This isn't just partisan "sides." It's also sides of specific legal questions.
I don't think "just stop picking a side regarding abortion, gun ownership, or gay marriage" is a reasonable solution. These are political wedge issues, but they are also legal questions with answers that can affect your daily life. Of course you want it to go a certain way!
no, stop thinking of sides at all, and especially don't start with a side first. start with reasoned first principles (the constitution is a good start) and continue to reason your way to a position on any given issue that is consistent with those first principles, sides be damned. the only reason you pay attention to sides is identifying with and wanting to defend a side in the first place. don't worry about defending and entrenching. have earnest conversations. if your position is constantly getting barraged with hard-to-argue counterpoints, then consider changing your position. it's not that hard.
Forgive me for my ignorance: why would the constitution be a good start for reasoned first principles? The constitution was written centuries ago by wealthy men who considered women and other men property and its updating process is so onerous that it still has nothing in it that considers women equal to men, despite women's right to vote, pay taxes, own businesses, etc. being established decades ago.
while it's certainly biased by the thinking of the time, that stuff isn't enshrined in the constitution, not to that degree. the wealthy white dude framers knew they weren't perfect, so they allowed for changes by providing an amendment process to patch the rough spots. the constitution is a good start, not the final endpoint.
Like I said, the updating process is so onerous that women aren't considered equals under the constitution decades after women are obligated to pay taxes, have the right to vote, and other such things. I don't understand why it should be considered a good set of first principles because of this, because it would imply that the equalness of people isn't a first principle.
i mean, do you really believe that today, women are not considered equal, even if it's not perfectly spelled out by the constitution? more importantly, does that matter for using the constitution as a starting point? it doesn't have to be the constitution by the way; that was simply a convenient and relevant example of a starting point.
>that it still has nothing in it that considers women equal to men, despite women's right to vote, pay taxes, own businesses, etc. being established decades ago.
Mind pointing out where exactly in the current, live form of the constitution where women are not considered equal to men?
> the only reason you pay attention to sides is identify with and wanting to defend a side in the first place
True! For example, I inherently have a bias towards wanting LGBTQ people to have the right to participate in society through marriage, anti-discrimination laws, etc because I'm LGBTQ. I suspect a lot of black people have a bias towards wanting anti-discrimination legislation so they don't get discriminated against, too.
In a way, yes, that's problematic, because what you're saying is that those people are still not arguing for equal rights for all based on principle: their sole objective is arguing for more rights for themselves, which is still an adversarial position to take and in the long run will do nothing to prevent the tribalistic nature of public discourse.
Aren’t the people arguing against their rights the ones causing a problem? Everyone looking out for themselves is supposed to lead to at least a half-decent outcome - kind of the idea behind the “free market.”
no, why should it? i want those things for disadvantaged groups as well. that doesn't mean that i've chosen a side and will defend it to the death against the bad ol' "others". everyone can be part of the same tribe. no other tribe needed. and it's ok if we don't all agree on the same things at the same time.
(i'm not going to pretend that i'm always cool, calm and collected in real life. far from it, i'm as flawed as the next person. but when it comes to thinking about this stuff, and striving to be more consistent with my own principles, this is the way i think myself out of all the partisanship i see around me.)
Okay, the constitution is as far from “first principles” as you can possibly get. Totally arbitrary. If that’s what you value, that’s fine, but it is not more logical than someone else’s view.
If you really do start from first principles (I think “utilitarianism” might be a better example of something that would be a first principle), and you find out that one side of an issue is good and the other is evil, or even if you find out that one political party is a good bit morally better than the other, you’re now back to picking sides. Because picking the right side of a morally important issue is a moral imperative to most people.
here's another point i forgot to bring up earlier that i'm just gonna hang off of here...
getting caught up in a side means you can't pick and choose from the whole menu of ideas out in the world. it means that if you're against abortion, you must be for guns (or vice versa), lest you suffer cognitive dissonance and social anxiety. that's exactly how political parties, pundits, the media, and partisans of all stripes get twisted up into contradictory positions, but can never extricate themselves, because they'd have to acknowledge a modicum of reasonableness coming from "the other side". it's pretty silly to get so tied up in a tribal affiliation that you shut down your own thinking that way.
this is actually the topic of the linked paper (i.e., culturally motivated reasoning), which was hardly discussed at all in these comments.
I like actually thinking about things, but does that address the problem where you’re more likely to see people who disagree with your (well-reasoned) opinion as violent?
it takes some mental fortitude to maintain this position, but you have to understand that 99.99% of the time, those other people think of themselves as good and reasonable too. and the feeling of violence is a direct result of identifying with your chosen "side", thus feeling personally affronted. rather, you can create space between who you are and what you believe, and in this way, someone can attack those beliefs without it affecting who you think you are. you don't feel it's violent against you because of that separation. you can similarly project that separation onto other people, so that you're not attacking them personally, but just discussing their ideas and beliefs.
this is true, but that's even moreso why we need to have such conversations openly, especially with people different from us, to elucidate our blind spots.
and that's the crux of why diversity can be powerful. it's not about diversity of demographics, but diversity of perspective and thinking that strengthens societies (and companies and teams).
>start with reasoned first principles (the constitution is a good start) and continue to reason your way to a position on any given issue that is consistent with those first principles, sides be damned.
How do you come up with first principles? Consequentialism vs deontology has been around for centuries and it's obvious which one is the the correct one.
that's a false dichotomy for the rhetoricians. it's both, and more, and more complicated than that.
we spend the first 18 years or so of our lives empirically deriving those first principles together, along with the derivations of our ancestors in the form of documents like the constitution. since none of us are intrinsically perfect, we have a whole running population who nonlinearly superpositions our perspectives to create a common, if dynamic and imperfect, consensus of what's reasonable in a social context, and what's not.
Read old document written in specific political tradition.
^ That’s where you jumped the shark.
Less biased philosophy might be Camus, or Freire. Camus if you’re feeling cheeky, Freire if you’re feeling academic.
Freire describes forced import of culture and solutions to problems by financiers on people far away. It is far more objective look at freedom than the Constitutions goal of agency capture people far away.
Camus snarks about the absurdity in the belief we can ever truly understand one another given lack of direct access to each other’s bodily states and memory.
Both push back against the idea of allowing external influence to guide us in different ways. The Constitution is an aristocratic doctrine of acceptable forms and limits of state coercion which are routinely ignored. It’s scripture to hold up as an appeal to imagined authority Freire and Camus don’t believe exists.
ok, so you've criticized the constitution for the acts of unspecified people who later misappropriated it. can we only misappropriate the constitution, or perhaps, some people can take the same document, flawed or not, and derive a reasoned, even egalitarian and/or benevolent, position from it? do you see how that doesn't invalidate the document's principles, or its potential use as a starting point of reasoning?
By saying it can be interpreted correctly or incorrectly and you’re on … the side… of those who interpret it correctly is another violation of your simple philosophy.
You are one of seven billion in an aimless universe with no higher purpose. Your preferred political philosophy is not a universal constant everyone values. Continuing to lean on it does not make your perspective more valid. It just proves changing one’s mind in the face of pushback and new evidence is harder than you cavalierly put it.
but i didn't make a qualitative judgment nor take a side. i said you can base a reasonable position on the constitution, as one of many potential starting points.
negative qualitative judgments like yours don't really add to the discussion, because the apparent objective is to tear down rather than build. why not try reasoning to a positive position instead?
Because I’ve already walked the path you laid out 20 years ago. I’ve read the letters of the Founders too. That you insist it be used as a basis is a bias I can build things without.
Paraphrasing Jefferson, we should bin the Constitution every 19 years. But Madison felt the future owed the past, so we teach our kids to abide a dead man’s idea of a proper political framework. Paraphrasing Jefferson again; the dead do not rule the living. Paraphrasing Hume then; commit the Constitution to the flames.
From my reference frame you need me to import a specific philosophy when understanding of physical laws are all that’s needed to build.
I’m not being qualitative; there is no theory of science, no quantity of evidence the Constitution is responsible for engineering anything. Plenty of evidence people built together before it existed. From my reference frame you’re demanding more work than necessary to solve human problems.
You’re qualifying my behavior as negative because you’re not getting what you want, but the Constitution does not include a provision to provide you that. shrug
let me put it plainly then: you're being evasive because you don't want to be vulnerable. the nihilism you've thrown up is a shield you wield to avoid taking a stance on anything, lest you be attacked for it.
but it doesn't work, see? so might as well stand for something, rather than nothing, if that strategy doesn't make you invulnerable anyway.
Nihilism to me is using conformity to a philosophy as excuse to defer real effort.
We put American tradition for profit making before the distribution of insulin; oh well if people can’t afford it <- there, see; nihilism in your system. Indifference to action because your philosophy would not allow it. A convenient scapegoat.
Your unwavering devotion to a specific form of parliamentary procedure hurts people in need.
From the start I suggest alternatives, you deflect exploring them, and repeat what you showed up with; I don’t think I’m the inflexible mind stuck in one modal. Such a patronizing ass; sorry child, none of those alternatives will do, come let me explain the Bill of Rights again.
I’m plenty vulnerable with friends and family. I’m not about to take the pop psych view of an air gapped stranger to heart; reads like you just pulled that out of a glossary of psych terms and do not understand there is an entire diagnostic criteria required to make such a conclusion. Par for the course on social media.
I don't think "just stop picking a side regarding abortion, gun ownership, or gay marriage" is a reasonable solution. These are political wedge issues, but they are also legal questions with answers that can affect your daily life. Of course you want it to go a certain way!