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Culture War Roundup for the week of September 19, 2022

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Can you date folks with different politics?

I watch this stream yesterday and i find it quite interesting. Im actually kinda in this situation now, i took a girl on a date, she made it obvious she was a progressive. I often dont share my own views on these things in real life, due to how toxic these conversations can be, so i just try to listen and empathize with where the person is coming from. Though im planning to open my mouth a little more about things on the 2nd go round, as to not give a misleading representation of who i am.

Whats interesting is that the streamer in question distinct "politics" from "human rights", she gives a pretty weak example with Roe V Wade. However i think the distinction between "politics" and "human rights" is shaky to begin with. No one really agrees on what human rights even are, per her roe example, gun control (constitutional arguably, but still) being another one, & there are still societies/people that arent accepting of LGBT although thats been on the decline over some decades. My guess is she is taking this to mean, "you probably shouldnt date a nazi", which is perfectly fine. But there arent a lot of those guys around in this day and age. For myself, i dont really believe any idea is above criticism, so i dont see how having a different idea of what constitutes human rights is much different from just having different politics.

According to pew research, most people, (myself included) are fine with dating people across the political aisle {note that many people wouldnt date a trump voter, but many would date a republican, but i suspect many people might view trump as a fundamentally immoral individual, and thus that makes him distinct from just mere disagreement}. I also find that peoples political beliefs arent good measures of how moral they are in real life. There are many progressives ive seen who were cheaters, liars, lazy, ect & conservatives who were kind hearted, hard working, & loving ect (& vice versa). But i want to know what you guys think.

Whats interesting is that the streamer in question distinct "politics" from "human rights", she gives a pretty weak example with Roe V Wade. However i think the distinction between "politics" and "human rights" is shaky to begin with. No one really agrees on what human rights even are, per her roe example, gun control (constitutional arguably, but still) being another one, & there are still societies/people that arent accepting of LGBT although thats been on the decline over some decades. My guess is she is taking this to mean, "you probably shouldnt date a nazi", which is perfectly fine.

... so, I'm going to take an example that isn't dating:

With abortion and birth control rights threatened both around the world and particularly in the United States, RPGnet believes that reproductive rights are human rights. We're committed to that, and will sanction posts supporting anti-human-rights positions.

This is, to skip the chase, a left-leaning site. It is not a tremendous surprise. I don't have access to the internal politics forum that I'm sure sparked this announcement. I'm unsure if they have, or ever will need to have, actual application of this rule -- the place was left-leaning enough a decade ago that the against-the-grain political posters were nicknamed zebras (for getting run down and eaten), and I doubt it's gotten more varied since. To the extent I look at all, it's because the Nobilis/Chuubo's stuff only really gets posted there.

But it's a useful example of a thread I've seen a lot. You criticize that "no one really agrees on what human rights even are", but that misses the point entirely: 'human rights', here, doesn't mean some legalistic or dictionary sense. It means matters so important that the writer is not willing to accept that their edge cases are up for discussion. It doesn't matter whether that's actually present as a descriptive sense: a lot of this class of 'human rights' are not actually protected at all, or may be not especially popular in the broader world (and, conversely, many things are not 'human rights' even if they're explicitly covered by the US Constitution and UN and large majorities in the speaker's country). It's a normative analysis for that specific context: these are axioms that can not and should not be debated in this situation. If the matter comes up, agreeing to disagree isn't acceptable.

The breadth of this application is not something universal, or probably even the majority of progressive spaces. Nor, for that matter, is it something that only shows up in progressive spaces (nor do you have to go into Deep Religious Evangelical SoCon ones to see right-wing variants: this twitter convo has three more open-minded rat-sphere-adjacent people talking, but the gut reaction is still pretty close to the same even if the expression is more amicable).

I mostly see "human rights" as a useful rhetorical trick, it feels like a crushing argument to pro-lifers. I doubt anyones' internal thoughts are best described by "the matter is so important that edge cases are not up for discussion."

I suspect that if I wrote the following

Abortion might not be a human right. Even if you're 100% sure human rights must be protected at all costs, are you 100% sure abortion is a human right?

Nobody would be enlightened, or even take the time to read the linked article.

Geeks on the Internet have this tendency to think "If I say something that can be read literally in one way, and people don't get it, that's their own fault. I mean, how could anyone not understand literal words?"

The world doesn't work that way. We have implicature and context. To quote xkcd: "Communicating badly and then acting smug when you're misunderstood is not cleverness."

Asking "are you 100% sure abortion is a human right" communicates, by ordinary conversational standards, "are you 100% sure that abortion specifically is a human right", even if it does not include the literal word "specifically". Saying it when you want to communicate "are you 100% sure about anything at all" is miscommunication, even though it fits your literal words.

Furthermore, in ordinary conversation, "100%" is used the same way; it doesn't literally mean "100%, not even a 0.001% chance that I'm a brain in a jar and abortion isn't real", it means "high enough confidence in ideas unique to this case that for practical purposes they function like 100%." Yelling "Nyaa nyaa, you can't literally be 100% confident" is just communicating poorly with literal words.

Saying it when you want to communicate "are you 100% sure about anything at all" is miscommunication, even though it fits your literal words.

Help this geek understand the quoted portion of your post, and what it communicates by ordinary conversation standards. Because what I interpret is that you thought I was as trying to give this lesson. I wasn't. Let's suppose 100% is a probability, and people can be fully confident about whatever. I assumed that this would have been obvious when I wrote "Even if you're 100% sure human rights must be protected at all costs..."

Now I'm thinking you completely misunderstood my point altogether, which makes me want to reiterate and rephrase it, but I suspect you don't think the "abortion is a human right" discussion is very interesting.

Let's suppose ... people can be fully confident about whatever.

"Abortion is a human right" is an example of "whatever". You did not think people can be fully confident about that.