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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   35105 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 28, 2022

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If it's friends and family, have you tried arguing with them? Progressive positions are wet paper bags. If it's people you know less well, then yeah I would be keeping my mouth shut as well. It's interesting that this happens to you. It's impossible not to notice that progressivism is injected into every bit of public messaging from everything all the time, but I have not personally been part of many conversations like this. I did undergrad/PhD in very blue places, so it's not like I don't know any progressives.

Are you by chance a woman? My friends and I don't discuss politics at all really ever. My fiancee tells me that these things come up semi-frequently with her friends though. In any case, I get all the political discussions I want on the internet and also with my dad. Works for me.

Progressive positions are wet paper bags.

I frequently hear the same about conservative positions from progressives. I'm not sure there's anything deeper here than "I think my political opponents are wrong." which is trivially true. The main reason I read this forum is because I think it's highly unlikely that politics can be reduced to "my political opponents have bad arguments and are wrong and should feel bad listen to my side's obviously correct arguments", and part of that is trying to learn to steelman conservative arguments.

No, I'm not a woman. I don't know why there's this difference between your and my experiences, maybe in part that I have a lot of woman friends, maybe that I went to one of the most leftists institutions on the planet for undergrad, maybe that I live in one of the most leftist cities on the planet. Maybe something else, don't know.

I've argued with people many times before. It's not so easy to convince someone their views are wrong, and I don't think that progressive positions are so easily destroyed. Mostly they come from deep-seated value differences, or differences in our understanding of the facts. A hundred different times, I've argued with someone for over an hour and it comes down to core axiomatic differences. I've given up arguing, and I'd rather just get quippy words in edgewise if I can, but I can't always think of them on the spot.

I have a lot of woman friends

This isn't exactly related to your OP, but what is this dynamic? I haven't ever had a woman I would consider a "friend" i.e. that I would hang out with alone and/or text/call in a totally platonic way. Does your wife/gf not have an issue with you spending time with these other girls? Is there actually no romantic interest on your part, as in you would say no and be surprised if one of them made a move or indicated they wanted you to?

Well, usually I hang out with people in groups, usually with my wife and these women's husbands/boyfriends all together. I don't usually see anyone one-on-one at all. Though in theory I could easily go hang out with one of these women and my wife would trust me, no questions asked. I guess I've done things like this before, though it was a while ago.

I find these women attractive, and if I were single, I'd try to date them. But as things stand I really would say no if one of them made a move, because I value my marriage far more than having a relationship with one of them. My wife knows this, and she trusts me.

Do you text with these women, mostly their husbands, or both? Who did you typically know first, husband or wife? Any tension with the husbands?

I text them, but I'm not the sort of person who texts "hey, what's up" and just chats with people all day long, whether they're male or female. When I text them, I usually am trying to make plans with them, or at least showing them some interesting piece of content I found on Youtube or whatever that I think they'd like, or getting their opinion on something.

In these cases of my female friends, I usually know the wife first, which is why I'm usually better friends with them. There's no tension with the husbands as far as I know, though.

Maybe it helps that my wife and I lived in a big fairly tight-knit coed community in undergrad while we were dating. Some of these women come directly out of that community. But since my wife and I were living directly with both men and women while dating, she couldn't follow me around everywhere, she just had to trust me, and I had to trust her. We'd often be doing things with other people in the community, and as such, the suspicion never really arose.

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