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The more I think about politics, I always end up coming back to this quote from a very good video (from a very good youtuber!).
I think in most cases, politics are about values. To piggy back off the abortion example. The go to argument surrounding this typically is bodily autonomy, and although one could argue that this isn't really consistent on a factual, legal level. If I were in the room debating a pro-choice person on the issue, here is how it would go.
PC Person
The fetus is not entitled to its mothers body, consider the court case McFall v Shimp: McFall suffered from a life-threatening bone marrow disease and his cousin, Shimp, was a compatible bone marrow donor. Shimp refused to donate bone marrow. McFall requested Shimp be compelled to donate. The Court considered Shimp’s refusal “morally indefensible,” but still ruled in Shimp’s favor, explaining,
“For a society which respects the rights of one individual, to sink its teeth into the jugular vein or neck of one of its members and suck from it sustenance for another member, is revolting to our hard-wrought concepts of jurisprudence. Forcible extraction of living body tissue causes revulsion to the judicial mind.”
Judith Jarvis Thomson tackles the issues of bodily integrity and moral obligations in her essay, “A Defense of Abortion.” Thomson asks us to imagine a famous violinist with a fatal kidney ailment. One day a bunch of music lovers kidnap you and hook your kidneys up to the violinist’s circulatory system. In nine months the violinist will have recovered, but if you disconnect yourself prematurely the violinist will die. Thomson asks, “Is it morally incumbent on you to accede to this situation?”
When you drive (have sex), you know there’s a possibility you could crash into someone (conceive). Even when you drive very cautiously (use contraception), there is still a chance of a car accident. Should you be in a car crash in which the victim’s life is at stake, the law does not compel you to donate blood or organs to save the victim. While it would be admirable for you to donate, you are not required to do so."
Me:
"Thats cool. Lets say you, for whatever reason, are a psychopath who enjoys taking children, draining them of their blood, hospitalizing them and or possibly killing. If I was king for a day, and assuming your blood was a match, I would sentence you to life in prison, and then order that your blood be drained and given to the remaining children to save them. Fight Me"
I don't find this to be unreasonable, given that we would already use lethal injection for these kinds of people (also a violation of "bodily autonomy"). Draining someone of their blood would be no less worse than forcefully injecting them.
You are free to think I'm a crazy person, fine. But that's not my main point. The same problem exists for issues like nationalism & immigration. You can scream all day about how immigrants are a net gain to the economy, or how they commit less crime. But a ethno-nationalist will simply go "No, I value the culture and heritage of the green people, and I'd rather them go extinct than to have our way of life polluted by the purples.".
Another explicit example of what im talking about is race. A black person does not vote democrat because they are factually good for the economy (whether or not they are is besides the point). If you asked average black voter to produce a study about specific policies that cite this, they would come up short. Support for democrats comes from the idea of racial solidarity, and the fact that black people value the black race, and would like to advance black interest.
I have no clue how one would even go about resolving this. Morals & values are not empirical - you cant prove bodily autonomy and cultural heritage are good in the same way you can prove what foods are and aren't healthy. These things are based on moral intuitions that are fundamentally subjective. I don't think I could ever change my personal mind on that issue to be completely honest, but on a societal scale, this is obviously not sustainable. There needs to be some way to reconcile a difference in moral values.
Genuine value differences are real, but surprisingly often they're not the source of political disagreements, at least on a surface-level analysis.
Consider rent control: (some) leftists think it improves affordable housing availability. (Most) rightists think it does the opposite. Leftists and rightists may place different amounts of value on the availability of affordable housing (and do, to a limited extent, though I don't most rightists are actually opposed in principle), but is that core to the disagreement? If a leftist could be convinced that rent control actually harms their terminal goals (as a good chunk have), then the question is resolved with no value shift.
Consider BLM: there's that infamous survey where a good chunk of BLM supporters said they believed that the police kill not ten unarmed black men each year (roughly accurate) but ten thousand. If I thought that I'd be right there beside them! I'm less confident they'd change their mind if they heard the right number -- being that wrong suggests near-total scope insensitivity -- but the actual fact of the matter can change minds.
There's a lot more: rightists think that housing-first homeless assistance programs don't work, that safe injection sites increase overdose deaths, that gay couples are much more likely to abuse their (adopted) kids, that racial achievement gaps in education can't be solved by shoveling money at inner city schools. Leftists think that Christianity is false and harmful, that permitting hateful speech will inevitably lead to genocide, that adding highway lanes increases traffic, that universal healthcare would dramatically reduce costs. I think a reasonable person on either side of the isle, were they convinced of the other side's claims of fact, might switch sides on any of these issues.
It's definitely worth considering whether the factual disagreement is just cover for a values disagreement -- who was it that noted that people who think that torture would be morally unacceptable if it did work are much more likely to believe that torture doesn't work? -- but I don't think it always is. Now other questions, like abortion, are much closer to genuinely irreconcilable value differences; at least, the Thomson-level pro-choice advocates wouldn't be swayed by learning fetuses are fully conscious/have souls/can feel pain... But why worry about those hard disagreements when we can't even solve the easy ones? Well, we have solved some of them: they stop being political issues when every agrees, so you just stop hearing about it. But there's still plenty more out there.
I'm not sure that's true, there's a pretty common phenomenon where upon learning what should be good news people instead respond with hostility and anger. Like telling people that data centers aren't really that heavy on water consumption or that food prices are actually cheaper than ever or that home ownership rates is actually around historic levels, or that children starving in the US isn't an issue anymore or that welfare fraud is actually a relatively negligible issue compared to the overall budget or whatever else.
Now some of the anger could be from a "I think you're lying and I'm mad that you are lying to me and denying a serious issue", but I think some of it is reflective that the particulars don't matter to begin with, it's the vibes that matter. You don't actually need immigrants to be 64% of murders (yes this was a real claim spreading on X) to have the vibe of "outsiders bad". You don't actually need to believe that ten thousand blacks are killed by police each year to have the vibe of "fuck the police". And you're harshing the vibe for pointing out the actual statistics and facts, so fuck you.
Well, yes, this is definitely a real effect. Actually, I was confused when I first read this comment; I thought you were replying to my other post. The question is how common the effect is, and what it would take to overcome. I started with rent control for a reason: there's a decently large contingent of leftists who have given up on the idea. Not the populists, but I don't think I've seen a serious defense of rent control from the wonk/YIMBY/urbanism side for... a decade? Well, I'm sure it exists, but my impression is that it's a lot less popular in those circles than it used to be.
... But outside of those circles? Yeah, there's a frighteningly large proportion of people who are incapable of or totally unwilling to understand frequency and base rates, or just the concept of a tradeoff. I've got no idea how to close that gap.
(I genuinely don't understand how the AI water meme even got started. How could someone simultaneously be so disconnected from reality as to believe it's a real problem and well-informed enough to know about evaporative cooling in datacenters in the first place? I understand how it spread; it's one of those claims that's just too good to check if you already hate AI for the normal Luddite/antislop reasons. But where did it come from?)
Well the YIMBY/urbanism side understands, by definition, that the issue is supply based and thus rent control isn't really an effective solution off that.
I will go to bat and say I don't think rent control is as bad as people think and it's at least partly selection bias. Rent control doesn't have much political energy when homes are being built and rent is going down. Rent control comes about when rents are going up rapidly, which means already terrible conditions. It compounds a bad problem to make an even worse problem, but the issue is still fundamentally lack of supply and bureaucracy. And new rentals will still get built even in predicted negative rent environments, so if builders can tolerate an expected -1%yoy in rent, they should be willing to tolerate +3%yoy rent.
That they're willing to build even when rents are expected to be lower long term is the biggest sign that builders want to build, and they're just being prevented. And all the places with rent control are well, the places that don't want to address the real issue so it's a great little sign of "don't come here to rent control city, we think government should control your property and we will never ever allow you to build anything new"
Take a real issue (data centers need to consume water)
Unaware of your bad faith or not you misinterpret it out of context making a mountain of an ant hill because you're against the very concept to begin with
Other people hear it and start repeating it because holy shit that mountain is scary, and for something I'm already against anyway?
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