That is censorship. Prior to this point in time only hate speech, inciteful, vulgar, things were censored. To remove speech from the view of others that is contrary to your own simply because you believe it is "garbage" is censorship. Perhaps the other side believes your speech should be censored. Let's have your comment removed because of your generalization of speech you don't like as "garbage" doesn't conform with the guidelines i just thought of right now and actually, i think your comment is "garbage". How to punish you for your opinion now? 12 hours ban? 24? Deplatformed? Where does it end? THAT is censorship.
Stop using someone else's services for your expression. Just imagine you are in Walmart or a Target or your local grocery store. You don't have a right to be there or to engage in any speech or really anything else if the manager wants you removed from private property. If you want to nationalize Twitter and Facebook be my guest but until then the owners of said private property can continue to kick people off of it. I still have yet to see one case where a person's right to free speech were somehow infringed upon.
I would put forth that you're not going to get far in this conversation if you can't acknowledge that censorship and government abridgement of free speech are not one and the same.
A company deplatforming an individual is indeed censorship, but is not government abridgement of free speech.
The violent groups that organized on Facebook, does anyone feel Google or Apple should penalize Facebook for allowing that to occur? Should all Facebook users be deplatformed?
I understand what you're saying, but in my limited experience, it appears it isn't exactly what information is being presented so much as How it is presented. Often I see some with a differing opinion begin along the lines of: "You're an idiot Trumper, you're killing the planet!!" How about begin with a question to engage? For example: " why is it you think climate change doesn't exist? From the studies I've seen, I was convinced. " That's better right?
ratww, I didn't intend to suggest perfection from either side. But, only one side wants to censor the other for their opinion, the manner in which they convey it, or broad association with extremists by way of similar beliefs on a much narrower subset of ideas.
My example of climate change was merely a "for instance" rather than for the topic of the example to become part of the discussion.
Point being, silencing one side doesn't work if the alleged reason is their ideas are so wrong they are too dangerous to be read unless you can properly show what you claim is "right".
I never mentioned anything about censorship here, so I don't see how this applies to my reply.
What I was objecting here is the theory that people on the right has been radicalised due to the left not wanting to discuss. I'm just demonstrating that not only the left wants to speak to the extremists, but also the right itself wants (Pence and Fox News). But the extremists don't care: they're even attacking both left and right preemptively. There's zero interest from extremists to understand opposing opinions.
This theory that the left is to blame for the radicalisation of those people holds absolutely no water.
It’s really tiresome seeing the “Republicans are victims of the left“ meme over and over. You’ve controlled the government for years. You’ve mismanaged the pandemic, killing more Americans than world war 2. We’re not supposed to take the president’s words literally, unless he’s saying something that you happen to personally agree with.
And no, discussing studies doesn’t work. See the anti-vax debate. We’ve been pointing out the science on climate change and vaccines, clearly and respectfully, for _decades_ and it has not mattered.
I’ve never seen anyone directly start a persuasive argument with “you’re an idiot Trumper”. It isn’t that common. Your helpless victim attitude is showing.
Trump had every opportunity to win this election rightfully. He is not a victim and neither are you or his supporters. Stop playing one.
You seem to be requesting perfection from one side but not from the other.
To keep on the previous example: Pence and Fox News never called anyone "idiot Trumper" or anything and they are being attacked by that crowd.
About climate change: Greta Thunberg has been called all kinds of names without equivalent provocation.
And there's a lot of people willing to engage with climate change deniers in the way you're suggesting they should, but a large part of climate change deniers are not willing to accept that those people are acting in good faith. There's lot of accusations that non-deniers are paid shills and stuff like that.
Again, why does every person on one side has to be perfect, but the other side gets a pass? Even the Republicans can't control the Trump crowd.
Absolutely, and I acknowledge that: the right itself is full of completely reasonable people that is being shunned by some of the extremists.
On the other hand, the same thing should apply to the left! Just because someone on the left has not been using logical arguments and acting in bad faith, it doesn't mean the whole left is doing it. People don't get a free pass on claiming "the left caused it" or (EDIT) "the left not talking to them is the reason they have this opinion".
Wait, just so we're on the same page: by "the left caused it" I mean that I don't believe the theory that "the left is to blame for people having extremist opinions because the left doesn't want to talk to them". Not some specific event.
I also believe that blaming the whole right for anything is incorrect too, and repeatedly mentioned that some of the right are being shunned by extremists too.
I think that one possible disconnect is the issue of ‘extremism’. I don’t think we can make a black and white division between extremists and everyone else.
For example, I think things like saying ‘whiteness’ is the problem, is not particularly associated with the extremes and yet very much are part of the cause of the problem. Similarly, calling everyone on the left a snowflake or a communist, is not only the purview of extremists.
> I don’t think we can make a black and white division between extremists and everyone else.
I haven't made any black and white division between extremists and anyone else. I always said "large portion of extremists", "a large part of climate change deniers", etc.
What I'm replying to here is the multiple posts (not yours) saying that the problem is that some people on the left have been communicating in a combative/ineffective manner.
While this is true, I don't believe this is the source of the problem. And demanding perfection from one side while absolving the other is not a fair tactic. It's pure bullshit. Why must the left be flawless? In fact, it's a bit condescending to the extremists.
I don’t believe it is the only source. However the situation is a non-exclusive OR. When either side does this, they become part of the cause. The behavior is the source of the problem - not a side.
No ‘side’ can claim not to be the cause unless it can curb the behavior. The left cannot curb the right behaving unreasonably, but it might be able to curb unreason on its own side.
However this: “demanding perfection from one side while absolving the other” seems like a straw man. If this is being done, it’s clearly being done by the right and the left.
When the right say the left are causing the problem by doing this, they are correct. You are also correct to say they aren’t the only ones causing it.
However the left cannot improve the situation by pointing fingers at the right and doubling down.
The left doesn’t have to be ‘flawless’, but if it’s not better than the right, then how does it expect to improve anything?
It's not a strawman. The posts I answered virtually said that the reason extremists still hold their extreme position is due to "the left" being too combative and being unable to create arguments to debate with the extremists. Note I'm not saying "the right" to refer to them.
I'm not talking about "the right" here. The right is too varied (as is the left). I'm talking about extremists.
I pointed out that some extremists are not even willing to listen to people on the right itself. Pence and Fox News are definitely not calling people "idiot trumpsters" and are still being attacked by them.
It's not even a matter of the left trying to engage in discussion. People have screamed at me and called me "sheeple" for wearing a mask in the supermarket. How do you engage? I just left. Am I the cause of the problem for not speaking a word before or after the engagement?
The left can't improve the situation by trying to debate with people that's unwilling to debate in the first place, period.
“The left can't improve the situation by trying to debate with people that's unwilling to debate in the first place, period.“
This is true.
However the left can improve the situation by being willing to debate people who are willing to debate, and yet casual dismissals or irrelevances about whiteness and racism stop that dead.
The people who claim to be willing to debate aren't necessarily willing to debate though. Someone like a Richard Spencer is really looking to gish gallop and not debate
I appreciate your honesty and I will attempt to explain, briefly, so you might understand better.
1. Most people on the right are against abortion for the reason that it is against their particular religion, which declares it as murder and murder is wrong.
But, the others don't care at all about a woman's right to choose, they just don't want their tax dollars paying for that choice instead of other things they want. It really is that simple.
As far as the court goes, that is completely different. The saying goes "you can indict a ham sandwich ", and that is largely true. Courts all over the nation entertain frivolous actions on a daily basis, people love this (Judge Judy), but when cases are preliminary dismissed without the "day in court" faith in the court will be quickly lost by those who believed win or lose, it should have been heard.
Each person reading this was raised in a time when they were taught every vote counts, your opinion matters, and to stand up for what you believe in while respecting the opinions of others. The opinion of one side is no longer even listened to, let alone respected. How many of you have ever genuinely tried to explain to someone with a different opinion why you disagree with them? I don't see that much anymore. Not everyone with a different opinion is set in their beliefs. Some may welcome your perspective and shift their viewpoint to yours. It's worth a try, right? Apparently not for most. Instead, the right is vilified, insulted, and they believe they are treated differently and unfairly from the left. Their voices are being systematically taken away through deplatforming. They are being stereotyped and lumped into a single category along with extremists. So, the logical conclusion is that if you isolate, disparage, and discourage someone enough, they will become you've now convinced them they are. Multiply that by 70 million. Instead, try talking to people with the goal of explaining your point of view and why you feel that way. It certainly can't hurt more than what's happening now.
But your own post makes clear the problem with your logic. This isn’t about convincing people. It’s about the fact that people’s political views are guided by gut, instinct and the bubbles they’re in instead of by critical thinking. These people believe abortion is killing an innocent baby. They don’t want their tax dollars spent on thing X. They believe the election was rigged — evidence doesn’t come into it. How do you change what people believe? I think we’ve tried rational debate. God knows I have. It’s frustrating to be told over and over, “well, if you just explained better...” when the people I’m trying to convince aren’t interested in learning. They’re happy with their beliefs, their beliefs work for them. And that’s a pity, because their beliefs are destructive and increasingly inhumane. That’s my belief, obviously, but I think it’s one supported by facts: abortion is wrong but you can cage Mexican children. The Jews control the government. Voter suppression is a reasonable response to higher turnout in urban centers. Chinese students shouldn’t be able to go to grad schools in the US. I could go on.
At a certain point, just take the hit. I’m sorry, but one side has more moral politics than the other. I don’t see how this is a debate at this point, and I’m honestly frustrated that people like you keep asking us to have the debate. If anything, it’s the right that keeps crying that they’ve been deplatformed when they’re doing it to themselves by having horrific opinions.
AND the right doesn’t even argue in good faith! Like they just make stuff up. For instance, about ANTIFA being behind the attempted coup on Wednesday. You want us to argue with that?
Just wanna add that the left seems to believe what institutions and the legacy media tell them, at face value.
Many on the right use critical thinking, however they seem to believe that numbers and “science” can be spun into any narrative the gatekeepers want (whoever they may be).
Most of the schism really seems to be based on trust. Left trusts by default, the right does not. The left trusts that the government knows best, the right does not. The right believes in personal responsibility for running your life (not trusting it to any other party), the left does not, requiring collectivism and social programs.
Yes, the left trusts “science”, broadly. That’s because when we see 99% of scientists in a field claiming something, we don’t pretend we know better than them. We respect science, we understand on some level the work that goes into good science, and so we aren’t arrogant arses.
> Second, most research questions are addressed by many teams, and it is misleading to emphasize the statistically significant findings of any single team. What matters is the totality of the evidence.
93% of surveyed geneticists and behavioral psychologists claim that the black-white IQ gap has a non-zero genetic component. Do you know better than them?
I'm inclined to believe them, but not rule out the possibility it was their bias speaking. Historically doctors have believed a white woman's pelvis is better for child bearing, whereas a black woman's is better for hard labor. That has since been proven wrong. There is no discernable difference between the races in the pelvic area.
Regardless, the argument against discrimination is that one has no CHOICE what race they are born with. Because there is no choice, race does not reflect their invididual merits or lack thereof, and one should not be awarded or punished based on that factor alone. There is also significant variation within a race with regard to IQ or otherwise, that exceeds the difference of the mean value between races
> Nah, the right trusts everything the tv and radio hosts tell them.
I don't agree. The media, as a whole, leans left. Except for comparatively far fewer right leaning news outlets. I don't think I can name a single newspaper that doesn't have a left slant. LA Times, NY Times, WashPo are the giants, plus any of your local city newspapers. People on the right are not likely to trust any of those entities.
For news stations there's CNN, NBC, ABC, which all lean left. For the right, there's Fox and a couple a low-key bum ones like OANN and NewsMax. Again, right leaning people are likely to view most of tv media sources as untrustworthy.
The media leans neoliberal, not left. You never see leftist leaders painted in a good light by CNN, ABC, NBC, WashPo, NY Times or LA Times, as those leaders threaten the continued consolidation of wealth by the upper class.
From my experience, the right is terrible at judging who to trust (i mean most people are really). They mistrust the government for instance, and rightly so, for you should have a healthy distrust of the government. However, they then go and trust absolute quacks like anti-vaxxers, conspiracy theorists, Trump, etc. ???
I've seen some of the links shared in right wing forums (I used to frequent one a few years ago), and the sources they link scream "bullshit" to me, and not because I disagree with what they say. It's just that life experience of identifying what is BS and what is not necessarily BS. Some people just will not believe authority, but will believe the first thing they see that goes against mainstream.
Maybe unrelated, but there's actually largely even distribution of anti-vaxxers between left and right. It's not an issue split by political affiliation. You could say the same about conspiracy theorists, but it'd probably be more difficult to poll/test.
All I see are people listening. Scores of legal professionals, attorneys, and judges have read through thousands of pages of serious arguments made by the right. Election officials have burned the midnight oil over and over again searching for issues after listening to complaints from the right. Journalists have spent countless hours chasing down people to listen to, only to find deception. After all of this listening, all we ever seem to find is deception. If the right doesn’t change their tune, then all the listeners can do is see them as a group he’ll bent on deception. You make your bed, and you sleep in it. Period.
And yet if we look at it objectively, the right is clearly overrepresnted in our political system. Republicans lost the popular vote in five of the last six presidential elections. In the next presidential election there will be many eligible voters who weren't even born last time they won. The Senate gives a seven point advantage to Republicans. So please, explain to me where you get this idea that the right is "treated unfairly," because it's getting very hard to see how this argument is being made in good faith.
> And yet if we look at it objectively, the right is clearly overrepresnted in our political system.
That isn't nearly as clear as it seems, because of the incentives the electoral college creates.
Republicans could pick up a lot more votes in places like California or New York if they had any reason to try, but none of those votes help them if they can't flip the state. Spending resources campaigning in California so that it goes to the Democrats by 54 to 46 instead 65 to 35 is a losing strategy, so they don't.
But then that's why the popular vote numbers come out the way they do. If you actually abolished the electoral college, suddenly the foregone conclusion states would matter, everybody's campaign strategy would change and so would all the numbers.
The people the electoral college actually underrepresents are the people of California and Massachusetts. But also Texas, Alabama, Mississippi, Kentucky, etc. The people it overrepresents are the people of Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, etc. The swing states. Because they're the only people whose vote can plausibly change the outcome, so they're the only people whose concerns politicians care to address.
Which means you can pretty easily end up in a situation where people from deep red states feel underrepresented, because in practice they are. The same as the people from deep blue states.
Thanks for your reply. Let me start by saying that I agree the numbers would look completely different if it weren't for the Electoral College. That is because the Republican platform has consistently failed to win over a majority of Americans: absent the EC, the Republican Party would have to recalibrate its platform in order to remain competitive. This feedback mechanism is essential to a functioning democracy, and it's currently broken, because Republicans still have a decent shot at winning nationally thanks to the bias in the EC.
With respect to your argument that the EC actually overrepresents swing states, you may be correct. However, the EC bias clearly favors Republicans over Democrats. In 2020, that bias was 3.9% in favor of Republicans, although it varies from election to election[0]. When the size of the bias exceeds the margin of victory for the winner of the popular vote, the popular vote loser takes the EC, as in 2016.
Furthermore, you didn't actually address the most antidemocratic institution of all: the Senate. The Senate is heavily biased towards small states; California (pop 39m) and Wyoming (pop < 1m) each have two senators. The average state is currently much more Republican than the average American, amounting to 6.6% bias[1]. That is to say, Democrats could win by five points nationally (a huge victory given current polarization levels) and still not control the Senate.
Finally, I'm sure that you can end up with a situation wherein conservatives "feel" underrepresented; my whole point is that they objectively are not, so this whole persecution complex evinced by some is completely ridiculous. People are entitled to their feelings; they should also be willing to look at facts and adjust their reactions accordingly.
> absent the EC, the Republican Party would have to recalibrate its platform in order to remain competitive.
Absent the EC, both parties would have to recalibrate their platforms in order to remain competitive. It would completely upturn the map. You would see Republicans campaigning in New York and Democrats in Texas. Wall St. and Big Oil and Hollywood would gain influence, retirees in Florida and auto workers in the rust belt would lose it. It would redraw all the lines and fundamentally change both of the parties.
I think that's really where you're going wrong. Treating the members of each party as two different species, as though every voter for a given party has uniform shared interests with all the others. There is no such thing as "Republicans" being over-represented. Pennsylvanians are over-represented, which influences the party platforms of both the Republicans and the Democrats. Which allows them both to ignore California and Texas and New York, but also the entire dozen odd little deep red states that are supposed to be the most "over-represented" despite not being competitive at all and consequently being totally ignored by both parties.
> The average state is currently much more Republican than the average American, amounting to 6.6% bias
The obvious flaw in the party-based analysis being that we're currently going into a legislative session in which the Democrats control the Senate, which they do approximately half of the time. Because they adjust their policies to the map.
Also, the purpose of the Senate is to be this way, in the same way that Justices of the Supreme Court are not elected. Senators were not originally elected, they were appointed by the state legislatures. It's by design as a check on the populist tendencies of the House, and causing Senators to be directly elected has only made everything worse by depriving the states of their voice in the federal government and the destroying the restraint on federal power that once implied.
> Treating the members of each party as two different species, as though every voter for a given party has uniform shared interests with all the others. There is no such thing as "Republicans" being over-represented. Pennsylvanians are over-represented, which influences the party platforms of both the Republicans and the Democrats.
For the reasons I've outlined above, Republicans are overrepresented. To reiterate, it takes more Democratic votes to achieve a majority than it does Republican votes. This is a matter of fact.
> The obvious flaw in the party-based analysis being that we're currently going into a legislative session in which the Democrats control the Senate, which they do approximately half of the time.
But Republicans have controlled the Senate even when Democratic Senators have gotten more votes and represent more people. So Democrats are forced to adjust their policies while Republicans are under much less pressure to do so.
> Also, the purpose of the Senate is to be this way, in the same way that Justices of the Supreme Court are not elected.
When the Senate was created, the difference in population between the largest and smallest states was 12x. Today it is 68x. If you still think this is a feature rather than a bug, you and I have fundamentally different ideas about what democracy should be.
This will be my final comment as all those who keep telling me that it's my duty as a liberal to engage in dialog with the other side also seem to downvote my comments to oblivion when I try. Ciao.
How about instead we say, "appointed by a Republican president," so we don't get bogged down in semantics? Since Heller, Citizens United, Bush v Gore etc were clearly the products of partisan Republican justices.
Sorry to be blunt but this just goes to show how often your "feelings" diverge from objective reality.
One can be moderately conservative and still conservative. If you look at the court's decisions, the only time in the last one hundred years SCOTUS has had a sustained liberal streak was in the 1960s.
