
It took me 15 years to to remake my bed into somewhat rational arguments, and still I find lots of hay in there. Generally both sides, or all sides really, want the same things and disagree on how to get there. And the truth is there is almost never an obvious or clear way to get there. It's fractal pros and cons all the way down.
> but individuals carry a burden to for not trying to remake their bed
In what way? I turn on Fox sometimes and it's not that it's slanted, but it's just a stream of lies and BS. I've watched a bunch of Trump's speeches and in addition to being incoherent, he says the same lies and BS all the way down. Yesterday's tariff speech was a great example.
I don't consider myself progressive (though the MAGA right would think me so), but where do I go to try and 'remake [my] bed'?
I think what's meant is that you need to be open to changing your opinion and manner of approach to things. To stay with the analogy: when you "remake" your bed and it ends up the same, chances are that you didn't try to improve on its design.
By turning on Fox sometimes (provided it's not your main source) you might already not fall into the category of people not trying to remake their bed.
Wait, we're designing bedding now? Not just remaking our beds? What a strained analogy that when you 'remake' your bed and it's the 'same' (why would it be different?) then you didn't improve the design?? Even more shocking is that you ran with this as opposed to realizing that these were warning signs that either your fundamental argument is ridiculous, or your analogy is.
Well, the first thing is to realize CNN is also just a stream of lies and BS. Every media news organization in the world has become (they always were?) pure garbage.
Listening to first-hand sources is the way, I guess, but also remembering they can be lying as well, so be vigilant.
It's true, because all the upper levels of ALL large media organizations have been infiltrated by big-moneyed conservatives.
CNN and NBC weren't always as bad as they are now, but their descent has been obvious and dramatic.
Some of them still employ democrats to some minimal extent, such as Jamelle Bouie at the NYT, but that's merely subterfuge, lest their bent be glaringly obvious.
If someone can name a large organization that is an exception to my first paragraph, I would be happy to learn of them.
> Generally both sides, or all sides really, want the same things and disagree on how to get there.
No, that is just not true. For example, do you think Putin and his supporters wanted a functioning democracy in Russia and independent Ukraine? No, they wanted someone functioning as a dictator to restore Russia's cold war territory and influence, and they wanted to undermine western democracies that stood in their way.
History does not support your claim that everyone wants the same things. Some people want power and strong man to take over the government. We see that with the Trump administration. The religious conservatives want to use that to make America a Christian nation. The billionaire libertarians want to use it to deregulate their industries and run the government like a corporation. And Trump wants to act unilaterally to bring about his vision of being seen as some great figure. They have illiberal aims.
I'm speaking about the collectives, not the individuals. There are always deranged individuals and some of them, many of them, manage to get in power. But the ideological collectives all have pretty much the same core goals. Needs met, population happy.
What's your threshold where an "individual" becomes a "collective"? Certainly billionaire libertarians, religious conservatives, Putin and his supporters and the Trump administration (along with the judges he's appointed, the people in congress and state governments who ran on his platform and the 10s of millions of Americans who voted for them) are not individuals...
They also very obviously want different things compared to others.
Shy of a few fringe groups, I am not aware of any large suffering & death collectives. Every large collective is trying to achieve a better life for it's adherents, and is always welcoming to those who want to join. Christains might see living is the light of Jesus as the ideal life, and while not for everyone, you should at least be able to understand why they feel that way (as opposed to a religion of self inflicted torture).
Remember the goal here is not to become sympathetic to Trump, or Putin, or Sanders, or Netanyahu, or Islam. The goal is to have an accurate understanding of them, so that when you form arguments against them, you are actually attacking bedrock and not just straw.
> Christains might see living is the light of Jesus as the ideal life, and while not for everyone, you should at least be able to understand why they feel that way (as opposed to a religion of self inflicted torture).
Yes, but also we've seen how they've behaved in the past when they had vast political power in Europe. And we see what the goals of the Heritage Foundation is with Project 2025. There have always been a decent number of conservative Christians who want prayer, the bible and ten commandments in school. Who don't want legal abortion or gay marriage. And the more power they have, the more they would restrict. They also tend to believe in a lot of conspiracy theories, like the Democratic Party being controlled by satanists and communists, who have also infiltrated the "Deep State".
So you can imagine how those beliefs play out with enough political power.
politics, especially international geopolitics is a zero-sum game. The game of competition for limited resources and markets. Because resources are limited, the pie is fixed, and this makes it zero sum game.
Although there is a way to frame political alliances as a win-win when two parties increase their share at a cost of some other third party losing theirs.
Because of that, the arguments will always be straw-man, because people want to win resources, not to argue in good faith.
Any political issue can be framed in terms of zero sum game, if you look at the whole picture
This is incorrect. There are few physical resources that we have reached the limit of, such that one entity’s gain is necessarily another’s loss. There are also a great many things of value that aren’t simply raw resources, for which the pie will never be fixed, because the pie is made by humans and can be made bigger or smaller.
This zero-sum narrative is only true in a world of no growth, where all resources are being fully utilized to maximum effect. That is very far from the world we live in, where there is enormous room for additional extraction, creation, and efficient utilization of resources.
the zero sum will always be true because of the fundamental law of physics: Law of preservation of energy.
Everything in the economy thats worth producing/consuming costs energy and labor. Energy and labor is not free.
You may be conflating win-win with debt-based growth, where economy can grow at the cost of running fiscal deficit and accumulating debt. Sure the economy and market can grow, but the debt will also grow and the inflation will cancel out the nominal growth
We use about 1 part in 10000 of the sun's energy deposit on earth... No, we are _really_ far away from preservation of energy being a limiting problem
yes, the only way to increase economy without stealing from someone else is technological advancement and efficiency improvements (which amounts to R&D spend = $$$$)
I guess I can interpret the strongest form of your argument to suggest that resources and markets have a specific level of economically relevant supply at any specific time, which I suppose is an empirical claim that’s true. I feel like recent days’ trade policy earthquakes might operate along a similar line of reasoning: there’s only so much, “they’ve” been getting better off, which means they’ve been “taking” from the US, so the US is taking back.
In the same sense it’s true that there are only so many bushels of seed corn left after the winter. At the moment, we can squabble over how to divide the fixed supply. I could take all the corn, eat half, keep the rest for myself to plant this season. Or, if I’ve already got enough to plant all my land, and you’ve got more land and nothing else to do, I could invest some of my leftover corn with you and we can all have double the harvest in a few months… when the supply will have dramatically expanded, assuming I don’t treat it as a zero-sum game right now. Or I could focus on “winning” right now, and we’ll both be poorer after the harvest than we would have been otherwise.
While I agree that you could frame most any political issue in zero-sum terms, I feel like the blind spot is the same: it tallies the score based on assumptions fixed in time, and it takes a pessimistic view of cooperative potential, of humans’ power to influence the constraints themselves.
the zero sum will always be true because of the fundamental law of physics: Law of preservation of energy / Law of preservation of matter.
Everything in the economy thats worth producing/consuming costs energy and labor. Energy and labor is not free.
Any free lunch one can have in the economy is only possible in nominal terms, when your economy/market grows, but your sovereign debt and fiscal deficit also grows and in real terms, after inflation there is no real growth.
if you look at the core, the bottom of the economics it is just pure physics: The flow and exchange of energy and materials, labor and capital. The fight is over a distribution of the flows between various factions
That's not how economics works. The pie is not fixed, it tends to grow over time as there's more trade between countries and their economies get bigger. The global economic pie has increased a massive amount over the past century.
the trade has increased because jobs have been offshored, corporations have been running labor cost arbitrage and making a profit from a difference in labor cost in US vs elsewhere
And as with most arbitrages, costs have lowered as a result. It means a piece of technology with thousands of individual parts can be in your hand for $200. Labor efficiency differences have resulted in an explosion of value-for-dollar for the American consumer.
They are both real problems and loaded questions. Okay. Ostensibly the point of politics is to solve problems that people have. That will lead to people putting forth what they think the problems are. We simply don’t have time to theorize every concievable potential problem and then, one by one, painstakingly (with our minds wide open like an open brain surgery) consider whether they are in fact problems that people have.
All of these pointed questions can also be disputed.
I always wondered, what those Pinkerton man thought, when they attacked union members with machine guns for their masters in the guilded age.
They thought "Well, I guess this makes me one of those people for whom "Not talking about politics with Friends" becomes a core tenent to my personal philosophy."
They thought that the union members were criminals.
Without the ability to realize that it's politics that defines what a criminal is.
The original argument put forth by capitalists was that unionized workers were effectively engaging in economic sabotage by striking and blockading factories.
That said the Pinkertons were basically mercenaries akin to organized crime, so probably viewed things in terms of might makes right.
Actually they make great conversion. Preface with, “Why is neither party talking about…” and you’ll find that most people agree.
Then lead them to the understanding that both parties are right-wing? (support the current economic system, support mass-murdering brown people overseas, support embezzling for personal gain as long as they don't get caught, etc)
> support embezzling for personal gain as long as they don't get caught
If you think this is a strictly right-wing characteristic you are hopelessly partisan.
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> fascism and fascist ideologies
This is political dog-whistling. As Orwell pointed out almost eight decades ago: "The word Fascism has now no meaning except in so far as it signifies ‘something not desirable’."[1] and is now obviously only a dog-whistle for fellow ideologues. This does not belong on HN.
[1] https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwel...
I agree the term is vague. But what then would you have us call it? The whole, constitutional crisis, outright flouting of the rule of law, suspension of due process/disappearing of political enemies in the streets type thing that is verifiably happening right now. Are you requesting that the word fascism be banned from HN? Have you seen the videos of legal college students being shoved into unmarked vans by unmarked and masked officers of the law? What do you call that? The talk of a third term?
I'd love to say, "he's just blustering", it's what my father said but he's enacted just about every thing he said. Should he begin speaking about a third term i don't think we have the luxury to ignore that anymore. To annex our nearby "allies" who've now become a united front opposing any economic relationship. What is that called? What would you have us say?
Why not give it a new name? We could do so with Marxism, Leninism, Maoism, etc. There is no reason we have to stop giving these phenomena a new name. You can always talk about the similarities, but if you mix it carelessly you'll lose the differences.
>But what then would you have us call it?
Most people say "fascist" when at most they mean "authoritarian". But maybe the latter's not scary enough for the boogeyman you want to evoke. Sometimes they say it when they should say demagoguery (which is, in my opinion, more than alarming enough of a word in ways that I can forgive people for feeling "populist" isn't). Quite often though, people merely mean "distasteful", but since tastes vary quite a bit, this might not alarm anyone at all.
>suspension of due process/disappearing of political enemies
You mean that when they send people back to their home countries because they're no longer welcome here?
>The talk of a third term?
From a man so old and in such ill health it seems quite likely he won't survive his second term? Mostly he's just trying to get a rise out of you. I don't like bullies, but when they do the "made you flinch" thing, part of me wants to smirk. Couldn't you just this once not flinch?
>To annex our nearby "allies"
He did it in the most asshole way possible, but offering them a proportionate number of votes in our Senate is hardly the insult they make it out to be. Especially when they're all dragged along by our policy already and just have no say in it whatsoever. "We want you to join the richest and most powerful nation on Earth and the benefits are truly too long to list" shouldn't send them running away screaming in terror.
>You mean that when they send people back to their home countries because they're no longer welcome here?
> I don't like bullies, but when they do the "made you flinch" thing, part of me wants to smirk.
You like bullies, actually - you just don't like thinking you like bullies.
Then why does part of me always wish you were clever enough to not flinch, just once, and show them up?
I keep waiting for it to happen. Hoping. And yet you always disappoint.
> You mean that when they send people back to their home countries because they're no longer welcome here?
Illegally, without due process. That's why a federal judge has been ruling against them on this. They also lied that everyone deported was part of a Venezuelan gang (or at least that they had proper grounds for thinking so, thus the importance of due process), and they lied that it was some kind of invasion.
>Illegally, without due process.
And what process, exactly, is due? Why is it due? My understanding of the term is that due process is mostly that because everyone gets the same... if some are getting different treatment, this raises due process concerns. If there was never any process designed, or if it has been abandoned. The bureaucracy can change the rules to some extent, they are not written in stone.
>That's why a federal judge has been ruling against them on this.
No one believes that, not even the left. They're happy that it's occurring of course, and they're clever enough to pretend that they've got real arguments... but in the back of their minds they know that the federal judge would rule against this no matter what, because the Trump administration is doing it. After all, for a full 2 months afterward they had people who were claiming the election was rigged and hoping that somehow that it would be invalidated. Their imaginations ran wild with ever-more-fanciful schemes. Now that's not happening, they've moved on and believe their in some sort of counter-coup.
>and they lied that it was some kind of invasion.
What's the definition of "invasion"? If an enemy were to invade with tanks and guns, they'd be wiped out. A clever enemy might just encourage its people to "migrate". To foment a sort of economic war. Or the word invasion can even have more metaphorical or casual usage. If someone says that mice have invaded their home do you complain that the word "invade" is wrong because the mice aren't wearing military uniforms and trying to accomplish some general's strategy?
In the academic community the term still has a useful meaning and is often used appropriately in those circles.
But you could substitute neoreactionary in GP and it would still be referring to real bloggers that are treated as if they're making legitimate and justifiable arguments.
It's a serious concern, I think it's good to criticize this tendency.
Even if you think it’s a dog whistle, Facism does mean something and it’s rather more accurate to use it now than say, 30 years ago.
No, it does not mean anything. Different people from the same side of the political spectrum define it differently, let alone different parts of the spectrum. If you don't define it before using it, it's a dog-whistle, full stop.
I've heard this dismissal a good bit often ("that's just a nothing word that means 'bad thing I don't like' ") but that's really just not true.
It has been consistently defined through the decades, especially during the 20th century. Here's one common example you can find from the 1983 American Heritage Dictionary and it sounds pretty familiar:
"A system of government that exercises a dictatorship of the extreme right, typically through the merging of state and business leadership, together with belligerent nationalism."
Dog whistle for what? Please define what it is a dog whistle for. Maybe in that context you'll find the common definition understood by people using it
One could do worse than using Eco's Ur-Fascism[1] as the starting point. The man had personal experience and he could write (oh how he could write.) However, I'd expect that some would dismiss him as an inveterate lefty (he wasn't), so we're back on square one.
[1] https://archive.org/details/umberto-eco-ur-fascism/umberto-e...
Speaking of words having meanings, what exactly do you mean by dog-whistle here? I understand dog-whistle to mean coded language for a different concept.
The word is starting to be used by the left in the same way the right uses "woke": It's become watered down and an over-used way to simply say "anything my side doesn't like".
- Climate change is real: "woke"
- Firing people in government: "fascist"
- Compassion and fairness: "woke"
- Cruelty toward political enemies: "fascist"
- Expertise-driven and reason-driven policies: "woke"
- Stacking government positions with loyal cronies: "fascist"
- Rights for women, minorities, gay people, and so on: "woke"
- Handouts to corporations: "fascist"
They've become vague words that mean the same thing: "Politics I don't like"
This reminds me of the joke about how republicans will defend criminal conspiracy by saying "Wow so it's illegal to make plans with friends now".
You do not have to look very far to find prominent voices on the right who are apologetically anti-democracy.
if what you mean by anti-democracy, is government oppression, then the left and right both use this equally.
there is only one continuum: liberty from government oppression, or lack thereof.
I hope you don't seriously consider the oligopoly of two parties and small circle of connected elites, dependent on financial backing from ultra high net worth oligarchs, corporations, special lobbying groups - a democracy. This is not democracy, it is plutocracy (the power of capital/rich)
There is bad, and there is worse, far worse.
And, it's a kleptocracy, more and more, for a very long time now.
US is not a democracy. Trump got like ~77 mln votes, which roughly compares to 23% of the population of 340 mln people. so Trump doesn't even represent the a quarter of US population.
other countries are more democratic, in a sense that winning candidate represents larger share of people living there
Eh, I really do call BS on that.
Umberto Eco's 14 tenants of fascism still stands strong and is highly visible in modern discourse.
This is the opposite of a dog whistle it's entirely explicit. There are people being thrown into vans for speech right now. There are law firms that are negotiating to lift bills of attainder for their prior political litigation. They are _literally_ throwing people in El Salvadorean prisons without due process, including people that were in this country legally.
Every rationalist movement eventually ends up at odds with rational people.
But then, whom are you dissing? Whom is GP dissing? Because it's really unclear. On the one hand, "rational people" keep their views even as they drift apart from a wider "rationalist movement". On the other hand, it's the rationalist communities - the movement - that's much more likely to actually know something "about the foundations of economics or political science". On the grasping hand, such communities can and do get stuck missing forest for the trees.
But then on the slapping hand, approximately all criticism of rationalism (particularly LessWrong-associated) I've seen on HN and elsewhere, involves either heresay and lies, or just a legion of strawmen like "zomg Roko's basilisk" or GP's own "arguments" like:
> Nobody likes a technocrat, because a technocrat would let a kid who fell down a well die there, since the cost of rescuing them could technically save the lives of 3 others someplace else
It's hard to even address something that's just plain bullshit, so in the end, I'm still leaning towards giving rationalists the benefit of doubt. Strange as some conclusions of some people may sometimes be, they at least try to argue it with reason, and not strawmen and ideological rally cries.
EDIT: and then there's:
> They often re-hash arguments which have been had and settled like 200 years ago
Well, somebody has to. It's important for the same reason reproducibility in science is important.
I'd be wary of assuming any complex argument has been "settled like 200 years ago". When people say this, they just mean "shut up and accept the uninformed, simplistic opinion". In a sense, this is even worse than blindly following religious dogma, as with organized religions, the core dogmas are actually designed by smart people to achieve some purpose (ill-minded or not); cutting people off with "settled like 200 years ago" is just telling them to accept whatever's the cheapest, worst-quality belief currently on sale on the "marketplace of ideas".
Rationalism, and the people who believe in it and promote it, has the problem that the human mind unavoidably decides to act as the arbiter of what is rational or not. This limits your vision to only that which the mind internally 'agrees with' or not, entrenching hidden biases.
Fundamentally, it's the mind only engaging with the cognitive, and ignoring the limbic. Engaging with the limbic, with the deep, primal parts of the brain, challenges cognitively-held truths and demands you to support these truths from a broader context.
This is why rationalists are more prone to engage with fascist viewpoints, they seek more power for their held beliefs and fascism offers that in spades. You're not thinking about the history of fascist movements and how horrible they all turned out. You're thinking: How can we do it better this time?
Just like in math, the rational is a subset of the real, and you need both the rational and the irrational to make reality. Focusing exclusively on rationality is intentionally blinding yourself to messy reality.
That's an interesting take, but I can't see how you can dismiss rationality/rationalism as insufficient to process reality on the basis of "ignoring the limbic", without dismissing all of science and mathematics in the process.
I do agree there's more to human experience than just the cognitive / "system 2" view, but the important aspect of our cognitive facility - aspects that put humans on top of the global food chain - is that we can model and reason about the "limbic", and even though we can merely approximate it in the cognitive space, we've also learned how to work with approximations and uncertainty.
This is to say, if reason seems to justify viewpoints generally known, viscerally and cognitively, to be abhorrent, it typically means one's reasoning about perfectly spherical cows in a vacuum instead of actual human beings, and fails to include the "deep, primal parts of the brain" in their model. That, fortunately, is a correctable mistake.
Just like in math, if you construct a seemingly solid edifice of theorems and proofs, but forget and subsequently violate a critical assumption, all kind of wild conclusions will come out the other end.
> I can't see how you can dismiss rationality/rationalism as insufficient to process reality on the basis of "ignoring the limbic", without dismissing all of science and mathematics in the process.
Only a rationalist could make such a statement. I tell you rationalism is only a part of reality, not the whole, and you take that as a dismissal of all of the rational. I have no problems with science and maths, I just don't elevate them to the level of prime importance that rationalists do. I watched the Veritasium video on Cantor and the Axiom of Choice before I saw it on HN, and I follow Dr. Angela Collier on YouTube.
I'm an intuitionist, not a rationalist. I believe in a broad and rich informational diet, and that intuitive understanding is better than reductionist, which is the only kind of understanding rationalists seem to value.
> is that we can model and reason about the "limbic",
We can, and the academic domain that produces is generally called the humanities, and the humanities seem to be almost universally dismissed, even despised, by rationalists. So color me unimpressed when rationalists do this acceptance / dismissal dance regarding them. You don't really care about the humanities, just that we can model and reason about them. You want your rational bent to encompass the irrational, when fundamentally it cannot do that. Yes we can study the humanities. Just not with science or math or any other positivistic approach that would satisfy a rationalist.
And I fundamentally disagree with the notion that it's the cognitive that allowed us to dominate. In fact it's the cooperation between the cognitive and the limbic that produces the language that allows us to communicate with each other that gave us the advantage. Without the limbic there's no reason or room to cooperate.
All your viewpoint seeks to do is reduce the real into the rational.
> Just like in math, if you construct a seemingly solid edifice of theorems and proofs, but forget and subsequently violate a critical assumption, all kind of wild conclusions will come out the other end.
Hence Elon Musk's Nazi-esque government takeover.
> Just like in math, the rational is a subset of the real
I just want to highlight this, since it's the cleanest way I've seen this expressed. This is a fantastic hackernews comment.
I too want to highlight this, since it's one of the cleanest case of blatant equivocation sneaking past people.
>> Just like in math, the rational is a subset of the real
That only works if you think Rationality ⊂ Reality the same way ℚ ⊂ ℝ — which is like saying Space-time ⊂ Archery because time flies like an arrow.
Wordplay is not an argument.
And I'd like to highlight this, since it's one of the cleanest cases of everyone in a situation knowing what's being said, and then a rationalist coming along and thinking everyone is misunderstanding it except for him.
Rationalists read poetry like "Compare thee to a summer's day? Pfft, impossible!"
Everyone likes to use fascist to smear their political opponents, yet I'm not seeing a lot of evidence that the "anti-fascists" are any different. They support mass censorship, state propaganda, political violence, forever war, discrimination, debanking, lawfare, lockdowns, and ironically even infringement of bodily autonomy through unconstitutional vaccine mandates.
I hope this "I know you are but what am I" approach to politics falls out of fashion soon. Like listening to children playing cops and robbers.
> whom are you dissing? Whom is GP dissing?
Just a nit, it's "who" in this case, not "whom," because it is a subject not an object. "Whom" is more often used as "to/with/for whom."
Thanks! English is not my first language, and I still have problem with this particular thing.
(IIRC use of "whom" was never covered in my English classes; I only learned about it from StarGate: SG-1, a show in which one of the main characters had a habit of mocking enemies by correcting their grammar.)
It always falls down because the end-goal of ones "rationalism" always has to be determined by a set of values.
If you want to form a political ideology based on rationality, your very first step will stick you right in the middle of the sticky-icky world of the humanities. 'Hello deontology, my old friend.'
Isn’t rationalism (as discussed above) more closely related to utilitarianism? Thus rationalism is more of a consequentialist framework than a deontological one?
Even definitions there are extremely hazy. "The most good for the most people".
Define "good". Happiness? Economic prosperity? Community? And over what time span?
Define "most". Percentage of people served? Number of people served?
Define "people". Are you counting citizens? Immigrants? Foreigners? Prisoners? People in the future?
You know the joke in the sciences about how everything distills down to mathematics? I would argue that we just as often distill down to philosophy. You have to reckon with a lot of questions which a stats degree can't help you much with.
To steal a quote from The Good Place, “This is why everyone hates moral philosophy professors”
Its almost like you’ve discovered content manufactured whose only purpose is propaganda
What's also remarkable is that these people often have incredible disdain for communities of experts who study these topics for their careers. The number of times that I've seen one of these blogs discuss a topic that they believe they have invented while ignoring the mountains of literature already produced on the topic is... concerning.
This is what no humanities education does to a motherfucker.
My favourite genre of this is when the crypto community rediscovers centuries of economic lessons from first-principles.
Those are good questions for sure and could lead to some interesting discussions, but (and maybe my generally left-leaning bias is showing by saying this) they're questions that are in many ways self-evident. For example, it's hard to argue that health care should only be affordable for the rich and that everyone else should just die in the streets.
There's other issues that are much less clear and, in my experience, more likely to shift from discussions and debates into strife and arguments:
- Should private citizens be allowed to own firearms? Should they be allowed to carry them on the streets?
- What do we do about meth and opiates on our streets? What do we do about the associated property and violent interpersonal crime?
- Should we start building more nuclear power plants to cut down on our greenhouse gas emissions?
And locally:
- The city is expanding to the west. What should this neighbourhood look like?
These, I believe, are squarely in the realm of "politics" and unless you're having the discussion in an ideological bubble are likely to be much hotter-button issues.
There's a lot of nuance in the healthcare access and affordability issue. In developed countries at least there's a pretty broad consensus that if someone is having a medical emergency then they should receive treatment regardless of ability to pay. But beyond that it gets sticky and there are hard choices that no one likes to discuss. Resources are finite but demand is effectively infinite, so one way or another there has to be some form of rationing. Like if a poor patient is dying of cancer and a drug could extend their life by 3 months at a cost of $100K then should society be obligated to pay? This is inherently a political question with no obvious correct answer.
"healthcare should be for everyone" is a great claim to make. but then the question is implementation. how will you get rid of the current system and replace it with a more equitable one? people are generally hesitant to make changes unless things are really bad. i like to think of this in terms of chemical bonds - people are bonded to their current systems, and wont break those bonds unless they are under enough stress that bond breakage is favorable. and once you start arguing for destruction of the current system, the morality gets fuzzy. do you support accelerationism, or a more gradual change? and then once you are in the weeds of implementing a fairer healthcare system, things are just genuinely terrible. i am very uninvolved in the healthcare system, but you need organizational structures, supply chain, etc. someone somewhere will probably try and be selfish about things which will make everything harder. structures will have to be built to deal with legal minutia. and meanwhile there are all these other preexisting systems used to the former system that struggle to make the switch instantaneously? every question is complicated and awful once you think about implementation. nothing is ever self evident. imo!
> "healthcare should be for everyone" is a great claim to make. but then the question is implementation. how will you get rid of the current system and replace it with a more equitable one?
And as importantly, what does "more equitable" or "fairer" mean? More broadly, how do people define "better"?
In the US, a major issue is that The D and The R have radically different ideas of what those words mean, even though they agree on the high level objectives like "healthcare should be for everyone".
- should private citizens be able to own their own property? Or should the government jump in an take what they think is "fair" so they can redistribute it to others?
Is this a trick question about tax or an ‘are you a communist?’ question?
Outside the extremes edge cases (billionaires), I’d be surprised if any significant portion of the population thought owning stuff a problem.
> I’d be surprised if any significant portion of the population thought owning stuff a problem.
Except for Real Estate...there's a not-insignificant group of people who thing that the idea of owning multiple homes and renting them out should not be allowed.
> The crucial question is what is "politics"? Are personalities politics? No. Are parties? No. Are inflammatory issues about race, sex or gender or political correctness or immigration? No!
I don't personally agree with how quick you are able to write those things off as not being political. Would you mind providing a bit more explanation of how you are able to arrive at such confident No's?
Perhaps you consider political to be an intrinsic quality of a thing rather than a descriptor of how a thing is used/intended? I fall into the latter camp, and thus am very open to consider almost anything and everything political. Much like art.
Literally none of this is politics, its governance. Politics is the human word for the chimplike "who gets to be the boss" games we play. No matter how well your society is running there will always be politics, put 20 people on a tropical island with no problems and 4 weeks later half of em will want to kill the other half - thats politics
> Are common American citizens able to afford and obtain reasonable health care?
"Should common American citizens" ... is a question.
This already implies a country's citizens having access to health care without financial barriers is a good idea already :)
[Note that I'm in the EU, I have access to affordable health care by default and I like it that way. But I don't think everyone in the US thinks like that. Or even understands what it means.]
Agree.
It is same thing with higher ed. Everyone should have college degree . Now even without everyone having it but just 3-4 times then before means there are tons of graduates without jobs, low paying jobs commensurate to years in education and heavy load of debt.
The question from start had to be Should everyone get a college degree?
Define all kinds of privilege/benefits as rights. And then move on to ask innocent questions as Is even asking for our rights politics?
"Should common American citizens" ... is a question
"How should..." is the really important and interesting question. Even when everybody answers yes, which most people do, to the "should" question they will often completely disagree on the "how should" question.
> The crucial question is what is "politics"? Are personalities politics? No. Are parties? No. Are inflammatory issues about race, sex or gender or political correctness or immigration? No!
What an easy answer when you not part of the disadvantaged demographic. Some problems apply almost exclusively to a single demographic. Not asking the cultural questions is like thinking that segregation was perfectly okay because everyone had access to everything you'd need. Just not in the small space.
Urban problems are not rural problems even when they look like the same problem. Why there is a food desert in Nowhere, SomeState is not going to be anything like the reason there is a good desert in Urbanville, Somestate. So while everyone definitely deserves the ability to acquire food pretending that subgroups don't exist means you can't actually solve their struggle. If you apply a blanket solution it doesn't help everyone.
It is beyond disingenuous to pretend that different kinds of people don't feel the impact of culture and regulation differently and in ways they either can't themselves or can't at all change. To take that stance, shows that one is on the default demographic that is always considered before anyone else.
> It is beyond disingenuous to pretend that different kinds of people don't feel the impact of culture and regulation differently
But that is why you shouldn't talk about it at parties, because people experience it so differently it is likely to lead to conflict and bad times.
Saying you need to talk about it since it is important is like teaching math at parties because it is important, it will just irritate people since they are there to enjoy themselves not get lectured.
Unlike your math example, if serious harm or death is at stake, I don't mind if it leads to conflict and bad times. Avoidance because "it might be a bad time", to me, feels like a lack of appreciation for what is at stake in these conversations.
The problem is the property political class, which includes both parties a-la Gore Vidal, seeks to dismiss, gaslight, and distract from these problems and instead make them pseudo-wedge issues or political footballs. One side is stuck on remaking reality as a shared, fantastical mirage, and the other complains about the delusion with stern words but agrees to it anyhow. Neither is concerned with addressing the core problem: big money buying all 3 branches of govt, and John McCain found that out the hard way that ethics don't win votes because enough Americans' manufactured consent to condone lawlessness, authoritarianism, radical deregulation, and privatization.
Either a Constitutional Convention 2.0 needs to happen to undo the damage like the repeal of the Tillman Act and the disastrous Citizens' United, or Americans needs to voluntarily do away with popularity contests by instead picking public administrators with limited power by sortition from amongst professional societies for a limited term of say 4 years once.
Great post, I agree with all your points regarding what is politics except that a functioning democracy should rely on common people, I think it should rely on the valuable people.
Common man democracy just lowers the decision making process to majority of idiots of the country that are easily manipulated. Worse yet, in its current form, it essentially causes the flip flopping mess because of the lack of long term vision and focus, something the common man doesn't want to deal with.
One man one vote in general makes no sense either. Why should a homeless or fresh immigrant's vote have the same impact as someone that has lived and paid taxes in a country for decades? How about...you get a vote weight equal to the amount of investment/taxes you have made in that country over the course of your life. Provide more for the community, have more to lose, get more say on policy.
Give incentive to the society value providers to remain and society detractors to leave.
Add to this that the current Democracy system is fundamentally flawed, most of those systems are exploitable anyway, it makes zero sense to change things up when a great leader is doing well. Having an arbitrary rule that they must step down because they can only serve for x time makes no sense. If it ain't broke don't fix it. Same goes the other way, where bad leaders can remain in power using war mechanisms.
The core problems today with society is not the left right or whatever, it's that people are lazy, selfish, manipulative, different, it's hard to find a system that works that can make everyone happy.
Are you willing to risk personal death or decrease your value for the greater good of the nation as a leader or citizen? That's the standard that all citizens and especially politicians should be held to. There are examples of this in the past, usually when a revolution happens. One might say it's happening in the US right now.
For certain one solution would be to remove people as much as possible from the equation, remove all incentive to abuse the system. The dictatorship and laws of a country should provide negative motivation for someone to cheat and should reward people providing value to society.
It's not easy, no matter how well a system is designed, people will find a way to cheat it, Bitcoin is a great example of this, not accounting for the banking industry buying the ecosystem and shitcoins diluting the entire system.
AI is not there yet, I don't think it ever could be, it's been trained on existing flawed ideas which have been further gimped in the interest of 'security'. It has no original thought, can't even draw a full glass of wine.
There are a lot of questions that are upstream of yours. Or at least, that illustrate why your questions are aggressively framed in a specific ideological directions and it's possible to frame them in the other direction.
If common American citizens can't afford health care, do other American citizens have an obligation to provide it? There is a word for a system where people are obligated to provide their labor to others. Does that word apply to a system where everyone gets free healthcare?
Do common Americans provide enough value to earn the wages they make now, especially the ones making a legislatively mandated minimum wage? How many fewer can actually earn an arbitrary increased number? Do people deserve things they didn't earn? What's the non-mystical explanation for that, if so?
Why aren't we having children? They can't have a productive life without having a life.
Is the difference between earnings and expenditures growing larger because Americans are unwilling to pay one another? If we are, why is that? (Actually I'll cheat a little on this one and provide a correct answer: the entire increased gap here is explained by housing. So the questions becomes: why aren't Americans willing to let strangers live closer to them? Might there be some risk or self-interest there? Are people obligated to act against their interests? Why, how, and by whom are they obligated?)
Which is better, democracy or a stable and prosperous society? Might they be mutually exclusive? What's holy about the popular vote, especially for morons? Even if we keep democracy, does a functional democracy require some form of IQ tests as a condition of the franchise?
Is the purpose of courts to write wrongs or interpret the law? Does separation of powers require courts to refrain from writing wrongs if the legislature has passed laws that are wrong? If not, does the lack of separation of powers place any limit at all on the courts' ability to right wrongs? How about when the courts are controlled by people whose concept of wrong is different than yours? Doesn't a functioning democracy require the concept of right and wrong to be decided by what are literally called the political branches, the legislative and executive?
Are the news media obligated to produce content in the interests of the people? Are you then obligated to produce content in the interests of the people? What's the difference between you writing in a public forum and a journalist? If there is a difference, should you therefore not enjoy freedom of the press? What if you, say, advocate for the courts to ignore separation of powers to do what is right? What if we the people decide that is not in our interests? How will you be punished for this transgression?
In actuality, I would probably give the same answers to many of these questions that you would. But the point is that there is no "just asking questions, man". Questions have premises and assumptions. If you, like me, don't like the ones in this question set, don't assume people will be comfortable if you're just askin' yours. I wouldn't be. And if people are all comfortable with you just askin' yours, ask yourself whether you have friends or conformation bias with echo chamber.
>A functioning democracy requires that the common people are able to use the law and courts to right wrongs. Are the common people able to use/afford access to the courts when wrongs are committed.
Having recently been completely railroaded and betrayed by the court system I can tell you. No. I literally had all my evidence thrown out with no explanation from the Judge other than "I don't think this is relevant" in regards to several different topics that I had made an organized report on. Meanwhile the corporate defense provided unorganized meaningless piles of documentation that would takes months to go over and it was left as "evidence" I do mean meaningless, several hundred pages were literally blank white pages submitted as evidence. I guess the crappy software they use to do discovery generated lots of white space in between snippits of info.
The court had decided before the trial that by default a person is wrong and a corporation is right.
Politics is decision making in groups.
Every group of people is a political unit and anything that affects decision making is political. Your office is a political unit, your family is a political unit, etc.
So if a racial issue is affecting the decisions we make then yes it’s political.
“What is politics” is entirely contextual.
I start talking about my wife’s work. That’s just personal family stuff, right? Not if there’s someone there who’s a hardcore women-should-stay-home sort.
Or maybe everyone is ok with women having jobs, but my wife’s work has been substantially impacted by the recent DOGE nonsense. Something as simple as “she has to go to the office on Monday” becomes political if there’s a Trump supporter present.
Let’s just talk shit about our cars. Oops, what brand of car you own is now political.
“My parents are going to come visit” sorry, turns out that the ability of foreigners to enter the country without fear of being detained for weeks for no good reason is political.
“Hello friend, thanks so much for coming over. I just wanted to start by asking you what do you think are the preconditions for having a functioning democracy”
> The crucial question is what is "politics"? … Are inflammatory issues about race, sex or gender or political correctness or immigration? No!
When people talk about privilege, this is it - being able to dictate which issues are ‘politics,’ and being able to dismiss my rights as ‘not politics.’
Do I have a right to work? To live? To own property? To marry the one I love? To have sex with the people I’m attracted to? To raise a child with my partner? To choose my own identity and to live my own life?
A white cishet man takes all those rights for granted - why shouldn’t I? Why should my struggle to obtain those same rights be dismissed as ‘inflammatory issues about sex or gender or political correctness’ and therefore ‘not politics?’
Are you married? Would you like to be? Do you ever worry about how you’ll be treated when you go to work, or make a purchase at the store? What’s it like to go grocery shopping, or car shopping, or touring places to live? What’s it like apply to and interview for jobs? Does you boss look like you? How do your parents feel about you? How do your neighbors greet you when they see you? What’s your relationship like with your landlord?
You’re really telling me that none of that is worth ‘politicking’ over?
that attitude is exactly why things are not going well right now - because we are pretending that of we look away, equality and justice will take care of itself.
Politics is simply figuring out who’s on your team. It’s why our current billionaires are so big on immigration and divisive rhetoric. Small groups have used this tactic for thousands of years to rule over larger groups.
In a good society you would know and have a favorable view of our wealthiest (kings in all but name) people. They wouldn’t be afraid and hide their wealth (Bezos, musk, etc are not the top) because there wouldn’t be an immoral wealth gap.
On top of that if you strictly want avoid political topics, be aware that there are forces who profit from making topics "political" that probably shouldn't be.
So when someone else decides which topics are politicized and you want to avoid political discussions — congrats you just let others decide about which topics you are willing to discuss.
My opinion is that most topics have a political dimension anyways, also because most topics have a economic dimension. Or phrased differently: Everything is political.
When discussing politics with friends the "how" is probably much more important than the "if". Most people do not have a vetted political opinion, they just have a strong vibe that they can't really reason about. They aligned with some sources and read/watch news they like to hear and that forms their image of the world. They never really tried to form a logically coherent worldview that is backed by facts instead of pre-filtered annecdotes that may or may not have happened in that way.
With this as the starting point a healthy political discourse isn't possible. You can't argue against someones vibes.
But that doesn't mean good/interesting political discourse isn't possible. It just means that if someone lets the politicians turn them into a vibe-based party-before-issue follower that uncritically believes most of what politicians say, they can no longer think or discuss the topics that impact them with others on a reasonable level. And this is why topics get politicized in the first way.
And no-one is immune to this, especially not you guys over there with that two-party system. But we all need to remember that towing the line of a political party means they no longer represent us, but we represent them. Mental flexibility translates to voter agency and our democracies hinge on voters being well informed and not throwing their agency away.
TL;DR: Not discussing politics and blindly towing the party line is like throwing your own agency away.
Political discussions for me are like programming. I enjoy them because I like finding bugs in people's logic like I do in programming.
I find a lot of people's political arguments wouldn't compile because of basic logic errors, and I try to point this out. But not many people are interested in this kind of analysis, they instead prefer the tribalist point-scoring like the OP mentions.
I dream of a world where political debates can be syntax-checked. I'm sure you could do it with AI today.
But in the end its all about feelings.
I can't describe how many times I will just go along with someone's passionate ranting on something I disagree with and egg them along because its makes them happy. This is tribalism. I will disagree with the group, and if you saw me you'd think I was the strongest supporter, but I actually vehemently disagree with everything.
There are very few people it's worth having a real discussion with these days.
I don't change my opinion of people for what they think, but it's very rare to find people who reciprocate this.
(Article starts off be asserting that they don't talk politics with friends then proceeds to describe how to talk politics with friends?)
Friends are people you should support and build up. You shouldn't try to make them feel bad by winning arguments with them. That said- a healthy society is only possible if individuals can exchange ideas about how to run things and then act collectively (aka "politics"). Sometimes people will have different interests and priorities, that lead to them having different ideas about stuff- most of the time this is totally fine.
This basically comes down to respect and communication skills- but for god's sake people- keep on talking about "politics"!
yep the purpose of the essay was to:
1) show the situations in which politics can't be discussed productively (dogmatic ideologies)
2) show how to avoid being dogmatic yourself
I absolutely encourage people to discuss politics productively
For me, "avoid being dogmatic yourself" is failing to bring home one very important point to avoid being dogmatic: understand that you are equally susceptible from the mistakes/misunderstandings that you blame others for.
An example in this article is the following part
> my angle ... becomes that of opposing their tribalism. Unfortunately ... most people just view me as the opposite of their own tribe
But this part totally fails self-reflection: it talks about your "conservative friends" and your "liberal friends". They are labelled "conservative" or "liberal". How does the author know that the interlocutor did not act exactly like the author: the interlocutor brought a subject, from their point of view their position on it where pretty neutral and sensible, the author reacts by playing the devil's advocate. They therefore see the author as the "conservative" or "liberal" person, and if they follow the author's strategy, they will play the devil's advocate. And then, THE AUTHOR fails to realize they don't actually care about the conclusion.
The lazy answer is: I'm smarter than them, I can tell when it's the case or not. Or: the subject I bring are not political, they are just common sense and sensible position, but they sometimes bring something I disagree with, and this is not common sense and sensible position.
In both case, it's weak and does not acknowledge the possibilities that you may have done the same mistakes as them from time to time (either classifying a "moderate" as "far" just because they were doing the devil's advocate, or presenting opinions that are not "trivially moderate" from the eyes of your interlocutor). It's a detail, but because of that, I'm not sure the author is as "non dogmatic" as they think they are: they are saying what everybody is saying. The large majority of people don't say "I'm dogmatic and my opinions are crazy" (if they believe their opinions are crazy, then it means they don't believe in their opinions and it is not really their opinions).
Absolutely. While I am a person who would avoid politics in most contexts myself, I couldn't help but feel uncomfortable with this attitude in this write up.
If you see others as being "insufficiently equipped" to handle nuance, "because it's hard" or "because they are too resistant" is a judgement I prefer not to pass on others.
> "Because if a desire to seek truth isn't there"
Who defines the truth? As much as I understand there is a need to draw a line somewhere, I also believe that everyone has a right to their truth. And that's my truth. I let everyone have their perspective and don't see a need to impose mine or look down upon them if they don't agree to mine, this included :)
People are entitled to their perspective of course, but it is a hindrance to discussion when people conflate their perspective with truth.
I think of truth like π. Some people say its 3, others 3.14, others 3.1415
There is a trade off between energy expended vs accuracy needed vs accurately communicating, but the de-referenced concept is not a matter of human perspective. Coordinating truth is why we have standards and protocols to build on.
If everyone has their own truth, then how could you know that to be the case? You'd have to appeal to something outside of "your truth" to make that judgement. Meaning, if it were even possible (or coherent) for there to be such a thing as "your truth", then you couldn't know it to be the case. It simply would be "the truth" as far as you are concerned. You can't step outside yourself. There is no "objective POV".
These sorts of claims are as incoherent as the equally intellectually jejune skeptical positions ("there is no truth" or "we cannot know the truth" or variations thereof). It's rare to see anyone outside of first year philosophy students make them.
Why can't you just say we have disagreements about what the truth is?
this is actually in the footnotes and addressed by the "thinking in bets" section
"[9] Fully understanding I can be the one in the wrong -- however, when this is the case, the person explaining is usually able to:
understand my argument convey their disagreement in good faith without circular reasoning or rhetorical tricks"
"There's a 40% chance this succeeds because of A, 25% chance of B, 10% of X, and 5% something we haven't thought of"
The footnote is basically saying "I can tell when it's the case or not", which is in fact exactly my problem. That is not the answer that I'm expecting from someone who has self-reflection.
For example: "understand my argument" is assuming that the argument is obviously correct. When someone presents to you an incorrect argument, 1) this person thinks the argument is correct (otherwise they will not present that argument), 2) you will not answer by saying "I've understood", you will argue. From their point of view, you are the one failing to understand. Now the question is: how many time this person was you? How many time you presented a bad argument and then blamed the interlocutor for "not understanding" when they don't accept a faulty argument?
Same with "circular reasoning or rhetorical trick": when I disagree, it is always very easy to convince myself that there is a problem in the interlocutor logic. Especially if I failed to understand or misunderstood the argument. I would even say that for all discussions that are not trivial, there are always elements that can be seen as circular or rhetorical trick.
I’m having a real hard time with this one lately.
The major mistake/misunderstanding I see now is thinking that a stupid, vindictive asshole who failed upwards would be a good person to run the country.
I don’t think I’m susceptible to that. I’ve never viewed anyone the way a lot of these people view Donald Trump. I can’t imagine I ever will. Is it a failure of imagination or is something really different between us?
Trump may be a bad leader but he'd still be just one type of bad leader. I'm not trying to fully relativize Trump either, they're not all equally bad.
I agree with Slavoj Zizek's take on Trump's appeal and why a lot of criticism of him seems to either have no effect or increases his fan appeal: As a general rule, people relate to others by identifying with their weaknesses, not only or not even primarily with their strengths. You aren't susceptible to his appeal because you're of a different class or background which has different sets of strengths/weaknesses which make it hard for you to relate to Trump.
The weaknesses Trump has - his stubborn ignorance, his impulsiveness, his might-makes-right mentality and disdain for rules, his vindictiveness - are deeply shared with his fans. They will forgive his sins because it is their sins too. For example when Trump is attacked for an impulsive comment, they relate to the risk that they could also be cancelled for some comment that is seen as racist or sexist or something. His policy framework is made of the kind of simple ideas you'll find in a pub, I once heard Trump described as "the average guy from Queens" and it made a lot of sense to me. "Nobody knew healthcare was so complicated", "We're going to build a wall".
I belong more to a white collar, professional class. I probably have a blindspot on the weaknesses and sins more endemic to my group, ones that I share with the figures I find appealing. If I had to guess I'd say it's something like an ideological/theoretical zeal, bureaucratic dysfunction, and an exclusionary judginess. When a politician unveils some theoretically elegant project and it largely fails and runs over budget and gets mired in bureaucratic hell, I'm maybe too quick to forgive that as it's a relatable sin.
In short, people like the dumb jerk because they are also dumb jerks? I can't say I disagree, but I don't think that's what cauch's comment was going for.
I find the most productive political discussions are about history. Most people don’t know any history at all, so a willingness to discuss the reason we have the Third Amendment, or the lasting effects of King Leopold’s dominion in Africa, or the Peleponnesian War, makes for a good discussion, and the distance makes people less emotionally tied to their positions and more willing to accept nuance. If we find we disagree, this also gives us social cover to pretend the topic isn’t intensely relevant to the present day.
Maybe the long peace within the US changed things, but in most countries and especially in Europe discussing history in a room with more than 2 nationalities is a good recipe to sow dissent.
Good point. I live in the US and I wouldn’t start with the American civil war. Talk about other people’s history. I’ll trade you the American Civil War for the Franco Prussian War.
The American Civil War is a great place to start. You can very quickly assess where somebody’s head is at and move on quickly.
That depends on what your purpose is having a conversation is in the first place
I mean it is a good filter to understand someone with. When I moved from the midwest to the south as a teenager and learned there are still plenty of people that were unhappy the south lost the civil war and want to remedy that you begin to understand there are some people that are deeply entrenched in their views and you have to make a judgement on how much time you're going to spend dealing with that.
I think entrenchment is a description of both sides, has neither I really willing to budge. I think the critical I think the critical criteria is how much you have to deal with it at all. Is it an interesting conversation that you can have once in awhile, or something that gets inserted into every conversation.
I think the civil war is interesting and nuanced topic to interrogate once in awhile, and can usually find some points of agreement with most people.
The legal, moral, and philosophical questions around it are fascinating. For example, how do you reconcile people's right to self-determination with a desire to carry out abhorrent actions. Historically speaking, the civil war and failures of reconstruction are probably the single most defining aspect of modern American political life.
> learned there are still plenty of people that were unhappy the south lost the civil war and want to remedy that
Did you peel that back to the next layer? Did they want to reintroduce slavery? Or did they want independence from a distant government?
I knew folks in the South who thought some of the craziest racist things and probably would've been OK with slavery (I did hear them promote segregation).
At the same time, the vast majority folks I knew who defended the Civil War or wanted secession didn't want slavery or segregation, but local (and often less) government. Did they misunderstand the role of slavery in the Southern secession? Usually. Does that change their _current intent_? No.
The latter group (which was much larger) should be engaged with on the issue of local government and secession, especially in the context of folks in Blue States who've been rattling about secession under Trump.
Some of the best convos I've had are with ideologues, it just requires authentic empathy and effort, which means letting go of moral presuppositions and being willing to really listen to them without injecting your own judgments & opinions. If people subconsciously think you're trying to do that, it'll trigger their defense mechanisms and the convo will instantly shut down (or devolve into chaos).
People love to talk about what they think is important, but NOT when they think they're being setup or playing into someone else's hand.
Well, I know a lot of people in the US who simply don't want to discuss politics at social events these days.
Which means the only input they get is ever polarised extreme feeds online, from social media algorithms and straight up paid adverts.
No, it can also mean they get too much extreme input from the people in reality.
There are lot's of people who won't stop, when you push the wrong button (speaking a wrong word).
People tend to moderate themselves and compromise a lot more in real conversations.
It's like all those videos of dogs barking angrily at each other through a closed gate, then suddenly becoming quiet and peaceful, their whole body language changing, when the gate is opened.
For sure people are more restrained in real life, than online, but the consequences can also be more severe if extreme positions meet offline.
I really don’t care. And honestly people I’ll tend to be socializing with are at least somewhat similar in political opinions. Just not interested in discussing political outrages at a social gathering.
If you insist on talking politics when the host or other guests don’t want to you’re a rude idiot.
Better than ruining real life relationships over politics. The only important impact most people have over politics is when they vote. Discussing politics has massive downsides and trivial benefits.
There might be very little alignment of political opinions within one's circle of friends, and any discussion would turn into an unpleasant discussion with the risk of ending the group of friends forever.
For most people, very few friendships form with an expectation of political agreement: activists met at a common protest or campaign, generic regulars of a popular political party or union, old style secret societies, and so on.
I think people can aim to meet politically aligned people at non-political events/places. I met most of my friends in venues that "members of the opposite tribe" just don't frequent. And I feel like it goes for both sides.
Yeah. There are exceptions. People can also have multiple circles. And it's not as if political opinions within a group are really uniform. But there does tend to be a certain degree of uniformity within many groups of friends.
Are you speaking from experience when you say discussing politics has massive downsides for your real life relationships? And if so, may I ask what happened?
that's always been the case, politics and religion are taboo
Of course they are, people get angry when they have to rationalize why they want to genocide some group of people different from them in mixed company.
What is the point of discussing politics? (not rhetorical). What physical changes in the world do you expect afterwards? You won't undo indoctrination. It just upsets people.
You can’t talk politics without first overcoming tribalism, so I suggest you start there, since in the US that is sadly the state of things.
If you start by talking about which sports team is better you will also cause these reactions. But politics should not be sports. It’s harmless to support a sports team that makes bad choices. Politics has real impact on people’s lives. It’s important to have exit criteria for alignments and affiliations with groups, to the extent they’re necessary.
> What physical changes in the world do you expect afterwards?
Just like voting, it has no effect in the small. You discuss to form and exchange opinions and ideas that become part of the whole. The benefits are in the aggregates. Thus it’s important that it has some other incentive. Where I’m from it’s not very tribalist, so we get the pleasure from thinking and discussing problems even without having an expectation that it will change policy. That wouldn’t work in the US outside very specific groups that understand the rules of engagement and the point of the game. But the discussions themselves are similar in vibe to board games or puzzles, that it’s somewhat fun even though it’s entirely useless (in the small).
This gets more complicated when you replace "friend" with "spouse" (/partner) because there comes up the problem of consensuality in unavoidably unpleasant unavoidable decision-making..
(Assuming one marries for "love")
I believe having a partner with directly opposing political views is unsustainable. Partners with adjacent political views may be manageable, or even preferable to a fully aligned one, but those with directly opposing views are a constant source of drama and tension in your life. Political views often reflect deeply held values and beliefs.
Political views can change over time though. It can be unsustainable in the way of "one or both people moderates their political views".
That will leave a large group of people without any partners, since men and women vote very differently.
Then so be it, if your views keep you from finding a partner then maybe you should start thinking about compromise rather than falling deeper into extremism.
But, this is also why one political party in the US tends to vote against things like no fault divorce and other questionable policies regarding womens rights.
>> those with directly opposing views are a constant source of drama and tension in your life
I don't think this is true at all. The vast majority of people largely ignore politics, cast their vote, and move on with their lives. It's completely fine to have different political views if you both act like normal reasonable people. We see a lot of the 'kick, scream, and cry' types on both side in the media. In the real world, most people have more important things to be getting on with.
> It's completely fine to have different political views if you both act like normal reasonable people.
Yes, this is true, you can have different political views and still be friends/lovers/partners/whatver.
What parent said though was "directly opposing political views", which I'd also agree with is inviting trouble, as it'll leak out in constant tensions and frictions. Simple things like "We shouldn't drive as much as we currently do" can lead to heavy argumentation if the underlying reasoning cannot be understood by both parties.
In real life, people might not speak about parties or political figures, but their everyday actions are driven by their values and beliefs, which also ends up reflected by who they vote for. Politics is everywhere, even where people don't speak of it directly.
>> We shouldn't drive as much as we can do
I wouldn't consider this a political view. It's a lifestyle choice based on personal beliefs. Two people can be fully behind the idea we need to do something about climate change and have different ideas on how that should be done. And I think that's part of the problem in recent times - instead of politics being about the big ideas and how a country is run it's become about small personal choices. If a person has heavy arguments with a partner about how much/little they drive I would say they've got an issue with a need to control others, rather than just a strong political opinion.
> Two people can be fully behind the idea we need to do something about climate change and have different ideas on how that should be done
I'm not sure if you purposefully ignore what I wrote directly after what you quoted, "if the underlying reasoning cannot be understood by both parties". If a partner would discuss things like this in real life, I'd say this partner might have an issue with discussing in good faith with others.
My point was that it'll lead to friction if you disagree about what "big ideas" are worthwhile to try to implement or not.
Note that various surveys report young women and young men diverging a lot more politically. Partly because women's rights have become so politicised.
>Partly because women's rights have become so politicised.
What is the womans suffrage movement?
I may be extrapolating on a single statement too far, but I do feel that you are missing a huge chunk of history regarding all the rights women (at least regarding the US) did not have.
Womans rights have been political for the last 200 years if not longer.
This trend is certainly one aspect of the explanation for the decline in the number of long-term relationships.
The other being that once women have largescale representation in the workforce, can open bank accounts and credit cards on their own, and can support themselves financially, one of the key pressures to marry is removed. Once there was no fault divorce and women did not need to prove why they needed to divorce, one of the key pressures to stay married is removed.
That happened a long time ago though, much much longer ago than the number of relationships started to drop, so its unrelated.
Perhaps important, republicans from state lawmakers up to the VP are interested in repealing no fault divorce laws.
And that's just what they'll openly admit to! Rest assured, they would absolutely not stop at no-fault divorce. They would undo all of the progress you mentioned, and likely more.
As the gender gap in voting patterns widens, denying rights to women goes from not only being an ideological project of the right but a political project as well. "We will win more elections if women have less social power" is not a good situation to be in.
I am the opposite of surprised. How else are terrible, low-quality men going to trap women into a life of unpaid home labor if they can control their own finances, reproduction, and choice to enter or leave a marriage.
It could also be the opposite causality. Because people aren't getting into intimate relationships as much (looking out for each other, caring deeply about an individual of the opposite gender), the two groups are naturally diverging into preferring "what's best for ME".
I think the political split between genders is MUCH stronger for singles. It's kind of a trap actually.
Also white/black, straight/gay, poor/wealthy etc.
We can find hundreds of dividing lines if we insist.
What do you mean by women’s rights? The difference in support for abortion by sex is trivial. https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/fact-sheet/public-opini...
Probably not abortion. While rights never happen in a vacuum, it is usually framed as a matter of fetus rights.
How about a woman's right to equal employment opportunity? 67% of women are in favour of DEI, while most men (57%) take the opposing view. https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/politics-news/poll-american...
The primary political parties are definitely catering to those sides.
Seeing a 3 point difference in the support for abortion between men and women is *wild* to me.
Rest assured: Those 33% of women who say abortion should be "Illegal in all/most cases," would instantly carve out an exception for themselves if their own lives or livelihoods were in jeopardy from a pregnancy.
Ah yes, one sex is diverging to the other side because they are wrong on MY pet issue. (This is not grounded in reality)
> Partly because women's rights have become so politicised.
That's a hand-wavy way of saying that a core pillar of one of your parties is to take away the rights of an entire gender.
Imagine describing 1940s Germany and saying "Ethnicity has become so politicized these days. I'm just interested in nationalizing the auto industry"
That would only be true if words weren't perverted for political leverage. Sexist used to mean "women can't do that" now sexist means "a woman experienced an unpleasant thing, and it carries more significance because of her gender, and if you dare dispute this you can expect to be cancelled".
How about “women can’t get certain medical procedures”? Or “women can’t vote”? Multiple prominent Republicans have floated reducing or eliminating women’s right to vote.
I don't know if you're a news buff, but they're actually actively saying "women can't do that".
That doesn't contradict what he said though, he didn't say the old sexists are no longer called sexist, he said the definition had expanded to cover many more than before.
Why even say it then? What's the point of countering "Well, the definition has expanded so much", when the thing you're talking about conforms to the old definition?
Marrying purely for "love" and ignoring core values, mindset compatibility, what they want in life and so on is a recipe for disaster, or at least some deep regrets down the line. I haven't seen nor heard about a single success story a decade or two down the line. Whom to marry is probably the most important decision in our lives. One of reasons why marrying early is too risky - people still massively change till at least 25-30, it cal still work but chances are smaller.
Its a typical junior mistake to marry for love/lust and not think a bit on top of that, in this case I blame parents who don't have some hard talks with their kids explaining them not-so-rosy parts of adult existence. Like initial enormous physical attraction wanes over time, kids crush most of remaining, and what still remains are 2 people and how they treat relationship and each other with that lust tuned down eventually to 0, under various, often not so nice situations. But our parent's generation didn't figure it all out, in contrary the amount of actually nice relationships in higher ages ain't that high.
I didn't have such prep talk neither, nor do I know anybody who had, and had to figure it all on my own via rough trials and failures till finally figuring myself and women out, and then happy marriage (so far, hard knock on the wood). Its like expecting everybody to be sophisticated engineer, learning them to count on fingers and throwing them out and good luck, I am sure you'll figure it out eventually. Some do, some don't. Most don't I'd say.
> Whom to marry is probably the most important decision in our lives.
That's putting way too much pressure on it. Find someone you feel like you could spend the rest of your life with? Marry them, see what happens. If you get a divorce, so be it, it's not the end of the world and there is plenty of others out there, even if you're "damaged goods" or whatever your worry is.
I feel like the pressure people put around marriage it what makes it so damaging in the first place, people feeling like they have to marry in the first place, or if they're married, they need to try to stick together more than some couple who isn't married, and so on.
Just make a decision and learn from your mistakes in case you fuck up, it really isn't more complicated than that.
I'm going to assume you're a man and probably have a little less experience here than the average woman does.
This said, I am a man too, but a large part of my career was supporting lawyers and court systems, including family court systems.
Choosing the wrong partner is one of the biggest risks you take in your life, especially for a woman. This is one of those things that can easily lead to you being bankrupt with nothing. This can lead to you being abused or raped. You can end up with a child that you did not want to have. You can end up dead.
With states pushing to revoke things like no fault divorce (and women being the primary initiators of divorce) it's not hard see the traps women lived in the past coming back.
Then add the strongly religious connotations marriage has in the US and you quickly see why this is a rollercoaster that emotions and politics are not going to be removed from.
> That's putting way too much pressure on it. Find someone you feel like you could spend the rest of your life with? Marry them, see what happens. If you get a divorce, so be it, it's not the end of the world
This is quite bad advice, because divorce can be devastating financially.
This is the sort of thing they should teach in schools. English literature is a good venue for it.
Politics feels like an integral part of finding a partner nowadays. Which makes sense—values are important to agree upon.
The width of the spectrum of political views for 65% of people used to be relatively narrow.
That's increasingly not the case.
Capitalism "Choice is good!"
Politics "Not like that, not like that!"
I don't believe that political views used to be narrow, I believe the political views you were allowed to actually express were much more narrow and everything else was repressed.
Really depends on the region. There's lots of opinions/ideas/directions/parties in many countries with lots of overlap. In the US... I'm not sure how relationships, that actually talk about things, can survive if partners have different party preferences.
Being friends with someone doesn't mean we both should agree on everything. It also doesn't mean we should try to avoid discussing whatever. If we agree on something, good. If someone is changing his opinion bases on a talk and arguments, good. If not, also good.
I am friend with someone because I like that someone and I enjoy meeting him and talking to him, doing things together.
That doesn't mean agreeing on everything. And doesn't mean being afraid of speaking.
If someone quits, being my friend because we have different opinions on X, so be it. I am not like that. I won't break a friendship because someone thinks differently.
I'll provide an opposing viewpoint. In the last 10 years, I've lost friendships and family because people in my life have voted for candidates that stripped rights away from women, minorities, etc.
Having a vast difference between opinions is fine, but some of their decisions are fundamentally against my core beliefs and have done literal harm to many people I know.
For that reason, terminating family and friendships has been absolutely worth it for me.
Until we can live in a world where fundamental rights are protected and respected, we have no common ground, and it's pointless to tiptoe around these insanely harmful beliefs while maintaining a facade of friendship.
I think essentially tolerating other peoples opinions and trying to understand where they are coming from is more useful than applying purity tests to your friends and family.
I’m pretty sure that they weren’t voting for those candidates for the express purpose of stripping away those rights and there were other policies and values that they were voting for.
I’ll be honest that I’m Jewish and certain posts about Palestine where friends or non Jewish family have specifically expressed values that I find anti-myself I have completely cut out of my life. (not all beliefs about pro Palestine are anti-semetic, but most are) But I believe that most views at the party level are just different priorities or different view points and tolerance is necessary, because they are not directly in conflict.
> I’m pretty sure that they weren’t voting for those candidates for the express purpose of stripping away those rights and there were other policies and values that they were voting for.
I thought the GOP was pretty clear throughout the election cycle, from President to local office, that their desired world can only come to be through a drastic restructuring of the Constitutional status quo ante.
I don’t know that “I only voted for (e.g.) tax cuts, everything else is collateral damage and I’m not culpable for it,” is a defensible moral stance.
First you try to argue tolerance and understanding, and then you say that "most pro-Palestine views are antisemitic" and that you cut off all contact with people who hold those views. Your hypocrisy is astounding and you should be embarrassed.
What I was suggesting was to be tolerant of more general views like choosing a political party or candidate and large complicated things, and reserve intolerance for actual directed hatred.
> I’m pretty sure that they weren’t voting for those candidates for the express purpose of stripping away those rights and there were other policies and values that they were voting for.
Voting for a party explicitly demonstrates at least acceptance of if not outright support for its platform. You don't get to absolve yourself of support for kicking puppies because the FooBar party also includes a modest tax cut in its policy agenda that you really want.
It doesn't matter if the opposing party advocates for raising taxes or even eating kittens.
That's true even if realistically, there are no other parties capable of winning. You can support a third party, abstain out of protest, or even begin a grass-roots campaign to start yet another party. You can even try changing the FooBar party from within, so long as you don't vote for them until sufficient change has occurred.
Voting for a party explicitly demonstrates at least acceptance of if not outright support for its platform. You don't get to absolve yourself of support for kicking puppies because the FooBar party also includes a modest tax cut in its policy agenda that you really want.
Virtually no independent thinker is going to support either major party's platform, for the simple reason that both parties have a collection of inconsistent policies that are an incoherent ideological mishmash. Therefore you do not so much vote FOR a party as you instead hold your nose and vote AGAINST the other one.
Sure, but in the US, the choices right now are between a party that you might not fully agree with, and a party whose explicit platform is to strip fundamental rights away from women, LGBTQ people, and other minorities, all while dismantling the basic structures of democracy in order to guarantee their hold on power for as long as possible.
When you vote for a party, you may not fully agree with all their policies, but you are stating that the drawbacks are acceptable compromises. When you vote for FooBar, you might not want puppies to be kicked, but you consider it a tradeoff worth making if it gets you that tax cut.
If you are looking at the political landscape of the US as an independent thinker, and are questioning whether abandoning the principles of human rights and liberal democracy are a tradeoff worth making, then I really question whether your thoughts are really as independent as you would like to believe.
> and a party whose explicit platform is to strip fundamental rights away from women, LGBTQ people, and other minorities, all while dismantling the basic structures of democracy in order to guarantee their hold on power for as long as possible.
This certainly might be what you believe their platform amounts to. But it is most certainly not their explicit platform. Accuse people of what they actually have done, not what you believe their actions to be logically equivalent to. Otherwise there can't actually be a reasonable discussion, because you're giving off heat rather than light.
This is their explicit platform. Trump's presidential campaign officially ran on the basis of "Agenda 47", which clearly sets out their goals and aims. It includes dismantling the basic structures of democracy (in the form of heavy expansion of executive powers), and reducing access to healthcare for women and LGBTQ people. We have already seen evidence of the above, as well as events like the new administration arresting protestors without due process.
I think your point is that Project 2025 is not Trump's explicit platform, which is correct (although this doesn't affect my statement which was about his explicit platform). However, if it looks, walks, and talks like a duck, we also need to be willing to call it a duck. Project 2025 goes significantly above and beyond Agenda 47, the group behind it explicitly endorse Trump, and many of Project 2025's authors are involved in the Trump administration. Being an "independent thinker" does not mean accepting what both sides say at face value, it means looking at people's behaviour and drawing judgements based on that.
Actions speaker louder than words. It might not be their platform, but it's what they're doing. If you see your party taking action to strip away rights from LGBTQ groups, immigrants, women and you still support them, then I don't know what else to say.
This is the problem with a two-party system. It makes every citizen either complicit in the worst party or the second-worst party.
You can't hold who they voted for against people in a two-party system. There just isn't enough choice.
> "...women, ... and other minorities..."
According to polls, slightly more women voted for Trump in 2024 than in 2020 and significantly more minorities voted for Trump in 2024 than in 2020 (https://www.nbcwashington.com/decision-2024/2024-voter-turno...). One party energetically claims to be on the side of the oppressed but the oppressed don't exactly seem to be flocking to be on the side of that party. Makes you think, doesn't it?
The Democrats cannot win as long as there's a substantial faction inside it unwilling to face the reality of what voters actually think instead of what they want to tell the voters to think.
You are giving a fully partisan version from one side, while ignoring the partisan view from the other. Not entirely your fault correctly stating what the other side thinks, in terms that the other side will agree with, is an extremely hard task. It sounds like it should be simple. But getting it right requires getting past our cognitive biases that the other side is wrong, which make it hard to actually see what they are seeing.
Here is a Republican take that is about as biased as your take on Republicans. "Democrats are fully infected by the woke mind virus, destroying merit in favor of DEI, promoting antisemitism in support of Hamas terrorism, and suppressing free speech in favor of totalitarian control."
Both partisan perspective have some truth, and a lot that is false. For example, while it is true that Trump represents a threat to democracy, threatening democracy is not part of the Republican party's explicit platform. Conversely, while it is true that there has been a sharp rise in antisemitism on the left, most of that really is antizionism. (That said, if you try to make Palestine free from sea to sea, where will over 7 million Jewish refugees go? You're unlikely to be more lucky than Hitler was in the 1930s in finding a country who is willing to accept them. What happens then?)
I disagree, but I think moral purity is a less ethical way of living than practical action - best exemplified by the story of the Good Samaritan.
Similarly to “silence is complicity.” Refusing to oppose a party by choosing the other is indicating acceptance of what they will do.
This is a fundamental difference with how people on the (American) left and people on the right view politics. Those on the right frequently vote based on a single or a few issues, ignoring the rest of the platform that may be unpalatable. While those on the left frequently view voting as an endorsement of the whole person. Any unwanted policy tends to be a turn off. It's why you say "you don't get to absolve yourself of support for kicking puppies" while the right does just that. You would be better served understanding the values and motivations of your opposition rather than projecting your values onto them and judging them based on a strawman.
I would've probably agreed with this point 10 or 15 years ago. Someone saying "I would've liked universal healthcare, but lower taxes are more important to me" has an understandable position. I might not agree with their choice, but I can respect their decision.
However, these days the American political landscape looks a lot different. I understand having priorities, but if someone believes that a magical make-eggs-be-cheaper plan should have a higher priority than their friend (i.e., me) having basic human rights, why would I want to be friends with them? It doesn't matter if they personally agree with the politician's strip-their-friend-of-basic-rights plans or not, the fact that it isn't a priority to them at all says enough.
What basic rights do I have that you don't, and where are these codified?
In the US there are no federal antidiscrimination protections for LGBT people except in employment through Bostock (and conveniently, Trump's EEOC has stopped pursuing these cases). You can be evicted from your home for being gay but not for being black or Christian.
Access to gender affirming care for trans minors is banned in more than half of US states. The very same medicines are allowed to be given to cis minors.
In 13 US states bathroom bills prevent trans people from comfortably existing outside of their homes for more than a few hours at a time.
It has only been 22 years since sodomy laws were found unconstitutional. It has only been 10 years since gay marriage was legalized nationwide. Thomas wrote in his Dobbs concurrence that Lawrence should be revisited. Several state legislatures have passed resolutions calling for Obergefell to be overturned.
While less of a "basic right", the Trump administration has banned trans people from serving in the military. Visibility of gay or trans characters in media available for minors is also regularly threatened. Products for trans people sold at stores like Target have led to bomb threats.
> Access to gender affirming care for trans minors is banned in more than half of US states. The very same medicines are allowed to be given to cis minors.
The Cass report conclusions and recommendations should be listened to, it was a way better and more thorough study than the Netherlands study that begat all of the "gender clinics" in the US and elsewhere. https://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/ukgwa/20250310143...
> In 13 US states bathroom bills prevent trans people from comfortably existing outside of their homes for more than a few hours at a time.
As far as bathrooms, i feel uncomfortable in public restrooms. I don't know what the rate of people that feel uncomfortable in public restrooms, but those of us that do find family or single occupant restrooms, and know what places have those. No one wants to piss in a literal trough, i could be wrong.
I don't consider sodomy a basic human right, but i could be argued with, i guess.
I don't see what "bomb threats" have to do with human rights, in this context. Is there a human right to have products available at Target? If everyone boycotted Target (like they did with Bud Light), is that a violation of human rights, too?
I am unsure why people keep deleting their replies. It is possible to have a reasoned discussion about inflammatory topics.
This is how things often goes. "Oh those aren't actually rights."
You can think this, I suppose. But let me tell you that a very large number of LGBT people do consider these things to be questions of their basic rights.