Don Quixote’s Thought for the Day: Do we even talk?
Don Quixote on Jan 20 2010 at 8:22 pm | Filed under: Uncategorized
As I suspected, the answer to my thought a couple days ago established that we have very few liberal readers left here in the Bookwormroom (So glad you still drop by, Helen, insults and all). No wonder we have so few really good disagreements anymore.
So, is this problem unique to the Bookwormroom or has it happened all over? Are liberals and conservatives off on their own private islands or are there still common meeting grounds where both points of view are respected and genuine, productive dialogue takes place? Anyone know of any such places?
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I really wouldn’t read too much into this, Book. Like you, I really enjoy Helen’s participation, both for entertainment value and because she does force us to think and articulate our positions, all snark aside. However, activity on this blog from the Left peaked during the election season, when (sorry to say) you were visited both by thinking Lefties and paid trolls.
I suspect that we are in a lull before the storm. Up to now, most Lefties have felt that their battle was won and there was no need to visit sites like this. Things will heat up again as we approach this year’s election season.
Sadly, Danny and DQ, the fact that I’m seen as “entertainment” is a big part of the problem. As Maya Angelou said, “friendship is possible only among equals.” Same, I think, of honest dialog. Of course, there are nutty liberals. There are nutty conservatives, too. And nutty people who don’t know the difference. Likewise, there are thinking liberals and conservatives.
The fact is, most liberals used a lot of energy during the election year. And we won. The question now is, What did we win? If that’s flip, well, I guess conversation is impossible.
Neither conservatives not liberals have it all figured our; we’re all people.
As to not visiting this site, I have all along. But I don’t have the energy to fight twelve people every day and do anything else. I’m a poet not a politician. Writing poetry is the medium I use to discover truth not that I think it should be for everyone.
I agree, this is the lull before the storm. I have a dreadful feeling that things are going to get very ugly very quickly. Do not delude yourself that one Senator being elected is going to alter the agenda that the progressives have been pursuing for the past century. My fear is twofold: I hope that the message of Scott Brown’s election for Republicans is not simply that voters do not like Democrats. It goes far deeper. I believe that voters do not like the status quo and that includes member of both parties. There are very few Republicans I admire as most have become simply politicians. We need to return control of the country back to the working middle class. The second thing I fear is that we will now have an economic upturn now that Wall Street and industry are not looking down the barrel of Obamacare and Cap&Trade. There is pent up demand that could break through and if so, the improvement in unemployment and properity could fuel a Democratic comeback in time for the November elections. You had asked a while back about hyper-inflation and why given the trillions of dollars we are dumping into the economy we’ve not seen any real increase in prices. I think that a lot of this has to do with the fear that people have regarding the economy and the reluctance we share toward spending anything (or investing in anything). If consumer confidence rebounds, I am afraid that inflation will be reality.
Birds of a feather, path of least resistance and fellowship are reasons that come to mind. We see this in Church too. Someone finds a new life in relationship to God, finds it exciting and exciting to be around these loving people. Tells their friends about and some come to church some leave because of the expressed excitement in the new life holds no interest or actually repulses them so eventually the new Christian frequently ends up with only or mostly Christian friends developing their fellowship. It then takes an extra effort on the part of one such as this to keep the Great Commission active in their lives. Here in Marin it is pretty difficult to talk about Jesus without a condescending/dismissive “That’s nice for you”. BTW I am not talking about turn or burn types of conversations. The problem then for a congregation is that it can become an inward organization becoming accustom to what is normal and thus safe by comparison for them rather than being doers of Jesus’ commands who was not shy of a controversy or two.
Where to go for real political debate rather than just swapping insults though I have no idea.
“are there still common meeting grounds where both points of view are respected and genuine, productive dialogue takes place?”
Well, the internet is always problematic, because unlike face-to-face interactions there is no penalty for incivility.
However, I have seen a great drawing-apart in personal interactions: There are very few liberals that I even <i>try</i> to discuss anything with, because any disagreement is seen as proof that I am evil–racist, fascist, etc, etc. (On the other hand I have had almost no difficulty over the years getting along with conservatives, even when I was a liberal.)
“holds no interest or actually repulses them”
I’ve noticed that, too. Even expressing respect for Christianity can cause a serious rift.
(On the other hand I have had almost no difficulty over the years getting along with conservatives, even when I was a liberal.)
pst314, There is nothing I love more than a Conversion Story! Was there anything specific that happened to you or was you conversion a gradual awareness?
<B>I really wouldn’t read too much into this, Book.</b>
Book? Where.
<B>because she does force us to think and articulate our positions,</b>
That was true back in the day, I think. Now, there’s no new material. Besides, she never liked having her positions and article links transcribed and translated into something that actually made sense. She’d say that I was putting words in her mouth. Funny, I never knew logic and substantiation of illusionary concepts were what the Left does.
<B>There are nutty conservatives, too.</b>
Were you the same person that first came here and started talking about institutional white racism, and then got angry and started calling people racists because they were opposed to your world view… or was that the other Leftist guru.
Maybe you think these things are easily forgotten, but in the non-emotional planar perspective, it wasn’t that long ago.
<B>And we won.</b>
Notice how they conceptualize victory only as something to be gained from other Americans, not actual external enemies. Because their internal enemies are their actual enemies. This makes sense, from their perspective.
<B>No wonder we have so few really good disagreements anymore.</b>
That has nothing to do with the subject. You see few disagreements because you aren’t willingly to openly state your disagreement with everyone. And the same is true for the rest of us. On different sites, such as Neo-Neocon or elsewhere, even if you take a bunch of conservatives, they won’t agree and will, indeed, even argue about either trivial or non-trivial issues.
This is a product of the environment, which has been ground out over several years. This is not a new thing. Neo-Neocon’s blog was in this format, so to speak, until she got a little too famous and trolls went to her blogspot to sabotage it, and she had to relocate some things to ban IP numbers and what not.
Characterizing this as something new would be a mistake. Social harmony was never something new in human affairs to begin with. You can see it in various places, though not everywhere or even anywhere.
There are huge numbers of blogs where conservatives battle it out with liberals, or with just about anyone, actually. But reading even a slim fraction of them requires that one… stop reading the New York Times and various other news organizations, online or offline. The reason is simple: nobody has time to read all the comments and then comment, while reading newspapers at the same time, and blogging at the same time.
<B>But I don’t have the energy to fight twelve people every day and do anything else. I’m a poet not a politician.</b>
I wouldn’t personally blame you for that. DQ’s reasons are his own.
There are no rules of engagement and sticking to facts. The old school of journalism – the five w’s .. who, what, where, whey and why no longer apply to the written or spoken word. No surprise that it has spilled over into the net and blogs.
A DMZ for political give and take seems unlikely. We are a mix of young, younger and old and older. While many of us may be angry and frustrated, we are coming at the issues from different ends of the political spectrum and different ends and stages of life, too.
Comment sections of all the blogs – left, right, white and black reflect the chasm.
One brief comment to Helen: I came to this blog a virgin. I had never ventured into any room or comment section. I did my daily reading and any ranting to myself. The suggestion to visit this blog was made because of the cerebral tone of the posts. You, and only you took it upon yourself to ‘snark’ me as I recall. I was not even aware that your tone was intended to be such and it was only because of suek chiding your remarks that it alerted me to the fact, that I should be on guard. You never apologized and in fact, took great pleasure in your short lived success.
Friendship is possible only when one considers the other just as equal – Sadie
I think we have arrived at the point where kind, civil respectful discourse with the left is a chimera. The left senses a now-or-never moment in its grand project to subject us all to state control, and it has little desire or inclination to pretend that what we think or protest is of the least consequence to it.
If—big if—Scott Brown’s victory doesn’t “take,” and we see a continuation of the theft and monkey wrenching that Obama, ACORN and sociopaths like Bill Ayers are visiting upon us, we areheading straight to a civil war.
I’m sorry, but there comes a time when two sides simply cannot “dialogue” with each other any more. I’m not interested in discussing politics, economics or morals with people who do not give a second thought to their hatred for ordinary people and America, their avaricious peasant concept that the pie cannot grow and that only educated thugs like them should be allowed apportion it, or that their right to the orgasm is the supreme good no matter how many lives it destroys.
I love this blog. BW, DQ, and the band of commentators regularly discuss issues that leave me saying, “Why didn’t I think of that?” or “I wish I wrote that well.” I consider it a conversation among virtual friends and interesting strangers. Nonetheless, I do worry about being in an echo chamber. It is so hard to overcome one’s confirmation bias (seeing what you want to see and failing to see contrary evidence, or even harder, hearing the dog that didn’t bark). Our devil’s advocate’s skills are not entirely rusty — not as long as we live amidst the leftist msm. The New York Times is a handy strop. But I still have this nagging feeling that I should make more of an effort to visit lefty blogs. To answer DQ’s question: go to the Belmont Club’s site for at this link:
http://pajamasmedia.com/richardfernandez/2010/01/18/strange-loop/#more-7587 Excerpts to follow.
From the Belmont Club — make sure you check out the network graph (not pasted here):
At the core of Douthat’s problem is the question of who talks to whom over what? Who is the messager and who the messagee over the Internet? In the apparent mental model the Internet itself becomes a curiously passive thing, a sort of newfangled broadcasting device/telephone. Its implied structure is interesting too. Douthat’s model seems to have “candidates” above a horizontal divide and the “netroots” below them in top-down fashion. The candidate receives a message and “enacts” an agenda that the net-roots left support. The Republicans are strategically crippled, he argues, because they cannot carry out a program to shrink government. By denying themselves revenue they make it impossible to respond to respond to petitioners. If the jukebox takes no coins, then the jukebox plays no music. “When Scott Brown pledges an across-the-board tax cut and sweeping deficit reduction all at once, he’s setting the conservative grass roots up for a major disappointment,” since cutting expenditures is not conceivable within this system.
But it’s entirely possible that the Internet doesn’t work like this at all. First of all there are no fixed pairings of the sort implied. There is no fixed conservative grassroots at the beck and call of Republican politicians any more than there is a clean one to one mapping between Democrat politicians and what is vaguely called the “netroots”. But at least part of the Internet maps itself around ideas. In mid-2009 a Belmont Club post entitled Left Brain, Right Brain described a study showing a map of sites organized by their proximity to “litmus test” ideas like abortion, gun control and the like. They found that the blogosphere is indeed divided into two halves, with the conservative side interestingly enough, significantly more diverse than the left wing side. This should have been expected because the conservative side is far less rigidly organized around party, ideological, union or activist lines.
What was interesting about the graph was the high traffic of links at their intersection. Sites with a cross-over appeal, which linked to ideas on both the left or the right had a greater number of visitors than those sites (either on the left or right) which stayed in niche corners. This suggests a dynamism in the system that cannot be influenced by party structures. But the critically, the Internet does not split along the hierarchical divide that Douthat seems to describe. Rather it represents a conversation in which hierarchy doesn’t matter, or doesn’t matter as much as it used to. Content, link density and reputation does.
Charles, can’t disagree with you when it comes to people like Keith Olbermann
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Axh6VnA-TKI
I think that he was one of the disinstitutionalized crazies that BW mentioned in a recent post.
Sorry to be hogging the comment board this morning. One last post. Really long, but really good from Megan McArdle (responding to a deranged Andrew Sullivan).
http://meganmcardle.theatlantic.com/archives/2010/01/both_sides_now.php
http://meganmcardle.theatlantic.com/archives/2010/01/both_sides_now.php
In 2004, the day after George Bush was re-elected, New York was a sullen place. At lunch, I sat next to one of my favorite New York liberals in brooding silence for a while, and then her sadness and rage suddenly erupted.
“I just didn’t realize,” she said, “that America hated me.”
What do you say to that? America didn’t hate her; America didn’t know her. America mostly wasn’t thinking about her. Yes, I’ve no doubt that the more tribal political partisans were cackling at the thought of grieving New York liberals (and in 2006, their liberal counterparts were prowling the internet for pleasurable nuggets of schadenfreude–no, don’t deny it, I physically watched them do it.) But most people hadn’t been thinking about my companion when they voted. They’d been thinking about themselves. They’d been trying to do, in their own hamfisted and probably ignorant way, the best thing for themselves and their country.
I’ve got a fine sense of deja vu after reading this on Andrew’s page:
Saying that you “cannot grasp” what motivates others is supposed to indicate their utter moral turpitude, I suppose. And in the case of say, people who rape children, yes, it’s true: I cannot grasp it. Can’t imagine. Don’t want to.
But when you’re using it as a dodge to avoid grappling with the opinion of well over half your fellow countrymen, this won’t do. Being unable to imagine what the majority of Americans might be thinking doesn’t indicate a problem with them. It suggests you kind of need to get out more. Ask around. If there’s one thing any American is always happy to share, it’s his opinion.
But for the shut-ins, and those who are too busy with their needlepoint, I have a useful little shortcut that you can use to try and understand why this vast, pulsating blob of undifferentiated evildoers might be opposing the Democrats’ health care agenda: they think it’s a bad idea.
That’s not so hard to imagine, is it? You have had ideas, and you have opposed the bad ideas of others. You have experience in the domain, so to speak. Think of it as sort of a visualization device.
The next time you are trying to imagine why the people who disagree with you are actively promoting the destruction of all that is good in the universe, grab a soothing cup of mint tea, put your feet up on a comfy pillow, and then close your eyes and imagine what those people would look like campaigning against something that is a very bad idea. 99 times out of a hundred, you’ll find that they look . . . well, exactly like they look when they’re campaigning against your idea. And suddenly the whole thing is no longer so inexplicable, isn’t it?
I mean, we all know that that’s ridiculous, because you have never in your life been wrong about any major question, or had a bad idea of your own, which is why you are so fabulously wealthy and married to the first person you ever dated, who is even now smiling at you in blissful perfection from the arms of your four flawless children. But they don’t know that, you see. As I think I’ve mentioned, they haven’t met you. They won’t know anything about you until you finally accept that Nobel Peace Prize. So you’ll have to content yourself with understanding that while you, personally, may never be in error, other well meaning people sometimes are. And then still other well-meaning people have to get up off the sofa and point this out, lest they lead the entire nation astray.
This does not require arguing that the people who oppose you are right. Obviously, if you thought that, they wouldn’t be opposing you. It just requires a little more empathy, a little less tribalism.
When I realized that health care was probably going to pass, I was, as you can imagine, sort of unhappy. I thought that this was, over the long run, very likely to result in the untimely deaths of lots of people, maybe including me. I may have been in error about this belief–but it was sincerely held.
Had I gone off into a despairing and rage-filled rant about how I just could not understand how all those people could be so determined to kill millions and millions of innocent people with their stupid central planning schemes that never work, haven’t they seen what happened to the Soviet Union, ferchrissakes . . . should my views get a respectful hearing? I think not. Had I said anything like that, I would have sounded like an idiot. As, indeed, some of the more benighted conservative commentators kind of did.
Because it’s not that hard to understand why the people on the other side want what they want. They look at people without insurance, and they want to help them. I’d like to help them too. They believe, as I do not, that the government will be able to muster the political will to control costs. They believe, as I do not, centralized government planning will improve the health care system rather than being hijacked by special interests within it. They believe, as I do not, that there is so much fat and waste in the pharma and medical technology industries that they can considerably reduce reimbursements without reducing useful innovation and thereby condemning those who might have been saved to an early death. These are not unreasonable beliefs. Neither are mine.
In a situation like that, it is natural to despair that those who oppose you have made a tragic error. But if you want to rage, rage against the universe that provides us too little information, and too limited brains, to make perfect choices every time. If Coakley wins (or Brown does and the Democrats manage, against my expectation, to pass something anyway), I won’t be happy about it. But I don’t need to go inventing evils where none exist, for the sheer joy of venting my unhappiness on a person. Life is too short for me to spend any time manufacturing hatred for strangers.
I will make one final conjecture: I think that what makes rational disagreement with liberals difficult if not impossible is the refusal to grant them the automatic presumption of moral superiority. Drives them crazy.
The gulf between conservatives and liberals dramatically widened over the last few years.
I trade political discussion emails with a very liberal friend of mine. We try to avoid insulting each other, though it sometimes slips through. When we make progress, we end up boiling the disagreement down to one or a few basic axioms over which we just circle endlessly, and then it’s time to stop, because we simply, COMPLETELY disagree in our basic worldview: those axioms.
That commenter that gpc31 excerpted just above is representative of that 25-30% that still “strongly approve” of Obama. They are filled with a visceral hatred of George Bush – and Republicans, and conservatives – that will never go away. That hatred would extend to most of us here in Book’s domain, because we have a great deal of certainty that our conservative principles truly represent what is correct about the world and what works within the world. On the far left, this is interpreted to mean that we are simply and purely evil. This is NOT hyperbole.
Some of us here equally view them, with their committed worldview that is 180 degrees opposite to ours, as them being purely, consciously evil as well.
There’s a meme out there that the voter behavior in 2006-2008 (the liberal rebellion, I call it) was hopey changey, and NICE, and filled with enthusiasm and positive thoughts and hope and ideas. And the 2010-2012 rebellion (the conservative side of the rebellion, if you will) is mean and angry and nasty. This is not true. There was a shocking amount of meanness in 2006-2008 on the liberal side, more than I’ve ever seen. The hatred was spilling over the levees into a flood. I’m a type of conservative who sees the Bush years as not particularly conservative at all, and yet the rage against it was breathtaking. Now we’ve seen three years of a very liberal Congress, and one year of complete far-left control of all branches of our national government, and we’ve gotten angry too (finally). Maybe the dirty little secret of “enthusiasm” in politics is that you have to be genuinely aggrieved to keep the enthusiasm constantly running, enough to remain motivated to effect political change on the scale we are now seeing on our side, too.
But the gulf has dramatically widened. The anonymity of the blogosphere leads to starker representations of “the truth as I see it”, and a greater freedom to engage in insults. The benefits of trying to interact decline. You end up with a person such as Helen Losse as a sole commenter having to engage twelve enthusiastic opponents who give her little to no quarter. I bet it would be exhausting and ultimately seem to be futile to continue to try to engage. And so, in the blogosphere, we disengage and go our own ways. And this comment area of Book’s is one of the most polite oases I’ve seen. The vast majority of the others are filled with expletive-laden rants – vitriolic RANTS – against anyone who dares to drop in with that alternate worldview and leave comments. You’re lucky if they limit themselves to only three sentences that describe what a worthless piece of crawling insect vermin you are who deserves to be exterminated off the face of the earth, preferably while screaming in pain as the acid eats your body away alive.
Probably, the blogosphere commenter cadre is mostly from the 20% on the far-left and 20% on the far-right who will never agree on anything (and never have agreed, ever!). And all the people in the middle ignore us. If they visit commentary, they see the level of hatred spilling over and simply leave, having no time, energy, or desire to even experience it – let alone register and then leave their own comments. The worries of enveloping oneself in an echo chamber are very real on both sides.
I like to visit realclearpolitics.com for at least the mix of headlines. It’s a very eclectic representation from left, right and middle. Every once in a while one of the liberal headlines appears thoughtful enough to be worth reading. It helps keep me from being trapped in an echo chamber. Those email discussions with my liberal friend help too. I am reminded that while there ARE those, like William Ayers, who are self-aware enough to actually be evil in intention and design, the vast majority of those I disagree with aren’t evil.
Actually, GPC31, if you really want to drive a Liberal nuts, tell them that we can’t argue with Liberals because Liberals argue from the heart whereas conservatives argue from the brain. Believe me, it works. Here’s another one: “It’s not that we say Liberals are evil (unlike what they say about Republicans and conservatives). Many are fundamentally good people whose mistaken beliefs enable evil to flourish”. Also, I can’t tell you how many times I have used Book’s phrase, “Conservatives collect facts and use them to build conclusions whereas Liberals emote conclusions and peddle them as facts” and left my Liberal friends gasping like wide-eyed carp stranded on a muddy shore.
MikeD – I used to enjoy reading Andrew Sullivan when he was a big and passionate Bush supporter, especially after 9/11 and the run-up to Iraq. However, he turned on a dime and visciously attacked Bush’s War on Terror policy when Bush…refused to support gay marriage. That non-sequitur erased an shred of respect that I had for Sullivan. He really needs medication.
The analytical monologues here are pretty fun.
Passion and emotion are often triggers to lengthy and complete expositions of one’s personal views. The key thing is to realize that emotion is like an acid: too much of it and you’ll get something similar to PTSD.
The Left, obviously, disagree. Emotion is the proletariat’s opium, yes.
The problem, DQ, is that talking requires a common language, and that seems to have vanished. I take very seriously the motto of my blog: “Conservatives deal with facts and reach conclusions; liberals have conclusions and sell them as facts.” It’s very difficult to sustain a conversation with someone who is uninterested in the facts, and simply parrots, repeatedly, that Bush is evil, Palin is stupid, Obama is brilliant, Gitmo is a place of torture, Banks are greedy, etc. There’s nowhere to go with the analysis.
However, as I’ve noted before, if I can catch people in conversation before they get to the conclusions, and anchor the conversation to real issues and actual knowledge, people usually agree with me. I like to think that, after they reach that agreement, the next time they parrot one of their conclusions, some small part of their brain starts whispering to them “Hey, that’s wrong.” I know that’s what happened to me and, when the cognitive dissonance between my actual knowledge and my liberal conclusions became too loud, I was able to cross the political Rubicon.
Andrew Sullivan is like Charles Johnson. What they got in their spines can be related more to Pick Up Artists than to spines of steel: a little bit too superficial, concentrated in a word smithing profession, that feeds from a funding source.
They appear like intellectuals, but at their core they are too inflexible intellectually to adapt to changing philosophies and premises. Charles Johnson hasn’t changed one iota since 9/11, neither has AS. They only appeared to be people we thought we knew, because they ‘agreed’. A lesson on being aware of ‘political agreements’. They don’t mean as much as one might think it would. It doesn’t mean total agreement. It just means that disagreement hasn’t happened yet. It doesn’t mean that he has the same philosophy and ethics as you, either, just because his political end goal somehow ended up at a single point same as one of yours.
If anything, they taught me that superficial agreement on politics is meaningless. It doesn’t matter where people are politically, for all that matters are their actions. They are either your allies in a fight, neutrals, or enemies. That’s what matters. Some types of personalities are better allies, of course, and some are better at being enemies. That’s how the cookie crumbles.
I’ve heard about those with progressive or classical liberal views, that are otherwise Democrats or even Leftists, that have integrity, of a sort, but I don’t go seeking them out. I hear about them from the people who do seek them out, however. But, you can’t seek out people with different views than yours, while hoping they have a stronger argument, while you yourself feel insecurity in your beliefs. This naturally limits the number of people seeking out alternative views. It’s not a popular or common occurrence for people to drop their current lifestyle and immerse themselves in an alien culture or mentality.
I don’t seek them out because I’ve already sought them out and having satisfied that need for experience, I no longer need them anymore. I can learn far more from specialists and professionals in actual professions. The political arena has been pretty much depleted in my view. I can’t learn much more theory from Leftists or ideological foes of mine. In fact, I can spell out the crimes of institutional racism and the theory of emotions better than most Democrats in my age group. I can spell it out in my words and they’ll agree, because it would harmonize with their views of politics. They’ll agree because I know where they are heading better than they do.
The problem with learning politics is that you need a strong foundation in epistemology and metaphysics. It also helps if you act Ethically and train yourself to react virtuously. It also helps if you have some actual character strengthening skills or hobbies or vocations. Things you have learned or chosen to learn that increases your own personal fortitude, confidence, health, and integrity. On the internet, we mostly start and end with politics, but that’s not who we are. Deana, for example, is someone I recognize as a specialist in her own field. Even if we did have ideological differences, I would care far more about actual reality and how people deal with it using skills, than how ideology says things should be. That’s a crucial difference between people who support pie in the sky Utopias that end up turning people into fuel and those that believe people cannot be considered as disposable resources to be expended for a ‘common good’. Everybody should be saved. Since everyone has interests and free will, it is possible to save everyone by collaboration and cooperation. If there are people that cannot be saved because they won’t cooperate, if there are people who once saved, go on to harm more people causing the system to break down and not be able to save everyone, then those people can be terminated. The choice of who to save, a terrorist or an American family, is based upon this.
In the end, it is always easier to convince people who actually live in reality to change their minds. Having everyone trained in how to use a gun won’t mean they become automatically 2nd Amendment supporters or NRA members. It just means that pie in the sky illusions and arrogant ‘guns are evil’ myths become easier to dispel. It’s far easier to fool somebody that has no experience with something than it is to fool somebody that has seen the genuine article. Isn’t that obvious. But judging by how people act, it doesn’t seem apparent.
“pst314, There is nothing I love more than a Conversion Story! Was there anything specific that happened to you or was you conversion a gradual awareness?”
It was a gradual conversion process. Feel free to remind me later for specific anecdotes. No time now.
With more than 600 responses to: Liberal bloggers and Dems, I told you so, the responses are varied. For anyone who wants to weigh in …
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/peter-daou/liberal-bloggers-to-obama_b_429031.html
Helen:
Sadly, Danny and DQ, the fact that I’m seen as “entertainment” is a big part of the problem. As Maya Angelou said, “friendship is possible only among equals.” Same, I think, of honest dialog. Of course, there are nutty liberals. There are nutty conservatives, too. And nutty people who don’t know the difference. Likewise, there are thinking liberals and conservatives.
Helen is not a nutty liberal. Without having met her, I think she would make a fine friend and neighbor. The reason many on this blog see her as “entertainment” is because her arguments are so easy to defeat. I also note that Helen must have recognized that because she seldom responded to any of our refutations.
Helen is right, of course, that “friendship is possible only among equals.” The problem is that Helen came on to this board telling us that we were not her equal. Indeed, by the mere fact of being born white and American, many of us were inherently racist with only the slim hope of becoming “recovering racists” if we adopted her view of the world. She certainly didn’t think of us as equals. Most liberals don’t think of conservatives as equals (as least not moral equals) and, to be entirely honest, most conservatives don’t think of liberals as equals (at least not intellectual equals). But we don’t have to be friends to listen to each other’s ideas, and consider them seriously and respectfully. For the life of me, I don’t understand why both sides don’t do less belligerent talking and more respectfully listening. And I take it as a most ominous sign that we are pulling farther and farther apart into our own little “echo chambers” and listening less and less to each other.
>>Helen is not a nutty liberal.>>
Ok. Whatever you say.
>> Without having met her, I think she would make a fine friend and neighbor. >>
I agree. There were situations when I was growing up where the standard rule of etiquette was not to discuss religion or politics. Socialization with one’s neighbors was probably one of these. There were good reasons for the rule – mostly peace and good will within social circles – and neighborhoods.
>>The reason many on this blog see her as “entertainment” is because her arguments are so easy to defeat.>>
I wouldn’t call her “entertainment”. She does make statements with no backup which we are supposed to accept as fact because she has “made it so”. She makes no argument. She makes no defense of her statements. On the other hand, often her statements do spur discussion on topics or aspects of topics which we were not considering before.
>>I also note that Helen must have recognized that because she seldom responded to any of our refutations.>>
I think Helen belongs to that group that considers that arguments just lead to trouble. Her heart tells her what she should think…thinking might just cause conflict within her heart, and she doesn’t want conflict. In her heart or anywhere else. She wants peace and love. That’s certainly not nutty – just unrealistic.
As a former pitcher, it took me a long time to learn a simple truth*: the batters had a way of telling me whether or not I had good “stuff”. Didn’t matter how I felt in the bullpen, or what the radar gun said, just whether or not I got outs. And too many brushback pitches are counter-productive.
Listen to your adversaries. It will work in your favor.
*Which is why it didn’t take me long to become a former pitcher.
I’ve never borne any animus toward Helen. It’s her ideas that I find incoherent. I agree with suek’s take that Helen, being a poet, favors her heart over her head, so an idea is “good” if it makes her feel good.
In dealing with people like that, I’m reminded of the Catholic concept of “invincible ignorance.” There are times when a person or neighbor cannot and will not see facts or logic, and no amount of goodwill or attenpts to persuade will work. So, you must simply withdraw from the conversation. There are greener fields to tend and better things to do. If that means retreating to my “echo chamber,” so be it.
DQ, you’re warning about echo chambers is well taken.
Charles, “invincible ignorance”! I just wish we Episcopalians (Catholic-Lite) could articulate such a perfect description of what we articulate today, or maybe C.S. Lewis did, dunno.
<B>And I take it as a most ominous sign that we are pulling farther and farther apart into our own little “echo chambers” and listening less and less to each other. </b>
If that was the extent of the damage to the nation, it wouldn’t be a problem. America was built upon the premise of liberty, not conformity, DQ. Or have you forgotten that.
Living apart, in different states with different customs and laws, was the dream of the American frontier. It is not a problem for people to build their lives surrounded by those with shared interests and views.
It’s a great sin to believe that coalitions or alliances are built upon the echo chamber. Because often times they aren’t. It is because you haven’t listened to people and their actual thoughts, that you can believe an agreement, on paper, is simply an echo of what everybody else thinks. The real world isn’t like that. While it is true you can create cults and ideologies, Jim Jones or Marxism, that can create an echo chamber, that was a means to an end, however. It was the means to power and if something would have worked better to steal power from the masses, it would have been adopted instead. But as it was, the echo chamber was well suited for tyrannies and totalitarian societies.
Try not to confuse liberty and the lack of willingness to conform with ‘enlightened fake liberals’ as being an echo chamber, DQ. This is not a court trial where there can only be two sides to any argument. Nor is it a recommendation that if only the Palestinians and Jews sat down to a table and ‘listened to each other’ that peace and cooperation would become reality.
Wow, Y-man, you are unnecessarily harsh on me. I haven’t forgotten anything. And I have not suggested that we need to conform to anything. All I’m suggesting is that all sides listen more, not that any side surrender their beliefs or anything else. By the way, you are quite correct that the Palestinians and Jews could sit down at a table and listen to each other for a very long time without reaching an agreement that will lead to peace and cooperation. But, of course, they will never achieve peace and cooperation by not listening to each other, unless you consider genocide an option.
P.S. In a court trial there can be many sides to an argument and often are. Multiple parties, with multiple cross-complaints and multiple contentions, are commonplace.
DQ…
I see it more like a divorce. You can discuss and discuss, but if in the end you can’t come to mutuality, then there isn’t a lot of point in discussing any more. It seems to me that for the last 50 to 100 years, there has been a discussion between progressives and conservatives in which liberals have continually said “big government is what we need to make everything better for everybody”. Conservatives have constantly said “no…the individual is the key…but ok…government _can_ do some things better” and yielded ground, letting government do more and more. Conservatives today are reaching a point where they’re saying “NO MORE!” because progressives have clearly indicated where they intend to take us – to Statism – whether you call it Socialism or Communism. We’re reaching the point where the lines will be drawn, and discussion will not be possible – neither side is willing to give ground. That being the case, it’s either the ballot or the bullet.
I sense that you recognize this, and are hoping we don’t reach that point – and wisely, because we’re losing our trust in the ballot. Progressives have no compunction about cheating. Discussion with cheaters never has a good outcome. Taqiya. Those who lie and cheat cannot be bargained with. It isn’t limited to muslims. And talking isn’t going to change anything.
We are at war.
If we were in another country, we would be shooting each other. Instead we’ve developed a civilized way of engaging in battle without physical violence (for the most part).
Are you suggesting we talk to one another like the US and Vietnam in Paris? How did that work out?
I’m talking here about committed liberals and equally committed conservatives. Since we don’t speak the same language, don’t share the same moral values (in the sense that our values are drawn from the same source) and don’t work for the same goals there is really not much to talk about, except the shape of the table.
Our goal is to persuade those less committed. Then we can engage in civil conversation, and lay out our case. We might even come to some common understanding which incorporates the concerns of reasonable people. But never with a committed liberal.
As to racism, if you want to see real racism, go to Africa.
<B>All I’m suggesting is that all sides listen more, not that any side surrender their beliefs or anything else. </b>
And what good do you think that will do in politics? Politics is not about people listening. It’s about solving people’s problems. Listening is only one way to get there. And it is a very passive way indeed. In this context, the simple act of listening gives power to those that have controlled the pathways of communication and propaganda. 3 guesses which faction that is.
You treat this like it’s an even playing field, rather than a battlefield.
<B>I haven’t forgotten anything. And I have not suggested that we need to conform to anything.</b>
If you have not forgotten these things, then you must have chosen to ignore them as if they were less important. It doesn’t matter whether you suggested it or not. The reality is that because of the left’s destabilization of America, listening is just another form of coercion. The time where people could listen to others free of coercion is getting farther and farther away from the present. So you see, it doesn’t matter what you want. It’s going to happen, regardless of what people wish.
Now, supposedly, things were setup here in the US in order to allow people to go their own way (including social experimentation by different states). You call this an ‘echo chamber’. In point of fact, that’s the solution, not part of the problem. The problem is the simple fact that once Leftist totalitarian policies are implemented, it becomes impossible for people to live their own lives, so they start trying to convert people/politicians and all you seem to recommend as a solution is for both sides to ‘listen’. That’s not going to solve anything at this time nor will it in the future given current trends. If the internet is becoming an ‘echo chamber’ of those more comfortable with their allies than with their bloodthirsty enemies, then that is because the internet is actually… Free. And being free, DQ, wasn’t ever an echo chamber to begin with. It’s what Americans should have in their own lives, not just on the internet.
The Puritans left the UK for Plymouth Rock. The Mormons left the 13 Colonies for Utah. Every settler and their wagon train left the settled lands for the dangerous West. And you somehow viewed this impulse and the results of such through the prism of an echo chamber, simply because like minded people started going to the same place and congregating, making a paradise of what was once desert. Supposedly, this effect can be reduced in your eyes by increasing the ability to listen on both sides. Unfortunately, if all those people I mentioned wanted to ‘listen’ to their neighbors, they would have stayed where they were, yes… Thus until you have a vigorous security requirement, I will not support or tolerate any justification for the decrease of liberty. Nor will it be likely that you are able to convince anyone else, on either side that the benefits of listening outweighs the risks. Regardless of what you may happen to call liberty or the effects of liberty, it is still better than anything else as a guide to living. People creating new lives without harm to anyone else, is not something that should be easily traded for ephemeral promises. It’s not worth it. It wasn’t back then and it still isn’t today.
Let’s not kid ourselves here. We’re not talking about common courtesy: factions listening to other generic factions. Your topic is about listening… to the Left. Let’s be mindful of the context here, particularly of the political context. This isn’t about hearing somebody’s opinions on whether we should have vanilla or chocolate. The more we talk, the less we can actually do. More important in politics and war than ice cream shopping.
<B>Multiple parties, with multiple cross-complaints and multiple contentions, are commonplace.</b>
The court system is a tangent. I bring it up only to mention the prosecution and the defense. Plea bargains are feasible or even common. This deal is made by the two sides listening to each other. Multiple parties or not, is irrelevant. Thinking of how real world factions operate outside the context/power of the law, as if they were inside judicial jurisdiction, is counter-productive. That’s the only reason why I bring it up.
<B>But, of course, they will never achieve peace and cooperation by not listening to each other, unless you consider genocide an option.</b>
War is an extension of politics, because war is also about communication and dealing with people’s interests. The bullet and the bomb speaks louder than the speech because actual lives are being lost on both sides. Thus war is effective in gaining true communication because the refusal to listen gets worn down. But ask yourself why those people refused to listen and favored killing each other as a viable alternative. It’s cause ‘listening’ was becoming coercion. Talking wasn’t solving their problems and since their problems consisted of things important like taking care of their people, fighting was produced because they’d rather do something than sit around and do nothing while hearing their enemies tell them lies.
You took a similar stance [talking/peace] on Iraq, do you remember. I told you that you shouldn’t listen to the propaganda echo chamber of the media about Iraq [about war not being able to solve things there]. But you didn’t believe that a peaceful and worthwhile victory in Iraq could happen. Well, it did happen, and mostly because Petraeus knew how to communicate both by talking and by making war [this is a crucial ability]. That’s a vital distinction you should have by now. The Sunnis could have listened to America’s claims of helping Iraq all they wanted to. They would have believed none of it. The Shia listened for a long time about the Sunnis not making tribal warfare on them. Until they stopped paying attention to words and started paying attention to the body count. Listening to somebody, talking, and actually believing what one hears or making others believe your words, were never the same things.
The very fact that you think genocide is an immediate alternate to talking/listening is… suggestive. It’s not the only other choice.
Peace isn’t made by words. It’s made by people who are able to solve people’s problems without getting most of them killed. Now some of those solutions involved just going somewhere else like American type settlers. Other solutions were something like the Civil War or WWII. And yet other solutions were like the Surge in Iraq: COIN. And then there are others, political solutions, here in the US, which are neither fully war nor fully peaceful cooperation.
DQ – “friendship is possible only among equals?” I suppose it depends how you define “equals,” because – if you’re at all like m0st of us – the experiences of your own life ought to disprove that one. That’s Angelou incoherence at it’s best, Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats is deeper. Come on! – you know better than that.
Though it’s entirely possible Angelou doesn’t. Maya Angelou is a walking mass of undigested cliches, and a godawful writer on her best days. (On a normal, routine day: Mother of God!) Rising to the heights of being merely illiterate is a triumph for her.
But she’s a perfect illustration of one of the problems: we’re all supposed to overlook the myriad issues with her “art,” and buy straight in to her wonderfully wonderful intentions. Sort of along the lines of: “of course I’m illiterate, but you know what I mean – and isn’t it just transcendent!” She’s the epitome of thinking with the emotions and leaving the brain home in the closet. In other words, as several of you have pointed out: the perfect liberal: all heart, no brain.
A manner of communications to which conservatives are disinclined.