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Do we want each other dead?
True, I may not want your idea or voice in the world.
I might be happy if it just went away.
If all those like you went away, think what my side could achieve unopposed!
But I would not support what would be needed for you to 'just go away'.
Moreover I know that there are countless other aspects to you (hypothetical asshole) that I might not find as tiresome as your online persona.
No doubt if I met you we could find something to bond over.
If I watched you with people you love, I might warm to you.
Even if I saw you, a stranger, being hurt, I would doubtless hate to see that (let's assume there is no slapstick element; admittedly that might change the equation).
But I can't see any of these things.
All I can see are the asshole-ish parts of you that peek at me through the distancing device that is my laptop.
And if those parts vanished, I might be able to convince myself to forget about all the other putative parts.
And perhaps depending on how my day and life were going, I might be glad of whatever must have happened to make your asshole-ish online parts disappear.
I perceive all this more or less symmetrically.
You'd be happy if my ideas and voice went away too. Be honest.
Your contempt for that which I share with you through our screens is evident.
Or maybe you're a supporter of someone who expresses contempt for me.
Someone who views everything as combat.
If I just went away, he'd be good with it.
You'd be good with it.
Hell, maybe people like me are an obstacle to your goals, and if we all went away, all your dreams would come true.
But still. You're like me.
You wouldn't want anything done to me really.
Actually, if you met me, you'd probably like and respect me.
It's true – even if you say you're done with the concept of empathy.
We'd probably disagree on a lot of things, but we'd make it work.
You'd probably even wince if you happened to see me fall over, unless it was an especially hilarious fall.
Nonetheless, in your weaker moments, you might be glad if something happened and the news reached you that my voice was to be no more.
So I don't think we're so different.
There's nothing more to solve than our respective asshole-ish parts clashing over distant, linked screens.
Sort that little issue out and we can be friends.
The only problem is, it's not just the two of us here.
Um, this is lovely and all, but have you ever actually been in a serious conflict with another person or group of people? Especially with a militant Leftist?
I have, as it happens. I sent an email offering to meet up and find a compromise that worked for us, and got an email back that said, to the best of my recollection, "There is nowhere that we will compromise and discussing things with you would be a waste of time".
People in the real world, actual aggressive self-righteous goal-oriented people, don't compromise because they're nice and they want what's best for everyone. They compromise only if they have to in order to get what they want. (And often not even then, look how the trade unions caused the decline of British industry rather than compromise on ideology).
I don't do it anymore but for some of the earlier parts of this insanity I would speak up. At a party, at family dinner.
I'm large and I'm calm and I'm reasonably well spoken, and because I spend time here I'd seen the arguments for both sides.
Every time I'd try, every time! The leftist would storm out - no matter how calm I was, no matter how well I dodged some of the common pitfalls. When challenged and they realized they couldn't bully me into shutting up...they fled. And we are talking doctors, lawyers, and so on.
Eventually I decided that the risk to my social life and professional life was too much and stopped.
And that was over five years ago, the extremism has only been getting worse since.
I'm sure the militant right would do the same? But I have no access to them.
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This is approximately why I'm now ironclad in my belief that I do not want to share a country with anyone left of, say, Bill Clinton. I don't want them dead. I want them to leave. Preferably of their own accord. I don't even mind paying for the tickets, as long as they're one-way and they aren't coming back. And if they won't leave, I want them to generally be as miserable as possible until they wish they had left.
Lefties are just not suited for sharing a country with other citizens who have differing belief systems; they cannot be trusted to cooperate (or 'not defect') on core issues regarding the country's safety and security, and they will generally prefer foreigners over their own neighbors in any dispute, it seems.
Yes the famous 'heat map' study is very flawed, but the point made by said heat map has been confirmed in varying ways by different studies. Lefties try to sympathize with 'everyone' (and often entirely non-human things, or abstract concepts, like "the environment.") and as a result often end up sacrificing those that would 'actually matter' to them.
Lefties also have far, far less diversity of thought within their circles than righties. It is in fact safe to assume that whatever any given lefty says they believe reflects very precisely what all of the other lefties believe. And they'll henpeck their own into line as needed.
This crystalized for me when I watched everyone on the Dem side fall into line behind Kamala Harris as Biden's successor in one day, even ones who had, that very same day, said she was the wrong choice.
Lefties are far more likely to cut off family, friends, and other relationships over 'minor' political squabbles. So you can debate them in good faith, and still find that they come away hating your guts if you don't capitulate, and then cut you off so you have no hope of ever changing their mind. This concept is so absolutely backwards compared to how I try to manage my relationships that TO ME It reads as entirely alien and incomprehensible behavior.
Lefties have no good theory of mind for their political opponents. They believe they know what their opponents believe, but they tend to fail the ideological Turing test badly. So its that much easier for them to demonize opponents for things said opponents do not actually believe. See aforementioned point about intellectual diversity.
Lefties also have that distinct tendency to claim intellectual superiority and scientific backing for their views, but also tend to be completely wrong on some of the most important, core facts about reality. The most egregious one being blank-slatism as it pertains to human beings and their mental development. Their battle against reality on this point has done untold amounts of harm, and its impossible to even have a discussion on the degree of nature vs. nurture in their framework. I don't want to be forced into their framework, I want to have the actual debate. Which probably requires removing the people preventing it.
And of course as we have now seen, it is pretty much incontrovertible that more lefties than righties tend to support, or at least excuse violence as a means of settling political disputes, up to and including murder. Not all of them, but a significant amount, and these members are NOT policed by other lefties so they have an outsize effect. My first encounter with this was back when the Charlie Hebdo murders occurred, and I went on Reddit's /r/anarchism subreddit to find them twisting themselves into pretzels to explain why killing a bunch of cartoonists wasn't exactly the moral abomination it sounds like. You can still find some remnants of their discussion.
In my view, it shouldn't be so hard to say "murdering non-violent people is BAD" regardless of how offensive they are.
I can back up each of the above points with various studies, but I apologize I'm not taking the time to do that at this moment since I don't have them all immediately handy. I'm not trying to just 'boo-outgroup' here, I think that observable, reliable facts of the world are reflected in what I said, and this informs my own belief on why I don't want to be around them. Maybe I'm the one with the twisted morality and worldview.
Ding me for that if you must, mods. I'm not calling out any particular persons on the site with this, I swear.
And while I don't immediately give righties/red tribe a pass, by any means, I could throw together a comprehensive explanation of why I prefer to live around Red Tribers rather than Blue tribers, and maybe will throw that together at some point. Ultimately it comes down to Righties being more 'genuine' in how they comport and portray themselves, and more in touch with baseline 'reality' where it counts.
I consider myself red-tinged Grey tribe, and it has become clear to me that I cannot, over the long term, co-exist with blue tribe, for reasons I have no control over, and I'm leaning a bit more in favor of 'conflict' theory over 'mistake' theory these days.
Note, I am literally only stating my own personal beliefs on the issue, and I still inherently wish to treat any individual person, even if they identify as left-wing, as an individual who has worth and dignity in their own right, even if they're hopelessly compromised by their ideology and will never have their mind changed.
I'm not calling for any particular actions against any persons, and I've already arranged my life so I don't encounter many blue tribers as I go about my daily business, so I'm not going to take any different personal actions.
But if you're asking me to make policy recommendations, I can't very well carve out exceptions for the few that I personally like.
This is the most depressing part for me. I classify myself as a libertarian, and I disagree with the left way, way more than I do with the right, but I'd completely fine living aside them - including communists, despite my ancestors suffering a lot from the communist regime and me hating all that relates to that - I am willing to set that aside for the sake of having a pleasant, peaceful society. If only the Left agreed to play by a simple set of rules - no violence, no destroying the country, no destroying the culture. I am willing to only "destroy" them like Charlie Kirk and Ben Shapiro did - by showing, with fact and argument, again and again, how utterly ridiculous their views are and how disastrous the consequences of them - including for them themselves - they are. But there's no way I can have this. Every time they feel they are losing the power, they become violent. I don't see how this violence can be dealt with in a peaceful framework.
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On charlie hebdo, I was a fedora tipping atheist back then and even I found the comics profane. I didn't like islam either, infact I had a burning passion of hatred for it. These days when I see those comics again I think to myself, good, fuck those guys. Should they have been killed? Probably not, but I would have been done for them getting their faces punched in.
Probably? That's how you know your moral compass is malfunctioning. When you ask yourself "how do I feel about brutally murdering a person that said something offensive to me?" and the answer is not "fuck no, not murder!" but "well, maybe no, maybe yes, he was really annoying so kinda murder sounds right but those people around me say murder is bad... so hard to figure this out... should I err on the safe side? Should I hedge more? It's really a tough conundrum!".
And, of course, you should only talk about punching other people's faces in if you're willing to have your own punched in for your opinions. Yes, I know yours doesn't smell. But that's how it works. I wouldn't accept this deal, I'd rather have a deal where nobody's face getting punched in, but maybe some people enjoy their faces being punched in?
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Probably not? Not no? Like maybe you could see an argument justifying their murders over cartoons? That's disgusting mate.
I'm hoping you were just caught up in couching because it's the motte, because 'they deserve to get their faces punched in' is a more respectable position than that by several orders of magnitude, and I assume anyone who disagrees has never had their face punched in.
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"Oh, I can know what he's referencing I can add some helpful links for this post. A little context, too." Oops. I guess I didn't not add helpful links or minor context. I have allowed myself to get lost in the textual sauce. An LLM, but worse.
This one is a trend that's been polled and surveyed for over a decade. It's bad. If we're pointing fingers I think this is one of many potential indicators of finger pointing direction.
The Heatmap is more interesting than the "ideological diversity" (ooo nodes) study. This one does not grab me like The Heatmap and instead I concluded, "Sure thing, social science. Run it back." For sake of brevity, this study asked 8 questions (n=400ish, 25%ish Republicans) and I'll share 3: (1) "Abortion should be illegal", (4) *"The federal budget for welfare programs should be increased", and (6) "The government should regulate business to protect the environment".
I don't think these are definitive type questions to accurately measure "diversity" -- a word the authors do not use -- of political temperament or ideology. The fun part is at the end where the authors remind us:
Ah
When academics invoke But, Trump, White, Christian in a context is important tone one must resist the temptation. Ah-ha! These inconvenient findings must be evidence for why the paper is correct. I, on the other hand, once again recall that science science is sham. Do it again, bozos, and do it better.
What other studies are you thinking of? This one got me good. What started as "helpful link":
This references the "heat map" study which you call flawed. For The Heatmap, or Ideological differences in the expanse of the moral circle, the study compares how liberals and conservatives express and/or extend "moral concern." The authors find liberals are prone to extend moral concern in a loose "universalist" fashion, whereas conservatives distributed moral concern a tighter "parochial" shape. They then mapped these response in concentric circles for our benefit. These circles start from the category of immediate family at the center, out to all of humanity, lifeforms in the universe, and finally everything that ever exists including space rocks.
People, like me, interpret "moral concern" as a synonym for units of caring. Which is not wholly accurate. This is a stated preference, but not a tested preference. A polite interpretation is that liberals are capable, or would like to be, of loving all of humanity and beyond to a greater extent than conservatives. From there, the "liberals love space rocks as much as their kids" dunks write themselves.
One of the exercises has the participants distribute their moral concern as a zero-sum resource. Liberals were more likely to apply concern to things far away from the center than conservatives, although they still applied concern to the center. That maps the same direction as the non-zero-sum, unlimited distribution which brings liberals and conservatives closer, but still distinct in pattern. Conservatives, even when told that moral concern is not finite, won't ascribe much moral value to space rocks. The gradient for conservatives shows they don't consider space rocks worthy of concern at all. In the study they stop giving moral concern points, regardless if they're finite, much sooner when extending outwards. They do so to the point where the outer circles are closer to non-existent.
If I can believe that these exercises can provide insight, then I would very much like to see the study repeated, then simplified, and finally standardized. I want to see this deployed across cultures and through time. What would populations in Somalia, South Africa, or Spain land if we replicated the study in those population? Does safety and prosperity change the disposition and by how much? Race/ethnicity? Climate?
A million questions. How does this interact with other parts we know to be (at least partly) hardwired like temperament and preferences? If the finding that liberals generally have a higher IQ is true, then might it be related? I know the findings are not so broad, but it's hard to not think there could be costs (and benefits) in processing the world in such a way. So long as we can consistently clamp down moral temperament as dimorphic across culture and time.
How exciting! Of course, because it's exciting, triggers my imagination, and was made into a meme then I assume it won't hold up. The limited/unlimited sample sizes for the exercises were 131 and 263 people respectively, however each only had about 35 conservatives. Maybe this should have been its own post, but I figure someone smarter and most handsome could do it better than I.
Dems are more conformist if we take the Do It Again, Bozo science at face value. This would suggest they're at least a little better about backing Their Guy. As a counter-point, the above quoted text sounds like an obviously bipartisan phenomena to me. It is normal for the average politically interested voter to vote for plainly partisan reasons.
What behavior should we expect from Dems when their election plans fall apart? "Yesterday I said it would be a mistake to let the Californian machine "brown and a woman" candidate takeover, but the party fucked it-- oh well we'll get you guys next time." Nobody wins elections by telling the opposition they are right on the tepid candidate. No way, that billion dollar campaign is gonna happen. It may as well be spent on a fun, joyful Brat! campaign.
This is exactly the kind of example where we -- you, me, everyone else -- are programmed to notice the enemy's transgressions, but forget our own. Your average MAGA voter was railing against TikTok a year ago. Now? All quiet on the big bad Chinuh! front. Difference in degree, not kind? Maybe. Team Trump can turn on a dime. I consider this as an uncontroversial statement without comparison to anything else. The D machine's effort in 2024 was absurd and, yes, it worked to an extent. It had to work. It was always going to work. You can't just give up at the end of democracy. [Which should put in perspective the monumental and historical fuck-up of Democrats in 2024.]
All the consensus backs the Republican candidate no matter what some writer at National Review said ten minutes ago. Trump has some in-house resistance, but how'd that work out? How many Republicans backed Trump after calling him some name or even disavowed him? Many, including Vance. Democrats have seen this and they've called it out! "People can change their minds, you know?" Yeah, yeah, some more than others.
The mainstream Dem machine is impressive and has some unique advantages. Concepts of optics, messaging, and narrative are more prominent in the minds of Blue voters and, to some extent, this has trained them. Maybe the Republicans don't get as close as Kamala did if the parties swapped position and infrastructure. Falling in line behind Kamala for the party -- or whoever it is -- can be your expectation next time. No surprise or condemnation or special accusation necessary.
Political disputes at the moment, but more righties than lefties tend to support violence as a means in other general settings. Is this the same? No, it's frequently not the same. There are many qualities of American leftism that are in not mirrored or symmetric to the right. That is another fundamental problem with the left-right paradigm not solved by another axis. There are qualities of leftism that I also find frustrating, abhorrent, or special. Nature nurture blank slateism is a huge fundamental contradiction in liberal and leftist ideology.I share many of the same grey tribe suspicion of lefty thinking, culture, and politics. I still* think you lean too far in your condemnation of people.
In terms of ideological conformity, you can also take a look at organizations and institution that have become more left wing over time (almost all of them) and those that have become more right wing (good luck finding ANY).
What happens with Righties when they notice they've been pushed out of a space they like is... they go build a new one, start a new foundation on which to build a new institution. Note this is how Charlie Kirk got his start.
Look at how the Ratio of Conservatives to Liberals as College Faculty has dropped off a cliff since the 60's.
Note, this was precisely the sort of thing Charlie Kirk was trying to combat.
Of course, the left will simply say "Conservatives aren't as smart/don't believe in science/are anti-intellectual" as an excuse for this, as part of that whole "intellectual superiority and scientific backing" shtick. But amazingly the place where Conservative presence is the strongest tends to be the math, physics, and engineering departments, WHERE BEING CORRECT IN THE REAL WORLD continues to matter the most.
It was NOT because the share of conservatives in the population dropped off sharply that they took over colleges. It was attributable to the intentional attrition of activists over a long period of time actively favoring their ideological peers for hiring, and actively making life unpleasant for righties, to ultimately cement control over the valuable institutions. They are very open about the strategy and tactics they were employing. Conservatives/righties generally don't use these strategies to co-opt functional institutions.
And believe me, I can get almost as critical of red tribe politics and belief if I choose. But the central point, borne out by decades of living around both sides... is that Red Tribe will actually leave you alone/accept you as you are much, much more readily than blue tribe, provided you don't start conflicts. Grey tribe is easily the most accepting of all, but tends to lose out to blue tribe operatives due to having no/poor antibodies to their entryist tactics.
Well, the place where the Republican-vs-Democrat ratio is highest is in Economics, but that's not so much because there's especially extensive high-stakes testing that Applied Economics gets. It's probably because our best theories, starting in literally the first Microecon 101 classes, have good, simple explanations for why many populist (and historically leftist-aligned) economic ideas end up worsening the very problems they were trying to solve. You can still say those explanations are too simple, and make an economics research career out of trying to justify that, but having to add and defend precisely the necessary epicycles can't be entirely comfortable.
I'd also point out that it's common for a math professor to take pride in how disconnected their research is from real-world applications. Maybe in the back of their mind they expect some applied math guys to snatch up their work and use it eventually, but the more decades that takes, the more ahead-of-its-time their work must have been! There may also be some counter-signalling, where the shakier your reputation is, the more your grant applications have to look like "this could advance cancer research, somehow, because graph theory I guess" rather than "this builds on my work that finally proved the long-open Guys-Youbarelyheardof Conjecture"? The trick with trying to subvert math is that even if it's not empirical, it's still objective. Other mathematicians may disagree over how important the Guys-Youbarelyheardof Conjecture is, but even if some of them dislike you that doesn't make it any easier for them to find flaws in your proof.
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You are a martial arts instructor, right?
What do you do when a liberal comes to your dojo? It must happen, and while in my experience, most people try to avoid politics on the mat (for good reason!) you're often going to get clues about people's affiliations.
This isn't a gotcha question or anything. I just really want to know how you deal with people you literally don't think should coexist with you, when you are in a position of trust and authority and with responsibility for their safety. As a former instructor myself I'd be very concerned about someone who feels they can't teach people with the wrong politics. This sounds nearly as bad as all those psychologists and therapists reportedly distressed at the idea of having to provide help to Republicans.
Let me hijack this to relay an anecdote from last Saturday. I.e., about one day after Charlie Kirk's murder. It is a useless anecdote that goes nowhere, and I'd like to get rid of it because it serves no purpose.
Having spent far too much time on the motte, on Friday, I ended up dreaming in the night that people all around me would finally pick up whatever weapons or improvised weapons they could to go, meet up, and beat do death their political opponents. In my dream, that ended up subverted by my old instructor, who turned those violent impulses into a peaceful tournament. I awoke in the morning poorly rested, reminded myself not to dwell so much on American culture war issues, and packed my stuff to go to the day's actual real-world fully-awake HEMA tournament.
Where I met a gaggle of fighters from a "workers' sports club", who were fully decked out in gear sporting images of raised red fists, anarchist signs, "FCK AFD" and the usual far-left symbology. They were perfectly decent and civil people and nobody said a word about politics.
That is all.
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Teach them what they want to know, basically. Then decline to hang out with them much outside the gym.
Its not like there's a hard and fast rule against discussing politics in the gym. But the transaction is simple, they are paying to be a member of the gym, they attend classes, they get the instruction they paid for.
And let me say, I'd argue that I'm a tad left of the median for members' political affiliation. Like I said, I'm grey tribe. Some of these folks are full on Q-anon adjacent, giant-truck driving, gun-nut red tribers.
I walked into the gym on Wednesday and multiple people, including the owner of the gym, were asking me about the Charlie Kirk thing, unprompted. Some of them are extraordinarily livid.
It is good thing that one of our more open lefties (who doesn't confront people about it, to be clear) was on vacation in Texas this week.
Let me point out that I also used to work as a Public Defender, where my entire job was... defending people who were probably guilty. And I took my job very seriously in that respect, even if I found the people themselves distasteful, i.e. people I would not want to live around.
The way I solved that issue was:
A) never actually asking them if 'they did it.' I always just said "whatever story you tell, make damn sure it is consistent."
B) If it was clear and obvious that they did it, or they said they did it, I treat my main goal as making the state do their job properly. If the state screws up or lacks evidence to convict, my job is to point that out and try to create a valid defense. If the state fails to convict... that's on them.
From a sheer professionalism standpoint, I can set aside any feeling I have about an individual to provide them a service that they are 'entitled' to due to my contractual obligations. That is perfectly in keeping with my principles and social norms.
Separating my personal feelings out and teaching a lefty how to fight is easy, in that paradigm.
Also, getting buff and learning to fight is one of the things that can make a guy more right wing. SO I like to think I'm keeping the politically moderate guys from falling into Leftism, even if I'm not winning over lefties.
I have no intentions of confronting any individuals who do not confront me first.
Hence my point:
I would not join a gym where the majority of the members were lefties. Freedom of association. I don't think the lefties at my gym want me dead.
But I do not want such people to have political authority over me in any way.
And because I live in one of the reddest areas of a Red state, they simply do not have political authority over me, so no lefties I know personally read as a 'danger' to me. But as a whole, coherent group...
I can live with that arrangement, blue tribe completely politically neutered and fringe enough that they are unable to ever effect any outcomes. If any get violent, they get exiled instantly. That's tolerable to me. But we're a long way from that arrangement at a national level.
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I think you are greatly underestimating how centrist most people are. Harris' shortcomings, and Biden's/Clinton's before her, were well known and widely acknowledged, even though it is certainly the case that Dem commentators, as expected, fell in line.
I'm talking about stuff like Aaron Sorkin suggesting that the Dems should pick Mitt Romney as their nominee (an EXTREMELY Centrist proposal!), and then walking it back THE EXACT SAME DAY, with zero indication that this caused him any mental distress.
Tons of folks saying "we must have a convention, its the only way!" shut up the instant Kamala was 'announced' as the successor.
That's a level of group cohesion you NEVER, EVER see on the right.
I don't know about that. Do you seriously think that Paul Ryan, Mitch McConnell, Romney, etc., are ideologically or temperamentally down with Trump? I would say the Republican party has cohered around MAGA far more effectively than the Dems have managed to cohere around... anything. Republicans who have not come around have essentially been booted from the party, while a notable Dem example would be Manchin's more or less victorious showdown with Biden over BBB. (Manchin is no longer senator, but he lost from the right, not the left.)
On Sorkin, again, we are talking about someone so clearly dissatisfied with the putative nominee and VP in Harris that he writes an op-ed suggesting that Dems nominate a Republican, but you are somehow shocked that they later write a tweet endorsing Harris over Trump?? Do you want him to get mad and endorse a third party or something? Either a) he genuinely got caught up in the idea of Harris or b) he simply wants to convey enthusiasm in order for Trump to lose. His editiorial's thrust was very much that Trump's 2nd term would be very bad; once a nominee has been picked or settled upon, surely it would make no sense to be publicly milquetoast about that nominee.
This seems just patently incorrect to me.
In 2016-2020 there was zero penalty to defecting from Trump as a Republican, talking against him, voting against him (I still recall McCain casting the decisive vote to BLOCK the repeal of Obamacare. When he died he was still given full accolades by his fellow Republicans). They did work together long enough to not impeach and remove Trump, I guess.
In 2020-2024 you have the entire edifice of the federal Democratic party working together to ignore/cover up Biden's increasing cognitive decline. Although plenty of people noticed it, there were ZERO leaks until it was decided he needed to be replaced. And they've been working even harder since then to deflect and diffuse any responsibility now that they've had to admit what was going on. It is truly awe-inspiring.
Compared to how virtually every Trump appointee that quit or got booted immediately went and wrote a tell-all book about how inept and chaotic the administration was.
And now, post 2024, I still don't think the GOP has really conglomerated around MAGA. Its more like they've become content to just sit back and let him do things via the Executive order process and re-arrange deck chairs while he tries to steer the ship.
No, I'm "shocked" someone would spend such mental effort to try to create a persuasive essay in hopes of convincing others to take a particular course of action that... apparently, they themselves didn't find compelling.
Then literally say "whoops, I take it all back, ignore what I said earlier, I'm on the team again" without even a hint of mental distress.
Its like he didn't even believe his own words when he wrote them. So why should anyone else take him seriously on anything ever again?
HAVE THE COURAGE OF YOUR CONVICTIONS, MAN.
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