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One thing that has always bothered me about progressive politics, is the constant moral framing. As this women does here Along with this comment:
"The left will debate taxes and social programs, not human rights— And why would they engage in conversations intended to reduce personhood. Like Bffr."
But here is what i dont get - why are some issues less "up for debate"? (mainly social issues, such as gay marriage) but others not? & Furthermore, why is it assumed that Democrats & democratic voters are in favor of these Human Rights, even though many of them havent been achieved or been actively worked against?
To elaborate more on what i mean. Im gonna take a handful of things that are often stated to be human rights by liberals & progressives (or at least - could be argued to be) mainly:
A living wage Affordable Housing Healthcare Education
Affordable Housing is a notorious one, and no blue state in the country has been able to tackle the problem effectively. Mainly because locals vote against measures to make it more affordable. Many of these states are also notoriously expensive (part of it is because of housing as well) And the only way to get a living wage would be to go to school (which is arguably still a failure: a living wage as human right would imply all humans are entitled to it - no just those who went to college). No state has universal healthcare. Many states also have poor educational outcomes (Looking at you Maryland).
I bring a lot of this up, because i feel like what a lot of people who think this way dont realize is that many of these economic issues effect people a lot more, and on a lot more of scale than many social issues like gay marriage do. In such way where i think one could effectively "moralize it"
Lets say liberals in a blue state vote against an affordable housing policy, think of the consequential impact of that: The poor single moms and their kids have to stay outside in the heat and the cold & if she cant find a job with a good wage - potentially go without food? Is this supposedly more morally tolerable? Is this hypothetical liberal a "better person" than a hypothetical conservative voter who would vote against gay marriage for instance? Wouldnt they also functionally be against "human rights" as well? Why is "bigotry" more morally unacceptable to these individuals than the economic problems at hand?
For the record im not arguing that being against gay marriage would be "ok". But two guys not being able to get married shouldnt be as big of a deal compared to the hypothetical single mom scenario ive painted above. I think a lot of people (the majority voters) are probably against "human rights" in some way or another - a lot of it is because actually fully realizing the right threatens their self interests (home owner voting against affordable housing, people being against higher taxes, or against poor people moving in next to them to aid with access to education and general social mobility). The apparent lack of those things mentioned arguably creates more suffering for many more people than merely "hating" gay people would (if you wanted to frame it that way).
Abortion, anyone? That's a limiting of personhood they're very happy to converse about.
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Scott talked about this in 2013 ("Not Just a Mere Political Issue"), even using the same example you gave of how opposition to gay marriage is seen as verboten in a way that other, more obviously consequential opinions aren't.
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Because admitting they are up for debate means letting opponents speak and granting them legitimacy. If you can preemptively shut down the debate by declaring any other position beyond the pale, you win.
I find it hard to believe you don't "get" this.
Is this obnoxious implication of bad faith accomplishing anything useful?
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The declaration of certain issues like gay marriage or trans* or immigration as “Not about politics, just being a decent human”, and then following that up with “No political discussion” rules was honestly a brilliant(albeit extremely frustratingly, to me) way that many popular subreddits basically silenced all dissent.
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I don't think @Nerd's question is "Why did a left that believed it had won try to cancel its political opponents?" - a question to which the answer is as obvious as @Amadan thinks it is. I think it is "Why did a left that believed it had won put so much more effort into cancelling IQ realists, biological sex realists etc. for threatening their social orthodoxy than it put into cancelling the Koch brothers or the US debt clock guy for threatening their economic orthodoxy"
Yeah, you actually summed it up nicely!
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This is a well-phrased question regardless, and one that I'd like to see talked about.
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Guy's not posted here much, and SJ doesn't always advertise the full strategy. I can believe he hadn't quite worked it out.
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Simple, straightforward, and correct.
My least favourite version of this is the "this isn't political" gambit. "This isn't politics, it's people's lives!" As if people's lives aren't the fundamental subject matter of politics! It is, in general, a transparent attempt to remove one's own positions from the arena of reasonable debate.
Your politics are politics. My politics are basic human decency. So it always goes.
Gay marriage is probably a good example of this - what was a matter for reasonable public debate and contestation became, as soon as it was implemented, something beyond mere 'politics', which is presumed to be universally accepted and will never be debated again. Speaking from Australia, our plebiscite on the subject was 60-40 in favour of SSM, and as a result, SSM is apparently locked in, even though two out of five people oppose it. By contrast, the Voice referendum was 60-40 against. Is that result as definitive? It doesn't seem like it. The losing side of that referendum seem to have vowed to continue the fight. Well, why not also the anti-SSM people? They would seem to have exactly the same justification for continuing the fight. The republic referendum was 55-45 against; the republican movement does not seem to have given up and gone home.
If the result is the result you want, you declare that result to now be sacred and removed from the realm of politics. If it's not the result you want, oh well, get 'em next time.
It is completely absurd. It's all politics. It is all up for debate. That is the point of democracy.
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I mean, if the goal was to "win" on these issues it clearly isnt a tactic that works for all issues. Hence many "human rights" not being realized in democratic states. And it also wouldnt answer the question as to why the economic issues brought forward are of less moral importance. (why give "homophobia" a less of a free pass when housing and wages negatively affect more people?). Even if you are trying to shutdown the debate, why shutdown some debates and not others? What makes, "lets not build housing or give a livable wage to a single-mom, because i dont want to give up my high house prices or pay more in taxes or have her live near me, ect" more morally legitimate?
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This is correct, but I've been arguing for some time that this isn't necessarily even bad behavior, because endlessly negotiating every facet of your existence with the entire rest of your society is antithetical to anything resembling a peaceful, prosperous existence. Such an existence depends on the personal not being political, and the way that happens is exactly by the formation of "common decency", of a set of norms and rules and behaviors that people conform to without significant argument or complaint, with those who cannot conform being ostracized.
We have to do this, but having done it, we forgot why it was necessary, and so burned down all the mechanisms required, and are now sort of rebuilding them badly, ad-hoc, and in a values-diverse environment they aren't made for.
I don't think that follows, at least not trivially. A liberal's answer - this liberal's answer, for example - would be that, quite the opposite, the personal becomes political because society ie the body politic tries to screw around with people's personal lives. In fact, I rather think that for the personal not to be political, you would need a maximally liberated society, a society where the very idea of taking issue with another citizen's behavior would seem nonsensical, if that behavior is not literally criminal. Then, and only then, can all people live secure in the knowledge that their life is their own, without feeling that their happiness is under siege every waking moment.
I am not a full-on anarchist or libertarian in terms of the political systems that I think can produce good outcomes in the long term, but I do believe that "people can do what they want forever" is an essential component of the Good, and that government is good largely insofar as it gets us closer to that ideal (with the obvious epicycles about the government being empowered to infringe on freedoms in the interest of collective survival, as people need to be alive to be able to do what they want).
This framing would make sense if you could define a "personal life" that politics should not screw with. But in fact, no such definition exists, any more than there exists a rigorous definition of "harm" or, in our context, "screwing". The appearance of such definitions is a product of values-coherence, of cultural homogeneity.
I think you are correct that this is indeed the Liberal perspective. I think it should be obvious to you and all others why this perspective is self-destructive. Behavior being criminal requires laws. How do those laws get written if you can't imagine objecting to someone else's behavior unless it's already against the law?
Human coexistence requires significant constraint of individual desires and will. Humans generally cannot "live secure in the knowledge that their life is their own"; the closest approach to this happy state is to get them to accept the constraints other humans place on them as normal and not really constraints at all, and the only way that happens is values-coherence.
Maybe founding society on a goal that is obviously impossible to achieve or even closely approach is a bad idea? Values-diverse humans are going to want a lot of things that interfere with other humans against their will, and are going to have no way to calculate or enforce which infringements are minimal and which are unacceptable. Politics becomes a weapon, not a common tool, and then the whole thing burns down. You are currently watching this happen.
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Isn't the entire debate about what is and should be literally criminal? Rightists think that it both is and should be literally criminal to enter the country without permission. Leftists don't. In some states it is literally criminal to abort a fetus after a certain length of time, but before natural childbirth, but leftists don't want it to be. There are probably leftists who want it to be literally criminal to state certain opinions or use certain symbols, as it is in Europe. Leftists are often but not always in favor of more rights and fewer laws disallowing freedoms. Maybe not all debates are legal debates, but quite a lot of them are.
Given the talk of "sets of norms" and "ostracizing", I thought this was about non-law-based norms.
Non-law-based norms is the substance from which laws emerge. you can't say "anything not illegal should be permitted", because not permitting things that aren't illegal is how things get to be illegal in the first place.
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It’s okay, you can say that here.
It’s literally just a rhetorical shaming technique to put their debate opponents on the defensive from the start. “If you hold this position you’re an icky person” is a schoolyard-tier tactic but on many normies it just works.
I agree this is a bad rhetorical device but what's the best way to get around them just calling you ick and posting a screenshot of you on Twitter? I'm my experience engaging with it, they just call you cringe and recieve a trillion upvotes.
My automatic answer to this is that debating with Twitterati is a fool’s errand; they are not there to honestly engage, they are there to farm upboats by calling you cringe, the only winning move is not to play. Better master debaters than I have tried to figure out how to “get around them just calling you ick” and none have succeeded. That’s why the place where we are currently exists: there is no solution to the problem other than going away to a different discussion forum.
However, in an effort to at least gesture in the direction of something, I think you can only fight fire with fire by (a) wresting control of the banhammer from their allies to your allies (thanks Elon), and (b) having more allies who’ll call them cringe than they have allies who’ll call you cringe.
I ask because I tried to implement your option (a) with a "It's not 2018 anymore, nobody gives a shit about this patriarchy shit" to match their unthinking dismissal. I unfortunately didn't have the follow through in real time to deliver a critical hit.
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There isn't any difference. Whatever issue they are focusing on at the time, whether gay marriage, the social program du jour, or some tax, will be framed as a human rights issue.
Bike lanes, (not) talking to your parents, doing drugs in playgrounds...
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I think the main difference is how would you even argue for or against gay marriage? The difference of opinion on it and topics like it are on a different level than a debate. It is closer to a conflict theory topic than mistake theory. Religious conservatives don't argue against it because they agree that gays should be able to marry but disagree that the government should be the one to do it; they don't think gays should be able to marry, at least not in the same sense as traditional marriages, and usually more broadly.
Housing affordability, healthcare, education, etc... Are more mistake theory. There is a general agreement on both sides that it would be good if housing, education and healthcare were more affordable and higher quality. Both sides have the same goal, but the strategy to get there are at odds, usually some sort of opposition between government intervention vs free enterprise and markets.
This is a decent response. But i think the problem i still have is the one of functional outcome. The women in the video kinda stated that because voting republican would defacto = voting for someone who would be against those things (abortion/gay marriage other "human rights"). That means youd still be a "bad person", even if you agreed with that stuff. I would imagine it would still follow here: even if people hypothetically would be for more housing as an example - them voting against virtually all or any attempts to make it a reality (particularly if they dont want to sacrifice their own interests to accomplish those things, which is often the case with these kinds of policies) creates the same functional reality of people not having that available to them (& suffering consequentially as a result).
I guess if your judging things by intentions it might slide - but I think it still fails from a functional standpoint.
To add a bit (perhaps this is a reiteration) - being against gay marriage still yields less suffering overall (even if we were to call it intentional) than being against those other things, even if we assumed that people had valid or good reasons being against those specific housing policies (Id argue we already know the solution, people simply dont want it implemented because they are guarding their homes value). I suppose this would come down to how one is judging things.
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