> conservative justice at best hold the line on social issues, or continue to move forward.
The difference is that—unlike racial justice, women's rights, and gay rights—in this case abortion was a mistake and so the step forward would be to reverse it. If you go back far enough, society has successfully reversed actions that were at the time considered forward progress.
If contraception worked 100%, or if we were able to disable the libido whenever we want and prevent all rape from happening, maybe i would agree with that.
Since we're not, until someone convince me the violinist argument is not receivable[0], i would continue to support women wanting early abortion.
I don’t understand how you can say something like that with a clear conscience. But then again I don’t understand how China can treat the Uighurs the way they are and sleep at night either. I suppose people just rationalize other people in collective societal delusion as “sub-human” to the point where it’s easy to ignore.
> I don’t understand how you can say something like that with a clear conscience
Not the gp, but my position is that equating a fetus to a person is a fallacy based in the idea that it's a potential person. Which however means it's actually not one. Human beings have language, thought, self-awareness, memories, knowledge, experience, friends, family, hopes and fears. A fetus, wild speculations aside, has none of these. A dna is just a long molecule, not necessary and not enough to attribute humanity. A developed brain and a sense of self instead are both necessary and sufficient. A fetus has neither.
How strange, as I’m the opposite. I’m about as anti-conservative as they come: UBI, legalize almost everything, universal healthcare and insurance, but I’m extremely against abortion.
You are in an unenviable position, because the Democratic Party has all but said that you can't be both a Democrat and pro-life.
There is a minor party called the American Solidarity Party that is a little more of a mix, similar to Christian democratic parties in Europe. They oppose abortion and the death penalty but support universal health care, environmental protections, stricter regulation of financial markets, etc.
Yep, it doesn’t seem to be a common position, for sure.
I have heard of the American Solidarity Party and like some of their viewpoints, but I think that any consenting adults should be able to have a relationship (and the corresponding legal benefits). I also don’t like the religious motivations behind many of the arguments of the ASP; my views against abortion are secular in nature, and I think the religious arguments probably hurt the pro-life movement as a whole.
It's possible to be against abortion and be willing to compromise on it because there are much more important issues for you to consider.
Political parties like to pretend they have monopolies on certain positions, but that's just wrong. You'll find lots of gay rights-supporting Republicans and a whole mess of pro-gun Democrats. Some voters are rational enough to realize that they should put more weight on the issues that directly effect them than the nice-to-have emotional stuff that doesn't.
There should be "Real Solidarity Party" which takes no position other than to be favor of ranked choice voting (or similar).
Without this, it makes absolutely no difference what the platform is of the Greens, the Libertarians, the Solidarity Party, or any other 3rd party: they can only work as spoilers in an election.
Get us to an electoral system in which the winning D or R candidate is faced with knowing that 40% of their vote came from people whose first choice was the Communo-Anarchist Party, and another 10% from people who preferred the "White Power Now" party, and you're going to see a totally different sort of politics.
I wonder if we just spent a single term governing by referendum where we would land. It’s probably not sustainable but it might be interesting to see what surfaces.
It’s really weird because purity and shaming tactics used to be the domain of the far right (hundreds of years ago). It’s now switched to the far left. I’m a big believer in horseshoe theory. Born in a different household or time period, these personalities would be strong advocates for the other side.
I remember a long time ago in middle school, I read a book called Red Scarf Girl. It is a memoir by a girl during the Cultural Revolution in China. As a middle schooler, I didn’t think too much about the book other than what strange rules such a bizarre society had for how you could interact and what you could say. But the book increasingly keeps coming to my mind lately. During the Cultural Revolution, there were accusations that people were “landlords” or related to landlords. Even rumors of having something to do with the bourgeoisie was enough to elicit swift punishment from the other members of society. If you weren’t vocal about being on the “right side of history”, then you must be adamantly against it and were addressed as such, either by peers or the government. A lot of accusations turned into witch hunts against people, even if the charges were flimsy.
Anyway, I’ve often observed this same sort of behavior in extremist progressive circles, but it sure appears to be spilling into the mainstream a lot more everyday.
I think we're not in any danger of a true socialist revolution here seeing that the Chopistani warlord Raz himself is literally an Airbnb landlord who drives a Tesla with a trunk full of AR-15s. The moment anyone comes to him for the actual money (from each according to his ability, after all, and he's certainly able) they'll get punched in the teeth or shot.
Note how it's always someone else that needs to pay/atone/change, never the "activists" themselves. It's always this amorphous "we". Not a single virtue signaling white executive that I know of has resigned their position to "increase diversity". Not a single white actor has foregone a role. And so on and so forth all the way down the list. You know how many black people worked in the building I worked in while at Google? Zero. You know how many I interviewed in nearly a decade there? One. He was rejected (not by me though, the guy did very well in my interview). Talk is cheap. Want something done about it? Be the change you want to see in the world.
I come from a country where there was a socialist revolution. The entire contingent of the current "movement" would meet a quick and brutal end after a real revolution, because the moment you don't like something a real revolutionary likes, you become a counter-revolutionary, and those are dealt with quickly, with a bullet to the back of the head. Or, as was the case in the Soviet Union, with tens of millions of bullets to tens of millions of heads.
Not a real executive IIRC. He resigned from the BoD. And he's the only prominent person to do something concrete and direct like that. The rest are putting out PR releases and posting black squares to Instagram.
I would think it is more like Contrapoints, who got cancelled for being sympathetic towards certain outgroup members despite being one of the most prominent trans public faces.
or Scott Alexander of slate-star-codex whose rationalistic approach is despised by others in the left, because it often lets the data lead a person to conclusions instead of going about it the other way round. He is quite squarely part of the left, but also disliked by the left.
Stand up comedians often fall in this category. IMO, Louis CK's scorched earth cancellation was a result of him being an IGC, where folks were just waiting for a thing to come out, so he could be discredited.
Being an IGC can yield huge benefits though. But, it requires carefully planning your public persona to a T and you need to be good enough, that you can't ever be called a talentless hack who is profiteering from contrarianism.
I've seen two approaches that have worked. Either build a ton of good will (like Dave Chapelle) and then be a contrarian. At that point. Or, never pretend to be aligned with a group, build an audience that is sufficiently intellectually diverse, mix contrarian opinions with self deprecation and clearly differentiate your person from your persona. (like Bill Burr). It is incredibly important to be intellectually honest though. Because even the faintest hint of hypocrisy will get you cancelled.
I don't understand the association of being contrarian and having no talent. Or do you mean the knee-jerk reaction to it? Because I would classify the most eccentric artists to be very contrarian with unlimited baskets of critique.
There is a large portion of philosophy that ponders the question if criticism can be a creative endeavor. I am firmly in the camp that believes it is indeed with no restriction.
I meant that if you are a contrarian then the majority will dismiss you as an opportunist who is using their contrarian position to gain popularity, that they would have otherwise been unable to attain.
Their implication being, that the contrarian lacks the talent to make it without the additional attention brought by being the contrarian.
I wasn't stating a truth, but rather the perception and resulting reaction from the 'hivemind'.
> There is a large portion of philosophy that ponders the question if criticism can be a creative endeavor. I am firmly in the camp that believes it is indeed with no restriction.
I am totally with you on that. I am sorry if the original comment came across as being demeaning towards contrarians.
As a counter-point to this being a "veiled reference" - Your comment that the article is a reference to something that's happening in the world could conceivably apply at any given point in time.
There will always be contentious ideas - the meta of an "in-group contrarian" transcends the current social narrative.
Candace Owens has pretty standard viewpoints for Trump-minded people. Her main differentiator that has made her popular is that she is a black woman, so it is much harder to call her racist or sexist for stating the exact same thing that, say, a white male Trump supporter would get called racist or sexist for.
I don’t support Trump and am not even conservative but look how I got downvoted when I pointed out that someone misquoted him. Sorry, you want to claim that conservatives ignore facts and then proceed to downvote me when I literally reference Trump’s verbatim quote from Twitter to correct your misquoted version?
I almost think Trump keeps winning elections out of a sense of schadenfreude. No one likes the guy, but when you constantly get downvoted and people attempt to silence any minor disagreement from the party line, it sure makes you want to vote for him out of spite (I won’t though).
>I almost think Trump keeps winning elections out of a sense of schadenfreude.
I definitely think a lot of his appeal has to do with his ability to rile up the left then demonstrate their ineptitude at stopping him. He's also doesn't seem to have much in the way of strong principles on subjects, instead, he does pretty much exactly what he thinks his supporters will like.
His corruption is the trade-off one makes for electing a politician like him. He'll do whatever it takes to make his constituents happy, and in return they give him a blank check.
Umm... except that’s not what he said though. If it was, I would completely agree with you that it is an incitement (more accurately, a proclamation) of violence. But what he actually said was:
"when the looting starts, the shooting starts"
And, per Wikipedia:
"He said that he was not aware of the phrase's 'racially-charged history'. He added that he didn't know where the phrase had originated, and that his intent in using it was to say 'when there's looting, people get shot and they die.'"
So his statement is not an incitement, but a prediction. You may believe that Trump is lying about his intention, but that's a different debate.
So at worst we have someone who is intentionally inciting violence.
At best we have a leader of our country too irresponsible to do due diligence on his own posts to the entire free world. He has literally infinite resources at his disposal to communicate effectively about this.
Being a hateful bigot and or an ignoramus should both be unacceptable positions for the leader of the US. Furthermore this isn't the first time he's said or done hateful / bigoted / ignorant things / lied so you'll excuse people if they don't give him the 'benefit of the doubt'.
When you have a 'bully pulpit' as powerful and far reaching as Facebook now provides to the president then it is totally reasonable to want to hold them accountable (given you disagree with their stance).
I don't exactly understand what is objectionable about protesting the decision making of corporate entities given the immense power they hold?
This is like saying you shouldn't boycott BP for their oil spill, you should just complain to your congressperson. I don't understand why you can't complain on both fronts?
Devil’s advocate thought experiment: suppose I was a CEO of a large social media company and my personal view is pro-life. Should I remove pro-choice posts (or censor them with violence labels), or should I allow discussion on the topic even though I personally disagree with it?
I don’t think people can have their cake and eat it too. Either the CEOs of these companies start imposing their personal views on their users or they try to make the platform as neutral as possible. In-between solutions are going to make everyone angry.
Conservative Americans are traditionally all-in on respect for private property. One doesn't expect to go just walk on someone's lawn and put up a sign without the owner's permission. I honestly don't understand why the same respect doesn't apply to the services provided by private companies like Twitter and Facebook.
These companies spend billions of dollars annually on infrastructure and engineering to host user content. How can Republicans be asking the government to step in and dictate over that multi-billion investment? Doesn't that fly in the face of everything they believe about government's role in the private sector?
In your example, of course the pro-life CEO can do whatever they want with content on their site, assuming it was uploaded by users within the site's terms of service. If someone were actually paying for hosting of the content, they would have a case to get upset about having it taken down. But that's not the kind of contract that users of social media sites have made with the companies.
The point isn't to push a personal cause or belief. The goal should be to keep a safe space where people aren't allowed to threaten others and incite violence.
The pro-life viewpoint considers pro-choice views to be advocating violence in the most direct way possible ("murdering babies"). That's the fundamental problem: there is a huge subjective grey area.
I am pretty sure that's the _intended_ Facebook stance, and the disagreement comes over what's a "grey area" and what's clear cut -- which is what makes it a grey area to begin with.
> "ok... you can chose to not take a stance on grey areas and act on clear cut cases."
Eating meat is considered unethical by many and the fact that animals are often treated poorly by factory farming is not deniable. That's pretty clear cut. What ruling would you make?
Yet my meat comes from sustainable near-wild farms that enhance the environ, not a factory farm. Should I have to listen to some loud vegan breathlessly proclaim all omnivores to be vile and lacking in ethics? Everything is a damned grey area.
That was a frustratingly meandering and low-density listen. Here's the substance of the episode, the rest can be discarded:
> Now that we have agreed that not all speech is protected, is this particular speech we are talking about protected? The answer is that first we start with a presumption that a law punishing speech for its content or message or subject matter violates the First Amendment.
> We look to see if the speech falls into a short list of well-defined historical exceptions to the First Amendment; obscenity, defamation, fraud, speech that’s integral to criminal conduct. And if the speech doesn’t fall into one of those narrow categories, the government cannot restrict it, unless it can pass that incredibly tough test called strict scrutiny, which is almost always fatal.
> So how much does saying you can’t shout fire in a theater help you in doing that analysis? Not a bit. It’s empty words. Every time someone says it I get a little more misanthropic.
So, as to whether it's illegal to shout Fire! in a crowded theater (which isn't on fire), I still don't know. The StackExchange folks lean toward it probably being illegal, especially if you end up causing a panic, depending on state. https://law.stackexchange.com/q/28853
The difference is that—unlike racial justice, women's rights, and gay rights—in this case abortion was a mistake and so the step forward would be to reverse it. If you go back far enough, society has successfully reversed actions that were at the time considered forward progress.