God I hate the current political discourse. You have extremists vs extremists, and now both sides are vilifying everyone that doesn’t blindly adhere to all their positions.
I’ve had people try to tell me that basic healthcare and corrections to income equality are “extremely progressive” viewpoints. I’m done with letting others’ definition of extremism into the conversation.
Being called an extremist is not really the thing I’m taking issue with. The right wing has been doing that for decades, screeching “communist!” at the most ridiculous things. And depending on which particular ideals you subscribe to, being such an “extremist” is probably a good thing.
The issue I have is that instead of calling out that shitty behavior, the left has started emulating and expanding on it. In addition to calling everyone “fascist”, they’ve started attacking the entire concept of being a centrist (and I mean actual centrist here, not just right wingers arguing in bad faith). People aren’t born believing in one socioeconomic system or another, it’s learned. Generally, everyone is going to start off somewhere in the center, as they become politically aware. If the only voices they ever hear is two sides screeching names at eachother, you wind up with a disengaged and disinterested voting population, which will only help the fascists.
The issue I have is that instead of calling out that shitty behavior, the left has started emulating and expanding on it.
Why wouldn’t we adopt a tactic that has proven effective?
The left tried “calling it out” for decades. Unfortunately, as the right realized, the liberals were so committed to compromise and being the “reasonable” ones that they could be as unreasonable as they want and they’d still reach across the aisle and try to compromise. When you’re up against an enemy like that with no backbone, whose whole identity rests on being the “reasonable compromise,” all you have to do is take the maximalist, most extreme position on every issue, and then you can let yourself be “talked down” to what you actually want. Meanwhile, you can actually promote specific ideas and a general ideology in order to influence where the electorate stands, while the other side can never full-throatedly embrace a coherent ideology and just triangulates carefully focus group tested positions.
The right has won by being beligerant, extreme, and unapologetic, and the reason they’ve won is because it’s taken so fucking long for any sort of actual left to even begin to emerge and react to that by actually standing up to them and giving it back to them. Even so, the closest we have to a “left” in the mainstream, the Democratic party, is still overwhelmingly committed to moderation and compromise! Rather than criticizing the left for being too beligerant, the left should be criticized for not being beligerant enough! Instead “centrists” will go out and find some fringe group of online communists with no power and compare that against the extremism of the mainstream right, which currently holds majorities in every branch of the US government.
You misunderstand my position. Maybe that’s on me for being too vague.
My position can be summed up as “talk softly, carry a big stick.” At no point does that necessitate compromising. When dealing with online discussions, it’s not just you and the person you are directly speaking to. There’s other people reading. Some of those people are the frothing at the mouth right wingers, who you are never going to reach anyway, and so they are irrelevant. On the other hand, some of those people will be the young, some will be the adults who are just become politically aware. These are all people who can be persuaded with logic, and you want on your side. None of that necessitates you compromising your ideals (and not should you).
The same thing applies to when you go out protesting. The point is to get more people on your side, without simply becoming what you are fighting against. So you should be peaceful, you should be respectful, but in the interest of not compromising, you should also be armed.
I see, I understand that a bit better. Imo you need a carrot-and-stick approach, meeting belligerence with reason can come across as weakness, and if bad faith tactics are allowed to be deployed, they can win against someone committed to staying in good faith. The goal should be to have a reasonable discussion, but to do that, you gotta make sure the costs of straying from that are too high to be worth the benefit, and that can mean being rude and confrontational and throwing their tactics back in their face - but it’s situational. That’s what “speaking softly but carrying a big stick” means to me.
Exactly, and in my opinion, online discussions are not the place for the “unreasonable” tactics. It’s not really possible for an individual to be “louder” via text, and it’s not just the unreasonable person you are reaching. It’s all the people who may happen across the conversation later, and you have no way of knowing just how many of those are people that may still be swayed by reason.
I don’t really agree. You can be “shouted down” in text format, even if not literally. And yeah it’s not about reaching the unreasonable person, but it’s about not letting them win at the game they’re playing. Like I said, responding to aggression with reason can come across as weakness, and for some people, they’d rather feel strong than feel reasonable. It’s not really as simple as the more reasonable person wins, there’s a range of different things that are going to influence who people agree with, it might be aesthetics and which side sounds more cringe, or it might be empathy, or so on. “Logos” is only one factor.
There is no extremist left in the american political discourse. Theres hardly even any left at all. And yes you really are the villain if you dont want women and minority groups to be equal with cishet white men or for israel to stop genociding.
If you vilify everyone that differs from you in the slightest, you are a detriment to your own cause.
“In the slightest” being centrist code for “who counts as a human being” and “does bombing hospitals and starving children count as genocide”
Nobody is vilifying someone because they have different opinions on the importance of reading Shakespeare in high-school, or if they think, big centralised public libraries are a better option to lots of smaller public libraries.
This is just the quintessential enlightened centrist argument, reducing down serious issues about basic fundamental morals into just “disagreement”
Nobody is vilifying someone because they have different opinions on the importance of reading Shakespeare in high-school, or if they think, big centralised public libraries are a better option to lots of smaller public libraries.
No, but they are dumping people into that category in their mind, and then making all kinds of assumptions and conclusions about that person based off the one false assumption. And then because it’s the internet, the name calling starts and all constructive conversation ends.
Just look at this thread. I started it with “the current American political discourse sucks” and no-one commenting was able to take that statement at face value. Everyone replied with assumptions on what my stance was on issues I didn’t mention. It’s that exact reflex that I have a problem with. Essentially, I agree with the message, but I disagree with the delivery method.
no-one commenting was able to take that statement at face value
People can smell the tepid liberalism and pretty reliably guess what else you believe because they’ve seen it before. The modlog indicates they were right. You are exactly the person they’re talking about when they mock someone bothsidesing genocide.
Hamas doesn’t equal the entirety of the Palestinian population in the same way that the Israeli government/military doesn’t equal the entire Israeli population. Why is that so hard for you .ml tankies to separate? There’s a reason why I specifically make sure to phrase the discussion as “Hamas’s actions” not “the Palestinians’ actions”
Israel is fighting to eradicate the entire Palestinian people, Hamas is fighting to protect the entire Palestinian people, and even groups whose members Hamas murdered to obtain power are supporting them at this point in time. When you adopt the zionist framing that Israel is justified in fighting Hamas because they’re just so evil, you are carrying water for Israel.
If you’re old enough to remember Iraq, they did the same shit; the right wanted to murder as many Muslims as possible, the tepid liberals tried to say they only opposed Saddam and the Baathists and terrorists as if the two positions weren’t equivalent in practice.
I’m old enough to remember the first Iraq. I’m also aware enough of history to understand that when you hold a group up as the innocent victims, when they were anything but, you create an environment where other groups emulate them down the road.
The Israeli government holds the lions share of the blame for the Gaza genocide, after all, they are the one’s doing it. But if we want to learn from this, and learn from what led up to it to hopefully short circuit things before they get this far in the future, we must acknowledge Hamas role.
Hamas may be fighting for the Palestinian people, but how you fight can have a major effect on how your enemies react, and also can have a major effect on soft support from third parties. Things like fighting out of civilian areas, and fighting without uniforms, etc, were made war crimes in the past specifically because of situations like this; it ends up getting civilians caught in the crossfire at best, and targeted at worst.
This isn’t a left/right position, this is just observations on what has happened globally every time an assymetrical war has been fought over the last 30 years.
Realistically, everyone holds some blame here. If the UN had some balls (and if the US and USSR could have pulled their heads out of their collective asses back in the seventies) there would have been peacekeepers and a two state solution after the first war. Probably should have made Jerusalem a city state like the Vatican, just to stop everyone fighting for control of that too.
Whatever you say Herr Niemöller. Keep your false equivalences, ignore the US now has literal concentration camps, and calmly wait until they come for you.
I never made any equivalences, stated any of my political opinions, or said anything other the fact that the current US political discourse sucks.
And things are only going to get worse because people like you would rather make up shit to get offended by, instead of doing anything that might get the majority on your side.
Making things up? Have you read the news? People have been arrested by plainclothes thugs and deported with no due process. There was a picture earlier of the holding bunks of the victims of these extrajudiciary ICE raids next to literal concentration camps. They are being sent, irreversably, to work camps in other countries that are known to torture and kill their prisoners, especially foreigners. You are ignorant to the point of danger.
If thinking I am a human being with full and equal rights to every other human being and that anyone who disagrees can go fuck themselves makes me an extremist then that’s a reflection of the society I live in, not me.
And yeah, the people who ‘don’t agree with me on every point’ are the people trying to criminalize my existence. How many states is it illegal for you to piss in a public restroom? How many states are trying to criminalize your healthcare? Have you had the government confiscate or alter your passport? Did you even know this shit is happening?
Wrong again. I’m trying to point out that it’s exactly this type of conversation that has been driving people away and making the left wing half of the US political spectrum completely impotent.
Seems like a great way to say “I bought into the right wing populist bullshit, and don’t want to be held accountable for the results we’re now seeing. So I’ll blame the left that the right wing populist bullshiit told me to blame for everything.”
As dumb as it is to claim the left and right are only having minor disagreements, or are equally valid, your comment is not helping because this behavior is exactly what Anteater is referring to.
So that in 4 years, asking that political prisoners be treated with the slightest amount of human decency is just too damn extreme for the right to take seriously?
No, I would have them work against the right even more than they are now on a macro level, and on a personal level to be firm that certain things are wrong but to not drive away people who are willing to convert.
God I hate the current political discourse. You have extremists vs extremists, and now both sides are vilifying everyone that doesn’t blindly adhere to all their positions.
I’ve had people try to tell me that basic healthcare and corrections to income equality are “extremely progressive” viewpoints. I’m done with letting others’ definition of extremism into the conversation.
Being called an extremist is not really the thing I’m taking issue with. The right wing has been doing that for decades, screeching “communist!” at the most ridiculous things. And depending on which particular ideals you subscribe to, being such an “extremist” is probably a good thing.
The issue I have is that instead of calling out that shitty behavior, the left has started emulating and expanding on it. In addition to calling everyone “fascist”, they’ve started attacking the entire concept of being a centrist (and I mean actual centrist here, not just right wingers arguing in bad faith). People aren’t born believing in one socioeconomic system or another, it’s learned. Generally, everyone is going to start off somewhere in the center, as they become politically aware. If the only voices they ever hear is two sides screeching names at eachother, you wind up with a disengaged and disinterested voting population, which will only help the fascists.
Why wouldn’t we adopt a tactic that has proven effective?
The left tried “calling it out” for decades. Unfortunately, as the right realized, the liberals were so committed to compromise and being the “reasonable” ones that they could be as unreasonable as they want and they’d still reach across the aisle and try to compromise. When you’re up against an enemy like that with no backbone, whose whole identity rests on being the “reasonable compromise,” all you have to do is take the maximalist, most extreme position on every issue, and then you can let yourself be “talked down” to what you actually want. Meanwhile, you can actually promote specific ideas and a general ideology in order to influence where the electorate stands, while the other side can never full-throatedly embrace a coherent ideology and just triangulates carefully focus group tested positions.
The right has won by being beligerant, extreme, and unapologetic, and the reason they’ve won is because it’s taken so fucking long for any sort of actual left to even begin to emerge and react to that by actually standing up to them and giving it back to them. Even so, the closest we have to a “left” in the mainstream, the Democratic party, is still overwhelmingly committed to moderation and compromise! Rather than criticizing the left for being too beligerant, the left should be criticized for not being beligerant enough! Instead “centrists” will go out and find some fringe group of online communists with no power and compare that against the extremism of the mainstream right, which currently holds majorities in every branch of the US government.
You misunderstand my position. Maybe that’s on me for being too vague.
My position can be summed up as “talk softly, carry a big stick.” At no point does that necessitate compromising. When dealing with online discussions, it’s not just you and the person you are directly speaking to. There’s other people reading. Some of those people are the frothing at the mouth right wingers, who you are never going to reach anyway, and so they are irrelevant. On the other hand, some of those people will be the young, some will be the adults who are just become politically aware. These are all people who can be persuaded with logic, and you want on your side. None of that necessitates you compromising your ideals (and not should you).
The same thing applies to when you go out protesting. The point is to get more people on your side, without simply becoming what you are fighting against. So you should be peaceful, you should be respectful, but in the interest of not compromising, you should also be armed.
I see, I understand that a bit better. Imo you need a carrot-and-stick approach, meeting belligerence with reason can come across as weakness, and if bad faith tactics are allowed to be deployed, they can win against someone committed to staying in good faith. The goal should be to have a reasonable discussion, but to do that, you gotta make sure the costs of straying from that are too high to be worth the benefit, and that can mean being rude and confrontational and throwing their tactics back in their face - but it’s situational. That’s what “speaking softly but carrying a big stick” means to me.
Exactly, and in my opinion, online discussions are not the place for the “unreasonable” tactics. It’s not really possible for an individual to be “louder” via text, and it’s not just the unreasonable person you are reaching. It’s all the people who may happen across the conversation later, and you have no way of knowing just how many of those are people that may still be swayed by reason.
I don’t really agree. You can be “shouted down” in text format, even if not literally. And yeah it’s not about reaching the unreasonable person, but it’s about not letting them win at the game they’re playing. Like I said, responding to aggression with reason can come across as weakness, and for some people, they’d rather feel strong than feel reasonable. It’s not really as simple as the more reasonable person wins, there’s a range of different things that are going to influence who people agree with, it might be aesthetics and which side sounds more cringe, or it might be empathy, or so on. “Logos” is only one factor.
I agree with this actually. I think your other comments were worded too vaguely, allowing differences of interpretation to cause severe disagreement.
Centrists lack a moral center. They test to see the way the wind is blowing and do that.
There is no extremist left in the american political discourse. Theres hardly even any left at all. And yes you really are the villain if you dont want women and minority groups to be equal with cishet white men or for israel to stop genociding.
Found the enabler. ⬆️
Found the source of the problem.
No two humans are going to agree on every point. If you vilify everyone that differs from you in the slightest, you are a detriment to your own cause.
But of course, no one actually wants to fix everything. They want to just make snarky comments online to feel superior.
“In the slightest” being centrist code for “who counts as a human being” and “does bombing hospitals and starving children count as genocide”
Nobody is vilifying someone because they have different opinions on the importance of reading Shakespeare in high-school, or if they think, big centralised public libraries are a better option to lots of smaller public libraries.
This is just the quintessential enlightened centrist argument, reducing down serious issues about basic fundamental morals into just “disagreement”
No, but they are dumping people into that category in their mind, and then making all kinds of assumptions and conclusions about that person based off the one false assumption. And then because it’s the internet, the name calling starts and all constructive conversation ends.
Just look at this thread. I started it with “the current American political discourse sucks” and no-one commenting was able to take that statement at face value. Everyone replied with assumptions on what my stance was on issues I didn’t mention. It’s that exact reflex that I have a problem with. Essentially, I agree with the message, but I disagree with the delivery method.
People can smell the tepid liberalism and pretty reliably guess what else you believe because they’ve seen it before. The modlog indicates they were right. You are exactly the person they’re talking about when they mock someone bothsidesing genocide.
Hamas doesn’t equal the entirety of the Palestinian population in the same way that the Israeli government/military doesn’t equal the entire Israeli population. Why is that so hard for you .ml tankies to separate? There’s a reason why I specifically make sure to phrase the discussion as “Hamas’s actions” not “the Palestinians’ actions”
Israel is fighting to eradicate the entire Palestinian people, Hamas is fighting to protect the entire Palestinian people, and even groups whose members Hamas murdered to obtain power are supporting them at this point in time. When you adopt the zionist framing that Israel is justified in fighting Hamas because they’re just so evil, you are carrying water for Israel.
If you’re old enough to remember Iraq, they did the same shit; the right wanted to murder as many Muslims as possible, the tepid liberals tried to say they only opposed Saddam and the Baathists and terrorists as if the two positions weren’t equivalent in practice.
I’m old enough to remember the first Iraq. I’m also aware enough of history to understand that when you hold a group up as the innocent victims, when they were anything but, you create an environment where other groups emulate them down the road.
The Israeli government holds the lions share of the blame for the Gaza genocide, after all, they are the one’s doing it. But if we want to learn from this, and learn from what led up to it to hopefully short circuit things before they get this far in the future, we must acknowledge Hamas role.
Hamas may be fighting for the Palestinian people, but how you fight can have a major effect on how your enemies react, and also can have a major effect on soft support from third parties. Things like fighting out of civilian areas, and fighting without uniforms, etc, were made war crimes in the past specifically because of situations like this; it ends up getting civilians caught in the crossfire at best, and targeted at worst.
This isn’t a left/right position, this is just observations on what has happened globally every time an assymetrical war has been fought over the last 30 years.
Realistically, everyone holds some blame here. If the UN had some balls (and if the US and USSR could have pulled their heads out of their collective asses back in the seventies) there would have been peacekeepers and a two state solution after the first war. Probably should have made Jerusalem a city state like the Vatican, just to stop everyone fighting for control of that too.
Whatever you say Herr Niemöller. Keep your false equivalences, ignore the US now has literal concentration camps, and calmly wait until they come for you.
I never made any equivalences, stated any of my political opinions, or said anything other the fact that the current US political discourse sucks.
And things are only going to get worse because people like you would rather make up shit to get offended by, instead of doing anything that might get the majority on your side.
Making things up? Have you read the news? People have been arrested by plainclothes thugs and deported with no due process. There was a picture earlier of the holding bunks of the victims of these extrajudiciary ICE raids next to literal concentration camps. They are being sent, irreversably, to work camps in other countries that are known to torture and kill their prisoners, especially foreigners. You are ignorant to the point of danger.
If thinking I am a human being with full and equal rights to every other human being and that anyone who disagrees can go fuck themselves makes me an extremist then that’s a reflection of the society I live in, not me.
And yeah, the people who ‘don’t agree with me on every point’ are the people trying to criminalize my existence. How many states is it illegal for you to piss in a public restroom? How many states are trying to criminalize your healthcare? Have you had the government confiscate or alter your passport? Did you even know this shit is happening?
Jokes on you! I villify everyone!!
Exactly. 99% of the time attacks against centrists are just smug nerds who believe their side of extremism is better than the other sides.
What positions of the two provided (being against facism, and protecting women) don’t you “blindly” adhere to?
And there’s the idiotic extrapolation I’m referring to. I’m talking about the discourse in general, not the specifics.
That’s a way to say you don’t want to say which specifics you are against because people will see your shitty morals
Wrong again. I’m trying to point out that it’s exactly this type of conversation that has been driving people away and making the left wing half of the US political spectrum completely impotent.
Seems like a great way to say “I bought into the right wing populist bullshit, and don’t want to be held accountable for the results we’re now seeing. So I’ll blame the left that the right wing populist bullshiit told me to blame for everything.”
As dumb as it is to claim the left and right are only having minor disagreements, or are equally valid, your comment is not helping because this behavior is exactly what Anteater is referring to.
And what would you have the left do?
Meet the right in the middle. Again?
So that in 4 years, asking that political prisoners be treated with the slightest amount of human decency is just too damn extreme for the right to take seriously?
No, I would have them work against the right even more than they are now on a macro level, and on a personal level to be firm that certain things are wrong but to not drive away people who are willing to convert.
Which minor policies are you being vilified for supporting?