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Can you date folks with different politics?
I watch this stream yesterday and i find it quite interesting. Im actually kinda in this situation now, i took a girl on a date, she made it obvious she was a progressive. I often dont share my own views on these things in real life, due to how toxic these conversations can be, so i just try to listen and empathize with where the person is coming from. Though im planning to open my mouth a little more about things on the 2nd go round, as to not give a misleading representation of who i am.
Whats interesting is that the streamer in question distinct "politics" from "human rights", she gives a pretty weak example with Roe V Wade. However i think the distinction between "politics" and "human rights" is shaky to begin with. No one really agrees on what human rights even are, per her roe example, gun control (constitutional arguably, but still) being another one, & there are still societies/people that arent accepting of LGBT although thats been on the decline over some decades. My guess is she is taking this to mean, "you probably shouldnt date a nazi", which is perfectly fine. But there arent a lot of those guys around in this day and age. For myself, i dont really believe any idea is above criticism, so i dont see how having a different idea of what constitutes human rights is much different from just having different politics.
According to pew research, most people, (myself included) are fine with dating people across the political aisle {note that many people wouldnt date a trump voter, but many would date a republican, but i suspect many people might view trump as a fundamentally immoral individual, and thus that makes him distinct from just mere disagreement}. I also find that peoples political beliefs arent good measures of how moral they are in real life. There are many progressives ive seen who were cheaters, liars, lazy, ect & conservatives who were kind hearted, hard working, & loving ect (& vice versa). But i want to know what you guys think.
Way back in the day, when I was first trying to date as a young adult in my college town, I ran into a woman who was nominally part of the "geek/nerd/gamer" subculture of the early 2010s (read: she preyed on geek/nerd/gamer men). She was abusive, manipulative, and a pathological liar. She also used all the progressive feminist lingo of the time. At me. A lot. Because she knew enough about my subculture to know the words that would particularly hurt me and isolate me. The same language that I saw wielded by other women with slightly less-conscious malice, but I still saw as them shitting on their captive audience, because most of their friends were geeky/nerdy/gamer men who would tolerate being shat on. I remember a few months where every woman I tried striking up a conversation with would immediately start talking about rape on college campuses at frat parties, despite our college not having frats, extravagant house parties, or whatever the fuck "greek life" is, and both of us being introverted shut-ins who watched anime.
When I was designated-driver-ing and dropping off the gang at the end of the night, the last person in my car for me to drive home was a short, pear-shaped girl with dark hair who I had wanted to talk to more, but apparently one of my male friends had invited her out for his own reasons, AND she turned out to still be hung up on some third dude, so neither of us got anywhere with her. But I didn't want to drive silently, I remembered she was Supernatural fangirl, I knew OF it, I tried asking her favorite episode.
Her response:
I had minimal interest in politics way back when beyond "Republicans=Religion, Me=Fedora-tipping Atheist," but I kept noticing that ever since I managed to get out of having to go to CDC, the people who were getting pissy and censorious and kept "won't someone please think of the children"ing me were always Liberal Feminists, and then moved on to being Anti-Racists, and later NB-Queer/Trans-Allies. Noticing that every day I was being entreated to have more and more empathy for whatever group at the time was demanding something (and less and less for myself); Women who wanted to work in "tech" but didn't like computers, women who had transitioned to being (homosexual) men whom actual homosexual men wouldn't date, women and black people and genderqueers who wanted to play Magic the Gathering but didn't feel represented despite the game having all of those things featuring prominently in it since 2002. I remember the first time I was actually called a Straight White Male, in real life. I chortled, and said "Go back to the dumb part of the internet, and take your lingo with you."
Almost ten years later, I'm watching The Imitation Game with a woman I've been casually seeing for a few weeks. I make the mistake of saying "Ah, and here we see Kiera Knightly, yet again reprising her role as a Modern Woman trapped in a Period Piece."
(Which isn't even much of a crack against Miss Swan herself, more gentle ribbing. She was a bounty hunter that one time, after all. It's a similar joke to how DiCaprio's roles have progressed from Ambitious Young Man Torn Between Loyalty and Ambition, to Ambitious Man Undone By His Ambition, to Ambitious no-longer-young-Man Living In The Ruins Of His Life [That His Own Ambitions Ruined].)
This got me a talking-to, about how it was less than a hundred years ago that women were finally allowed to vote, how dare I make light of such an important historical figure. I responded with "And less than 50 years ago, black people couldn't vote. And before 1776, no one could vote, no matter what genitals they had or what color they were. History was shit for everyone until very, very recently."
It eventually devolved into her blaming me for her younger sister not being allowed to wear bellyshirts at school, at which point I said "I should go" and Shep'd out.
What's onerous/dangerous in relationships are people who are infected with an ideological memeplex, or people who have sold out to an ideology; the first type will constantly be mentally coughing on you, the 2nd type will walk on you without a second thought if it advances them up the ranks. It's not about getting along despite having "different politics," it's about having enough self-awareness to notice there's a person across from you instead of a collection of labels, some of which you're allowed (encouraged, actually) to shit on.
When I've expressed my own equivalent frustrations about politics to women I'm intimate with or want to be intimate with,
I typically don't.
I phrase it in the context of concrete events that happened to me, so I'm telling personal anecdotes that inform the person I am today.
I use my own fucking words, and typically it's mildly entertaining so long as I'm brief.
Also, an addendum regarding Wokefishing: No, the guy who pretended to be feminist wasn't secretly an alt-right fascist the whole time. He was secretly a NOTHING the whole time, you tard. The only people who can so perfectly comport themselves on-demand into what you want in a partner are empty, predatory husks looking to briefly fill themselves (by filling you).
If i could give you an award on this site, i would! LOL!
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Relationships are built on propinquity, which is just a fancy term for "general nearness". The closer you are to someone in terms of likes, interests, physical location, etc. the more likely you are to have a strong relationship with that person. Of course no two people are identical, so you can't abandon relationships just because of a few disagreements. However, the wider and more important the disagreement, the more likely it is to cause issues long-term.
I could date a person who had different political opinions than me, but the wider the disagreement, the less important politics would need to be for that person for me to consider it. If I had the prospect of dating an authoritarian wokist (which is basically the polar opposite of my views), politics would have to almost be a non-factor for them for the relationship to have good long-term chances of success. If their political views were exactly the same as mine, I'd be fine with them being obsessed with politics.
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I am married now and don't really do the whole dating thing. But I am still on the lookout for new friends, and although friendship is lower stake, politics does seem to matter a little more with friends than it used to.
The underlying problem is that people seem to inhabit entirely different worlds nowadays depending on their politics. Your social media bubble and news diet can make your perception of the world completely different from that of your neighbors. The news stories you know about, the 'must watch' shows, the latest international incidents, etc. Its just hard to culturally connect with someone that has nothing in common with me. I am politically libertarian, and I was never gonna agree with their politics in the first place, but I have at least learned how to handle political disagreements in a friendly way. I don't know how to handle disagreements about reality itself.
The pandemic seemed to have made this far worse, with fewer people inhabiting a shared local reality, and instead inhabiting a shared political reality in the online space. But the pandemic also created a filter for shared local reality that I have been enjoying. All the people who aren't very worried about the pandemic tend to be the people out in the world interacting with each other. As long as I am someplace that is fully optional to be in (like a restaurant, and not like a school or grocery store) then I can safely assume I share at least some of my perception of reality with the people around me.
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... so, I'm going to take an example that isn't dating:
This is, to skip the chase, a left-leaning site. It is not a tremendous surprise. I don't have access to the internal politics forum that I'm sure sparked this announcement. I'm unsure if they have, or ever will need to have, actual application of this rule -- the place was left-leaning enough a decade ago that the against-the-grain political posters were nicknamed zebras (for getting run down and eaten), and I doubt it's gotten more varied since. To the extent I look at all, it's because the Nobilis/Chuubo's stuff only really gets posted there.
But it's a useful example of a thread I've seen a lot. You criticize that "no one really agrees on what human rights even are", but that misses the point entirely: 'human rights', here, doesn't mean some legalistic or dictionary sense. It means matters so important that the writer is not willing to accept that their edge cases are up for discussion. It doesn't matter whether that's actually present as a descriptive sense: a lot of this class of 'human rights' are not actually protected at all, or may be not especially popular in the broader world (and, conversely, many things are not 'human rights' even if they're explicitly covered by the US Constitution and UN and large majorities in the speaker's country). It's a normative analysis for that specific context: these are axioms that can not and should not be debated in this situation. If the matter comes up, agreeing to disagree isn't acceptable.
The breadth of this application is not something universal, or probably even the majority of progressive spaces. Nor, for that matter, is it something that only shows up in progressive spaces (nor do you have to go into Deep Religious Evangelical SoCon ones to see right-wing variants: this twitter convo has three more open-minded rat-sphere-adjacent people talking, but the gut reaction is still pretty close to the same even if the expression is more amicable).
Well, i mean thats kinda begging the question isnt it. Who gave them the authority to decide such a thing?
At the risk of tautology, the audience did, by the bit where they're doing it, and anyone's taking them seriously. I could go through the whole list of how moderators were picked up til 2012ish, but I don't think anyone cares, I don't know if it's changed since, and it's just a pretty shallow duct-tape patch on the underlying will to power. The RPGnet moderators run, for all meaningful purposes, the forum. (You can appeal to the admins, but they usually don't even bother to respond; from the rare times I've heard of them doing so, they just fob it off to the moderators.) There's nothing special about this compared to the "fuck Trump and his supporters" rule, "fuck ICE" rule, the "fuck 'nazis'" rule, or even a decade ago when it actually was a "fuck Nazis" rule, just because they call some of them about 'human rights' and some of them about not protecting awful people. It's just a norm they've set up.
In less formal relationships, the baton pass of the mandate of heaven is less obvious. But it still exists; you give people this power by interacting with them in ways where this power can be used. It's not some deep revelation about universal laws, it's just drawing lines with chalk.
And, to be fair and to steelman, that's how those sort of rules work. Barring some pretty extreme cults, state-run schools, or literal jails (badum-tish), you don't actually have some magical force requiring you to treat people seriously, or for them to treat you seriously. If someone draws lines by chalk, you either obey them, or you give them reason to fuck off.
To be somewhat less charitable, it being within one's power doesn't make it harmless. It's not hard to see what this has done to public discussion.
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Well said.
The incentive to put healthcare/trans rights/speech rights in the august company of “human rights” is obvious. Sometimes this is defensible by analogy to (locally) well-established categories like US Constitutional Amendments. Other times it’s better at illustrating the distinct non-universality of right some we take for granted. The number of qualifiers on ICCPR signatories provides prime examples.
Some day we’ll get a full version of Wisher, Theurgist, Fatalist, and only then will we be able to settle these questions of morality.
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I mostly see "human rights" as a useful rhetorical trick, it feels like a crushing argument to pro-lifers. I doubt anyones' internal thoughts are best described by "the matter is so important that edge cases are not up for discussion."
I suspect that if I wrote the following
Nobody would be enlightened, or even take the time to read the linked article.
Geeks on the Internet have this tendency to think "If I say something that can be read literally in one way, and people don't get it, that's their own fault. I mean, how could anyone not understand literal words?"
The world doesn't work that way. We have implicature and context. To quote xkcd: "Communicating badly and then acting smug when you're misunderstood is not cleverness."
Asking "are you 100% sure abortion is a human right" communicates, by ordinary conversational standards, "are you 100% sure that abortion specifically is a human right", even if it does not include the literal word "specifically". Saying it when you want to communicate "are you 100% sure about anything at all" is miscommunication, even though it fits your literal words.
Furthermore, in ordinary conversation, "100%" is used the same way; it doesn't literally mean "100%, not even a 0.001% chance that I'm a brain in a jar and abortion isn't real", it means "high enough confidence in ideas unique to this case that for practical purposes they function like 100%." Yelling "Nyaa nyaa, you can't literally be 100% confident" is just communicating poorly with literal words.
Help this geek understand the quoted portion of your post, and what it communicates by ordinary conversation standards. Because what I interpret is that you thought I was as trying to give this lesson. I wasn't. Let's suppose 100% is a probability, and people can be fully confident about whatever. I assumed that this would have been obvious when I wrote "Even if you're 100% sure human rights must be protected at all costs..."
Now I'm thinking you completely misunderstood my point altogether, which makes me want to reiterate and rephrase it, but I suspect you don't think the "abortion is a human right" discussion is very interesting.
"Abortion is a human right" is an example of "whatever". You did not think people can be fully confident about that.
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I can date someone with different politics as long as their metapolitics are, like mine, geared for cooperation rather than instant defection/conflict. This usually implies they're not too invested in politics in the abstract.
I don't think I would want to date someone who was too politically involved in trying to achieve political changes at levels that are obviously beyond their control.
That is, self-described 'activists' are right out. If they want to show up to a protest and hold a sign I guess that's okay, but devoting substantial time and effort trying to shift political outcomes is where I would draw the line.
So I can most likely tolerate somebody that I differ with politically, as long as we're generally in agreement that National/Federal Politics are a farce and any attempts by us as individuals to influence them are pointless, AND we generally align on the issues that are local enough to effect things we can control.
She could hate Donald Trump and I could think he's alright, as long as both of us know that Donald Trump has very little actual impact on our lives.
In practice, the type of person who even has strong feelings about Donald Trump is also likely to be the type who is overly obsessed with national politics. So having a position on Trump that you're willing to fight over is, itself, grounds for me to back out of any further entanglement. It can be fun to debate about the guy in the abstract, and come to differing opinions, but the second you start taking it too seriously is the second you're too invested in a question that has no importance for your life.
I don't think this is even me taking an 'eNLighTenED CenTriSM' position. I'm literally just looking for someone who isn't so invested in political fights that have no bearing on the relationship we share or our immediate living situation that they don't have energy to spare for the relationship and for the fights that do matter.
Then there's the nuanced positions. Somebody can be vehemently pro-choice and I could be in a relationship with them despite me leaning pro-life, but it would have to be understood that I do want to be consulted on matters pertaining to childbirth within the relationship, as long as she understands that I'd never hold a gun to her head and force her to carry a fetus to term.
Again, I assume people capable of exercising such nuance exist, but they sure ain't as obvious.
Obviously you know yourself better than I can, but this specific position strikes me as dangerous. An unexpected pregnancy can be stressful and values-clarifying in ways that are difficult to anticipate. I would not be at all shocked by one or the other of the two people in the hypothetical relationship you describe radically changing position when confronted with the real, immediate situation (she decides "you get no say, period," or you decide "abortion is a dealbreaker, do it and I'm out," for instance). I'm not even suggesting bad faith! Just that a truly accidental bait and switch can happen, and abortion is the perfect storm for that type of accident.
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I feel a lot of empathy for this point of view and I almost agree, but there are at the same time some implications in your comment that are truly horrifying.
The notion that any degree of actual attempt at political involvement is an actively bad thing is one that is acutely poisonous to democratic society at large, in addition to being morally repulsive to me. What happened to civic duty and responsibility? Meaningfully participating in communities more broadly? I’m not sure you can simply separate “oh, this is a local issue” and “oh, this is a national issue I am powerless about”. People drastically undersell the network effects of sharing their own opinion, let alone actually volunteering for a candidate. While it’s true a lot of people find themselves in an endless cycle of outrage and fear, egged on by the national media and political cycles, it’s also seems to be true that the antidote is the moderating influence of interpersonal discussion. It’s not a catalyst for more outrage, it’s a set of social brakes.
Perhaps this is an inaccurate read of your comment but my first impression was definitely one preaching political inactivity as a virtue, which it is not.
Your interpretation is a bit of an exaggeration of what I'm saying, but not completely off base.
Civic duty to whom? Which group? And how much of that duty can I expect will be reciprocated? At the national level... not much. Most people can't 'meaningfully participate' in a national 'community' in the U.S. because its just too big for them to have any noticeable, appreciable effect, and it's dominated by insiders!
There are certainly those who are good at making people feel like they had such an effect, though! But this reads to me as exploitation.
I'm not suggesting political apathy is the best path (okay, being honest, for many, many people it might be!). Only that much political activity is essentially throwing one's time, effort, and money into a machine that will only occasionally spit out a return on the investment, and usually it will be less than you put in, so one should be judicious about how much they insert.
And in the most heavily contested elections its all a red Queen's race/Molochian spiral, the more money and effort one candidate throws in, the more the other has to throw in attempting to counter, yet the outcome needle will barely move to the extent their efforts cancel out. That's a lot of resources being burned for effectively no gain!
Speaking of cancelling out, one thing I keep coming back to is how overhyped voting is, for any national-level position, because you can spend hours of time becoming informed about the issues and candidates and determining the 'optimal' vote to cast for your preferred outcome... only to be cancelled out by some yahoo that either doesn't investigate the issues or just listened to a pundit and chose that way. It makes more sense to find someone else who would vote opposite you and both agree to stay home for all the impact you have on the outcome.
Note that I make the exception for local elections and issues where the chances of you casting a deciding vote are substantially increased.
EVEN THEN, the marginal returns on getting heavily involved and actively contributing substantial funds and time to campaigns are TINY for any person who doesn't happen to have outsized influence in a given community. i.e. a celebrity or other 'elite' member that others look to for guidance.
And by definition, it is impossible for everyone to have an outsized influence.
In short, it's a power law distribution. 80+% of the outcome is attributable to <20% of the people's efforts. My attempts to sway opinions will be far less impactful than a political pundit with 100k+ listeners will be. Does this mean I don't attempt to sway opinions? Nah. In fact, I just put in targetted efforts towards the few people I'm most likely to be able to sway (my own family, generally speaking) and don't bother much beyond that.
If you consider that becoming more politically active is likely to cause you to lose friends and connections you might have otherwise maintained, then it is entirely possible for political activity to produce a significant and consistent negative return for you!
SO:
Explain to me how my life will become happier and more fulfilled or I'll become wealthier and more influential by becoming way more politically involved (read: devote more than an average of 5 hours/week to political causes and campaigns).
Further, explain how dating someone who is heavily politically involved will make my life happier or more fulfilled, even assuming they agree with me on object-level politics.
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You can make it work, but why would you want to? Date someone who aligns with you on core values. I don't bother letting leftists into my life, and it's better for everyone that way: I don't need to deal with them, and they don't need to deal with me.
I've been with my girl for the better part of a decade. We met early twenties, and now I'm a gray-bearded, prematurely-bald thirty-something. She was more leftist when we first met, but not left-wing. Had she been, I don't think we'd have ever moved past the initial idle flirtation stage. Strong political disagreements is such an immense obstacle and even if you can tolerate each other god forbid you try to start a family.
Interesting to see what gets downvoted. Parent comment sitting at -5 as I write this.
On the subreddit where scores were hidden, negative scores were very rare. I wonder if it's a difference in the audience or the system.
I was just thinking the same thing.
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You shouldn't look for any greater patterns in my vote tallies -- I post enough controversial positions that my vote tallies really only speak for people's opinions on me, and not their opinions on my posts.
Very high opinion of your own notoriety I see
"I am mildly inflammatory to enough people on a small forum that you shouldn't use me to measure the rest of the forum" isn't exactly a lofty claim.
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Definitely isn't true for me, I don't recognize your username and I upvoted your post here ¯_(ツ)_/¯
I'm not saying it goes for every vote, but I am saying if you want to make any conclusions about this place someone else would be a better sample.
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A counterargument would be that no one will align with you on all values. At some point, you're not the other person, so you will disagree on things relating to how you deal with the world. Where is it you draw the line? It may not exactly matter. When you're living with someone and sharing everything with them, you're bound to have disagreements that can drive you crazy that you need to learn to live with.
Are you? I know I'm pretty fortunate, but I have no disagreements with my wife that drive me crazy. Every topic that we've debated and disagreed on is something I have no problem moving on from.
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I said "who aligns with you on core values", necessarily indicating that disagreement on non-core values is negotiable. That's the line: values important enough to you that you will not compromise on them.
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It all depends on what we mean by politics. Sense 1 is the "soap opera", the sport, the thing on TV, ie you may disagree on which talking head you like when watching TV together. That's the trivial sense, where differences don't matter so much, and you can make do by just not watching the political soap opera together.
Sense 2 is politics as it applies to everyday decisions and behavior. But this would be better called a cultural clash, similar to people from different cultural/national backgrounds marrying,and having to negotiate a common way of life both can agree to. But such differences could also (perhaps more commonly) arise due to personality and temperamental differences.
Sure. Political differences are like cultural clashes. In which case, same answer: yeah, you can make it work, but it's sure a lot easier to not have to.
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"Human rights instead of politics" is not a particularly remarkable redefinition.
The entire point of mere politics to me, looks plainly like the ability to get along with people you disagree with. That link contains a quote by the pope-at-the-time (is there a word for "contemporary relative to a historical source"?) saying that homosexually is not a political battle, but a "destructive pretension against the plan of God." Both this and "human rights" are vague concepts and are mostly applause lights anyways.
Even the podcaster knows "political" is a Motte-and-Bailey. At this timestamp she describes how "the personal is political" is a good rhetorical device but is not accurate when taken out of context. That is to say, it is using "political" the normal way, to mean "controversial."
Redefinitions of this kind, be it using Human Rights or God's Plan, or even Something Else, are simply rhetorical techniques to say "you can't disagree with me." Well-behaved thiests will often debate biblical interpretations, even though they agree that God's Plan is paramount. Likewise, if you asked an honest progressive, "How do you know Roe v Wade is a human rights issue?" you could get a few different responses:
You will have blown her mind, as she did not really consider that. The situation is now up for debate. That's what those pro-lifers were saying the whole time?
She will provide an argument.
I predict that most "human rights issue, not a political issue" types would just stare at you and say "wow I can't even."
In this case, you don't need more than "contemporary," because it is Francis that Scott is talking about.
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Contemporaneous?
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I'd be shocked if you got a reply that was anything other than looping back to, "it should be between a woman and her doctor" or "you just want to control women" or similar. This is not a topic that invites thoughtful replies or a reset of expectations and positions.
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I have never, ever, gotten either of those responses. I mostly get screeched at in sputtered syllables. Then when they are capable of speech again, they say something like "I can't even", "How dare you", "This is why nobody loves you" or "This is why everybody hates you". Then for as long as I know them, they mostly avoid me, and spread rumors about me.
No minds are ever "blown" except cognitive dissonance exploding into blind rage. No arguments are ever provided.
I generally find better use in asking when it should be not allowed, most people tend to at least go for the viability standard and are amazed when they figure out that is what is up for debate.
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How do you phrase the question exactly? Is it the same phrasing I made? The reasoning I used was already that obvious to everyone here, eh?
Of course your experiences are exactly what I'd predict. Maybe I didn't emphasize it enough in my post, but those are the only 2 responses possible from honest progressives.
The dishonest ones who use "human rights issue not political issue" as a rhetorical device don't react that way. Of course, if you go over everything they'd ever said on the issue, you probably could construct an argument (go down path (2)). The reason they are dishonest is because the question dissolves the trick.
If somebody is saying, "Don't debate me" then giving an effective debate in response to that will obviously make them angry.
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I'm married. When I met my wife, she was "liberal" in the sense that she voted for Obama and was prochoice. Being prochoice hasn't changed. But she's abjectly horrified at trans children, BLM riots and the assault on free speech by progressives in Silicon Valley.
Lately she's been pretty depressed because it's like we're getting the worst of both worlds. Her prochoice preferences are being threatened, and schools are doubling or tripling down on secretly transitioning the children we are legally obligated to entrust to them. We're probably going to end up homeschooling ours.
Our governor recently said schools are no longer allowed to transition children in secret, and the usual chorus of the mentally ill cried out in outrage. Pretty sure schools are just gonna keep doing it anyways, and eat whatever lawsuits come out of it until a different governor switches things back. Same as colleges did with Title IX over reach. It's not their money they lose, it's ours anyways. So it's nice having a wife willing to make homeschooling her job.
I can't imagine how painful our lives would be if we didn't agree on not encouraging our child to mutilate herself. I hear about divorces where that's in contention from time to time, and I don't understand how every single one of those stories doesn't end in murder.
I'm pretty much in the same spot as your wife, and I still consider myself a liberal. I am also married to a conservative. He was a Romney-type conservative when we married, and has shifted right alongside the Republican party. It is difficult at times (especially during election years), but we are both very committed to the marriage.
That said, we are still aligned on basic values of how to live and raise our child. We try to tune out the political noise as much as possible and don't bring it up inside the house. This approach works well for us.
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Because nearly all the incentives are for the less unreasonable person to surrender. This is a general point of society nowadays. You will note that if this were true, we'd have rule by the most unreasonable.
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I routinely encounter dating profiles where the bio reads something like "If you're a Tory/voted Leave/support Brexit, swipe left" (in spite of the fact that I live in Ireland - the Republic, not the north).
The uncharitable interpretation of women who write things like this is that their thought process is something like "I could never have anything in common with a man who voted for Brexit, so us going on a date would be a waste of both our time." Which is a worldview I don't agree with.
The charitable interpretation is more like "Even if I did get along with a guy who voted for Brexit and found him attractive, I still couldn't bring myself to date someone with whom I have a fundamental value difference."
I suspect that a lot of this is really insincere signalling, however, and most of these women would hold their nose if they met a guy they really liked whose politics didn't align with their own.
Vice had an amusing article about conservative men trying to pass themselves off as woke in order to get with woke girls.
It's baffling to me that this is common in the Rep. of Ireland. Unless you live really near the border, I'm not sure who they're even talking about... Brits on holiday? Or have 'Tory / Brexit voter' somehow come to serve as political categories in a general sense, in a country where (by their literal definitions) virtually no-one is actually either of those things? In which case, why are these imported terms being used instead of indigenous labels ('If you're a Fine Gael voter, swipe left')? Very odd.
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Oh man, between that Vice article and the OPs Youtube discussion, it just reminds me why I love TheMotte and how awful discussion on non-Motte platforms is. I mean that article ended with this gem: “But also, if you’re a wokefish, it might genuinely be worth considering: why do I hold views that I’m too ashamed to publicly express?”
Are they really this incapable of imagining the shoe being on the other foot? How about trying to date while woke in some small town in Alabama? Could they imagine it then? Or the framing noted by the OP, how my political values are human rights issues, yours are mere politics. Whenever I leave the motte I realize that being able to decouple, discuss things above the object-level and imagine other perspectives with any level of charity is so incredibly rare and precious
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This isn't a problem even if people say it is a problem for them. It's like how in job descriptions they want you to know 78 different programming languages to manage a wordpress blog.
Most people, including those who are explicit about their politics have a very shallow understanding of it. I dated a girl who on the face was very progressive. Her political knowledge was skin deep, it was just fashion. She probably learned more about progressivism from me than her progressive friends, many a times I talked about X progressive idea which she had no clue about.
So for the practical minded guy, there is a very simple solution to the problem. Just lie. "Ohh I don't date right wingers", "ohhh cool, I'm a centrist/apolitical/{whatever gets the coochie}".
However, things get muddy if you come into conflict with someone who is actually serious serious.
If you're not gonna be honest,why not just lie and say you're a progressive/woke/liberal etc.
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"Progressive" is a label that can be applied to literally anyone who is against the status quo.
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It's possible that this is an effective strategy. But it's also possible it isn't. I know many young progressive women who know "libertarian" and "centrist" and the like are crypto-right-wing dogwhistles. I don't know how common that perspective is. Maybe that perspective is what "a deep understanding" entails.
Whatever it is that is causing normies to be shallowly progressive (Cathedral?) could add "centrist is a crypto-right-wing dogwhistle" to the doctrine, couldn't it? What would your strategy be then? "I'm no centrist; I'm a moderate-to-strong leftwinger." Doesn't exactly exude enthusiasm.
I've started making shit up that's nonetheless descriptively accurate. "Fedora-tipping Atheist" or "Techno-Conservationist"
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"A centrist by any other name would smell as [foul, from hanging out in the middle of the road with the dead skunk]"
But seriously, changing the term people use is comparatively much easier than changing the actual underlying situation. It may become taboo to say "centrist," but the population that word used to describe will still be there, and there will be another term on the euphemism treadmill, for sure.
I would call it a "Kolmogorov Treadmill" or something. Centrists can't be the only group. I wonder if "Classical Liberal," if not the same cluster, is at least a related one and also has undergone the treadmill. By that, I mean a few years ago I heard a lot of people self-describing as it, but I feel like recently, people have caught on and I've only heard "classical liberal" be used sneeringly.
"Free Speech" is probably another such term, where originally it's this unobjectionable, nice-sounding thing that someone can describe themselves in good conscience. Now some people do still call themselves supporters of free speech, but it's definitely a Bingo square now.
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“Centrist” is naturally resistant to getting labeled as crypto-not-centrist. This is separate from any drift of the Overton window.
Even though it would be rhetorically useful, the process of making that association is non-trivial. Whether this is people noticing the contradiction, or acquired cultural immunity from previous attempts at consensus-building, it doesn’t usually fly under the radar.
If that was true, "I'm not a racist, but..." would be resistant to being labeled racist.
I think you and me must have very different intuitions on what the overton window is, and what "normies" believe. Many of these things are heavily regional, and even more importantly, I'm probably a mentally ill hermit (I won't speak for you).
That one raises Suspiciously Specific Denial flags. See also: apophasis.
A better example would be the Kendi-esque definition of antiracism, which I don’t think is widely accepted in normie circles.
Centrist sounds an awfully lot like a "Not-Rightist" to me. While it's true that "Centrist" doesn't use "not" or any derived root, it's well-trod ground that centrism is one of the few "ideologies" thats defined by what it isn't. S.S.D. doesn't feel like a good rebuttal to me.
What is Kendi's antiracism a better example of?
The reasoning on “not racist, but...” is that whatever is after the “but” must be racist, or they wouldn’t have bothered with the disclaimer. Saying “centrist, but...” would have a similar if lesser effect. It’s the “but” that raises red flags.
Without a “but,” there’s not an obvious point of attack. Previous movements have tried to make one via with-me-or-against-me arguments. “The personal is political” attempted to frame inaction as patriarchal. Nixon’s appeal to a Silent Majority was an assertion that no reasonable centrist would be into the counterculture. Kendi’s definition of antiracism, as argued in a previous thread, is this sort of excluded middle tactic. You’re either fighting the good fight, or you are actively the enemy.
I don’t think these attempts have had lasting success in tarring perceptions of centrists. If I had to guess, it’s because most people aren’t concerned with the idea centrists as a class. Those who are have already signed up for the culture wars. But it could also be inoculation by cultural awareness—maybe by the time movie villains are making an argument, it’s broadly recognized as bad. Regardless, there’s bunch of normies out there who aren’t going to jump on the “hating centrists” train easily.
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I used to think it was entirely feasible, and I still suppose it could be along a number of different political issues, but everything in 2020 disabused me of the notion that it would be fine to be with someone with radically differing views. Starting with Covid, I don't really see how I could have reconciled the seething hatred that I felt (and feel) for the public health bureaucrats and lockdownists with a partner that wanted to stay home and stay safe. I don't think I could have tolerated being with someone that condoned BLMs riots as they tore down monuments to our city and smashed and looted our commercial district. I don't see how an anti-gun partner could tolerate my affinity for firearms - I'm going to have multiple guns, they're going to be in the house, and it's not really negotiable.
We can disagree about the proper role of central banking in the modern state, but we can't disagree about the things that are forced into the center of our lives. I suppose this is what's meant about the distinction between "politics" and "human rights", as I really do view freedom of movement, security of property, and the right to be armed as basic rights in a free society. For others, the things that are held in this fashion might be gay rights, abortion, or simply the reciprocal of what I said above (the "rights" to be free of sickness or not have guns around, at least in some framings).
Given the parameters of current year politics, I don't suppose I'd have much interest in dating someone with substantially different politics if I were single.
In other words: politics!
That's just a sleight of hand attempt on their part to move properly political questions into a sacred domain where their views will be beyond criticism. In exchange, they'll allow you to haggle over bureaucratic and administrative issues that no one actually cares about.
No, a subset of politics. The other parts of politics I might care about (certainly I have an opinion on tax amounts and foreign policy, for instance), but they're not personal in that sense.
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Not really. I honestly don't care very much what the local property tax rate is all that much. I have opinions, but it's not going to ruin my life if I get stuck paying an extra couple grand for some pointless makework project.
Didn't I just say that I have a bunch of things that I don't consider negotiable?
Your reply seems pretty unrelated to what I wrote. I don't get it.
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You definitely can. I'm married to someone with fairly different political views from mine (I'm libertarian by nature although somewhat moderate, she is fairly standard liberal beliefs). We've been married for 5 years now and it hasn't been a stumbling block for us. I think we have two things that have helped that to be the case.
First, we respect each other. Even when we disagree, we never make it personal. We don't call each other names or anything, and we each bear in mind that the other is coming from a place of good intentions even if we don't agree on the object-level discussion. Some people can get pretty nasty about political disagreements, and you really can't have that in a relationship IMO.
Second, neither of us is the sort of person whose mission in life is to convert others, so we don't actually talk about politics all that often. And when we do, we are able to end the discussion and agree to disagree. Sometimes we just aren't going to agree on the topic and that's OK with both of us. And that extends to our families as well: I keep my mouth shut when her family talks about how great Biden is, and she keeps her mouth shut when my dad talks about how great Trump is.
If people can pull off those two things, I think they can date each other regardless of personal beliefs.
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I am here. I could date someone with almost any political beliefs, but a Trump fanatic (which is how some people probably read voter) is right out. If my date actually thought Trump was playing 4d chess and had some great plan all along, rather than being an unhinged celebrity out of his depth who got some things right and some things wrong seemingly by random chance.
Which points to my view on the matter: dating across politics is ok, but you have to use similar systems and sources of knowledge to find your political beliefs. People who just kind of inherited their political views from their parents can date people who inherited the opposite political views from their parents, because they'll both view it as "well, this is life, this is who we are, I can't expect you to change your 'tribe' for me." People who get all their politics from mainstream media can date someone who gets different politics from the same newspapers; but someone who gets their politics from the NYT Sunday Opinion section will have trouble dating someone who gets their politics from banned subreddits, whether it's a Ross Douthat vs ChapoTrapHouse relationship or a Molly Ivins vs /r/theMotte relationship.
Personally, I can date or befriend anyone with any politics, if they get it from similar knowledge sources. I could date a Marxist who read Marx and Zinn, I couldn't date a "Marxist" who gets their marching orders from Twitter. I could date an Objectivist who wants to cite Hayek, I couldn't date a Libertarian whose only "texts" are greentext. I could date a Christian who reads the bible and wants to talk theology, I couldn't date a Christian who obeys his pastor.
Maybe there's some kind of meta-political belief underlying that, like obedience vs intellectual independence.
Reading abstruse political theory penned over a hundred years ago is much more an act of obedience than it is of independence. Slavish Marxist-Leninists are just as intellectually incurious as Ayn Rand cultists or fundamentalist Christians or modern antiracists. I think what you actually like is just people who are an intellectual match for you, which I agree is probably more important than how you prefer to waste that intellect.
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Are you married or is this just your speculation on what would work? In my personal life I have found like does not work well with like. Two committed ideologues of different stripes in a relationship just sounds miserable. For me it works way better that my wife has no political opinions or knowledge or interest so she can just “Yes honey” when I’m done sperging out and delivering monologues
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You describe obedience in both cases; the only difference you mention is the target of that obedience. Why is deference to Marx any less submissive than deference to Twitter? At least Twitter occasionally has good ideas.
No, 5HM is describing a categorical difference in the relationship. The premise is that group 1 engages with the target on a more “intellectual” level than group 2 is doing. This is useful as a proxy for shared values separate from the actual values of the ideology.
Compare vanilla Protestants vs charismatic Christian sects. An obedient believer from one isn’t necessarily going to feel comfortable with the other. The institutions signal different values.
It sounds like they believe that nobody could intellectually engage with trump to conclude he was playing 4d chess all along. Or; that nobody could intellectually engage with twitter and conclude that mobs are right and useful. Use of the phrase "marching orders" hints at this.
Mino (if I may speak for him) and I both agree that this is just a farcical comparison of apples and oranges. A person who executes tribal signals is not a person that is said to be having beliefs.
Really, 5HM is listing out annoying tribal behaviors while the topic under discussion is "irreconcilable political beliefs."
Yes.
Though maybe I need to specify: when I refer to "Trump 4d Chess" I don't mean a mild, motte-ish version that Trump is capable of more complex and high risk political play-calling than we normally see because he's politically unmoored to the establishment traditions that preclude them. I'm referring to people I know who told me, specifically and seriously, that Trump passed power to the military before Biden's inauguration, and that he would resume power in cooperation with the MyPillow guy some time in August 2021. Then October 2021. Etc. That's not something you get out of a reasoned analysis of available evidence. Ditto various twitterati positions, though I can't picture someone who cares deeply about a lot of those things liking me anyway so it's sort of a wash.
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Change it to
And I think we, and probably @FiveHourMarathon, would agree.
Neither the clout-chasing Marxbro or the chad Engels enthusiast are necessarily expressing intellectual rigor. Same for the 5D chess—the grid of (is/isn’t chessmaster) vs. (tribal/rational reasoning) has two more quadrants. But there is a correlation between the two axes.
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Yes, the sects send different signals, but the matter isn't obedient vs independent.
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Dead gods have a big advantage over living gods: their words are etched in stone and they can't come up with a bright new idea to cause a ruckus. That's why invisible, silent divinities are preferred over god-kings.
Even the Devil can quote scripture. A dead god is a mouthpiece for whoever cares to speak.
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Did I describe obedience to Marx? I described reading Marx and Zinn, with the obvious implication of reading others as well and interpreting them for yourself. I get along with people who read widely and form their own opinions, not with doctrinaire dogmatics.
What is the difference here between "taking marching orders" and "absorbing things they read and forming opinions"? Why is it different to be inspired by Marx than by LibsOfTikTok?
I'm describing people I'd want to date, as opposed to people I wouldn't want to date. People who read Marx are going to get along with me better. If you truly can't see the qualitative differences between LibsOfTikTok's "intellectual product" and The Eighteenth Brumaire because Communism Doesn't Work, then I don't know what to tell you. Guess we'll never date. Alas, you'll miss out on staring into my piercing blue eyes and feeling my pillowy soft lips on yours. But it just wouldn't work, I love high quality historically important philosophical work whether I agree with it or not.
I guess the difference I'm going for is somewhat analytical? If you're reading big thinkers and understand the nuts and bolts of your philosophy, it's qualitatively different from someone who reads "thinkpieces" and parrots talking points. I'm happy to talk Biblical or Quranic theology with anyone, I'm uninterested in hearing about what anyone saw on the 700 club.
Firstly, let me say that my preferences match yours: I don't care about object-level signals in partners. I care about meta-level engagement styles. If someone asked me why, I would just say I noticed a correlation between the kinds of people I enjoy, and the engagements they have.
Am I making a category error by calling that my reason? Maybe that's just my strategy to satisfy my goals?
Would you accept that as your reason? Does there need to be some grand, real underlying factor?
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What I'm suggesting is that the difference between "carefully absorbs knowledge to synthesize into new and personal understandings" and "recklessly takes in nonsense from unreliable internet sources to parrot" is largely the difference between whether you respect the person and their viewpoint or not, and not any sort of intellectual rigor. Some of the dumbest social media hot takes are from academic wordcels who live and breathe their ideologies and by all rights are reasonably high IQ.
I get you on the analytical bit, I appreciate good conversation and coherent thoughts when having serious talks. But alas, you're right: we can never be. I'm pretty aggressively anti-philosophy.
Just philosophy and seven inches of anatomy stand between our love.
Twitter doesn't make for a good look for most academics, though there are exceptions. But over lunch, I get along with most academics I've run into. Longform vs Shortform.
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James Carville and Mary Matlin somehow have made it work (for almost 30 years of marriage now), but I'm not sure if that indicates it's possible, or they both believe in globohomo in slightly different flavors, or they're both characters and their true beliefs differ.
I think agreement on values is pretty critical (especially when it comes to things like how the kids will be raised/trained). I (possibly mistakenly) view my politics as downstream from my values, but if a couple differs in that view, and their values align well enough even if their politics differ they can probably make it work.
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It depends on how deeply you both are certain and convinced and how well-founded your beliefs are. Most people only very shallowly know politics, if you prod a little you very quickly find that they don't have solid reasons for believing things, there are many contradictions and inconsistencies and questions they have not though through ever. I definitely feel so myself when reading certain people here, and then some people I know are even more so.
So explicit politics is often pretty arbitrary. It depends on one's social circles and is a bit like religion: a protestant and a catholic can be in a good marriage if their confession is not a deep and central part of their life.
Whats more important are implicit political beliefs that may actually (consciously or not) be opposite to the explicitly proclaimed beliefs. Implicit beliefs and culture, like the practical rubber-meets-road understanding of gender roles, parenthood, what a relationship is and what it's supposed to be about, whether to have kids and if yes how to raise them.
These worldview aspects are important of you are looking for the mother of your future kids. But if you're just looking for a sex partner for a few months, then who cares? Then what matters is probably mostly sexual attraction, compatibility and whether any beliefs stop either party from having sex (very conservative, religious etc).
So I think explicit political beliefs can actually falsely make it seem like two people are so different, but if they broadly actually do and want similar things in life (eg value college education, see similar things as desirable for the future like where and how to live), then it can work. In such cases the politics is just a thin aesthetic preference.
But it's not always so. You may find someone who is a progressive climate doomer who refuses to have a car, despises you if you have one, is obsessed with zero waste, is vegan and doesn't tolerate you eating meat in your shared home. Then it will be hard to live together. It all depends on how much it impacts real life everyday decisions and how much he/she believes that it's not only about her/his choices but those choices must also be enthusiastically mirrored by you,or if they are more tolerant and chill and understand that their understanding of what's moral isn't complete and 100% right in every aspect.
My wife has substantially different political opinions and I wouldn't call it thin aesthetics, but otherwise I agree. Majority of our political differences simply never come up too often. Those differences that come up, we made explicit compromises about early on, and soon those compromises became the normal. I think we both today equally like both of us have one place where we both have learned to actively ignore the rage-inducing news cycle, that is, our home.
I feel like there needs to be some kind of community for people in mixed-politics marriages. It seems we are a dying breed!
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I wouldn’t take anything they say about not dating Trump voters too seriously. Incels have done enough chadfishing experiments to show that you can say or believe whatever you want so long as they are attracted to you
Now as far as my personal experience goes, my sample size is very small consisting only of my wife and a handful of people I have dated. But I have never found political differences to be a hindrance. I have only encountered a couple people in my life whose political beliefs were based on anything more than emulating their social peers. So generally in my experience you date a girl and she will come to adopt all your beliefs because you will become the focus of her social life.
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I'm married to someone who is pretty progressive. It's very hard, but you can make it work, if both people are committed. We can each talk with each other and understand where the other person is coming from, even if we don't agree. Some progressives would simply write off anyone who thinks differently, and if you were with someone like that, it may never be able to work.
While the ability to talk is important, probably the most important thing is to understand that people are compartmentalized, and to learn to compartmentalized politics. Sure, it'll come up every now and again, and it should, but for years the wife and I just argued at each other over and over until we were both sick of it and miserable. We've been much happier since we both agreed to just not talk about politics as much anymore.
I really really hate the progressive messaging over the past half decade trying to imply that anyone who thinks differently is evil, and you can't get along with them. I think it's so illiberal and probably doing lots of damage to society. But these memes, like the "human rights are not politics, so therefore if you disagree on what I think are human rights than you're human garbage," are pervasive. There are others like this, too, trying to, if you ask me, unfairly change the rules of politics in society. If the person you're seeing cannot understand that these memes are probably not accurate, and that you can be a good person despite holding different viewpoints, then no matter how much effort you put in, it sadly would be unlikely to work out.
It's annoying, but I have yet to encounter any good counter-argument to this.
You can check out Scott's argument against deontology: http://web.archive.org/web/20170315153732/http://squid314.livejournal.com/323694.html
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The very concept of human rights is a not-so-old, totally-political invention (which is not a judgment on their usefulness/validity). It's just that saying "X rights are human rights" as an assertion is supposed to corner the other side into admitting to reject some human rights which makes one a monster.
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I wouldn't say it's perfect, but "thinking people are human garbage is itself a human rights violation" is usually the train of thought I go with.
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It's a secular declaration of sacred values. Attempting to formulate a counterargument is about as effective as trying to formulate a counterargument to an evangelical's religious beliefs.
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Human rights are a political football, that's how. 'Should we respect human rights or not' is a political question.
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The counter argument I like:
With an explanation:
So, applying that idea, my private support for (as an example) animal rights isn't political. Private support is just a feeling.
Donating to a cat shelter isn’t politics because there's no human opposition.
Joining an argument in hopes that other people will be shamed into supporting animal rights is a political act because I'm hoping to overcome the apathy or antipathy of the opposition.
I wouldn’t link an progressive to the original source for that idea, but I'll include it for completeness.
https://graymirror.substack.com/p/rise-of-the-neutral-company-1ba
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You make up a bunch of rights too. Right to immigrate wherever you want? Right to not compete for your job with the whole globe.
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I just want to know how it makes any sense for me to get rebuffed when complain about progressive writers putting their politics in my nerdy hobbies, with "everything is political", but somehow human rights is supposed to be "not politics".
Or forget about the argument from hypocrisy, since they don't work these days anyway. How in Jesus' name, of all the things one could pick, is the concept of "human rights" not political?
It's not supposed to make sense. When does any ideology care about making sense? They aren't optimized for truth-seeking.
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Do you have kids? I think that's the thing that can cause more friction. For example, what do you do if your ten year old girl comes home from school and says she's a boy now? Not talking about politics isn't really an option anymore.
Yes, but they're not old enough yet. We know we may encounter some issues like this someday. I generally don't want to ever tell my kids what to think in the first place, and I don't think my wife does either. I plan to do a lot of Socratic questioning, and explaining how I think while also not pressuring them to think that way. My wife and I believe in the tactics of not arguing about this stuff in front of the kids, not ridiculing each other's viewpoints, and not undermining each other.
That said, if trans issues come up, that in particular will probably be a very difficult thing to deal with, though I do believe that my wife is sane enough to not believe in puberty blockers and actually hormonal transition for children. I know she does understand that there are some decisions that children are not old enough to make.
I really want to move to a more purple area, so my kids are exposed equally to diverse messaging which is exposed to scrutiny, not just drinking progressive Kool aid. My wife understands this desire of mine and is also up for moving. But picking a location that I believe is diverse enough, while also finding jobs that fit certain criteria for each of us is a challenging enough prospect that we have not made significant headway in this regard yet.
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