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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.
... so, I'm going to take an example that isn't dating:
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).
Well, i mean thats kinda begging the question isnt it. Who gave them the authority to decide such a thing?
At the risk of tautology, the audience did, by the bit where they're doing it, and anyone's taking them seriously. I could go through the whole list of how moderators were picked up til 2012ish, but I don't think anyone cares, I don't know if it's changed since, and it's just a pretty shallow duct-tape patch on the underlying will to power. The RPGnet moderators run, for all meaningful purposes, the forum. (You can appeal to the admins, but they usually don't even bother to respond; from the rare times I've heard of them doing so, they just fob it off to the moderators.) There's nothing special about this compared to the "fuck Trump and his supporters" rule, "fuck ICE" rule, the "fuck 'nazis'" rule, or even a decade ago when it actually was a "fuck Nazis" rule, just because they call some of them about 'human rights' and some of them about not protecting awful people. It's just a norm they've set up.
In less formal relationships, the baton pass of the mandate of heaven is less obvious. But it still exists; you give people this power by interacting with them in ways where this power can be used. It's not some deep revelation about universal laws, it's just drawing lines with chalk.
And, to be fair and to steelman, that's how those sort of rules work. Barring some pretty extreme cults, state-run schools, or literal jails (badum-tish), you don't actually have some magical force requiring you to treat people seriously, or for them to treat you seriously. If someone draws lines by chalk, you either obey them, or you give them reason to fuck off.
To be somewhat less charitable, it being within one's power doesn't make it harmless. It's not hard to see what this has done to public discussion.
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