> Many amongst the left obsesses over what the right is doing (and vice versa), which tells me people enjoy rubbernecking rather than tuning out. It's a game of "neener-neener" high school football rivalry.
You mean like rolling back Roe v. Wade?[1]
You mean like trying to overthrow an election?[2]
Denying access to gender-affirming care for adults?[3]
What exactly do you think people are being unfairly obsessed over? Because there's a reason people follow politics: it's because politics, and because we're in a democracy - public opinion and discourse - has direct, kinetic effects on people's lives.
This is a real cheap opinion to have provided you're never weighed down with having to engage with the content and stick to vague insinuation. The fiction of "both sides".
While I oppose these things, I think people who agree with them should be allowed to express their opinion. Maybe if we allow them to explain why they support these things, we can better understand how to come to a mutual agreement.
> Many amongst the left obsesses over what the right is doing (and vice versa), which tells me people enjoy rubbernecking rather than tuning out. It's a game of "neener-neener" high school football rivalry.
This is a complete failure to understand that politics is real and has real consequences for real people. If your think that "actually none of this matters, why can't we all just get along?" then your world view and privilege is simply such that you have the leisure of ignoring it.
My wife is trans. By turning this into a game of sports and one-upsmanship, you're hurting us.
Listen to the left and to the right. Talk with them. Engage them. Humanize them.
Do this the Dr. King way, not the Malcom X way. You won't win hearts and minds if you're bearing your teeth all the time. People in the middle don't want deal with that. People that could be convinced are instead turned away.
Maybe you grew up in a completely liberal city and don't realize that the opposition have lives filled with joy, happiness, pain, trauma, and feelings too. Maybe you didn't go to school with them and don't work with them. Maybe you're not in a diverse, politically purple city where you can see that we're all in this together.
By being so offended and not turning the other cheek, you're letting the bullies know that they hurt you. You're giving them all the more endurance to continue. When social media and the news media obsess over what Trump is doing, they give him power. It's the same thing.
I'm not saying don't campaign, don't vote, and don't be strong. Those things are essential. Policies of tolerance and equity can win this faster than division and hate. But don't turn the other side into monsters so that you can feel good about yourself - you're just giving them fuel to keep fighting this decades-long guerilla war and making us all miserable for longer.
Martin Luther King had this to say about "the white moderate" [1]:
"First, I must confess that over the last few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro's great stumbling block in the stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen's Council-er or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate who is more devoted to "order" than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says "I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I can't agree with your methods of direct action;" who paternalistically feels he can set the timetable for another man's freedom; who lives by the myth of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait until a "more convenient season."
Shallow understanding from people of goodwill is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection."
Understand the difference between respecting your enemy and not doing anything to address problems. These are orthogonal.
Setting up censorship traps is slapping your enemy in their face.
You should read his "Loving Your Enemies" sermon [1]:
> Now let me hasten to say that Jesus was very serious when he gave this command; he wasn’t playing. He realized that it’s hard to love your enemies. He realized that it’s difficult to love those persons who seek to defeat you, those persons who say evil things about you. He realized that it was painfully hard, pressingly hard. But he wasn’t playing. And we cannot dismiss this passage as just another example of Oriental hyperbole, just a sort of exaggeration to get over the point. This is a basic philosophy of all that we hear coming from the lips of our Master. Because Jesus wasn’t playing; because he was serious. We have the Christian and moral responsibility to seek to discover the meaning of these words, and to discover how we can live out this command, and why we should live by this command.
[...]
> Another way that you love your enemy is this: When the opportunity presents itself for you to defeat your enemy, that is the time which you must not do it. There will come a time, in many instances, when the person who hates you most, the person who has misused you most, the person who has gossiped about you most, the person who has spread false rumors about you most, there will come a time when you will have an opportunity to defeat that person. It might be in terms of a recommendation for a job; it might be in terms of helping that person to make some move in life. That’s the time you must do it. That is the meaning of love. In the final analysis, love is not this sentimental something that we talk about. It’s not merely an emotional something. Love is creative, understanding goodwill for all men. It is the refusal to defeat any individual. When you rise to the level of love, of its great beauty and power, you seek only to defeat evil systems. Individuals who happen to be caught up in that system, you love, but you seek to defeat the system.
[...]
> Now there is a final reason I think that Jesus says, “Love your enemies.” It is this: that love has within it a redemptive power. And there is a power there that eventually transforms individuals. That’s why Jesus says, “Love your enemies.” Because if you hate your enemies, you have no way to redeem and to transform your enemies. But if you love your enemies, you will discover that at the very root of love is the power of redemption. You just keep loving people and keep loving them, even though they’re mistreating you. Here’s the person who is a neighbor, and this person is doing something wrong to you and all of that. Just keep being friendly to that person. Keep loving them. Don’t do anything to embarrass them. Just keep loving them, and they can’t stand it too long. Oh, they react in many ways in the beginning. They react with bitterness because they’re mad because you love them like that. They react with guilt feelings, and sometimes they’ll hate you a little more at that transition period, but just keep loving them. And by the power of your love they will break down under the load. That’s love, you see. It is redemptive, and this is why Jesus says love. There’s something about love that builds up and is creative. There is something about hate that tears down and is destructive. “love your enemies.”
[...]
> Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.
I regularly drive over a bridge with those words printed on it [2]. They're more powerful than hating your enemy.
>Do this the Dr. King way, not the Malcom X way. You won't win hearts and minds if you're bearing your teeth all the time.
You don't understand MLK if you think he was less radical than Malcom X[0]. He absolutely did not engage with and humanize his oppressors. He didn't patiently and calmly listen to what racists had to say and try to find common ground and a way to tolerate them. Read his "Letter from a Birmingham Jail[1]" His tolerance for white America was limited to those who were willing to do the work of fighting white supremacy. He had no love at all for the centrists of his day who preached what you're preaching here, or the "colorblind" politics that people have twisted out of his "I have a dream" speech.
You come off like the guy who'd be in 1930s Germany telling the Jews they shouldn't be so intolerant, that maybe the Nazis have some fair points to make and everyone should just hear them out, share a beer and a laugh, and surely everything will be fine if only they realized Nazis were people too. And then point out your wife is Jewish, like somehow that gets you a pass.
Your views are dangerously, almost maliciously naive.
At this point I have come to the conclusion that you can find a King quote to support whatever argument you're trying to make. I'm not so ignorant as to subscribe to the rose tainted Martin vs Malcolm dichotomy. I understand they were contemporaries. I've read LfaBJ. Which is why I think it's a steaming pile to try and argue "Martin was just as radical as Malcolm".
Martin was a human being. He was frustrated with the speed of progress. He did not preach violence. And he rightfully criticized people who wouldn't lift a finger in support of his peoples' rights to share in the same liberty under the law as everyone else. That's justice.
There is a huge difference between allowing immoral/evil unjust racist oppression to exist because you're unwilling to stand up and say "that's wrong", and demonizing your fellow countryman because our scientific understanding of when a human life begins is ever-evolving, or because of differing views on whether tax money should be used to subsidize elective cosmetic surgery. (I'm not arguing one way or another, I'm just stating these examples rhetorically since they're what started this discussion.)
Point being, there's intolerable immoral oppression, and there's acceptable functional political "oppression" (speed limits are oppressive, for instance, but we agree they're generally a useful oppression, so we tolerate the oppression). Racism is the first category. The first world problems of today (save abortion, that one's fuzzy and complicated) fall squarely into the second. And regardless of which category of oppression you're facing, there's still wisdom in understanding that sharpening your edge will only cause the other side to follow and is rarely the way to change minds.
It's also worth noting there also definitely was a group in Nazi Germany who were colloquially called Jews For Hitler[1]. You can guess how it turned out, but they absolutely echoed similar sentiments. They were as wrong as you might expect.
I'm not saying that politics don't have real consequences. But by pointing everyone who even slightly disagrees with you as literally the incarnation of evil, you're only making things worse. Do you think Fundamentalist Christians are less likely to support anti-abortion laws if you keep being toxic to them?
I grew up in that kind of church and over 30 years watched the entire world around me change: I have zero connection or desire to be in that world, my family mellowed out, the tv preachers all died.
Recent social media trends lead to far left liberals are attacking conservative people on social media directly, and vice versa. There's no opportunity for de-escalation on either side. Every confrontation is personal.
Conservatives don't respond to the vitriol. They have the exact same response you do to their hate. They put up barriers and become protective of their beliefs rather than engage in direct, vulnerable dialogue. They tune you out entirely and focus simply on defending and attacking. That's the only discourse left.
Do you realize the rich spectrum of conservative beliefs? Or do you see it all as a single position? There's so much opportunity to change hearts and minds, but it's all being squandered (and perhaps permanently so) on these petty fights and turf wars.
The other side is human, just as you. If they'd had a different life journey, they might stand beside you now. If you'd had theirs, you might be in their shoes.
I assume you've experienced a lot of change in your personal life. Understand and appreciate that everyone can take new paths.
All I'm asking is that you don't engage in petty attacks, as it's pointless, embittering, and drags out the battle. You can fight for what you believe without belittling.
Attacking them for what? This isn't theoretical, I'm connected to giant global database where the public availability of this information is well known. Attacking them for what?
If your moral compass is "someone was mean to me on the internet, now I don't support abortion rights for rape victims" then there was no causative effect, you're just doing what you were going to do anyway.
Because it makes the priority pretty clear: these aren't hard to find stories[1]. The victims aren't "the far left" they're just people[2]. It isn't hard to empathize with them, but apparently the conclusion you reach is that they deserve what's happening to them, because an unrelated group of people might've been mean to you on the internet.
"People are mean to me on the internet" is a lie used to deflect from the data. Because someone is always saying something shitty on the internet. Because someone, somewhere on the far-left might tell someone they're an asshole. But then the far-right will rock up to what they think is Obama's house[3]. But then here you are, telling me the only reason conservatives don't support my issues is because someone is mean to them. I don't know who that person is, I don't know why they were mean, but because they were that's all the justification needed to support denying healthcare to women.
You mean like rolling back Roe v. Wade?[1]
You mean like trying to overthrow an election?[2]
Denying access to gender-affirming care for adults?[3]
What exactly do you think people are being unfairly obsessed over? Because there's a reason people follow politics: it's because politics, and because we're in a democracy - public opinion and discourse - has direct, kinetic effects on people's lives.
This is a real cheap opinion to have provided you're never weighed down with having to engage with the content and stick to vague insinuation. The fiction of "both sides".
[1] https://www.npr.org/2022/06/24/1102305878/supreme-court-abor...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/January_6_United_States_Capito...
[3] https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2023/02/28/anti-trans-...