Comment by reaperducer
5 years ago
I realized that I can't actually say ANYTHING interesting on this platform without offending someone.
The only thing worse than people who are offended by everything is having to be afraid of offending over-sensitive people.
There's a lot of variety in my crowd
Which is a good thing. It's how it always was. You surrounded yourself with lots of different people with varying opinions. It's how you learned things. It was called being an adult.
Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Antonin Scolia were polar opposites on the issues. But they were also very good friends. Because they were adults. They weren't children who had to surround themselves with familiar things that reinforce their own views of the world.
I remember in college, we were encouraged to seek out differing opinions. I remember a guy who once chastised me for not seeking a broad enough range of opinions. He said, "What's wrong with you? Don't you want to be challenged?" My understanding is that sort of thing would never happen on a college campus today.
Be who you are. If people can't respect you for having a different opinion, they're not adults, and they're certainly not "friends," Facebook or otherwise.
I agree with the spirit of your words. I think that the subtext of your post (or at least people that espouse similar things on the internet) is that this is the fault of a certain brand of American politics (left leaning, "SJW" types) that don't engage with many right-leaning people.
The frustrating (and silly) thing is that this argument is used a lot to attack left-leaning folks who _do_ engage with many people whose experience and world view are very different from them... like people who are homeless, immigrants from other countries, people who are racially minoritized, people who are disabled.
For many people who don't experience those kinds of life experiences, building relationships with those folks can be really tough and bring into question a lot of the foundations of their world view.
The argument that left-leaning people won't engage with right-leaning people often feels like it's used as an excuse for right-leaning folks to use rhetoric and hold positions that routinely disenfranchise and threaten the safety of the kind of people that left-leaning people have worked to empathize with and build relationships without consequence. That the people who continue to have right-leaning views don't seem interested in putting in the same _effort_ to empathize and build relationships with people other than themselves is both hypocritical and not surprising to me.
Finally, engaging with "challenging" opinions is all well and good as a mental exercise, but building and maintaining a relationship with someone is a project that requires continuous work (even as just a friendship) and I think it's worthwhile to be selective in the people who you put in that kind of work for.
Agreed. Parent seems to think that engaging in rhetoric is universially fun and useful endeavor that will expand our mind and better us as a person. This is not true on a number of issues.
Disenfranchising issues (such as gay rights, police brutality, immigration, right to abortion, etc.) is not only theoretical to some people, but a real threat to their lives and well being. A person playing the devils advocate arguing for limits on immigration to an immigrant is not only annoying but actively threatening to an immigrant at risk of being deported.
A number of people have full rights to be insulted when points are raised on a number of subjects. In fact they also have the rights to react angrily if the subject is a direct threat to their lives and livelihood. People arguing things often don’t realize that there is a person on the other end of the debate, a person with feelings, like love and compassion, but also anger and disgust. If a subject threatens or belittles, them being insulted or angry is the natural response.
> "A person playing the devils advocate arguing for limits on immigration to an immigrant is not only annoying but actively threatening to an immigrant at risk of being deported."
This is nonsense. I'm an immigrant who argues for limits. Certain subjects being (subjectively) sensitive to talk about doesn't mean they're unproductive because of it. In fact we'll never get anywhere if we don't talk about them.
Limiting speech arbitrarily, especially over very assumptive beliefs of offense, is a terrible thing. You're not forced to participate in any discussion you don't want to be in but people have a right to discuss it.
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You can't just label some topics as "Disenfranchising issues" and then cease to have debate on the topic. There's always going to be a debate on to what extent should society go out of its way to enfranchise people and to what extent is the onus on the individual." You can't just shutdown these topics because you want more than others are willing to give. You can't label people hateful just because they don't want to be generous and you certainly can't shutdown the debate on the extent to which people are entitled to generosity or frugality.
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Some topics are sensitive, but that's not a reason to stop discussing these issues. We need dialogue or the political divide will just keep growing.
> Disenfranchising issues (such as gay rights, police brutality, immigration, right to abortion, etc.) is not only theoretical to some people,
Immigration is a zero sum game. No developed country can accept all immigrants wanting to live there. Neither leftist nor more conservative immigration policy gives every immigrant who wants to the opportunity to enter the United States. The claim that left-leaning individual's immigration policy is not 'disenfranchising' is laughable. For every person entering from South America, some number of people cannot enter from another country. You can say this is not the case all you want, but given that immigration does put pressure on a country's resources, this is always true. Similarly, if you let in everyone from South Asia, you will disenfranchise some South Americans, etc.
You can't just say something is disenfranchising and thus non-negotiable. For example, you say the pro-life position is disenfranchising because -- I assume -- you believe it takes away the right of a woman to not have a child. However, a pro-life person would make the obvious argument that actually the pro-choice position is disenfranchising because there is a person -- the child -- who is being killed without having a say in it. Should the pro-choice position now become unmentionable?
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Those disenfranchising issues have affected people on the other side. Those parents probably know a few.
Getting angry is natural, but anger is easy. Advancement of the cause doesn't entail getting likes, hearts or clap-backs. The real work is in persuasion.
You’re talking about _illegal immigration_.
Legal immigrants, which is the majority and the ones generally designed by the word “immigrants” (without qualitatif), aren’t being deported. Legal and illegal immigrations are two different topics (social, political, economical), it doesn’t really make sense to mix them.
Also I’m an immigrant myself and argue for some level of immigration control, and that’s the case for every single expat I know.
Being angry about an opinion is fine. That doesn't mean you should try to stop people from talking about it.
Save from the feedback of concrete actions being taken (which you want to avoid), discussion by a diverse crowd is the only way to properly surface the harmfulness of a viewpoint.
Making an opinion politically incorrect won't stop people from holding it, they may on the contrary feel validated by it.
As we provide platforms to everyone to broadcast their opinions on everything , what I foresee is that if we continue to keep generating these gazillions of data points every second all the time then soon AI’s will be needed to do the analysis for us and complement or help human policy makers to make the right decisions. We already see this with things like sentiment analysis. Welcome to the singularity .. I for once can’t wait to have our constantly bickering politicians replaced with AI agents whose sole job is to work for the people and who can be overidden by executive authority only as a last resort.
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> Disenfranchising issues (such as gay rights, police brutality, immigration, right to abortion, etc.) is not only theoretical to some people, but a real threat to their lives and well being.
To achieve long lasting social changes you have to have a dialogue and convince the other party, if you think the entirety of your opinion is so morally justified that even having further debate is morally wrong then you can never achieve permanent social change it will just be temporary.
> Disenfranchising issues (such as gay rights, police brutality, immigration, right to abortion, etc.) is not only theoretical to some people, but a real threat to their lives and well being. A person playing the devils advocate arguing for limits on immigration to an immigrant is not only annoying but actively threatening to an immigrant at risk of being deported.
There is a limit at which this is true, but most discussion of these issues doesn’t encroach into that territory. As an immigrant from a Muslim country I don’t feel “threats to my safety” when Trump talks about Islamic fundamentalism or extra scrutiny over immigration from certain countries. (It would be pretty odd to declare those topics off-limits, seeing as how the Muslim country I’m from has taken aggressive measures to fight the same exact fundamentalist forces.) I might feel differently if we were talking about putting Muslims in internment camps. But nobody is doing that, even though the left is acting like they are.
Does the US have “too many immigrants?” Until 2007, a plurality of Hispanic Americans (many of whom are immigrants) said “yes.” https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/02/19/latinos-hav.... Even today, 1 in 4 do. Only 14% say we have “too few immigrants” (which is the view de facto embraced by our current policies, which will lead to increased numbers of immigrants.) Given those views, it’s bizarre to treat discussion of immigration issues as off-limits.
You see this on issue after issue: leftists declare huge swaths of issues as off limits for discussion even to the point of excluding discussion of positions held by large swaths of the groups at issue. For example, 37% of women want to restrict Roe further or overrule it completely, compared to 38% who want to loosen its restrictions either somewhat or significantly. Another 16% want to maintain the status quo. http://maristpoll.marist.edu/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/NPR_.... Supermajorities of women, moreover, support measures like waiting periods.
Or, consider “police brutality.” An editor at the NYT was fired for running a op-ed by Tom Cotton advocating a law-and-order response to violence following the death of George Floyd. Recent polling shows that a majority of Hispanic people, who are disproportionately the target of aggressive policing, think “the breakdown of law and order” is a “bigger problem” than “systemic racism.” Large majorities of Black and Hispanic people want to either maintain existing levels of policing, or further increase them.
In practice, it’s your approach that’s “disenfranchising.” That rule makes the majority uncomfortable with expressing anything but the most left-leaning views with respect to a minority group. For example, Ilhan Omar and Linda Saraour say expectations of assimilation are “racist.” This is not even a mainstream opinion among American Muslims, who are one of the most assimilated groups in the country. (To the point that a majority voted for George W. Bush in 2000.) But a big fraction of well-meaning non-Muslims don’t want to be called racist. So they feel comfortable amplifying anti-assimilationist views, but not pro-assimilationist ones. Since non-Muslims are a huge majority of people, that dramatically distorts and biases the debate around Muslim assimilation in a manner that doesn’t reflect the views of Muslims themselves.
That phenomenon has had a real impact on the debate over abortion. A quarter of Democratic women want to further restrict Roe or overrule it. That viewpoint is completely unrepresented among Democratic men.
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This is what the guy is talking about.
You're on the left. Your current political pet issues aren't something you're willing to debate - instead you're announcing that anyone who disagrees with you is a "threat".
A person playing the devils advocate arguing for limits on immigration
Limits on immigration aren't a "devil's advocacy" position, they're the de-facto standard around the world for obvious and common sense reasons.
This is why the modern left is so awful. You take something that every single place in the world does and describe it as being basically the same as clubbing someone over the head. You refuse to even attempt to engage with the vast majority who think your position is nonsense.
This is why "social cooling" happens, if we accept the use of that term. It is a problem created by people like you.
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On all of those issues there are at least two takes-and they’ve flip-flopped over time. People on the right have a different take on how to alleviate homelessness (self empowerment vs state dependence). On immigration (remember the time Bernie _didn't_ want immigrants to take jobs from locals?) minorities (also about the extent of state help vs other empowerment vehicles).
There are varied ways to address the issues from different points of view. Parties have switched from one view to the opposing view over time, so by proxy of this we know there isn’t a “right” way and a “wrong” way but rather opposing philosophies that stress one thing over another. Why does one work better now and why will a different one work better tomorrow?
First of all, note that I did not talk at all about parties. I talked about left and right. Historically, the parties that represent right and left (or how much to the right and left they skew) has changed; which ideas fall in the category of left and right thinking have not as much.
It seems that your stance is based on the idea that a large group of people simply adopts one viewpoint or another arbitrarily, that those solutions have not changed over time, and that because of this we should treat them with equal merit. I believe this is wrong, for a number of different reasons.
First, it ignores the outcomes of the actual policies as well as the framework of thinking that it supports. Someone who has a "different take" whose outcome changes whether I or my friends can afford health care or not is not an "equal but opposite" philosophy.
To build on that, because it ignores the actual outcomes and treats all ideas as equal, it supports a framework of hyper-partisan thinking, the idea that ideology is about who you are loyal to. In this framework, your belief makes sense: just because we're loyal to different parties doesn't mean we can't be friends! But again, it ignores the very real implications of those beliefs.
Finally, it also concludes that solutions to these problems, and the people who are in charge of supporting them, cannot evolve and improve, only be renewed as a way to for members of a party to pledge loyalty. Bernie is not a perfect leftist, and has certainly had some shitty takes and policies; sometimes people get better (and sometimes they don't). As our understanding of the plight of the common people grows and adjusts to the new realities we are faced with, different solutions will evolve on the left, and that is good.
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> remember the time Bernie _didn't_ want immigrants to take jobs from locals?
I'm plucking this bit out because I don't think that's a good summary of his position. He still doesn't "want immigrants to take jobs from locals." He's concerned about corporations abusing immigrant labor to depress American wages. He's long voted for bills to protect immigrants, even while being wary of increasing low-skill immigration. He's trying to find a middle ground between labor and immigration, and that isn't easy.
For an in-depth look:
https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2020/2/25/21143931/b...
I think a huge part of the difference is people's perspective on which is worse: false positives or false negatives.
Warning: opinions follow
To reduce scope to something like welfare for illustrative purposes, there's actually pretty broad agreement from both sides that some people just need help through no fault of their own and that at some level, there should be some kind of program to provide that help. And there's similar agreement that people who don't have such a need should be prevented from intentionally gaming/milking a system (getting benefits without a legitimate need). The interesting parts come in two other scenarios: 1) someone who legitimately needs help and doesn't get it, and 2) someone who doesn't need help but does get it. Those are both wasteful and unjust and we'd all like to reduce those cases to as close to zero as possible. But the left and the right disagree about which case is more unjust. The right would like to focus on efficiency and self-sufficiency, so the greater injustice is fostering an environment where you can get assistance without deserving it (which perpetuates and/or deepens the dependence), and you're willing to concede that this means some people who need help won't get it. The left, on the other hand, would like to focus on covering everyone who needs help, and anyone slipping through the cracks is an injustice, but this means that you have to accept the inefficiency of allowing some people who don't need/deserve assistance to get it, and you just shrug and say that's the cost of providing a good safety net.
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How do you empower someone without helping them?
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The issue isn't that they don't have a different rationale, it's the particulars of what that rationale is built on. "State dependence" alleviates suffering when implemented in earnest, "self-empowerment" perpetuates inequality and privileges luck and momentum over innovation and (paradoxically) moment-to-moment hard work.
In America, there has always been one side on the right side of history and one on the wrong, as far as health and happiness go. People and institutions switch sides, but the sides exist all the same. It comes down to how considerate you are of your neighbors, here and abroad. It's baffling that such a rich society continues to engage interpersonally with a scarcity mindset. Bootstraps are a myth; give until you can't and then ask for what you need. If we still then have racial issues, class issues, gender issues, religious issues, then the problem goes deeper than economics, and we'll need to face that with the same level of compassion.
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I think the current trend of not engaging with those who are politically different cuts across the political spectrum. There is an intense trend to stay within ideological bubbles at the moment, and to try to censor voices that do not align with one's own leanings. People both liberal and conservative just get _angry_ at anyone with a different political or social idea, and write them off as "bad people", which is not productive. They also tend to leap to the conclusion that if you disagree about one idea, you must adhere to the opposite ideology on every issue. As a moderate person, this is an extremely tiresome experience I have over and over again with people of both liberal and conservative leanings.
This comment is the most conniving one I have heard in awhile. To paraphrase, your argument is convincing and it’s similar to those who blame it on the “SJW” types so let’s shift the argument on over to those supposed people.
So many assumptions piled onto assumptions about people.
> So many assumptions piled onto assumptions about people.
Spot on.
It's basically a preemptive strike before anyone gets the idea to point at cancel culture and the like.
Reminds me of “I can tolerate anything except the outgroup”: https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/30/i-can-tolerate-anythin...
I don't know. Do left-wing people really put so much effort in empathizing with minorities, or is it rather that they come with a complete theory of how the minorities think, and only interact with those who agree with the theory?
How much would a white left-wing person be willing to debate with e.g. a conservative immigrant? Would they treat them as an equal, or even defer to their lived experience? Or would they simply find another, less conservative immigrant, who would not oppose their world-view, and choose this one to be the speaker for the minority?
In my experience, there is not much difference between left-wing and right-wing people in willingness to help oppressed people. Seems to me they mostly differ in style: a left-wing person would probably create a non-profit organization and also write about what the government should do, a right-wing person would probably work under the umbrella of some religious group and also write about how individuals should help themselves and each other. On each side, a few people would actually do something, more people would talk about how someone else should do something, and most wouldn't really care. I am not saying the sides are exactly balanced; I am just saying empathising with people (but also twisting their opinions to better fit your ideology) exists on both sides.
(By coincidence, today I saw a debate where a strongly left-wing person dismissed some complaints of a marginalized person as "anti-scientific", without actually addressing the substance of their argument, just because that person disagreed with some organization that has a mission to help this marginalized community. No more detais, because it happened in a private conversation, it's just a funny coincidence that first I read this, then I switch a browser tab and read about how empathetic left-wing people are. Some of them are, some of them are not.)
I am not necessarily saying that leftists are a panacea of altruist thinking, having washed away their colonial upbringing in their dialogues with a theoretical minority. ;)
Rather, I understand leftist thought to be rooted in questioning hierarchy and power structures, which I believe leads to more readily seeking solidarity with those that are not as well off as they are.
> By coincidence, today I saw a debate where a strongly left-wing person dismissed some complaints of a marginalized person
This does sound like a funny happenstance. My original reply was about this same sort of funny coincidence in reverse; how I often see the left critiqued as being "intolerant" when I frequently see them lifting and amplifying the voices of those who are disenfranchised by the system that they materially benefit from.
> How much would a white left-wing person be willing to debate with e.g. a conservative immigrant?
First, debates are not typical discourse. In my experience, debates are meant to be a show of virtue. Whose virtues you're being weighed against will greatly determine your behavior or whether you even decide to participate at all. I think that Hacker News values sound, well written arguments, which is why I am here posting. :)
Therefore, I think that given the propensity toward identity politics (from both sides) and the difficulty in interrogating the root of the beliefs that immigrant without appearing to be questioning the validity of them, I (as a white leftist) would prefer not to debate them. So, yes, I would rather propose someone whose lived experience might be more similar to theirs - perhaps a left-leaning immigrant - specifically because I would be afraid of either appearing weak in the eyes of right-wing spectators by deferring to their lived experience, or seem like an asshole because I am questioning the validity of their experience. It would be a PR nightmare. :)
In a private, personal setting (i.e. not a debate) I think that talking to your hypothetical conservative immigrant would probably be a great opportunity for me to learn about their experience and explore the root of their beliefs. I hope I would get to share mine as well.
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The bigger problem is left-leaning people getting harassed and immediately flagged as right/alt-right/-ist (i.e., "not one of us") when merely disagreeing with or challenging dogma. See Joe Rogan, JK Rowling, Sam Harris, Bret Weinstein, Richard Dawkins, Steven Pinker for some high profile examples.
Don't toe the line and echo approved orthodoxy? You're the enemy! This is extreme tribal behavior.
As a result, there is a chilling effect and a lot liberals no longer feel welcome on the left[1][2]. Certainly don't feel welcome to speak or think openly. This is incredibly regressive, damaging to liberalism and enlightenment values. Seriously, not being able to challenge your own side and engage in dialectic will send us back to the dark ages.
1. https://taibbi.substack.com/p/the-left-is-now-the-right
2. https://taibbi.substack.com/p/the-left-is-now-the-right/comm...
Thinkers should instead crush tribalism, like this: http://blog.cr.yp.to/20160607-dueprocess.html
> a lot liberals no longer feel welcome on the left
"the left" isn't a discrete thinkspace. There is a political spectrum, which isn't linear. The individuals mentioned are still relatively leftist, regardless of whoever is critical or engaging in other disparaging acts. Implying there is 1 left-wing or 1 right-wing is tribal behavior.
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This was addressed above, in the bit talking about people failing to put the same effort into empathising and understanding people who historically receive little to no empathy or understanding whatsoever. Ignore our personal feelings on the matter for a moment: do we honestly believe JK Rowling has made an effort to converse with, understand, and empathize with trans women?
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"Right wingers" don't have a monopoly on ignorance. People of every ideology are unwilling to listen to opposing viewpoints, read controversial books, and rate movies based on the social context rather than the artistic content. Pointing at the worse parts of only one ideology is counterproductive.
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> It is also currently right wing that seeks to suppress actual fields of study on Universities.
Care to share your feelings on the far left push to suppress science and mathematics?
> And working in more conservative environment, I was careful not to say things that could be constructed as near-feminist, because that would lower my "trustworthiness" in other arenas too.
The opposite is certainly true today in corporate America and higher education. Making an argument for the existence of a biological basis for sex or denying that all whites are automatically racist is a no-go.
The ideas that the far left is trying to suppress are very much not conservative. It’s an assault on objectivity and rational thought.
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This is really eloquently put. A concrete example: I grew up in Minnesota in an area with a lot of Somali refugees. When the Trump travel ban went into effect, many of them were cut off from their families. I have friends that had to choose between packing up their lives to immigrate to Germany or never seeing their family again.
In that context, I'm not particularly interested in engaging with the idea that the travel ban is A Good Thing Actually. And I don't think I'd maintain a friendship with someone who thinks that it is. I do not consider this a character flaw.
> The frustrating (and silly) thing is that this argument is used a lot to attack left-leaning folks who _do_ engage with many people whose experience and world view are very different from them... like people who are homeless, immigrants from other countries, people who are racially minoritized, people who are disabled
I think there are a lot more people who think they do this than actually do this. Left-leaning spaces are some of the most homogenous around. I can’t tell you how many left-leaning people I know who were genuinely shocked and surprised that, when it came time to vote, “people of color” didn’t like Elizabeth Warren. Their perception of getting to know “immigrants from other countries” and “people who are racially minoritized” rested entirely on interacting with immigrants and minorities who travel in the same rarified elite circles as themselves and hold the same views. “Center people of color” during the primary became “f--k moderates” after the convention, without a hint of irony.
Of course I’m painting with a very broad brush! Obviously not all left-leaning people are like that. But I do think there is a lack of appreciation for the relationships right-leaning folks have with people who are different from themselves. One of the most racially integrated places I’ve ever been is rural Texas. It’s a function of economics and geography. Left-leaning cities are highly segregated—educated left leaning people generally don’t live and work alongside immigrants and racial minorities.
I do actually agree with you. It is very easy to be radical in your beliefs (in either direction) when you don't need to interact with the people that they effect. There are plenty of "ivory tower" leftists. The difference is that I do believe that those leftists are seeking to find solidarity with the oppressed, though not always successfully. Sometimes they miss the mark, and there are plenty examples of shitty behavior, but I think that they're heading in the right direction.
I also think that it's unfortunate it's so easy to mistake a critique like that as an attack of the left as a whole. Leftist policy should always have the goal of materially making peoples lives better. We should ruthlessly measure and criticize whether we are in fact succeeding in that, both by the numbers and by the lived experience of the people they effect.
The current form of discourse in America is so hyper-partisan as to make that sort of critique almost impossible to do in public, as it comes off as a show of weakness rather than an opportunity for evolution. It's painful.
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A missionary may also engage with people with different experiences than their own, but they're only doing so to cement their own world view. When they come across someone they disagree with, they'll just label them as evil without thinking about it.
To be clear, I don't think that it's a right vs left thing. I think that social media incentivizes people to behave poorly. Ben Shapiro had an enlightening discussion with a founder of Vox about the nature of polarization [1], but that's not why he's famous or how he makes money. His audience wants to see him bash unprepared liberals, so that's what he's going to do. Even if he doesn't, some other pundit will simply take his place.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pMOUiWCjkn4
You just painted all missionaries with a pretty broad brush.
> A missionary may also engage with people with different experiences than their own, but they're only doing so to cement their own world view. When they come across someone they disagree with, they'll just label them as evil without thinking about it.
As a former Mormon missionary, I couldn't disagree more. I didn't meet many people who were interested in the Mormon church, but I didn't consider them evil. If anything, it was my views on my religion and personal spirituality that evolved enormously over the course of the two years, far more than the 19 years previous or the many since. I learned a lot about myself and my worldview. Certainly a lot more than anyone changed their worldview by talking to me.
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> I think that the subtext of your post (or at least people that espouse similar things on the internet) is that this is the fault of a certain brand of American politics (left leaning, "SJW" types) that don't engage with many right-leaning people.
That wasn’t the subtext at all. Interesting that you think the shoe fits so well, though.
I tried to couch my reply as not assuming intent on your part specifically, but rather my attempt at pointing out a pattern I have seen other people engage in and be subject to.
When looking at this and your other reply to me elsewhere in this thread, it does not feel like you're engaging me in good faith.
> Which is a good thing. It's how it always was. You surrounded yourself with lots of different people with varying opinions. It's how you learned things. It was called being an adult.
This is a load of gilded age nonsense. There's never been any point in history where people deliberately exposed themselves to uncomfortable truths about people they considered other as part of "growing up".
I'd really challenge you to think about when you think this was. Was it in the 80s while gay people were dying of aids while straight people ignored their plight?
The 70s when mainstream american society treated anti-war activists as terrorists?
The 50s and 60s when white people literally moved out of cities and into suburbs to get away from black people?
What you're experiencing isn't "people failing to communicate with people with diverse views," but the internet finally forcing people to coexist with social groups they could just ignore until now. You have to exist on the same site as people who have been deeply harmed by the systems that benefit you and you're scared of that anger and those people's unwillingness to accept your desire to stick your head in the sand like your parents could.
I believe the parent comment is describing how most people had friends of various backgrounds that they saw physically and communicated with freely - instead of having a social filter over digital connections that blocked them immediately before they ever really knew them.
> "internet finally forcing people to coexist with social groups they could just ignore until now"
How so? The internet has made it much easier to isolate and block than ever before. That's exactly why there's so much division today.
> "you're scared of that anger and those people's unwillingness"
What are you talking about here?
> I believe the parent comment is describing how most people had friends of various backgrounds that they saw physically and communicated with freely - instead of having a social filter over digital connections that blocked them immediately before they ever really knew them.
In person or not, everyone has a social filter on who they interact with. Your wealth, race, gender, orientation, interests, and location all act as filters against who you'll interact with, let alone be friends with. If you go to Harvard, how much relative opportunity do you think that gives you to befriend someone who isn't a rich white person? Especially, ya know, when only white people (white men, even) could even go to Harvard.
These filters are more or less permeable by the culture and scope of your life, but if you think there's some magical moment in the past when white people by an large all had black friends or rich people all had poor friends, you're dreaming.
It's easier now to experience perspectives alien to you by a country mile. It's also easier for them to intrude into your life.
Somehow, it's the most privileged people are the most likely to call this intrusion an attack. To call people wanting to re-establish boundaries with them a violation of their 'right to free speech'. Funny that.
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Farnam Street has a great blog post supporting what you just said:
That most people only express things to people that they thing would be accepting of what they said. Even if they might not agree with it, they'll at least accept that it's okay to hold those opinions.
Once you cross the line into "Expressing this opinion will cause negative social consequences to me" then people start self-censoring.
https://fs.blog/2020/09/spiral-of-silence/
Interesting how it ends with :
> In anonymous environments, the spiral of silence can end up reversing itself, making the most fringe views the loudest.
> Was it in the 80s while gay people were dying of aids while straight people ignored their plight?
Now in 2020s Gay people are accepted in the mainstream society.
> The 70s when mainstream american society treated anti-war activists as terrorists?
Anti-war activists are no longer treated as terrorists.
> The 50s and 60s when white people literally moved out of cities and into suburbs to get away from black people?
Segregation has ended.
All of these positive changes have come by "You surrounded yourself with lots of different people with varying opinions."
If the people were so rigid with their views as assume them to be then these positive changes would have never happened.
They actually largely came about because people protested and demanded to be heard.
Ignoring that your statements are optimistic at best. Some gay people are accepted into mainstream society. Anti-war activists absolutely have recently still been considered terrorists. Hell, anti-RACISM activists are actively being called terrorists by the government right now which goes to the next thing, which is that segregation as a legal concept has ended but turning neighbourhoods white is still absolutely a thing.
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It was true for me, individually, my entire life. Yes, a large segment of society have always been closed-minded. That doesn't make being open to new ideas and diverse friendships a bad thing.
At the same time that we are scoffing at the closed-mindedness of the past, in realms like politics, people were _better_ at working together across the aisle at some periods in History. Obviously, not the Civil War era, but for much of the early 20th century, as an example. Just because a lot of people are bad at something does not mean it isn't a laudable goal or practice.
> as people who have been deeply harmed by the systems
Most of the people attacking other people online haven't been deeply harmed by anything at all. They're just parroting what they hear in their online echo chambers. The signal to noise ratio in the discussion of issues that really do affect people is moving to mostly noise. Most of the time it's mountains from molehills, just to virtue signal for attention. Nothing constructive is coming from it. In fact, I'd say it's dividing people more than ever.
Yup, this stuff keeps rising up out of nowhere, and the messages are unnatural to the point that they’re likely engineered.
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>What you're experiencing isn't "people failing to communicate with people with diverse views," but the internet finally forcing people to coexist with social groups they could just ignore until now.
How is that working for you?. This kind of forced one dimensional thinking is the issue rather than having discussions and building consensus around these very complex and sensitive topics.
Hmm, didn't they treat the soldiers coming back from the war as terrorists. I'd say there are two sides to all those coins you are throwing around.
No, they didn't. Definitively. Such assertions, researched, turned out to be wholly fabricated precisely for rhetorical disinformation.
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>Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Antonin Scolia were polar opposites on the issues. But they were also very good friends. Because they were adults. They weren't children who had to surround themselves with familiar things that reinforce their own views of the world.
They also were both high status individuals who lived almost exclusively in the world of academic disagreement. It's not that difficult to be open-minded when closed-mindedness has little physical consequences for you.
If you live in a town in Myanmar where some heated discussion on the internet can turn into an ethnic riot and end with you dead on the street, or you're a Chinese shop owner and some garbage on the internet ends with your store being destroyed you get a little bit more careful about the "sticks and stones may break my bones but words will never hurt me" attitude.
The shifting attitude towards offense isn't so much the result of technology as the article suggests, or changing culture in the upper strata of society, it's democratisation of discourse to people for whom discourse actually matters in the real world. I think this is why the change has been so pronounced in the US in particular. In the US, average people for the longest amount of time had no ability to speak at all, all discourse was 'free' because it was free from consequence for the people who spoke, in practical terms.
"high status individuals who lived almost exclusively in the world of academic disagreement"
And yet it seems to me as an outside observer that it is precisely American academia that is obsessed with divisive ideologies. The shop owners seem to be way more pragmatic.
Please could you explain this bit a little further?
> The shifting attitude towards offense isn't so much the result of technology as the article suggests, or changing culture in the upper strata of society, it's democratisation of discourse to people for whom discourse actually matters in the real world. I think this is why the change has been so pronounced in the US in particular. In the US, average people for the longest amount of time had no ability to speak at all
Why did people in the US have no ability to speak? Or have less ability than those in some other country?
Or are you saying that social media took off because those in the US already felt free to speak and then a platform appeared?
>Why did people in the US have no ability to speak? Or have less ability than those in some other country?
because US public discourse has been, in the past, dominated by elites. Politics was largely the domain of the upper middle-class, politicians were largely homogenous demographically drawn from top-tier universities, the media recruited from similar institutions, and so on. So you have a significantly narrower spectrum in what is considered 'political debate' than what is actually present in the population, and the people who are doing the debating are largely shielded in their personal life from consequences because it's a sort of intellectual exercise and filling op-ed pages, not a matter of life and safety. That's what created the idea of 'free' debate, but rather it's insular debate. Culture in the US was predominantly created top-down.
Social media kind of blew this wide open in all directions. You see this take alot these days that Americans 'used to live in the same reality' and now don't, and it's the fault of liberals, conservatives, the media, postmodernism or whatever else. But really what's happening is that Americans never lived in the same reality, but finally middle America, and black lives matter, and metoo get to actually speak up. And that's going to cause much more heat than a bunch of harvard grads in a debate club, because now the people who actually have skin in the game are part of the discussion rather than just the subject of it.
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Good point. Supreme court justices have constitutionally protected, lifetime appointment job security. They can't really get fired for writing politically incorrect memos or dissenting opinions.
That's an interesting idea. As per your example, has the spread of social media affected other places in similar ways?
There are a few identifiable elements of toxicity in social memia.
i) The tendency to immaturity. (This is a social problem.)
ii) The tendency to loud stupidity and stubborn ignorance. Not all opinions need be heard and acknowledged. Reason is a habit that must be practised. (This is a cultural problem. At bottom, it is anti-intellectualism.)
iii) The very modern problem of "victimology discourse". Everyone has lived injustice because, frankly, people are exploitative and "the system" finds abuse to be profitable. But we cannot have free speech and productive exchanges if Victim Points overrule discussion.
In the end, the reflective person will disengage from the dungheap. This leaves only the dung.
I would add into this mix that the engagement algorithms social media uses to pick which posts show up in peoples timelines, go viral, etc. is very much a cyclic process that reinforces all of the social problems that you speak of.
No. The problem is that social media is like gathering all the people you know into a single room and shouting your thoughts at them. That's not how socializing is done. Not how the encouragement to seek out differing opinions in college works. Those things are done individually or in small groups. That works great, there can be a give and take where people can listen to each other. That's where social media badly breaks down.
> Which is a good thing. It's how it always was. You surrounded yourself with lots of different people with varying opinions. It's how you learned things. It was called being an adult.
This is a very rosy-colored view of a past that wasn't enjoyed by many people except for certain small subsets of relatively-well-off folks whose disagreements were around less directly consequential things (like tax policy) than "some of you don't deserve any rights."
And even then, even in my grandfather's old social circles... still a LOT of sorting going on.
Read "The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind" for a good discussion from the inside of how American religion has been dominated by sensitivity for decades.
> My understanding is that sort of thing would never happen on a college campus today.
This is almost certainly not true. Your idea of what is the norm is being driven by what is actually the exception because that’s what we see on the news (the news almost by definition shows things that are newsworthy and are out of the norm).
"However, hard evidence points to a different reality. This year, the Heterodox Academy conducted an internal member survey of 445 academics. “Imagine expressing your views about a controversial issue while at work, at a time when faculty, staff, and/or other colleagues were present. To what extent would you worry about the following consequences?” To the hypothetical “My reputation would be tarnished,” 32.68 percent answered “very concerned” and 27.27 percent answered “extremely concerned.” To the hypothetical “My career would be hurt,” 24.75 percent answered “very concerned” and 28.68 percent answered “extremely concerned.”
In other words, more than half the respondents consider expressing views beyond a certain consensus in an academic setting quite dangerous to their career trajectory."
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/09/academics-...
First, this says nothing about if this is different than it used to be "back in the day". Second, it has never been true anywhere that almost all people in a given field felt totally comfortable voicing controversial opinions around their colleges and did not worry about any consequences. Third, these are faculty, not students. Students are there to learn and expand their knowledge and try out different ideas. Teachers are there to do a job and openly talking about a crazy idea you had to anyone and everyone is not going to do you any favors.
Well, in my corporate job, there are meetings where I don't espouse my controversial view about an architecture or modeling decision, because... the same thing?
I'm sure that's also true in the Church of Scientology and a lot of religious congregations. That is how people work. Creating spaces where robust discussion and dissent is respected and productive is actually hard work and requires good management (which Lord knows most academic departments don't have, since the Head Manager is just whoever got coerced into being chair this time).
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Hard to trust an institution called the heterodox academy.
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This begs the question. What controversial issues?
Your idea of what is the norm is being driven by what is actually the exception because that’s what we see on the news
Actually, my notion of this is driven by seeing a dsignated "Safe Space" on a college campus, and a "Free Speech Zone" at the University of Houston.
Don't make assumptions about other people.
Okay, the University of Houston also has wheel chair ramp accessibility everywhere as well.
How many people do you see on average using it though? Are students in wheel chairs the norm of the campus?
Ala - how many people do you personally observe at the "safe space" - or do you even go there?
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So, you saw creating a 'safe space' inside of a college campus, and you decided that means the whole campus is a 'safe space'.
That makes sense. Whenever I walk into a building with a bathroom, I assume I can pee anywhere in the building.
If you are going to hold regular people to the intellectual and emotional discipline of supreme court justices, you're gonna be disappointed. I think we can use our empathy here and understand that these systems we have created have successfully disrupted information flow, its social verification, and the tools and processes we have to mitigate fallout from this are immature. It will take time for society to filter in the social processes needed to suss out truthful information. Sadly, like those who dealt with other disruptive technologies like the printing press, I dont think this will be fixed to our standards within a generation.
Ginsburg and Scalia obviously cleared that bar but that doesn't mean those with less discipline can't do so. I share GP's view that this is a pretty basic part of being an adult.
That being said, I fully agree with the rest of your comment. This deficiency isn't new: Most people in any period of history have been unable to engage with ideas like adults, and there are a host of social technologies that prevent these infantile tendencies from blowing up society. Dramatic shifts in the way we live and engage with others (like those brought about by the Internet age) obsolete these safeguards, leaving this type of person vulnerable to a world of epistemological hazards until new tools and processes are created for them to follow by rote.
I suppose your defenition of maturity is different than mine, I would assume that maturity is defined by the traits held by most adults in a species. If it isnt held by most adults in that species, is it really an indicator of maturity? But we are getting into pedantics here. I agree with you, I just assume from human history that what we as a society claim to be maturity is a idealist goal that we set out to achieve but ultimately fall short of. He are going to have to up out maturity baseline in order to tackle the challenges we have created for ourselves.
>Dirac and Bohr obviously cleared that bar but that doesn't mean those with less discipline can't do so.
See how silly that sounds when you change the subject to something that we know is difficult. "Being an adult" is even more open ended. What does it mean, who defines it? Do you have to be "An Adult" to get elected to office and make rules that others have to follow? Is "An Adult" necessary to implement features on a website that dictate how people interact with each other?
I agree with your agreement statement. Infantile grownups in the past generally did not have a global audience in which they could wreak havoc with, and there issues tended to be local in context.
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While this is great advice, it doesn't solve OPs problem of worrying about offending someone.
The larger problem is an offended person can do a lot of damage. In extreme cases, offended people have SWATted their targets causing all sorts of physical damage and emotional distress.
Personally, I don't want to worry about getting SWATted because some nobody from my high-school disagreed with my Facebook post. So I'm not going to post anything on Facebook.
I definitely know that nobody on my Facebook would ever SWAT me. I just don't like to trigger people. People carry a lot of hidden emotional baggage with them these days with trip wires in various topics of discussion. Something about Facebook/Twitter makes it easier to step on those. Or, maybe it's me; maybe something about FB/Twitter makes me post outlandish things without realizing it. I'm with you on this - it's not worth trying to "solve" it when I can just not post on Facebook.
I think it's kind of like the difference between e-sports and real sports. Real sports and e-sports share their competitive nature, but real sports have the endorphins that balance that out with positivity. Online discussion can be antagonistic just like real discussion, but real discussion often has non-verbal cues, food, relaxing atmosphere, small talk, jokes, etc. that balance that out.
People carry a lot of hidden emotional baggage with them these days
Not any more than in days past. People just don't deal with it well anymore.
Possibly because they missed out on three formerly common phrases when they were growing up: "Too bad," "Who Cares?" and "Get over it."
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Worrying about offending people is like trying to make something idiot-proof. It's impossible, in part because there are simply a bunch of malicious people who want to be offended to use it as a weapon or pretense against someone they don't like for whatever reason (or worse, "just because").
it doesn't solve OPs problem of worrying about offending someone
The solution is to not worry about them. If they don't like it, too bad. They're not worth knowing.
There are plenty of high-quality people and friendships to be made in the world. We don't need to cling to low-grade friendships just because they're people we already know.
In extreme cases, offended people have SWATted their targets causing all sorts of physical damage and emotional distress
You can't live your life worrying about what someone else "might" do.
When that person works at your work and has influence, you do get to worry about what someone might do if they interpret you wrong.
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offended people have an extremely disproportionate power. An offended female HS student can completely destroy the career and livelihood of a male teacher in a few keystrokes.
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Oh come on. When you meet your friends, you meet them in groups. When you talk to them, it's usually to sub groups or one to one. There's the nice colleagues from work, there's the childhood friends, there's the friends for drinking and banter and there's former girlfriends or love interests.
Each of these have different interests, a different shared background with you, and are used to different communication modes and different contexts. The idea that you should always talk to everyone at the same time and show them a single monolithic self is just silly. Life doesn't work like that and being a politician is not a job I signed up for.
Exactly. Great way to put it. Facebook forces you into this politician way of communicating which is a waste of time and just sucks.
This reminds me of the Black Mirror episode "Nosedive". Everyone has a publicly visible social score and they can vote their peers based on their interactions.
Since it's used for jobs, housing, loans etc. everyone becomes risk-averse and artificially nice. And more and more alike externally.
We're not there yet but excessive surveillance is definitely worth talking about.
In terms of a social media site, what you are saying sounds exhausting. Having a couple of friends with different opinions is great, having like 100+ people not educated in certain topics, all with their own opinion is where it kind of breaks.
You mentioned Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Antonin Scolia, they were both well versed in law and justice, so it makes sense even if their opinions are different, they can respect each other.
having like 100+ people not educated in certain topics, all with their own opinion is where it kind of breaks.
Why have 100+ people? Why not have a small group of high-quality friends, instead of a large pool of low-quality friends?
Well that is always an option, which I have thought about. I would basically need to remove my entire family and a large amount of friends (not low-quality friends, they are just educated in other areas).
Once I realized that, it was easier to just delete facebook, and keep in touch with my close friends and people that are in similar studies to myself by using group chat messages, emails or just face to face (not so much this option in 2020)
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> Why not have a small group of high-quality friends, instead of a large pool of low-quality friends?
You can and should. Although at a certain point the benefit of being connected to those people via social media as opposed to say, a group chat via text message or an app like Discord/Slack, diminishes greatly. I think that's the paradox of social media: the only thing it does well that alternatives don't is connecting you to lots and lots of people, many of whom you barely or don't know at all, but the quality of the experience degrades with the number of people you are connected to and the weakness of your connection to them.
Ginsburg and Scalia, even if they did take a genuine interest in one another's friendship, had external considerations two average, everyday people wouldn't have. The image of the court, and its ability of folks with different world-views to come together and still respect each other when disagreeing-- it helps present an image of an impartial court. The functioning of SCOTUS depends on the legitimacy of its image. Many of our institutions function this way, but it is acutely important to the court.
even if they did take a genuine interest in one another's friendship
There's no need to doubt this. It's been well documented in books and newspapers for decades.
Let's phrase this another way: if neither were SCOTUS justices, but mere acquaintances that came across one another at say, a party, and began discussing politics-- would they have become friends? No.
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> If people can't respect you for having a different opinion, they're not adults, and they're certainly not "friends," Facebook or otherwise.
Nah. Not everyone has the luxury that you have, of just throwing away their friends like that, even if it is "their" fault.
Frankly, I personally don't care much about politics at all. It is a hobby of mine. But I don't truly care about it.
Why would I give up a friend, to stand up for ideas that I don't really care much about at all?
For some sort of worthless "principle"? No thanks. Feel free to keep your principles if that's what you care about. I don't really value those, though.
What would it take for you to care about politics? What sort of issue would have to be up for debate?
> What would it take for you to care about politics? What sort of issue would have to be up for debate?
I don't think that there is anything at all, in modern day politics that makes that much of a difference.
Individual circumstances and relationships matter much much more than basically all politics in the modern day.
But even if we are discussing things that pass this very high bar of where it matters (So as an actual real life world world, or civil war, and before you say it, the 2020 election does not count as a "civil war" lol), I would still argue that an individual person's ability to effect those politics is very small.
So, for example, even if that other friend was on the "wrong" side of whatever this "very important political topic" is, that person's actual ability to have an effect on that political topic, is so small that I would care more about that person, than their stance on this issue.
> The only thing worse than people who are offended by everything is having to be afraid of offending over-sensitive people.
That's a rather simplified world view. Let's make an example: I have a bunch of friends who are deeply interested in medicine - a discussion about cancer, what it is, treatment possibilities etc. are a very appropriate topic. I also have a friend who's just been diagnosed with breast cancer. Having that discussion in front of her would be utterly insensitive.
Likewise, it's kind of insensitive to perma-gloat about your new great relationship in front of somebody who just had a divorce.
What topics we can deal with depends on our lives and what's currently going on. Paying attention to those circumstances in other people's lives is the kind thing to do, and has nothing to do with "being afraid of offending oversensitive people"
Remember that guy who gave you advice? He suggest to seek a broad range of opinions. You were in control when you sought out those opinions. Facebook takes that control away - you will see the opinions it considers appropriate for your stream, when it considers them appropriate.
And sure, be who you are. But that "adult" thing also includes respecting other people's boundaries, and social media makes that almost impossible.
LOL. The "all feedback is great" crowd is downvoting a comment that they don't agree with. Zero surprise they're snowflaking, but entertaining.
FWIW, I agree with you.
> Which is a good thing. It's how it always was. You surrounded yourself with lots of different people with varying opinions. It's how you learned things. It was called being an adult.
Right and wrong. I don't think a ton of young people in the 60s were hanging around with people who voted for Nixon. But its true that in a world where (all the white people) go to the same bar, there's a social pressure to meld and focus on common understanding.
The divergence between the 2 ends of the wedge issues is as large right now as it was in the 1800s. The reason we are not literally having skirmishes across state lines is because we are more geographically mixed now (cities vs rural).
Its not a maturity thing anymore - its that we're actual enemies of each other, and not just at the wedge issues anymore. We have similarities like "shops at Target" and "wants their family to do well" but that doesn't prevent open conflict. Ideologically we are actually, really divided, and fundamentalism is the coin of the realm.
The level of emotionally and politically motivated anti-intellectualism over the past decade or so has grown so much and so exponentially to the point that all-out idiocracy now rules the day. It's become a fashionable sport to compete on how aggressively one can deploy stupidity to drown out the voices of reason and truth, so that we all inevitably sink a little deeper into the worst instincts of human nature.
Thing is, I /know/ for a fact that most people are not this stupid. But I also understand that these days it's every man, woman and child for themselves, so I can sympathize with the innate need to blend in.
Past dictators and totalitarian regimes from the history books, who wanted people to have zero ability to think for themselves could honestly look at this situation we're in right now, and feel so much pride that they might even blush a little bit; meanwhile Carl Sagan is turning over in his fucking graves.
If people can't respect you for having a different opinion, they're not adults, and they're certainly not "friends," Facebook or otherwise.
What if your opinion is proven to be wrong but you are just not respecting the fact. Does it make sense to respect someone's opinion just because it is an opinion in such a case?
If it is impossible to prove something maybe topic should have been stopped long ago. Friends bring joy. Adults should at least not bully.
Everyone is not perfect. It is maddening when person with so many flows can't be respectful about another person minor inconveniences.
I think you're making an assumption of participants that are reasonable, rational, and willing to engage in discussion and debate in good faith. But a lot of people are unreasonable, irrational, do not want to discuss, and are really simply entrenched in their belief systems and preaching it.
A lot of this is down to context, not our moral failings.
We moderate ourselves differently at the bar, with our boss, with our wife's aunt. Maybe you don't drag contentious politics to your inlaw's dinner chat or sex anecdotes into work conversations. The OP's point is about applying this moderation across the board, because on FB everything is. This context breeds a culture of banality.
This website is discussing a broader and scarier implication, but the what the OP is describing is already at full (I hope!) maturity.
I suppose your adult/child dichotomy is meant to be an insult and not taken literally, but I have to say that it's just as important for children/young people to intentionally seek out different opinions. Maybe even more so than adults, because that's when the bulk of your worldview, beliefs, and personality are formed.
From my experience, young people are better at it than adults, too.
It is certainly not about age.
Every newborn is like an angel. But they quickly learn and follow parents footsteps. Like infinite purgatory. Some break through, acknowledging that conflicting view can be right. That's an ideal. Sadly a lot of people would die earlier than achieve it.
All people deserve respect. Not all opinions do.
You're painting a rosy picture. For example, how many Blacks were ever friends with Klansmen? How many Jews were friends with Nazis? If someone's opinions include the idea that I'm less than human, I can't be friends with them. It's impossible to bridge that gap if the other side sees me as an animal, or a monster, or an enemy agent actively working to destroy the country, if not the world.
I doubt there are any more hate groups now than there ever were; the difference is, these days, people are more willing to call them out for being what they are.
Daryl Davis, an African-American man, famously attended KKK rallies, befriended Klansmen, and over the course of his life helped persuade over 200 Klansmen to give up their robes. He did what you claim is impossible and I can't imagine a better role model.
Well, how many Klansmen attended Black churches and universities, befriending Black folks all the while and... uh... ok, I can't really see the great outcome here other than the Klansman not being a Klansman anymore.
I'm proud you could come up with one guy who was saintly. For the rest of us non-saintly people, it's pretty tough to maintain and tend friendships with people who think we're bad, immoral, subhuman, or otherwise less than. Just makes conversation hard to keep up!
That is however not how civil rights movement worked in general. And actual blacks were beaten up or worst by klan. It was not something that would be exceptional either. The violence in particular around voting suppression was very real and not just about how people feel. It was not just about personal hate, or was more rational about who is going to rule the place.
The person you responded to asked how many. The answer is that not many. And it is not like having black friends meant you won't be racist. Nor having wife or mom you like prevents mysoginy. Personal relationships have part only up to the point.
That being said, some nazi members had a Jew they personally liked or protected. It dis mot stopped genocide.
That's a great accomplishment. However, I think the point is that we (as a society) should recognize and stand up for our oppressed people. Otherwise, we're placing the burden on the oppressed to "take the high road" and, essentially, fight an uphill battle.
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> someone saying that describing software as "sexy" is sexist and contributes to women not wanting to work in tech jobs. I think you're painting a rosy picture where people are only upset at actual hate groups, and not using whatever benign words the "allies" have decided are unacceptable.
And I think _you're_ painting a picture wherein "people who are amplifying minority perspectives in order to help society be more inclusive" are in fact nefariously scheming to control a cultural narrative for...reasons?
There is certainly a line beyond which "Excessive Political Correctness" is unreasonable, unhelpful, unproductive, and disconnected from actual people's experiences. But the latter of these examples, at least, strikes me as a perfectly reasonable piece of feedback. I don't personally find the former to be offensive, but at the same time - I have no reason to disagree with the person making that claim. If they're offended by it, that is a _fact_. It's up to me whether I choose to act on that fact. Personally, I don't consider the words "idiot" or "sexy" to be important enough to insist upon using them, when others have told me that the usage hurts them.
Say that someone is intentionally misrepresenting the situation, and is trying to pressure you into stopping using a particular word even though no-one is truly hurt or impacted by it. What's the failure case if you listen to them? You stop using a word. Big whoop. What's the failure case if you _don't_ listen to them? You continue to hurt and offend people. This seems both more likely and more impactful than the other failure case - so, to me, the choice is clear.
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OK, try this: How many gays were/are friends with Southern Baptists?
It's the same dynamic, even though Southern Baptists are more mainstream.
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