I am not aboard with this type of "both sides are problematic" thinking.
Only one side denies climate change. Only one side denies medical consensus on vaccines and pandemic prevention techniques. Only one side is okay with mocking a disabled reporter (to pick one egregious example among countless).
Yes, if you're red/republican/conservative/right, you're voting for those things, you're signing off on them.
We don't need to "come together and find common ground" on those issues. We need to figure out how truth and decency lost their footing and slipped off the center stage.
First, the comment you replied to didn't argue both sides are problematic, just that not everyone who voted for Trump is a bad person. Both sides being problematic also doesn't imply that one side isn't more problematic than the other.
I think it's crazy that so many people voted for Trump and honestly believe he's the best person to run the country. I'd have a hard time respecting someone who didn't see how bad Trump was in a lot of ways. But I think most people on the left seem to have no idea why anybody would vote for Trump, and don't realize that is more of an indictment of the extent they are out of touch with 49% of the country, rather than an indication of the idiocy of their political opponents.
An effective rejection of Trumpism must first involve understanding and relating to the people who supported him, and I think a lot of people are lamenting the general lack of interest in such discourse.
Edit: fixed two words which drastically changed the meaning of sentence.
Sure, but when you engage on why they voted for Trump, you receive a litany of mistruths and nonsense and it goes nowhere. Biden is going to raise taxes! Biden is going to take away guns! Hunter Biden's corruption! It's pretty hard to have a conversation when a third party is honking and playing a tuba five feet away, and that's essentially what Fox News, Facebook, Breitbart, et al are doing.
Biden campaigned on raising the corporate income tax rate from 21% back to 28%. If you have a stock market portfolio (including an IRA or 401(k)) and this proposal is enacted, it will adversely affect the value of your investments. It's also been tied to student loan forgiveness, so people without college degrees who are investing for retirement (and those who've paid off their degrees) will in effect be subsidizing those with student loan debt, which is a demographic that skews affluent:
>Households in the upper half of the income distribution hold more student debt than those in the lower half. The highest-income quartile of households owes about one-third of that debt; the lowest-income quartile owes about 12 percent. People who don’t go to college don’t have student debt. They have lower incomes and more constrained job opportunities than others.
You would, but we were banned long ago if we made anything approaching valid points on places like this. Your ignorance is the result of the bubble, which follows from censorship. You cannot see it because the censorship makes the edges of your bubble invisible to you.
The problem is the points you perceive as valid are the products of your own bubble, which operates as an automated factory of lies and deception. As with holocaust deniers, arguing with you is not a valid approach: only shutting you out.
> I think it's crazy that so many people voted for Trump and honestly believe he's the best person to run the country.
...out of the two options on the ballot. Which is also the only reason why so many people voted for Biden. The most mind-boggling thing from my German point of view is how little movement there is to leave the two-party system behind.
Exactly! While our (Czech Republic) voting system is far from perfect (the current president is rather controversial and the prime minister is a populist with some rather shady financial deals) political parties regularly go out of business if they fuck up strong enough. And this system will likely also fix the current problems over time, resulting in possibly less bad state.
Having just two parties is insane, that simply means they can get away with anything & just take turns once in a while as voters have no other choice.
I assume that you guys have some version of proportional representation. The US doesn't. It would take a complete rewrite of the US constitution to get rid of the two party system.
Re-empowering electors could help with respect to presidential elections. Popular election of senators really ties our hands at the senate level, though. Point being, it is difficult to turn a plurality into a compromise majority without either a runoff or a delegated negotiation of some sort. Parliamentary systems have that baked in, of course.
I was under the impression from recent reading that the situation in Czechia is really bad with mass protests and serious problems. You're happy with the system though?
There were some protests against anti covid measure a few weeks ago that got quite a bit of publicity due to taking place on the iconic Old Town Square in Prague - but nothing relly major or really ongoing.
The situation is not perfect and the protest not without merit, as the government preatty much squandered any success we had handling the first wave of covid by doing preatty much no preparations, releasing almost all restrictions and then failed to respond in time when things turned for the worse in september.
I guess it can make people angry, if their livelyhood is in danger due to the restrictive measures needed after you fuck up the initial response to the second wave like we did here. Still violent protest is not really an answer and it was indeed an one-off so far. Hopefully people will remeber at least a bit of they not to vote the populist currently in power during the next elections next year.
Also there are regular protests in Belarus and now even in Poland these days that are bigger by many orders of magnitude that what we managed to pull off here since the Velvet Revolution when indeed preatty much everyone was in the streats, which resulted in the fall of the soviet aligned comunist regime back then.
There are in fact many parties in the USA. But unfortunately the USA is still using an early alpha release voting system that was invented in the 1700s before voting theory had been even understood.
The result of a majority win voting system is that it only legitimizes 2 parties in practice. This worked 'ok' so long as the 2 parties acted in good faith.
However the last 20-30 years the Republican party got twisted into a movement to undermine government, enrich themselves, and narrowly focus on a couple of right-wing Christian interests to distract a populist base. They've maintained their relevance by turning Fox news and other right-wing owned outlets into effectually state-run propaganda machines. Leaving only the Democrats trying to govern with the Republicans trying to undermine and obstruct that very government.
The only way out of the USA's problems is to have a modern preference voting method, or in the long term the country may be doom to fail.
I almost always for an Nth party, where N>2. Literally every single election, I’ve been told that I was wasting my vote, that this was the most important election of my life, etc. There is a tremendous amount of social pressure to vote mainstream. I don’t have high hopes of breaking the cartel anytime soon.
I think the pressure mostly comes from the value that if you're in favor of an outcome, you should be in favor of the prerequisite actions to that outcome. If your favored actions are counterproductive to your favored outcome, then it strikes others as irrational.
Not sure they are bad people per se... but where do you draw the line?
Sure Hitler improved the German economy, does that make it defensible to support him?
This is the fundamental question in nationalist movements that are driven by ideologies, tribalism, and cult of personalities... instead of real facts backed up by science and data.
Given that provably almost nothing Trump ever says is even true, how can these people know he is the best person to govern? If there are no facts, it is just beliefs... and that is incredibly dangerous.
Look, an objective observer might say, only one side advocates for abortion. You might personally dismiss it and say it's a woman's right, but you have to at least acknowledge that people who equate abortion to a form of murder aren't totally out-of-line.
Point being, anyone can pick and choose a handful of issues (and ignore others) to "prove" that anyone who votes for [insert party here] is morally bankrupt.
No objective observer would ever say that either side “advocates for abortion”. That’s the sort of thing a demagogue right-winger would say to try to score cheap political points.
California forces anybody buying health insurance to pay for abortion, and pay have to pay a tax if you don't buy health insurance. If they aren't advocating for it, why are they trying to force me to pay for it?
Can you provide a scan of a health insurance invoice where there’s a line item for an abortion which you didn’t request or receive? It doesn’t have to be your receipt; any insurance invoice from literally anybody in California where they were charged specifically for an abortion that they didn’t request or receive?
I’ll wait.
Or is this a specious argument like the perennial classic, “I had to pay taxes which went in part toward maintaining the roads and I never drove on that particular road over there and so therefore the taxes are unfair”? Because I am very interested in your opinions if that’s the direction you’ve decided to argue, here.
In your road example, they are in fact paying for the roads, and you aren't disputing that, so maybe try finding a better analogy that doesn't undermine your argument.
You make a fairly excellent point about the nature of debate and public opinion.
However, denial of scientific and historical fact is not something "anyone" can find instances of for "[insert party here]". Only on the right does that occur.
That's no longer true unfortunately. Denialism on the left about certain things is becoming rampant:
- Blacks commit far more crime than other racial groups. There are sociological explanations for this, but that is currently a fact, and one that people on the left do mental backflips to avoid acknowledging.
- Gender pay gap in most industries is small or non-existent once you adjust for experience and other factors. Not to say that there is no discrimination at all, but this is another thing people on the left can't or don't want to acknowledge.
Hmm. But what if you reframe the data? Instead of "Blacks commit more crimes than other racial groups", you're more likely to get on the path of finding constructive solutions by framing it as "People who grew up in predominantly black neighborhoods commit more crimes than those who grew up in predominantly non-black neighborhoods."
I mean, I think we've pretty well established that crime isn't genetic. It's environmental. So why frame it as if the opposite were true?
I haven't studied the demographic data at length recently, but fairly sure that your assertion does not hold for high income blacks.
I have no comment on the pay gap, I don't know much about it.
I think you're proving my point. Can you just state the fact? You can even add some qualifying statements like I did. But for christ's sake just say it first! No need to go out of your way to find a subset that is (no doubt) excepted from the average. It's politically inconvenient, yes. But it's also the truth, and one that might help explain why african americans are more likely to have interactions with police (a group I have no love for, tbh).
My own mother can't do this. She goes on about how the fbi crime statistics are probably "biased" in some way, though has no interest in finding out if or how that's the case. "It's obvious" she says. This greatly upsets me. How can we deal with problems if we can't look them straight in the face?
> I think you're proving my point. Can you just state the fact? You can even add some qualifying statements like I did. But for christ's sake just say it first! No need to go out of your way to find a subset that is (no doubt) excepted from the average. It's politically inconvenient, yes.
It's not just politically inconvenient, it's also lacking a lot of nuance. Native Americans commit crimes at an even higher rate than African Americans do. The two groups share a long history of violent disenfranchisement. Taking the statistics in isolation, yes Native Americans and African Americans do commit crime at higher than average rates. But ignoring structural issues is just as disingenuous as ignoring the data.
> But it's also the truth, and one that might help explain why african americans are more likely to have interactions with police (a group I have no love for, tbh).
Can you prove this cause and effect chain? The rate at which African Americans encounter the police is much greater than the rate at which violent crimes are committed. I'm not saying you're wrong, but I haven't seen any causality research here, but the way you've juxtaposed these claims implies that you believe there's causality here.
> I mean, I think we've pretty well established that crime isn't genetic. It's environmental.
In reality, twin studies and adoption studies have shown a large genetic component.
We don't even need twin studies to know this. It must be true unless you're a young-earth creationist. If there wasn't genetic variability in criminality, humans wouldn't have been capable of evolving to be so much less violent than other primates.
(And of course, disparities in male/female behavior is obviously biological.)
> I haven't studied the demographic data at length recently, but fairly sure that your assertion does not hold for high income blacks.
In fact, it does hold in higher income brackets too. And I'd bet whites are more violent than Asians after controlling for income, too.
The gender pay gap is a statistic that requires some nuance to evaluate and I think your analysis is reductive. Yes, if you add in controls it lessens, but why? Why do women as a population have systematically lower levels of work experience? The pay gap is an assessment of how well our society is structured to allow people of both genders economic opportunities.
Shouldn't choosing to raise a family account for the experience gap? Yes, this is an example of one way that we've structured society so that women tend to have fewer career opportunities. IMO, there is not a good reason men (as a demographic) shouldn't be spending an equal amount of time raising children.
> The gender pay gap is a statistic that requires some nuance to evaluate
If only nuance were present when politicians on the left make misleading or false statements like "women (are) paid 77 cents on the dollar for doing the same work as men".
> Shouldn't choosing to raise a family account for the experience gap?
Edit: I think I misread your second paragraph. Choosing to raise a family likely does account for the existence of the experience gap, if that's what you mean; but raising a family isn't equivalent to on-the-job experience.
You are not going to find racial activists who deny the first fact. The second "fact" seems to fly over the whole "and other factors". That's the entire point of the statement.
Here are the major factors I've looked at: The previously mentioned (and most significant by far) years of experience (which for many women is affected by having children), hours spent at work, self-rated confidence, (personality trait) agreeableness, etc. etc.
The _entire_ point is that maternity, preconceived biases on women's behavior in the workplace, and expectations of women to do housework are factors that are to be contemplated and analyzed in their systemic causes.
There's a reason why in European countries parental leave is split between both parents and there's effort to make it easier for men to be caretakers.
If women are statistically likely to need to take more time off work than men due to being a parent, then I would argue this is effectively a systemic pay gap. Whether or not that needs fixing is another question but it's totally bizarre to say "if you ignore all the reasons why women are often in positions where they receive less pay that men don't have to deal with, there isn't a gap".
(To be clear: whether or not this pay gap needs addressing is its own question entirely. It makes total sense to me that a woman needs time off to recover from giving birth or from health complications during pregnancy.)
EDIT: I'd ask for valid science showing a fetus isn't alive, doesn't feel pain, etc., but the science is clear here. The question isn't in the science but in the implications. Like it or not (here... apparently not), the conservative position on abortion had a lot of hard science to back it up.
I agree for hard science, but I see more wishful thinking about society on the "left". A lot of the rhetoric about social justice implicitly hinges on the Blank Slate theory, the assumption that all (groups of) people would, in a vacuum, have exactly the same statistical outcomes. Therefore, all deviations from the average must automatically be a sign of systemic discrimination. When you look at studies, the situation is rarely as clear-cut.
The same is true with the "diversity is strength" mantra, where everyone seems to cite that one feel-good McKinsey study as if that told the full story.
This kind of naivety is not as bad as burning the planet, but at the end of the day, it's still people looking at studies and saying "can't be true".
And I think left has the opposite problem of denial of science by taking it as gospel and trying the most extreme solution possible instead of actually looking at the tradeoffs (let's be clear that the right buries their head in the sand instead of looking at solutions and tradeoffs as well).
Ironic that you would acknowledge bias then commit it yourself. Is the right, or the left, pushing to reject biological science that says XX = female, XY = male?
Clearly it takes more than a dichotomy of chromosomal options to define one's gender. You're drastically oversimplifying "biological science" in order to put forth an example of the left denying scientific fact.
More importantly though, the left's "agenda" with regards to trans people isn't about rejecting medical or scientific consensus on gender. A trans woman's doctor is still going to give her advice tailored to her specific case of being born with a male body. It's about accepting people for who they want to be, and that doesn't clash with any category of facts or knowledge. Implying otherwise is disingenuous.
Depends on if you mean gender or sex. Both sides accept that as sex, but it's more common on the right to improperly accept that they mean the corresponding gender, and it's more common on the left to properly believe that gender is not sex.
I used to think about this in exactly the same way as you do, so despite the wall of text I hold no judgment against you at all. But you are mistaken, and I'll try to explain why (although I'm not sure I'll do the topic of "the epistemology of science" justice in a rambling forum post).
I think you have some misunderstandings about the term "definition", misunderstandings that I certainly used to have. We use this term both in mathematics and the sciences, but only mathematics has true definitions (as in, a logical statement which precisely determines a set). I can define a right angle as the angle that makes all four angles of an intersection of two straight lines equal. We can show that it's a unique value, exactly 90 degrees, and neither 40 degrees nor 89.8 degrees are right angles. Only 90 degrees _exactly_ is a right angle.
By contrast, in other sciences we usually only have categories with fuzzy borders. Take for instance the term "species". Wikipedia says "A species is often defined as the largest group of organisms in which any two individuals of the appropriate sexes or mating types can produce fertile offspring, typically by sexual reproduction." But as a definition, in the mathematical sense, this just doesn't work, at all. One obvious shortcoming is that every infertile individual forms a species by itself, by this definition.
But the main shortcoming is that on casual inspection, it looks like it's defining sets of organisms: the set of rabbits, the set of horses, etc. But it is not, because these sets don't exist. Let A0 be a rabbit. A0's parents are themselves rabbits, and the parents of those rabbits were themselves rabbits, and so on. But rabbits haven't existed forever, and at some point we reach an ancestor An of our initial rabbit that we would no longer consider a rabbit: species(An) /= species(A0) (where for all X: species(X) is a set). But this did not happen through some break in continuity: at any point, we would consider an organism and its offspring as belonging to the same species. But then this individual An must be of the same species as A0: species(An) = species(A{n-1}) = ... = species(A0). We have a contradiction.
So strictly logically speaking, this definition is useless. Nevertheless, the concept of species is clearly a useful concept that helps us communicate things about the real world. How do we explain this?
When we'd program a video game which has rabbits in it, we'd probably neatly define some data structure or class named "Rabbit" which simulates the rabbit. But this is not how reality works: we just have a bunch of particles that are interacting which eachother. Crucially, from these particle interactions emerge certain patterns which we can observe. Our concept of "rabbit" is not imposed on the universe from the top down, on the contrary: our brains pick up on recurring patterns in the particle soup around us, and giving these recurring patterns names helps us communicate, and therefore, survive (this is what we call abstraction; I have another long rant on this forum about abstraction, if you're interested: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24429749). But no two instances of such a pattern are identical, and exactly where one pattern ends and the next begins is somewhat arbitrary. Any strict definition of "rabbit" is doomed to fail.
Think of it as neural net classification: each object in the universe has some "rabbitness" value. The keyboard I'm typing this on has very low rabbitness. A fox has significantly higher rabbitness (it breathes, has four legs, two ears, etc) but still not very high rabbitness. Crucially, rabbitness is completely determined by some distance metric from earlier examples. So rabbitness is determined by _relative_ distance to earlier examples, not by anything absolute. We draw lines, somewhat arbitrarely, in this space and name them to help us communicate (such as: anything over .95 rabbitness is a rabbit). But these names are but tools and different names or different borders can be used in different contexts.
So back to sex/gender. Within the particle soup around us, we recognise the pattern "human" (or any sexually reproducing animal). We notice another pattern in these humans: they seem to fall apart into two categories based on their role in reproduction and physical appearance. We name these categories "male" and "female". But again, the borders are fuzzy and no hard definition can be found. Not all men have penises, there are women with beards, etc. Eventually, we discover DNA and find out that men tend to have XY chromosomes and women XX chromosomes. So do we have our hard definition of gender/sex now? Not at all. Not every person has either XX or XY. There are also "male-presenting" people with XX chromosomes (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XX_male_syndrome).
So attempting to define sex based on chromosomes falls flat, and leads to absurdities. Suppose you become friends with a male-presenting XX, who does not know he has XX chromosomes. He has male genitalia, has identified as male his entire life, and has been addressed as he/him his entire life. Then he gets tested for infertility and finds out he has XX chromosomes, and tells you this. Will you now insist to your friend that he is a woman? Will you insist on adressing him with female pronouns? Does he have to change his gender on his passport?
I would find it absurd, not to mention cruel, to do so. We're in a situation here where it seems more productive to accept that we use overloaded terms to mean different things at different levels of abstraction. Sure, on a genetic level he's "female". But he's male in how society interfaces with him, which is much more relevant to him in most situations. So why not just say "he is male", and only discuss his genetic makeup if and when that is pertinent?
I read your wall of text. You make some interesting points. But I will be honest with you: I also used to think like you, in these long convoluted ways where I was trying to explain everything I saw via programming and all sorts of mathematical extrapolations, and I for a time I believed my own bit. But then I realised: it was all cp and youthful arrogance.
In a nutshell, you are nitpicking. You can always define an arbitrary scale at which nothing matters: you used time in your rabbit example very effectively to discount the usefulness of the "rabbit category". Or you used these XX males as a counter example to a rigid definition of gender. You even yourself realise that this way of thinking is completely useless as you yourself say that the category of species is extremely useful:
> So strictly logically speaking, this definition is useless. Nevertheless, the concept of species is clearly a useful concept that helps us communicate things about the real world. How do we explain this?
I can explain this for you: you are thinking life is logical and "discreet" because you are a programmer and this is what you were taught. It is not: life is... continuous! Like the integral: each point has measure 0 but when you "add" a transfinite amount of 0 measure points you get... non-zero area! This resolves your rabbit paradox: each generation of rabbit is a point with measure 0 since its "difference" is so small with the generation before and after that it we can model it as 0...
Or second model: Rabbit_n = 0.9999 * Rabbit_{n+1}
After 100 generations: similarity is already 0.99
After 1000 generations: similarity is 0.90
After 10000 generations: similarity is 0.36
Tadaa: problem solved. So don't think so hard about this, use your common sense and realise that most people are men and most people are women and a few edge cases do not matter for practical purposes. And this is the crux of the matter: we need to make decisions. Hence we do what you very well describe: we categorise the particle soup around us and we act. So the usefulness of categories/abstractions CAN ONLY EVER BE MEASURED BY THEIR USEFULNESS FOR DECISION MAKING (sorry for caps I but want to emphasize). When I say decision making I mean almost everything: from deciding what sandwich to eat to deciding on how to prove Fermat's last theorem. If categories help you to do things, they are useful. End of story (for me, you can go write a book about this, make sure to send me a free copy).
Finally, this is also all bs so don't take it too seriously: I am a person on the internet.
> you are thinking life is logical and "discreet" because you are a programmer and this is what you were taught.
Perhaps I did not express myself clearly, but my point is _the exact opposite_! Life is indeed not logical and discreet, as witnessed by the fact that vaguely defined categories are clearly tremendously useful. But these categories become misleading when one makes the mistake of identifying them with logically defined sets (ie when one thinks in logically reductive ways, the style of thinking you attribute to me). This is the mistake that I claim to identify in listenallyall's post.
They make the claim that XX _equals_ female and XY _equals_ male. To be clear, I don't actually think that the statement "men have XY chromosomes and women have XX chromosomes" is wrong or must be qualified every time. It's "mostly right", in the same sense that Newtonian physics is "mostly right", and adequate for most discussions where you're not looking at the edge cases of sex or gender, which is most such discussions.
But when talking about transgender people (it has not been explicitly stated that this is the subject of our discussion, but given the context I think it's fair to assume that it is), we are arguing _exactly about the edge cases_ of the gender categories. listenallyall's argument boils down to: the "male" set and the "female" set are clearly, logically defined by sex chromosomes, therefore there are no edge cases, and (speculating a bit from here on about what their point is) trans people just have to suck it up and stop claiming they are what they are not.
This is an argument based on the assumption that life is logical and discreet, that the universe has some obligation to provide you with neatly defined sets to help you understand the world. My way of showing that this is wrong is by making two arguments:
1) Life is not logical and discreet, as I tried to illustrate with the rabbit example (and I think you and I are making exactly the same point there),
2) If you go along with this discreet, "logical" reasoning, you end up with absurdities (the XX-presenting male example). I think this is where my post perhaps got a bit confusing: I am _not_ arguing for this style of thinking, but I'm going along with it to show that it is unproductive. It is undeniable that if you accept listenallyall's argument, you must either insist that a male-presenting XX is actually a woman, or be logically inconsistent.
A far more useful way to see gender is like the rabbit example. You have a bunch of sex-related characteristics which are bimodally distributed, and from that you can have a "maleness" and "femaleness" value for every person. How you weight individual variables (like "broadness of shoulders") is a bit arbitrary. Sex chromosomes are just one variable among many in this equation, with no special status. In fact, they are for most discussions probably one of the least relevant factors, as evidenced by the fact that we got by with our "male" and "female" categories for millennia without even knowing about chromosomes, and in everyday life our views of sex and gender don't seem to be particularly informed by chromosomes. We can then move on and treat gender as a "duck typed" property: if someone presents as a certain gender, refers to themselves as a certain gender, etc, they are that gender.
In conservative circles, statements like "gender is a social construct" are basically a meme, a clear proof that progressives are detached from reality. To be clear, I'm not sure I fully agree with that statement either. But for _decision making_, this is clearly a more productive view than "gender = chromosomes". I have XY chromosomes (I think) and a penis, but this is for most practical purposes much less relevant than the fact that I interact with society through the "male" interface (although I appreciate that I can use urinals). Why should I be not be free to choose which interface to interact through?
The progressive argument to treat transgender people as their preferred gender is the stronger argument for any sort of practical decision making: to refuse to do so causes needless suffering in people who have done no wrong. Insisting that a trans woman is actually a man, should be treated as a man, should be referred to with male pronouns, etc, makes the lives of these people significantly worse, and makes no one else's life better. It is also no different than insisting a male-presenting XX is a woman, which I think is also obviously cruel.
The only conservative argument I've ever heard against this is based on precisely the reductive thinking you attribute to me: to insist that one variable (chromosomes) out of many is not just more heavily weighted than what is justifiable for any practical purpose, but actually _strictly defines_ gender, ignoring _all other factors_. They then throw themselves up as champions of science and reason, because clearly progressives are detached from reality. This style of thinking is both wrong (as in, it leads to inconsistencies and is based on a high school level understanding of science and epistemology) and unproductive (you don't gain anything in terms of practical decision making).
> Finally, this is also all bs so don't take it too seriously: I am a person on the internet.
No worries, I enjoy these kinds of discussion, otherwise I wouldn't spend any time on it. But I can't help but take it somewhat seriously too. The outcome of this debate doesn't affect me very much, but there are people whose lives will be worse if "my side" loses the debate.
If we are constantly going on about how bad one side is (fwiw, I basically agree with you about that), then it will only lead to more division and resentment. Based on my in group's behavior, it seems like most people who believe this think that continuing to publicly shame and wag fingers at the other side is how we get to a better world. And it so clearly is not.
I'm frustrated by this, but also truly searching for solutions or alternative explanations.
Simple solution is to not try to "solve" anything. Just be accepting of people who hold different opinions. I'm sure you would be tolerant of someone who believes Mohammed was the messenger of God. Nutty beliefs don't get much more serious than that when you consider the content of those messages.
Good points, and I largely agree with you. My "both sides" observation was more to do with how I see so many people willing to disown each other in our individual lives', not so much about broader policies. There is no common ground to be found between believing or not believing in science. But there is common ground for us as individuals to see the humanity in each other.
> Yes, if you're red/republican/conservative/right, you're voting for those things, you're signing off on them.
I wish I were able to convey this better to some stubborn family members. The argument I hear is that they are voting for partial representation of their conservative values, and they are aware of the downsides of this choice. But I don't buy it. I think they are undervaluing the negative costs of that vote, or completely ignoring them.
> Only one side denies medical consensus on vaccines
You’re incorrect about this one AFAIK. From the Safety of Childhood MMR Vaccine section of [0]:
> There are no differences between party groups about this issue. Moderates are a bit more likely than either conservatives or liberals to say that childhood vaccines are generally safe.
Totally agreed. The biggest problem in the political discussion is false equivalency.
If one side doesn't believe in truth, facts and science, and the other side defends them as fundamental to everything... than those are not equivalent positions.
This has been largely a one-sided war on decency. Don't kill the messenger.
The disabled reporter example isn't what it seems. Trump had done that identical style of mocking to many non-disabled individuals before doing it to the disabled individual, most likely he didn't even know the reporter was disabled, it was just a way that Trump mocks people. The media framed it as though Trump was specifically picking on his disability even though this historical context (which they omitted on purpose) makes that explanation unlikely.
This is, of course, no defence of Trump's behavior in this instance.
maybe it has something to do with career war-mongers and sanctioneers campaigning on their 'decency'
or
pathological liars who waged a vindictive, no holds barred war against whistleblowers espousing themselves to be defenders of the 'truth'
i do not have to like or support trump to think that joe biden is a lifelong robber barron and his return to normalcy will be marked by suffering around the world and absolute blindness towards the the deaths of despair happening within our own country.
Well said. The “both sides” thinking only serves to take us even more the tipping point of a scale that’s been moved FAR too much to the extreme right. America isn’t a left/right nation anymore - it’s a far far right and center nation.
Only one side denies climate change. Only one side denies medical consensus on vaccines and pandemic prevention techniques. Only one side is okay with mocking a disabled reporter (to pick one egregious example among countless).
Yes, if you're red/republican/conservative/right, you're voting for those things, you're signing off on them.
We don't need to "come together and find common ground" on those issues. We need to figure out how truth and decency lost their footing and slipped off the center stage.