"they should encourage diversity of thoughts, political ideologies, religions and diversity of perspectives and within that diversity"
This sounds good on its face but there's a problem that keeps coming up in its application: these thoughts, ideologies, and perspectives include many that are absurd, harmful, preposterous, and willfully …
"they should encourage diversity of thoughts, political ideologies, religions and diversity of perspectives and within that diversity"
This sounds good on its face but there's a problem that keeps coming up in its application: these thoughts, ideologies, and perspectives include many that are absurd, harmful, preposterous, and willfully false yet an over-amplified respect for diversity compels us to accept them along with the others. So we get the modern dilemma of he-said-she-said and, lacking all conviction, hesitate to call out lies. This is not an issue of diversity or tolerance or anything like that, this is a disintegration of the very notion of truth, of recognition of objective reality.
The origins of our epistemological crisis cannot all be laid at the feet of conservatism, even though conservativism has never been an honest formulation and it persists in believing things that history has disproven. The postmodernist view has been at least equally harmful, maybe more because it infected those most likely to know better with a reluctance to trust the evidence of their senses and, worst of all, an absolute terror of being perceived as judgmental.
"That's an opinion."
Maria concludes: "conservative ideas should also be accepted"
No, they should not. Its few ideas that are not simply insane are mostly falsehoods. They are harmful to the world, human and natural, and they are cruel. Conservatism needs to be crushed.
"yet an over-amplified respect for diversity compels us to accept them"
Yeah, this is the line for me. To my mind, diversity of thought means ideas should be heard and discussed, but it gives them no right to be accepted or treated as "valid."
The notion that we each get to have "our own truth" is so corrosive and ultimately dangerous.
Diversity of ideas is not in and of itself valuable. Ideas still need to be defended. So the core ask is the forum of debate. Just because someone has a right to express an opinion does not make it valid/moral/reasonable.
Yeah. I just wanted to further reinforce it. There's a tendency in polite conversation to say "I respect your opinion, but...". That bugs me. I don't say that. There's no real reason to validate one's right to possess an opinion in order to subsequently confront it. And I don't inherently respect anyone's opinion. I may respect their ability to present opinions, but any particular opinion lives and dies on its own merits. Anyhow, thanks for this Substack. The analysis of your post-article debates is quite interesting.
Conservatism isn't false or insane, on its own. What has become of it today is it's in direct contradiction to their own origins as wokeism and postmodern liberalism are to their Enlightenment origins. Let's not confuse Trumpism and QAnon with Barry Goldwater's Conscience of a Conservative, a good read that you won't necessarily agree with but you'll find that he had some sane, stable ideas that weren't popular in his time, but that may experience a comeback as we come to realize conservatives aren't/weren't wrong about *everything*. He seems dangerously liberal, frankly, by today's 'conservative' standards, and he'd be cast out by the Trumpers if he was alive today. And this was someone who was painted as an arch-conservative back in the Sixties.
If you think of ideology/ideas more as a spectrum, which they are, you'll find the closer you get to the centre, the less insane the ideas become, and more worthy of consideration of the other side.
And here's something to REALLY make you uncomfortable: Sometimes even a grain of truth can be found in the extremes. I'm finding stories on the far right you won't find in the left-wing media, (most recently on violence *by* transwomen, rather than the left's obsession with violence *against* them), and as I dig deeper I find there's sometimes truth there (IOW, they didn't just pull it out of Tucker Carlson's ass). Problem is, the right usually twists the story and sometimes makes shit up to suit its own narratives, and the left utterly ignores it or denies it even occurred when clearly it did (like prison sexual offenders harming inmates in women's prisons after they get transferred). So getting closer to the truth - which is perhaps all we can do right now with a mainstream media as broken as our other institutions - becomes more difficult, and points to the bias on both sides.
I agree with more of what you're saying than you might think, and I do have a lot of respect for Goldwater as a man of actual principle.
And on the other side I have seen the viciousness of the transnazis closer up than I ever wanted to; one of those nonbinary shitheads got me kicked off Medium because I refused to refer to it as "they," as if I would ever have any reason to refer to it at all, and what it wrote to me was some of the most vicious shit I have seen in all my decades online ... and I started with dialups. Like bringing my (dead) mother into its foaming rants. I lost a thousand followers and a sweet grand a month in their partner program. I have no trouble believing they assault people, they are every bit as bad as the Newsmax types. Fanatics of all stripes are interchangeable.
Grains of inadvertent truth I dismiss as stopped clock moments.
But I stand by what I said. Cruelty is never far away. Most conservatives would rather see a thousand deprived than one get an undeserved handout. How many Republicans decided they'd had enough when Trump was keeping immigrant kids in filthy cages? How many silence their misgivings when some creep with a gun shoots up a school or a gay bar? Sure, you can find some who are simply deluding themselves that the GOP will jettison the crazies and sticking with them because they really believe Satan has an office at the DNC.
But if the Republicans took a stand for compassion and empathy most of their members would form another party. This is my firm belief,
Yeah, I think I remember us talking about this before. The trans nazis got me kicked off too although I was making a lot less than $1k a month. Who needs incels and MAGAs when we've got some of the most misogynist, hateful bigots in dresses?
Actually Trump lost a chunk of votes after his first term. Might have won had he not turned off so many and also, he insisted on encouraging his idiot followers to kill themselves by refusing vaccinations. I know some decent conservatives and some decent liberals so I won't damn the rational ones, I'll reserve my harsh judgement for the extremists.
Sometimes I made that kind of money just from my writing but then Medium started awarding me $500 a month for being one of their best writers, an award I didn't think I deserved at all (but didn't turn down). Then all of a sudden they told me I was banned and the only possible explanation was this "nonbinary" person who had a snarling-with-rage cartoon avatar.
They didn't tell me what I got banned for either but I'd predicted for 10 days they'd take me down for criticizing the trans community in defence of Dave Chappelle. It amazes me how much they go after *paying* customers. The problem is all across the board, Facebook & Twitter are as utterly gaslit by the LGBTQ community as any other platform and I'm not sure what it will take to restore sanity, although I found an MSNBC article the other day that criticized Lia Thomas for swimming on a women's team and boldly referred to him as 'he' and 'him' all throughout.
“ I found an MSNBC article the other day that criticized Lia Thomas for swimming on a women's team and boldly referred to him as 'he' and 'him' all throughout.”
Wait, really??!! Do you think you could track it down and send me a link? I’m writing an article related to this and an article like that would make my point beautifully.
"they should encourage diversity of thoughts, political ideologies, religions and diversity of perspectives and within that diversity"
This sounds good on its face but there's a problem that keeps coming up in its application: these thoughts, ideologies, and perspectives include many that are absurd, harmful, preposterous, and willfully false yet an over-amplified respect for diversity compels us to accept them along with the others. So we get the modern dilemma of he-said-she-said and, lacking all conviction, hesitate to call out lies. This is not an issue of diversity or tolerance or anything like that, this is a disintegration of the very notion of truth, of recognition of objective reality.
The origins of our epistemological crisis cannot all be laid at the feet of conservatism, even though conservativism has never been an honest formulation and it persists in believing things that history has disproven. The postmodernist view has been at least equally harmful, maybe more because it infected those most likely to know better with a reluctance to trust the evidence of their senses and, worst of all, an absolute terror of being perceived as judgmental.
"That's an opinion."
Maria concludes: "conservative ideas should also be accepted"
No, they should not. Its few ideas that are not simply insane are mostly falsehoods. They are harmful to the world, human and natural, and they are cruel. Conservatism needs to be crushed.
"yet an over-amplified respect for diversity compels us to accept them"
Yeah, this is the line for me. To my mind, diversity of thought means ideas should be heard and discussed, but it gives them no right to be accepted or treated as "valid."
The notion that we each get to have "our own truth" is so corrosive and ultimately dangerous.
Diversity of ideas is not in and of itself valuable. Ideas still need to be defended. So the core ask is the forum of debate. Just because someone has a right to express an opinion does not make it valid/moral/reasonable.
"Ideas still need to be defended. So the core ask is the forum of debate"
Yep, I agree. Isn't that what I said?
Yeah. I just wanted to further reinforce it. There's a tendency in polite conversation to say "I respect your opinion, but...". That bugs me. I don't say that. There's no real reason to validate one's right to possess an opinion in order to subsequently confront it. And I don't inherently respect anyone's opinion. I may respect their ability to present opinions, but any particular opinion lives and dies on its own merits. Anyhow, thanks for this Substack. The analysis of your post-article debates is quite interesting.
This is what I mean by the epistemological crisis.
I've run into too many people who used to be sane yet who now support Trump.
Conservatism isn't false or insane, on its own. What has become of it today is it's in direct contradiction to their own origins as wokeism and postmodern liberalism are to their Enlightenment origins. Let's not confuse Trumpism and QAnon with Barry Goldwater's Conscience of a Conservative, a good read that you won't necessarily agree with but you'll find that he had some sane, stable ideas that weren't popular in his time, but that may experience a comeback as we come to realize conservatives aren't/weren't wrong about *everything*. He seems dangerously liberal, frankly, by today's 'conservative' standards, and he'd be cast out by the Trumpers if he was alive today. And this was someone who was painted as an arch-conservative back in the Sixties.
If you think of ideology/ideas more as a spectrum, which they are, you'll find the closer you get to the centre, the less insane the ideas become, and more worthy of consideration of the other side.
And here's something to REALLY make you uncomfortable: Sometimes even a grain of truth can be found in the extremes. I'm finding stories on the far right you won't find in the left-wing media, (most recently on violence *by* transwomen, rather than the left's obsession with violence *against* them), and as I dig deeper I find there's sometimes truth there (IOW, they didn't just pull it out of Tucker Carlson's ass). Problem is, the right usually twists the story and sometimes makes shit up to suit its own narratives, and the left utterly ignores it or denies it even occurred when clearly it did (like prison sexual offenders harming inmates in women's prisons after they get transferred). So getting closer to the truth - which is perhaps all we can do right now with a mainstream media as broken as our other institutions - becomes more difficult, and points to the bias on both sides.
I agree with more of what you're saying than you might think, and I do have a lot of respect for Goldwater as a man of actual principle.
And on the other side I have seen the viciousness of the transnazis closer up than I ever wanted to; one of those nonbinary shitheads got me kicked off Medium because I refused to refer to it as "they," as if I would ever have any reason to refer to it at all, and what it wrote to me was some of the most vicious shit I have seen in all my decades online ... and I started with dialups. Like bringing my (dead) mother into its foaming rants. I lost a thousand followers and a sweet grand a month in their partner program. I have no trouble believing they assault people, they are every bit as bad as the Newsmax types. Fanatics of all stripes are interchangeable.
Grains of inadvertent truth I dismiss as stopped clock moments.
But I stand by what I said. Cruelty is never far away. Most conservatives would rather see a thousand deprived than one get an undeserved handout. How many Republicans decided they'd had enough when Trump was keeping immigrant kids in filthy cages? How many silence their misgivings when some creep with a gun shoots up a school or a gay bar? Sure, you can find some who are simply deluding themselves that the GOP will jettison the crazies and sticking with them because they really believe Satan has an office at the DNC.
But if the Republicans took a stand for compassion and empathy most of their members would form another party. This is my firm belief,
Yeah, I think I remember us talking about this before. The trans nazis got me kicked off too although I was making a lot less than $1k a month. Who needs incels and MAGAs when we've got some of the most misogynist, hateful bigots in dresses?
Actually Trump lost a chunk of votes after his first term. Might have won had he not turned off so many and also, he insisted on encouraging his idiot followers to kill themselves by refusing vaccinations. I know some decent conservatives and some decent liberals so I won't damn the rational ones, I'll reserve my harsh judgement for the extremists.
Sometimes I made that kind of money just from my writing but then Medium started awarding me $500 a month for being one of their best writers, an award I didn't think I deserved at all (but didn't turn down). Then all of a sudden they told me I was banned and the only possible explanation was this "nonbinary" person who had a snarling-with-rage cartoon avatar.
They didn't tell me what I got banned for either but I'd predicted for 10 days they'd take me down for criticizing the trans community in defence of Dave Chappelle. It amazes me how much they go after *paying* customers. The problem is all across the board, Facebook & Twitter are as utterly gaslit by the LGBTQ community as any other platform and I'm not sure what it will take to restore sanity, although I found an MSNBC article the other day that criticized Lia Thomas for swimming on a women's team and boldly referred to him as 'he' and 'him' all throughout.
“ I found an MSNBC article the other day that criticized Lia Thomas for swimming on a women's team and boldly referred to him as 'he' and 'him' all throughout.”
Wait, really??!! Do you think you could track it down and send me a link? I’m writing an article related to this and an article like that would make my point beautifully.
Found it! It was on MSN News, not MSNBC, and via the Washington Examiner. https://www.msn.com/en-us/lifestyle/relationships/lia-thomas-shows-it-was-always-about-transgender-priority-not-equality/ar-AAXW6u5
Thank you so much!
As do I. He looks like a man with long hair and he's much bigger than the real women he was competing with.
I don't use the Ever Lengthening Acronym, I'm just gay.