Modern progressives shut themselves off from any ideas they don’t already agree with, making it impossible for them to discern whether what they believe is true or not.
Of course this is also true of many religious conservatives. It’s just now equally true of those on the far left.
What about them? That they exist? No one disputes that. That illegal immigrants cause crime? We have hard data on that; it's not true. That they are a drain on society via social programs? We have data on that too; they get taxes witheld but cannot claim refunds and cannot enroll in social benefit programs due to their lack of SSN.
On any topic you want to pick it's typically the radical right wing who have their fingers in their ears.
The people who think illegal immigrants shouldn't be illegal don't think anyone should be illegal. What's the double standard? It's not like they think black people should be allowed in but white people shouldn't.
What's hard to grasp is how you think this applies to a discussion about differing facts based on political leaning. Nobody disagrees with the facts here, only on what should be done going forward. So, not really relevant to the discussion.
Is it universally true that every truth test requires leveraging the existence of false claims/things I don’t agree with? For example if Socrates is a man, if all men are mortal, what false fact would you need to draw the logical conclusion? Or am I missing your point?
I’m not reflecting this idea, of course, because I’m a progressive. It does seem a bit imaginary, though.
Conservatives believe the truth supports conservative beliefs, and liberals believe it supports liberal beliefs. This type of comment is about the same as just saying "I am a liberal", which almost by definition means you think liberal beliefs are true. It doesn't add much to the conversation.
Well, no. It means when facts are tested by objective means, more of them align with liberal beliefs than conservative beliefs. Unless you believe that facts can't be objectively tested?
If you comment with evidence showing that, you might be enriching the comment section. Simply having a bunch of people leave unsubstantiated comments like "truth has a conservative bias" or "truth has a liberal bias" is only adding noise. And it shows a certain lack of self-awareness.
I am on the US left by any survey measurable by my principles, while not from US, this logic also sounds juvenile. Stooping to the level that a single person should be able to represent a whole side, did you see Joe at the debates?
Oh boy. Are you trying to do the "both sides" thing? Joe was pretty bad at the debates. His voice was weak. He stuttered. He misspoke. It was bad. And then what happened? He stepped down as the party's candidate, and the rest is history, as they say.
That is quite different from making up wild stories about immigrants eating cats, fabricating nonsense about widespread election fraud / stolen elections, suggesting injecting bleach is a sufficient remedy for coronavirus, sharpie-ing atop hurricane maps to prove previous incorrect statements were totally real because... look: sharpie! And this man has never had more widespread support.
These. Parties. Are. Not. The. Same.
By the way, it wasn't just one man making this "immigrants are eating our pets" thing. In addition to Trump, other prominent Republicans such as J.D. Vance, Marc Molinaro, and Laura Loomer also repeated this lie.
Statistically, most US seems to believe that the Democratic party is obviously worse at the Federal level. They just lost an election on every metric, although they did win the lost-to-Trump-twice award after almost a decade of opportunities to come up with an effective counter-Trump strategy.
He's been the undisputed head of the "conservative" party in the U.S. for 10 years now. And just won his second election, this time winning the popular vote. If that's not mainstream, I don't know what is.
Accurate. It's difficult to argue that the mainstream US Republican isn't a populist now. Twice is not a fluke.
And ever since the 70s there's been a tension between the blocks of the Republican party: fiscal business conservatives, foreign policy hawks, and rural/religious conservatives.
After couple decades getting the final group fired up, they decided they wanted to drive. And the primary system rewarded them.
> the final group fired up, they decided they wanted to drive. And the primary system rewarded them.
I've been an outside observer of US politics for many decades, I'd characterize what happened not so much as the primary system rewarding them but more as a consummate grifter and snakeoil carpetbagger fooling them into thinking they've won.
They got fired up, they got the candidate they voted for, I'm not sure the expected rewards will follow as hoped and expected.
I have definitely heard conservatives complain that reality has a left-wing bias. Not in quite those words, but close enough that you wonder if it’s possible to die of cognitive dissonance.
Is climate change driven by human activity? Do males have a natural advantage in sports? Do vaccines cause autism? Does rent control make housing more available?
The major political tribes are full of BS, because politics mostly isn't driven by disagreements about facts but by conflicting material interests. Partisans believe whats convenient.
> Do males have a natural advantage in sports? Do vaccines cause autism?
I won't argue about the other two, BUT.
We have facts for contact sports and for speed and strength sports, we've had these facts for millenia.
For the vaccine one, we also have facts. You're more likely to win the lottery than to get autism from them. I think they're probably the same odds as dying from a potted plant falling on your head while walking but anti vaxxers don't seem to be wearing helmets everywhere, that's so weird...
I don't think any of these are ambiguous. My point is that sometimes right wingers take the nonsense position and sometimes left wingers take the nonsense position. Neither side reliably follows the evidence or "believes the science" so glib lines like "reality has a liberal bias" are shallow and silly.
The point of the phrase "reality has a liberal bias" is not "liberals never take a nonsense position", it's "more of the facts that liberals [just as tribalistically] believe in happen to also be true, when compared to conservatives".
That something like this might happen is not surprising. If you have two political groups and you assign both beliefs from a bag in a purely random process, odds are that one of the groups will end up with more true beliefs than the other, through no virtue of their own but through pure chance.
How do you distinguish partisans from actual knowledge? The Steve Bannon philosophy of flood the zone with shit so it all looks the same seems to have killed public discourse IMO. It is easy to label everyone as partisans.
To your questions, the best explanations for climate change are human causes (and with very considerable evidence).
Women have higher pain tolerances and greater natural buoyancy, they are greatly advantaged at long distance cold water swimming. Many other sports require physical size and/or strength - so it does depend. Vaccines have no evidence of _causing_ autism, and the big paper that made that claim was retracted. I don't know about rent control and do not know what data exists.
Yeah, the answer of, yes, and here is all the evidence just doesn't seem to fly. I feel that trolling and trolls, and science illiteracy just have simply won the day.
Tim Walz claimed there is "no guarantee to free speech on misinformation or hate speech, and especially around our democracy." That's false--the First Amendment has no such carveouts for those things. So it's concerning that Walz would think otherwise.
Hillary Clinton has made similar comments, saying "But I also think there are Americans who are engaged in this kind of propaganda, and whether they should be civilly, or even in some cases criminally, charged is something that would be a better deterrence, because the Russians are unlikely, except in a very few cases, to ever stand trial in the United States." But again, there is no First Amendment carveout for propaganda, Russian or otherwise.
There are some limits to protected speech, but they're rare and mostly limited to direct incitement of a crime or other threat.
In the final analysis, I don't think it matters. The former leads to the latter. The same is true of things like attempts to keep the LGB, but toss the T. The T follows from the LGB. The LGB already presupposes all that is needed to infer the T. You would be drawing an artificial line in the sand otherwise. It's ad hoc and doesn't work.
One common error people make is that they think they can pick and choose beliefs and positions a la carte and expect them to remain stable as fixed parameters of the environment. But that's not how ideas work. They aren't static in this way. Rather, they function much like presuppositions that, over time, are worked out, dialectically, if you will. Society is like a machine that works out the consequences of ideas over time.
So, I always find it amusing when anyone appeals to some fondly remembered status quo that held in a prior decade, believing that all one needs to do is return to that status quo "verbatim" and all will be well, as if these things were just a matter of arranging the furniture a certain way. You can't roll back the clock, and if you could, you would only recreate a similar development that led to the undesirable state of affairs in the first place.
This isn't an argument for some kind of Big P progessivism, or against tradition, only an account of how cultures develop over time. In our case, by understanding the tensions and contradictions within the liberalism tradition, we can come to explain why Western societies have moved in a certain direction over the last 200 years. Heck, we can go back further to the influence of Luther, or even further to Ockham, without whose ideas liberalism would arguably not exist.
If you begin with liberal blinders on, then that might be the picture you receive.
(I define here "liberal" and "liberalism" not in the lazy, colloquial partisan sense, as in "own the libs!" or "left wing", but the philosophical definition in the tradition of Hobbes, Locke, and others. In this sense, "we" are all liberals in the liberal West.)
