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Edited by Mrph1 on Nov 30th 2023 at 11:03:59 AM
As applies to US politics, it doesn't really work that well to cooperate with white supremacists and authoritarians. They're not interested in good faith debate, principles, or anything particularly decent.
That's kinda the thing I've learned in the last few years: I don't support the idea of "echo chambers" or completely removing any alternate views, but that whole ideal of everyone respecting each other despite differing political opinions that a lot of us were raised with hinges on an assumption: that a significant portion of people haven't become radicalized, and increasingly support terrible and immoral policies. "Meeting them halfway" is the wrong thing to do in that case.
Edited by Draghinazzo on Mar 6th 2019 at 9:04:12 AM
I think the problem here is rather simple: there's a narrative that the left refuses to meet the right halfway, when in truth it is the right that refuses to budge from their side of the table.
The Usonian left isn't particularly extreme: far-left for me invokes stuff like communist terrorism and state atheism. What the right says is the far-left is just, the left.
We have no reason to meet the right halfway as they are now, because to do so would betray what the left stands for.
When/if their side chills out, then the debate and compromises can restart. Until then, I'm fine just where I am, thank you very much.
Except that that is literally how it works.
Take 'supporting gay marriage' for instance. A left wing position right?
In the US, maybe, but over here in the Netherlands where we've had same-sex marriage since 2001 the Right and Left both fully support it. It took the Right a while to fully embrace it before the legalisation, but as the Status Quo shifted, so did they. All of the people who still oppose it are on (or sometimes skirting) the Far Right.
And that isn't just a case of our Overton window being much farther to the Left. Our Right wing isn't any less Right wing than the one in the US. Outside of not being influenced by Christian Fundamentalism, the Right wing in the Netherlands holds many of the same social and economic positions that the Right wing in the US does, because outside of Fundamentalist Christians seizing to be a power group here, we're very similar to the US in economic and social position.
Positions and policies aren't Right wing or Left wing except in the context of the current balance of power/status quo. In the US, Fundamentalist Christians are a privileged group, so they're part of the Right wing and implement stupid stuff to keep their power intact. In the Netherlands, they used to be privileged, but aren't any more, so they're part of the Far Right and the Right wing blocks their attempts to wrest power from the current privileged groups and back to themselves.
Edited by Robrecht on Mar 6th 2019 at 2:13:49 PM
Angry gets shit done.It still doesn't work like that, because you can have policies that have been implemented and are established—so trying to remove them is against the status quo. This can come from either direction. Just consider arguments about making something a crime or decriminalisation. Depending on what the action in question is, you can have defending the status quo from the left or right of any given state.
@Robretch: That perhaps can be useful as a description of an individual or party's relationship with their own society, but becomes fairly useless when comparing societies to each other...or even specific policies to each other. For example, by your definition, a person wanting to rebuild the Soviet Union would be a far-rightist, even though they'd tend to be considered very leftist anywhere else.
Moreover, many aspects of society are Older Than They Think or Newer Than They Think, a lot of things leftists usually want have existed in the past. On the flipside, the right doesn't necessarily want to maintain the current status quo or return to a previous one, even when they claim they do. There are rightist philosophies that are more focused on the future than on the past.
To be fair, I would call Conservatism less a set of policies and more an attitude on society, culture, etc. This is why conservatives tend to be a Broken Base on say, the Confederacy. Conservatives who identify with The South support it as the cultural heritage they want to celebrate, Conservatives who identify with the North view the Confederacy as a sort of anti-America and glorify its destruction as part of their heritage.
Edited by Protagonist506 on Mar 6th 2019 at 5:49:04 AM
Leviticus 19:34Fact check: Did Ocasio-Cortez and her team break campaign finance law?
The answer is apparently most likely not, though several conservative organizations are alleging she did.
RE the WTFJHT feed from the previous page:
And in Fighteer's quote news, New Hampshire Republican men wore pearl necklaces when attending a hearing with proponents of gun control
, with the subtext quite clear - that those wanting gun restrictions were 'clutching at their pearls'.
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Honestly that just sends the message that gun owners are clutching their pearls at the thought of having their Republican penis extensions being taken away. It's a self-own, something they seem to be good at as of late.
Why are they even trying to legitimize something as stupid as this, anyway? Wouldn’t it be better to just ignore it completely, or even better:
Edited by megaeliz on Mar 6th 2019 at 11:08:58 AM

Nature:The wisdom of polarized crowds
Our analysis reveals that polarized teams consisting of a balanced set of ideologically diverse editors produce articles of a higher quality than homogeneous teams. The effect is most clearly seen in Wikipedia’s political articles, but also in social issues and even science articles. Analysis of article ‘talk pages’ reveals that ideologically polarized teams engage in longer, more constructive, competitive and substantively focused but linguistically diverse debates than teams of ideological moderates.