This is a superb explication of our present moment in politics and the process in general. If I had the power I'd make it required reading across our country. One of your best.
>Most people are in echochambers, primarily listening to information from their own side, ignorant of basic facts, wholly unable to explain why their opponents believe what they do. But this applies to those who are on your side too!
"Here are two respects in which God’s view must be very different from ours. In the first place, He sees (like you) how all the people in your home or your job are in various degrees awkward or difficult; but when He looks into that home or factory or office He sees one more person of the same kind – the one you never do see. I mean, of course, yourself. That is the next great step in wisdom – to realize that you also are just that sort of person. You also have a fatal flaw in your character. All the hopes and plans of others have again and again shipwrecked on your character just as your hopes and plans have shipwrecked on theirs.
"It is no good passing this over with some vague, general · admission such as ‘Of course, I know I have my faults.’ It is important to realize that there is some really fatal flaw in you: something which gives the others just that same feeling of despair which their flaws give you. And it is almost certainly something you don’t know about – like what the advertisements call ‘halitosis’, which everyone notices except the person who has it. But why, you ask, don’t the others tell me? Believe me, they have tried to tell you over and over again, and you just couldn’t ‘take it’. Perhaps a good deal of what you call their ‘nagging’ or ‘bad temper’ or ‘queerness’ are just their attempts to make you see the truth. And even the faults you do know you don’t know fully. You say, ‘I admit I lost my temper last night’; but the others know that you’re always doing it, that you are a bad-tempered person. You say, ‘I admit I drank too much last Saturday’; but everyone else knows that you are a habitual drunkard.
"That is one way in which God’s view must differ from mine. He sees all the characters: I see all except my own. But the second difference is this. He loves the people in spite of their faults. He goes on loving. He does not let go. Don’t say, ‘It’s all very well for Him; He hasn’t got to live with them.’ He has. He is inside them as well as outside them. He is with them far more intimately and closely and incessantly than we can ever be. Every vile thought within their minds (and ours), every moment of spite, envy, arrogance, greed and self-conceit comes right up against His patient and longing love, and grieves His spirit more than it grieves ours.
"The more we can imitate God in both these respects, the more progress we shall make. We must love ‘X’ more; and we must learn to see ourselves as a person of exactly the same kind. Some people say it is morbid to be always thinking of one’s own faults. That would be all very well if most of us could stop thinking of our own without soon beginning to think about those of other people. For unfortunately we enjoy thinking about other people’s faults: and in the proper sense of the word ‘morbid’, that is the most morbid pleasure in the world."
That a very simplistic view. Firstly, it’s a reach to say that he betrayed his oath. Dis he act deplorable? Yes. Should he have tried to stop the madness earlier? Yes. But neither of those even remotely relates to his oath. That he acted in a shitty manner and tried persuade others is true, but at the end of the say he never acted on these.
Secondly, its easy to go after Trump and ignore how Democrats have undermined the rule of law and constitution, including Harris. Why are they not disqualified in your view?
>Secondly, its easy to go after Trump and ignore how Democrats have undermined the rule of law and constitution, including Harris. Why are they not disqualified in your view?
Because people who say things like this are usually schizophrenic. The DoJ under Biden and Kamala has investigated and indited and convicted multiple Democrats including the mayor of NYC and Hunter Biden. The Democrats are happy to prosecute people in their own social groups who break the law. Republicans and Republican institutions like Rudy Giuliani, Sidney Powell, or Fox News meanwhile intentionally lie about election fraud to their viewers and do anything to avoid criticizing Trump or cover the multiple criminal cases against him (how we still have 80% of Republicans believing the 2020 election was stolen or that the case against Trump where he directed people to hide classified documents at Mar A Lago and obstructed the investigation is an example of lawfare). There is no equivalency between Democrat corruption and Democrats' response to it and Trump's corruption and Republicans' response to it.
I like how you can easily tell when someone hasn't read the indictments against trump. "At the end of the day he never acted on these"? Fraudulent electors slates were literally created with the explicit purpose of overturning the results of the 2020 election and trump was fully in on and supported the plan.
"hundreds of millions of people on the other side fear that the U.S. will descend into totalitarian dictatorship."
This might be true for this election and the previous two, but I don't think it was so much true for earlier elections that I remember from my lifetime (I'm in my late 50s). People were still passionate in their views, but I don't recall anyone having a serious apprehension that our whole democratic tradition was under threat.
Not even when people were holding protest signs declaring Nixon to be a Nazi? Or how many believed Kennedy would take marching orders from the Pope, turning America into a theocracy? Or how half the country found Lincoln so tyrannical they fought a war against his perceived power-grab?
Declaring American democracy dead is one of the oldest traditions in American democracy.
I wasn't born yet for Kennedy's presidency, and I was six years old when Nixon was last elected. In any event, my impression (for what it's worth) is that the views you described re: Nixon and Kennedy were not as widespread as the view that Donald Trump doesn't value democracy and is in danger of subverting it for his own gain (which I think is true).
I don't remember people comparing Nixon to a Nazi. My recollection was Tricky Dicky and Nixon saying "I am not a crook", when everyone knew he was "the One".
Hardly half. The free population of the North was three times that of the South. Where did you come up with half?
Also, back in 1856 the Southern states had already declared they secede if a republican were elected. A republican was elected in 1860 and they were mostly out by the time Lincoln took office in Mar 1861.
RE: your comment that politics is an area where we should be able to disagree without hatred, I like your point. But I should also note that the mental exercise you're suggesting--holding political views while also not being too furious at other people for them--requires more than just light mental gymnastics. It requires that we avoid (generally) holding many of our political views earnestly.
Your abortion example is good, here. Say somebody believes earnestly that a person should be defined as fully human at conception and that abortion is therefore murder. And say that they want to prevent children from being murdered and women from becoming murderers.
Once you've defined abortion that way--if you *really* believe it, instead of just holding that rhetorical position in a distal, cognitive way--the natural extension is that people who support abortion are supporting murder. Period. They may be doing it because they're deceived (which is perhaps the most compassionate position you can take given your constraints), but if you really think it's murder, then you have a moral imperative to override their confusion, to step into their space and stop the murder, because their opinion of abortion (and of you) should weigh much less in the moral scheme of things than the murder of an innocent life.
And if you live in a world where half of the population expects you to just accept that they're murdering kids and stay silent about it because it's their right to do so? It's not a huge leap from that position to feeling like the opposing side is deeply evil.
Political tolerance therefore requires holding beliefs like "abortion is murder" loosely. People have been observing this about tolerance for decades, now; a world where everybody tolerates everybody else's beliefs is a world where nobody really believes anything--or, barring that, a world where all beliefs are so occluded by uncertainty that the only thing anybody really believes is sort of a meta-belief that none of us has a clue and we're all just muddling through the fog together.
Some people find that last meta-belief comforting. But in the middle of it, it's completely unsurprising for a segment of the population to decide that there are things worth cutting through the fog for. And once they've done that, the earnest division starts up again. Because if you really believe something important--like believing that abortion is murder, or that racial oppression should be stopped, or that Jesus is the son of God and people who don't accept his grace are going to hell, or that there is One God and Mohammed is his prophet, etc... etc...--then that belief cleaves the world into the opponents you have to grapple with to pursue your belief to its logical end, and the people who are your allies in the match.
I'd be interested in hearing your take on this just because you are devoted to thinking these things through in much more detail than most.
In my own experience I've noted that most people deal with this by holding their beliefs tentatively. A lot of people I know from churches have wryly observed that Christians only half-believe in Hell, because if they really did, they would be running urgently to everyone they know, begging them to repent. Some beliefs, though, are much more difficult to hold tentatively than others (like beliefs RE: abortion).
While I don't think it's a hateable offense, there's a reasonable case (for non-utilitarians) that voting uninformed in swing states is pretty bad. If we think that a PA voter has a one-in-5-million chance of swinging the election, and the wrong candidate winning does $500 billion worth of damage relative to the right candidate winning, then voting wrong causes $100,000 worth of damage to the world, which is more than all the goodness most people create by working at their jobs for one year.
If you don't think it's permissible to flip a coin that makes the world either $100,000 better or worse, you shouldn't vote uninformed (or informed but biased).
I feel compassion for those with the most rigid views entailing moral condemnation of those who don't agree, mostly because they seem so damned unhappy.
Anti-abortion belief is mostly about self interest correlates for adding costs to.short term mating if you look at predictive correlates. Sexual lifestyle factors the best predictor by far.
Dude, it is simpler than that. People have different interests and different worldviews. One does not need to be all that smart to make a correct decision based on these things. As a white guy, if I put on the MAGA hat it is a no brainer to vote Trump. Take off that off and put on the Kamala shades and it's a no brainer to vote Harris.
Trumps pretty smart. His over the top attacks on his opponents are riveting and take the scan off him while letting him exercise his ego. Maybe not smart because this is a widespread human behavior. But he's a master.
This is a superb explication of our present moment in politics and the process in general. If I had the power I'd make it required reading across our country. One of your best.
>Most people are in echochambers, primarily listening to information from their own side, ignorant of basic facts, wholly unable to explain why their opponents believe what they do. But this applies to those who are on your side too!
You remind me of a bit C. S. Lewis wrote in his essay "The Trouble with X" (which is a great little essay, I recommend everyone read it: https://www.noeljesse.com/the-trouble-with-x-by-c-s-lewis/ ):
"Here are two respects in which God’s view must be very different from ours. In the first place, He sees (like you) how all the people in your home or your job are in various degrees awkward or difficult; but when He looks into that home or factory or office He sees one more person of the same kind – the one you never do see. I mean, of course, yourself. That is the next great step in wisdom – to realize that you also are just that sort of person. You also have a fatal flaw in your character. All the hopes and plans of others have again and again shipwrecked on your character just as your hopes and plans have shipwrecked on theirs.
"It is no good passing this over with some vague, general · admission such as ‘Of course, I know I have my faults.’ It is important to realize that there is some really fatal flaw in you: something which gives the others just that same feeling of despair which their flaws give you. And it is almost certainly something you don’t know about – like what the advertisements call ‘halitosis’, which everyone notices except the person who has it. But why, you ask, don’t the others tell me? Believe me, they have tried to tell you over and over again, and you just couldn’t ‘take it’. Perhaps a good deal of what you call their ‘nagging’ or ‘bad temper’ or ‘queerness’ are just their attempts to make you see the truth. And even the faults you do know you don’t know fully. You say, ‘I admit I lost my temper last night’; but the others know that you’re always doing it, that you are a bad-tempered person. You say, ‘I admit I drank too much last Saturday’; but everyone else knows that you are a habitual drunkard.
"That is one way in which God’s view must differ from mine. He sees all the characters: I see all except my own. But the second difference is this. He loves the people in spite of their faults. He goes on loving. He does not let go. Don’t say, ‘It’s all very well for Him; He hasn’t got to live with them.’ He has. He is inside them as well as outside them. He is with them far more intimately and closely and incessantly than we can ever be. Every vile thought within their minds (and ours), every moment of spite, envy, arrogance, greed and self-conceit comes right up against His patient and longing love, and grieves His spirit more than it grieves ours.
"The more we can imitate God in both these respects, the more progress we shall make. We must love ‘X’ more; and we must learn to see ourselves as a person of exactly the same kind. Some people say it is morbid to be always thinking of one’s own faults. That would be all very well if most of us could stop thinking of our own without soon beginning to think about those of other people. For unfortunately we enjoy thinking about other people’s faults: and in the proper sense of the word ‘morbid’, that is the most morbid pleasure in the world."
For a more modern take, see this excellent book:
"Mistakes Were Made (but Not By Me): Why We Justify Foolish Beliefs, Bad Decisions, and Hurtful Acts" by Carol Tavris and Elliot Aronson
https://www.amazon.com/Mistakes-Were-Made-but-Third-dp-0358329612/dp/0358329612
It's the sort of book you wish you could make all your antagonists read, so that they might, perhaps, see themselves as they really are.
It sounds naive and it is naive
Opposition to Trump isn't about policy; it's about respect for the rule of law. He's a crook who betrayed his sacred oath to the Constitution.
I try to love all my neighbors, but I will love the ones who voted for Trump from far, far away.
That a very simplistic view. Firstly, it’s a reach to say that he betrayed his oath. Dis he act deplorable? Yes. Should he have tried to stop the madness earlier? Yes. But neither of those even remotely relates to his oath. That he acted in a shitty manner and tried persuade others is true, but at the end of the say he never acted on these.
Secondly, its easy to go after Trump and ignore how Democrats have undermined the rule of law and constitution, including Harris. Why are they not disqualified in your view?
>Secondly, its easy to go after Trump and ignore how Democrats have undermined the rule of law and constitution, including Harris. Why are they not disqualified in your view?
Because people who say things like this are usually schizophrenic. The DoJ under Biden and Kamala has investigated and indited and convicted multiple Democrats including the mayor of NYC and Hunter Biden. The Democrats are happy to prosecute people in their own social groups who break the law. Republicans and Republican institutions like Rudy Giuliani, Sidney Powell, or Fox News meanwhile intentionally lie about election fraud to their viewers and do anything to avoid criticizing Trump or cover the multiple criminal cases against him (how we still have 80% of Republicans believing the 2020 election was stolen or that the case against Trump where he directed people to hide classified documents at Mar A Lago and obstructed the investigation is an example of lawfare). There is no equivalency between Democrat corruption and Democrats' response to it and Trump's corruption and Republicans' response to it.
I like how you can easily tell when someone hasn't read the indictments against trump. "At the end of the day he never acted on these"? Fraudulent electors slates were literally created with the explicit purpose of overturning the results of the 2020 election and trump was fully in on and supported the plan.
"hundreds of millions of people on the other side fear that the U.S. will descend into totalitarian dictatorship."
This might be true for this election and the previous two, but I don't think it was so much true for earlier elections that I remember from my lifetime (I'm in my late 50s). People were still passionate in their views, but I don't recall anyone having a serious apprehension that our whole democratic tradition was under threat.
Not even when people were holding protest signs declaring Nixon to be a Nazi? Or how many believed Kennedy would take marching orders from the Pope, turning America into a theocracy? Or how half the country found Lincoln so tyrannical they fought a war against his perceived power-grab?
Declaring American democracy dead is one of the oldest traditions in American democracy.
Nixon did concede. He was a trickster, never an open opponent to Democracy. Trump is the first non conceding candidate since the Civil War.
Did Trump not concede?
Of course not. He never acknowledged his defeat, and still says the election was stolen. He denies the legitimacy of Biden.
Fact checked this. He conceded on 7 Jan.
He never conceded the electoral defeat; at some point he conceded that was defeated in overthrowing the election.
"Bullshit!" cried the king, when do we eat?
Trump pcontinued to claim he won the election long after Jan 7 2021. To my knowledge, he hasn't conceded to this day.
I wasn't born yet for Kennedy's presidency, and I was six years old when Nixon was last elected. In any event, my impression (for what it's worth) is that the views you described re: Nixon and Kennedy were not as widespread as the view that Donald Trump doesn't value democracy and is in danger of subverting it for his own gain (which I think is true).
Wow, you are old!
You're only young once, but you can be immature your whole life.
I don't remember people comparing Nixon to a Nazi. My recollection was Tricky Dicky and Nixon saying "I am not a crook", when everyone knew he was "the One".
It was somewhat common to turn the X in Nixon into a swastika on protest signs. Here are two examples:
https://c8.alamy.com/comp/d18h0k/anti-nixon-demonstrators-at-the-white-house-one-demonstrator-wears-d18h0k.jpg
https://c8.alamy.com/comp/D18GJM/italian-anti-nixon-demonstrators-march-in-anticipation-of-president-D18GJM.jpg
Hardly half. The free population of the North was three times that of the South. Where did you come up with half?
Also, back in 1856 the Southern states had already declared they secede if a republican were elected. A republican was elected in 1860 and they were mostly out by the time Lincoln took office in Mar 1861.
RE: your comment that politics is an area where we should be able to disagree without hatred, I like your point. But I should also note that the mental exercise you're suggesting--holding political views while also not being too furious at other people for them--requires more than just light mental gymnastics. It requires that we avoid (generally) holding many of our political views earnestly.
Your abortion example is good, here. Say somebody believes earnestly that a person should be defined as fully human at conception and that abortion is therefore murder. And say that they want to prevent children from being murdered and women from becoming murderers.
Once you've defined abortion that way--if you *really* believe it, instead of just holding that rhetorical position in a distal, cognitive way--the natural extension is that people who support abortion are supporting murder. Period. They may be doing it because they're deceived (which is perhaps the most compassionate position you can take given your constraints), but if you really think it's murder, then you have a moral imperative to override their confusion, to step into their space and stop the murder, because their opinion of abortion (and of you) should weigh much less in the moral scheme of things than the murder of an innocent life.
And if you live in a world where half of the population expects you to just accept that they're murdering kids and stay silent about it because it's their right to do so? It's not a huge leap from that position to feeling like the opposing side is deeply evil.
Political tolerance therefore requires holding beliefs like "abortion is murder" loosely. People have been observing this about tolerance for decades, now; a world where everybody tolerates everybody else's beliefs is a world where nobody really believes anything--or, barring that, a world where all beliefs are so occluded by uncertainty that the only thing anybody really believes is sort of a meta-belief that none of us has a clue and we're all just muddling through the fog together.
Some people find that last meta-belief comforting. But in the middle of it, it's completely unsurprising for a segment of the population to decide that there are things worth cutting through the fog for. And once they've done that, the earnest division starts up again. Because if you really believe something important--like believing that abortion is murder, or that racial oppression should be stopped, or that Jesus is the son of God and people who don't accept his grace are going to hell, or that there is One God and Mohammed is his prophet, etc... etc...--then that belief cleaves the world into the opponents you have to grapple with to pursue your belief to its logical end, and the people who are your allies in the match.
I'd be interested in hearing your take on this just because you are devoted to thinking these things through in much more detail than most.
In my own experience I've noted that most people deal with this by holding their beliefs tentatively. A lot of people I know from churches have wryly observed that Christians only half-believe in Hell, because if they really did, they would be running urgently to everyone they know, begging them to repent. Some beliefs, though, are much more difficult to hold tentatively than others (like beliefs RE: abortion).
While I don't think it's a hateable offense, there's a reasonable case (for non-utilitarians) that voting uninformed in swing states is pretty bad. If we think that a PA voter has a one-in-5-million chance of swinging the election, and the wrong candidate winning does $500 billion worth of damage relative to the right candidate winning, then voting wrong causes $100,000 worth of damage to the world, which is more than all the goodness most people create by working at their jobs for one year.
If you don't think it's permissible to flip a coin that makes the world either $100,000 better or worse, you shouldn't vote uninformed (or informed but biased).
Who determines who is the “right” candidate and who is the “wrong” candidate?
Nobody. The right candidate is the one who would cause more good.
I feel compassion for those with the most rigid views entailing moral condemnation of those who don't agree, mostly because they seem so damned unhappy.
Anti-abortion belief is mostly about self interest correlates for adding costs to.short term mating if you look at predictive correlates. Sexual lifestyle factors the best predictor by far.
Dude, it is simpler than that. People have different interests and different worldviews. One does not need to be all that smart to make a correct decision based on these things. As a white guy, if I put on the MAGA hat it is a no brainer to vote Trump. Take off that off and put on the Kamala shades and it's a no brainer to vote Harris.
Trumps pretty smart. His over the top attacks on his opponents are riveting and take the scan off him while letting him exercise his ego. Maybe not smart because this is a widespread human behavior. But he's a master.
You're talking about Rabbi Akiva of course!