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PaperclipPerfector  5mo ago (text post)   23864 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 10, 2024

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And all Im saying is these types of candidates are everywhere. Throw a rock while in a purple suburb and you'll hit one. The whole "let's set our differences aside and put people over partisanship" shtick is as old as partisanship itself. Candidates espousing things like that are pretty common. I just don't see the need for doom if all you're looking for is a normie centrist. Your dreams aren't unachievable. Move to a suburb and start volunteering for local campaigns.

I just don't see the need for doom if all you're looking for is a normie centrist. Your dreams aren't unachievable. Move to a suburb and start volunteering for local campaigns.

There aren't any normies centerist candidates in the suburb that I live in. And no one wants to vote for a normie centerist because the don't take polarized hard-line stances. No one appears to want to elect critical thinkers.

No one appears to want to elect critical thinkers.

Is the problem that people aren't good critical thinkers, or that you don't like the product of their thinking? The two are easily confused.

We had a thread about BLM and its consequences last week; it drew some engagement, but not, I think, as much as it deserved. "Critical Thinking" seems like it ought to offer a fairly solid answer to whether the consequences of the BLM movement are more dead black people than WWII, Korea and Vietnam combined, in a shorter amount of time. Once you have an answer, though, it doesn't seem to me that critical thinking offers cooperative solutions to the problem, and it's pretty clear that this is because there are no cooperative solutions. Polarized hardline stances are, in fact, sometimes the correct response to a sufficiently fraught situation. It seems to me that we're in such a situation.

Is the problem that people aren't good critical thinkers, or that you don't like the product of their thinking?

There aren't any good critical thinkers, and if there are, they mask it with their ad homs and personal or partisan attacks.

Polarized hardline stances are, in fact, sometimes the correct response to a sufficiently fraught situation. It seems to me that we're in such a situation.

I don't have a problem with this. What I do have a problem with, is approaching folks on the opposite side of the argument with dehumanization, with bickering, and disrespect.

Like, if the spat that happened in that committee hearing last week between AOC and MTG happened in my presence, I'd tell them they're both wrong for attacking each other and walk away. Like, you wouldn't act like that in public if you weren't a politician, so why is it OK when you're in government? And I know that's very naive to think, but we're talking basic human decency here, even towards people like MTG who say vile and disgusting things every day.

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