Arguably the wisest forty words ever uttered, form part of a speech delivered by musical comedian Tim Minchin at The University of Western Australia: A famous bon mot asserts that opinions are like assholes in that everyone has one. There is great wisdom in this. But I would add that opinions differ significantly from assholes in that yours should be constantly and thoroughly examined.
A subject dear to me. At different times in my life, I have been a registered Democrat, Republican and Libertarian. At this time, I am registered unaffiliated. On some issues I tilt right, others left and others neither. My views have changed on some matters, others not so much. I see no reason for anyone to walk in lockstep with all of the beliefs of any political tribe.
Quoting Muhammad Ali, "The man who views the world at 50 the same as he did at 20 has wasted 30 years of his life."
The thing about bad beliefs is that I can sometimes understand how people can embrace some of them. Partly because there have been times in my life when I entertained them. Those can be honestly discussed in hope of flawed ideas being rejected. When the reason is political partisanship/tribalism and a defense of an associated label it is a much more difficult task. Most difficult is when their belief is based upon uncomfortable facts that lead to a pyrrhic victory.
I'm thinking about registering as an Independent. I've voted Democrat my entire life, except for one CT Republican senator who I liked better than her opponent, Joe Lieberman, this was before he left the Democratic party, but I'm as sick of the Democrats' woke bullshit as I am of the Republicans' Trump/MAGA bullshit.
I doubt the percentages are anywhere near close. I too see the SJWs are mirror-image MAGAts but you don't see any 70% of Democrats who want to make bathrooms and pronouns the core issues, while 70% of Republicans believe Trump won the election.
How about Elizabeth 'Pander Bear' Warren jumping on the reparations bandwagon? I lost all respect for her after that. What a disappointment she turned out to be.
Registering independent is largely symbolic. In the past I've made spreadsheets with data from Project Vote-smart on positions on issues and my own multipliers for the importance to me on those issues. The calculation gave me who to vote for with total disregard for party. It doesn't work so well when they vote in lockstep with what their party "leaders" push so they can have a majority. That potentially makes every candidate a pawn for their party royalty. Democracy is a bad joke.
If democracy ever had a chance it got its final stake in the heart with television.
When I was young a TV was a luxury and I saw the last days of community dry up like a water drop on a stone in bright sunlight, just as when I got on the web in 1996 I saw the last month of the literate Internet as A***OL* made it possible for morons to get online.
I blame TV for a lot. Before TV a smile was a reaction, then a few years of advertising told people they're "sposta" smile all the time. A satirist named Osborn wrote about this. Smile People annoy me like crazy. Especially here.
I don't get "registering as an independent"; doesn't register mean declaring one's affiliation with a political party, while independent means not affiliated with a political party?
For me there is only one political issue: the survival of the natural kingdom. Seven eighths of the world could perish (smokers and conservatives first, please) and I would click my heels. All other political positions are spokes of a wheel whose hub is a world with parrots and pongids. People suck.
As I wrote, registering as an independent is largely symbolic, but I see no need to declare affiliation with a party. That is especially true due to the warlike state between the parties.
I don't see all ideas as equal or worthy of respect. I do try to understand why people believe some of the things they belief. Far too often it is confirmation bias rather than a reason to hold a worldview. But sometimes they have reasons that are not just confirmation bias, but rather from their experience. That doesn't make them correct or good, but it does help me to not become a member of the radicalized extremes of partisan politics.
Once it becomes war, there are no good guys and bad guys. There are only our guys and their guys. Like the draftee who arrived in my platoon thinking we were the bad guys and Uncle Ho was correct, when the bullets flew that idea vanished like a fart in the wind.
You wrote, "For me there is only one political issue: the survival of the natural kingdom." I agree, but at the moment I see the biggest threat to that as the hostility between political rivals that increasingly looks like an increased desire for violence in the thought that the solution would be the death of "those people" that you expressed.
Depends on the state. In NH you need to declare a party to participate in the Primary. So I register with a party to help push the major candidate slate in my direction.
Well the supreme Republican priority is is to þwn Teh Libs, and one of the best ways to do that is to wipe out as many species as they can.
Candidly, and I don't like saying this, I see no hope of reconciliation between the two poles. Conservatives who come back to the fold of sanity are at the level of anecdote. If they take back the Congress they are going to be as environmentally destructive as they can, regardless of the human consequences.
As far as I'm concerned the second civil war started long ago. It's them or us, and if it's them the world dies.
"The thing about bad beliefs is that I can sometimes understand how people can embrace some of them. Partly because there have been times in my life when I entertained them."
I no longer hold a lotta the views I held a year-and-a-half ago. But held on to some I've had for 50 years. (Go figure. ;-) Dead Centrist now, AFAIK.
I don't know that you're all that far apart with Maria. I disagree with some of what she said about the dangers of wokeism but I doubt she and I would fight too much if we sat down for coffee. I don't think one necessarily *should* change being 'liberal' or 'conservative'. Both are very broad, encompassing ideologies encompassing many different ideas and values and policies, not all of them bad. Jonathan Haidt argues that liberals and conservatives can work together to bring out the best in both ideas, and they temper each other's tendency toward going too extreme. Like the welfare state: I believe in the need of a taxpayer-paid social safety net for people who are down on their luck, and who didn't do as well as others in the birth lottery, but it shouldn't be something you rely on and don't work, which is what conservatives worry about and liberals pooh-pooh. And I say, "Exhibit A illustrating the conservative concern is living across the hall from me." Wonderful lady, but she's got mental health issues within her control to deal with and she hasn't, and she's admitted she'd rather just continue to be taken care of by the entities who are doing so now. I don't think she's lazy, I think she'd like to have a different life but doesn't pursue it for a lot of different fears that are understandable, but not excusable.
So to talk about erasing poverty by just throwing money at it isn't the answer, as some liberals would have it, nor is it 'pulling yourself up by your bootstraps' without help from others as the Reagan-style conservatives held it. We need to help some folks with their own bootstraps, for a time anyway, but structure the safety net in such a way that people are encouraged, and pushed, to get off it unless they have *genuine* debilitating mental health issues they can't just decide to deal with.
The real problem we face is we become too married to our ideas and ideologies and don't want to hear anything that contradicts them. Often it's not wanting to admit to ourselves we were wrong about something, or it somehow offends our self-image (like challenging victimhood narratives).
I'd like to see people become less hardcore <whatever label> and treat their ideology more like a salad bar - take what works for you and leave the rest, but be mindful that what you consume and retain should be *healthy* for you and those around you.
"I don't know that you're all that far apart with Maria."
My key issue, as with a depressing number of people I come across online, is just the fixed mindset. I don't mind disagreeing with people. Obviously. But I find it really frustrating when people cling to their positions out of stubbornness.
As I said to Maria, my views are a mix of (centre-)left, (centre-)right and centre, I don't object to conservatism in and of itself at all. And I agree with Haidt about liberals and conservatives being able to work together. In fact, they need each other to temper each other's worst instincts.
One of the things I've learned from being a part of Braver Angels about many conservatives is that they see right through the deployment of tools like empathy & "help me to understand" type language as being basically just softer ways of trying to show how wrong they are and to change their minds. The implicit idea being that the conservative outlook is toxic and if only conservatives are listened to with empathy, then they will change for the supposed better. When what many conservatives actually want is to be genuinely heard and genuinely debated with, rather than "listened to" and therefore condescended to.
I see a little of that, but very little. Yes there are some rural conservatives who believe, accurately, that urban elites are indeed looking down at them. And frankly there is a lot to look down on, but that's an aside; they do have legitimate grievances at not being taken seriously.
But far more common among conservatives is the attitude that they should get everything they want, and with no delays, That their every position should immediately be realized as the law of the land and that any disagreement excuses violence. And they don't understand that so many of their positions are preposterous and intolerant.
True, but I find many on the left who believe the same. Which is why I'm becoming disaffected with the Democrats. Too much nazi-like rock-solid belief in one's own convictions with zero critical analysis. And as for violence, I was wondering this morning whether new lynch mobs might emerge not on the right, but within LGBTQ and esp trans since it's crystal-clear it's okay to threaten women with violence and fantasize about ways to kill them online, and whether eventually that normalizing language will turn into violence. The left is *always* willing to throw women under the bus and although it fancies itself the less violent wing, I always think, 'Yeah, uh, for *now*'.
"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.
Yeah, that's exactly my point. They are for some people but they shouldn't be. The same goes for treating skin colour or sexuality or gender as identities. This wrong-headed, tribal way of thinking is why so many issues have become impossibly divisive.
Because if you see a challenge to your ideas as a challenge to who you are, or different perspectives as existential threats, you get...well, the state of discourse today.
"there’s nothing sagacious about positioning oneself between the two poles"
Yeah, this is more or less my point, though I haven't expressed it quite like this. I agree, there's no point in positioning oneself between the poles. And there's no point in positioning oneself *at* the poles either. I've seen people online describe me as a liberal, a centrist, and even, on a few occasions, as a conservative! And I'm talking about people who did so with the intention of being complimentary.
The labels don't matter. I'm not attracted to certain ideas because they're "liberal" or "progressive" or "conservative", I'm attracted to them because I think they're smart and reasonable and the best compromise overall for a healthy, functioning society. If any idea, wherever it comes from, seems to threaten that society, I oppose it.
So yeah, I'm not trying to be seen as standing between the two extremes. There's no virtue in defending "both sides" of an argument (though there is value in *seeing* both sides of an argument accurately and not caricaturing one side or the other). My only allegiance is to good ideas. Wherever they come from.
The core value of conservatism is cruelty. I will never accept that.
From all I can see wokeism is a fad and won’t endure much longer than bell bottom jeans, and will collapse under the weight of its absurdity. It’s incoherent.
This is a hell of a way to characterise the views of millions of people Chris. I'm sure you're just being a little hyperbolic here. But of course, if you take this perspective seriously, as sadly some people do, all discourse is impossible. The other side is simply "evil."
Meanwhile, the opposite numbers on the right are calling "the Libs" groomers and communists. It's exactly the same instinct.
I don't say it casually, Steve, and I don't say it to shock or for attention. This is my firm belief. Let's take a few of the positions of pre-alt-right conservatism.
* "strong defense" euphemises bullying and intimidation as international policy
* "fiscal conservatism" is a rationale for not giving help to those who need it
* "states' rights" is to create a safe haven for bigotry and for destruction of the environment (have you ever heard it applied to any kindness?)
As for the new conservatism, the cruelty is out in the open and undeniable.
When conservatives call us groomers and communists, they are knowingly lying. When we call them cruel, we are not. I reject this symmetry.
I characterise liberals, broadly speaking, as being driven by kindness, and conservatives, broadly speaking, as being driven by stability. Both instincts are necessary in a functioning society. And both can be pursued to a fault.
All the identity politics, words are violence, you are whatever you say you are nonsense is the left going too far.
All the close the borders, "any lifestyle except a traditional christian nuclear family is evil" nonsense is the right going too far.
But they're both built on their respective instincts.
The violence we see from the left and the right, is because each side allows themselves to believe that a caricature of the other is the reality. And that their side is in existential danger. We saw how extreme this can get on J6 obviously, but also during the summer riots in 2020.
A subject dear to me. At different times in my life, I have been a registered Democrat, Republican and Libertarian. At this time, I am registered unaffiliated. On some issues I tilt right, others left and others neither. My views have changed on some matters, others not so much. I see no reason for anyone to walk in lockstep with all of the beliefs of any political tribe.
Quoting Muhammad Ali, "The man who views the world at 50 the same as he did at 20 has wasted 30 years of his life."
The thing about bad beliefs is that I can sometimes understand how people can embrace some of them. Partly because there have been times in my life when I entertained them. Those can be honestly discussed in hope of flawed ideas being rejected. When the reason is political partisanship/tribalism and a defense of an associated label it is a much more difficult task. Most difficult is when their belief is based upon uncomfortable facts that lead to a pyrrhic victory.
"I see no reason for anyone to walk in lockstep with all of the beliefs of any political tribe."
Louder please!!👏
I'm thinking about registering as an Independent. I've voted Democrat my entire life, except for one CT Republican senator who I liked better than her opponent, Joe Lieberman, this was before he left the Democratic party, but I'm as sick of the Democrats' woke bullshit as I am of the Republicans' Trump/MAGA bullshit.
I doubt the percentages are anywhere near close. I too see the SJWs are mirror-image MAGAts but you don't see any 70% of Democrats who want to make bathrooms and pronouns the core issues, while 70% of Republicans believe Trump won the election.
How about Elizabeth 'Pander Bear' Warren jumping on the reparations bandwagon? I lost all respect for her after that. What a disappointment she turned out to be.
Registering independent is largely symbolic. In the past I've made spreadsheets with data from Project Vote-smart on positions on issues and my own multipliers for the importance to me on those issues. The calculation gave me who to vote for with total disregard for party. It doesn't work so well when they vote in lockstep with what their party "leaders" push so they can have a majority. That potentially makes every candidate a pawn for their party royalty. Democracy is a bad joke.
If democracy ever had a chance it got its final stake in the heart with television.
When I was young a TV was a luxury and I saw the last days of community dry up like a water drop on a stone in bright sunlight, just as when I got on the web in 1996 I saw the last month of the literate Internet as A***OL* made it possible for morons to get online.
I blame TV for a lot. Before TV a smile was a reaction, then a few years of advertising told people they're "sposta" smile all the time. A satirist named Osborn wrote about this. Smile People annoy me like crazy. Especially here.
I don't get "registering as an independent"; doesn't register mean declaring one's affiliation with a political party, while independent means not affiliated with a political party?
For me there is only one political issue: the survival of the natural kingdom. Seven eighths of the world could perish (smokers and conservatives first, please) and I would click my heels. All other political positions are spokes of a wheel whose hub is a world with parrots and pongids. People suck.
As I wrote, registering as an independent is largely symbolic, but I see no need to declare affiliation with a party. That is especially true due to the warlike state between the parties.
I don't see all ideas as equal or worthy of respect. I do try to understand why people believe some of the things they belief. Far too often it is confirmation bias rather than a reason to hold a worldview. But sometimes they have reasons that are not just confirmation bias, but rather from their experience. That doesn't make them correct or good, but it does help me to not become a member of the radicalized extremes of partisan politics.
Once it becomes war, there are no good guys and bad guys. There are only our guys and their guys. Like the draftee who arrived in my platoon thinking we were the bad guys and Uncle Ho was correct, when the bullets flew that idea vanished like a fart in the wind.
You wrote, "For me there is only one political issue: the survival of the natural kingdom." I agree, but at the moment I see the biggest threat to that as the hostility between political rivals that increasingly looks like an increased desire for violence in the thought that the solution would be the death of "those people" that you expressed.
Depends on the state. In NH you need to declare a party to participate in the Primary. So I register with a party to help push the major candidate slate in my direction.
Well the supreme Republican priority is is to þwn Teh Libs, and one of the best ways to do that is to wipe out as many species as they can.
Candidly, and I don't like saying this, I see no hope of reconciliation between the two poles. Conservatives who come back to the fold of sanity are at the level of anecdote. If they take back the Congress they are going to be as environmentally destructive as they can, regardless of the human consequences.
As far as I'm concerned the second civil war started long ago. It's them or us, and if it's them the world dies.
"The thing about bad beliefs is that I can sometimes understand how people can embrace some of them. Partly because there have been times in my life when I entertained them."
I no longer hold a lotta the views I held a year-and-a-half ago. But held on to some I've had for 50 years. (Go figure. ;-) Dead Centrist now, AFAIK.
I don't know that you're all that far apart with Maria. I disagree with some of what she said about the dangers of wokeism but I doubt she and I would fight too much if we sat down for coffee. I don't think one necessarily *should* change being 'liberal' or 'conservative'. Both are very broad, encompassing ideologies encompassing many different ideas and values and policies, not all of them bad. Jonathan Haidt argues that liberals and conservatives can work together to bring out the best in both ideas, and they temper each other's tendency toward going too extreme. Like the welfare state: I believe in the need of a taxpayer-paid social safety net for people who are down on their luck, and who didn't do as well as others in the birth lottery, but it shouldn't be something you rely on and don't work, which is what conservatives worry about and liberals pooh-pooh. And I say, "Exhibit A illustrating the conservative concern is living across the hall from me." Wonderful lady, but she's got mental health issues within her control to deal with and she hasn't, and she's admitted she'd rather just continue to be taken care of by the entities who are doing so now. I don't think she's lazy, I think she'd like to have a different life but doesn't pursue it for a lot of different fears that are understandable, but not excusable.
So to talk about erasing poverty by just throwing money at it isn't the answer, as some liberals would have it, nor is it 'pulling yourself up by your bootstraps' without help from others as the Reagan-style conservatives held it. We need to help some folks with their own bootstraps, for a time anyway, but structure the safety net in such a way that people are encouraged, and pushed, to get off it unless they have *genuine* debilitating mental health issues they can't just decide to deal with.
The real problem we face is we become too married to our ideas and ideologies and don't want to hear anything that contradicts them. Often it's not wanting to admit to ourselves we were wrong about something, or it somehow offends our self-image (like challenging victimhood narratives).
I'd like to see people become less hardcore <whatever label> and treat their ideology more like a salad bar - take what works for you and leave the rest, but be mindful that what you consume and retain should be *healthy* for you and those around you.
"I don't know that you're all that far apart with Maria."
My key issue, as with a depressing number of people I come across online, is just the fixed mindset. I don't mind disagreeing with people. Obviously. But I find it really frustrating when people cling to their positions out of stubbornness.
As I said to Maria, my views are a mix of (centre-)left, (centre-)right and centre, I don't object to conservatism in and of itself at all. And I agree with Haidt about liberals and conservatives being able to work together. In fact, they need each other to temper each other's worst instincts.
One of the things I've learned from being a part of Braver Angels about many conservatives is that they see right through the deployment of tools like empathy & "help me to understand" type language as being basically just softer ways of trying to show how wrong they are and to change their minds. The implicit idea being that the conservative outlook is toxic and if only conservatives are listened to with empathy, then they will change for the supposed better. When what many conservatives actually want is to be genuinely heard and genuinely debated with, rather than "listened to" and therefore condescended to.
I see a little of that, but very little. Yes there are some rural conservatives who believe, accurately, that urban elites are indeed looking down at them. And frankly there is a lot to look down on, but that's an aside; they do have legitimate grievances at not being taken seriously.
But far more common among conservatives is the attitude that they should get everything they want, and with no delays, That their every position should immediately be realized as the law of the land and that any disagreement excuses violence. And they don't understand that so many of their positions are preposterous and intolerant.
Which is why people look down at them.
True, but I find many on the left who believe the same. Which is why I'm becoming disaffected with the Democrats. Too much nazi-like rock-solid belief in one's own convictions with zero critical analysis. And as for violence, I was wondering this morning whether new lynch mobs might emerge not on the right, but within LGBTQ and esp trans since it's crystal-clear it's okay to threaten women with violence and fantasize about ways to kill them online, and whether eventually that normalizing language will turn into violence. The left is *always* willing to throw women under the bus and although it fancies itself the less violent wing, I always think, 'Yeah, uh, for *now*'.
" To reject “woke” ideas you don't have to embrace their polar opposites." - The opposite of a bad idea is usually another bad idea.
"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.
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.
Slight pushback: in the USA "conservative", "liberal", "progressive", "MAGA" etc ARE becoming identities of themselves.
Yeah, that's exactly my point. They are for some people but they shouldn't be. The same goes for treating skin colour or sexuality or gender as identities. This wrong-headed, tribal way of thinking is why so many issues have become impossibly divisive.
Because if you see a challenge to your ideas as a challenge to who you are, or different perspectives as existential threats, you get...well, the state of discourse today.
"We might need to reevaluate the identity we’ve spent our lives carefully constructing."
The link here is broken.
Thank you!🙏
Liberals say 2 + 2 = 4
Conservatives say 2 + 2 = 20
Centrists say 2 + 2 = 12
"Liberals say 2 + 2 = 4"
You know what's sad? Even this isn't true for the extremes on the left. There was a whole Twitter war last year with the left arguing that 2 + 2 = 5 (https://thepostmillennial.com/two-plus-two-does-not-equal-five-no-matter-what-twitter-says).
Now, obviously this is the fringes, but that's the point.
Holy fuck I didn't even know about that!!! I think you've just blown my mind.
I’m not saying our side is unswervingly rational. I’m saying there’s nothing sagacious about positioning oneself between the two poles
"there’s nothing sagacious about positioning oneself between the two poles"
Yeah, this is more or less my point, though I haven't expressed it quite like this. I agree, there's no point in positioning oneself between the poles. And there's no point in positioning oneself *at* the poles either. I've seen people online describe me as a liberal, a centrist, and even, on a few occasions, as a conservative! And I'm talking about people who did so with the intention of being complimentary.
The labels don't matter. I'm not attracted to certain ideas because they're "liberal" or "progressive" or "conservative", I'm attracted to them because I think they're smart and reasonable and the best compromise overall for a healthy, functioning society. If any idea, wherever it comes from, seems to threaten that society, I oppose it.
So yeah, I'm not trying to be seen as standing between the two extremes. There's no virtue in defending "both sides" of an argument (though there is value in *seeing* both sides of an argument accurately and not caricaturing one side or the other). My only allegiance is to good ideas. Wherever they come from.
Not true. Centrists would say it equals four because we consider both sides; liberals overestimate and conservatives underestimate, LOL!
The core value of conservatism is cruelty. I will never accept that.
From all I can see wokeism is a fad and won’t endure much longer than bell bottom jeans, and will collapse under the weight of its absurdity. It’s incoherent.
"The core value of conservatism is cruelty."
This is a hell of a way to characterise the views of millions of people Chris. I'm sure you're just being a little hyperbolic here. But of course, if you take this perspective seriously, as sadly some people do, all discourse is impossible. The other side is simply "evil."
Meanwhile, the opposite numbers on the right are calling "the Libs" groomers and communists. It's exactly the same instinct.
I don't say it casually, Steve, and I don't say it to shock or for attention. This is my firm belief. Let's take a few of the positions of pre-alt-right conservatism.
* "strong defense" euphemises bullying and intimidation as international policy
* "fiscal conservatism" is a rationale for not giving help to those who need it
* "states' rights" is to create a safe haven for bigotry and for destruction of the environment (have you ever heard it applied to any kindness?)
As for the new conservatism, the cruelty is out in the open and undeniable.
When conservatives call us groomers and communists, they are knowingly lying. When we call them cruel, we are not. I reject this symmetry.
I characterise liberals, broadly speaking, as being driven by kindness, and conservatives, broadly speaking, as being driven by stability. Both instincts are necessary in a functioning society. And both can be pursued to a fault.
All the identity politics, words are violence, you are whatever you say you are nonsense is the left going too far.
All the close the borders, "any lifestyle except a traditional christian nuclear family is evil" nonsense is the right going too far.
But they're both built on their respective instincts.
The violence we see from the left and the right, is because each side allows themselves to believe that a caricature of the other is the reality. And that their side is in existential danger. We saw how extreme this can get on J6 obviously, but also during the summer riots in 2020.
Perfectly said.
To bad You're delusional. You'd have some things worth listening to, if You weren't.