>Majorities in both parties say it is very important that elected officials treat their opponents with respect. But while most Democrats (78%) say it is very important for Republican elected officials to treat Democratic officials with respect, only about half (47%) say it is very important for officials from their party to treat Republican politicians with respect. There is similar divide in the opinions of Republicans; 75% say Democrats should be respectful of GOP officials, while only 49% say the same about Republicans’ treatment of Democratic officials.
If there's one thing that unites us all, it is intense and hypocritical tribalism.
Your interpretation of his comment quite succinctly sums up the problems with society today. Being tolerant of something is not the same as treating it identically to other views. Imagine my neighbor is completely and absolutely convinced that 2+2=5. I'd be somewhat curious why somebody would believe such a peculiar thing. If we had the time I'd certainly be happy to indulge him and of course I'd also try to correct him. If, at the end of the day, we couldn't agree? That's fine. Of course I'm probably not going to be convinced that 2+2=5 and won't make a secret of it, but agreeing to disagree is okay.
In practice this distinction of tolerance vs "all opinions are equal" is even more critical because many of the topics people love to get into heated arguments about have compelling, entirely factual, arguments supporting mutually exclusive conclusions. Life's fun that way. On these sort of topics - guns, migration, economic systems, etc - there are of course some completely unsupportable views, but there are no right answers. In fact they probably literally do not exist since even with omniscience, the answer would still be contingent on the state of a society and people at any given point in time and place.
We all believe the things we believe because we, tautologically, think they're what we ought believe - what is most right, or most supported, or whatever our personal value system tells us is correct. The problem we face today is when we then start assuming that because our value system tells us this belief must be the most valid, that we start to treat other completely supportable views as invalid.
I think deep down, most people agree with you. But it's not very practical to have a level-headed approach to political discourse, since most political topics of the day are not rooted in morality, but instead are economic agendas shrouded in morality. For example, no one really knows the systems effect of forgiving student loan debt, but politicians advocating for it are quite confident that that policy helps them win. So, being uncertain or open to discussion along the lines of whether or not that policy is good for the US isn't really the point. It's already known to be good for other, more palpable reasons, and any effort to shift the discussion into uncertainty about the effects of the US is only bad for the politician who already knows about the policy's effect on them personally.
True, but for some reason in the US we’ve decided that all/most people are equal sources of viable opinions when it comes to electing representatives. Whether or not you treat their opinions with respect matters little compared to their ability to vote their opinions into office.
I think this is a somewhat false equivalency. The number and extremity of alignment with catastrophic far-right ideology, while relatively small, is significantly larger than the same metrics for similarly catastrophic far-left ideologies in the US (in my opinion). While there are a lot of people who too-broadly level accusations of Naziism against conservatives, and vice versa for things like Communism, there is in fact a real issue at hand around the topic of far-left vs far-right ideologies, and I don't think it requires blind tribalism to have the opinion that one is much more rampant or destructive than the other. In my experience, most criticisms that are based around simply inverting the political sidedness of the claim at hand tend to unjustly ignore this.
It's obvious that people will disagree vehemently with each other on many issues. But that's always been true.
What changes is how we manage those disagreements. You point out an extreme view, but it's not very likely for that view to become law.
Politicians represent a lot of people, and those people they represent deserve respect even while you negotiate strongly for your own perspective. You may even find them an ally on another issue.
The alternative is for you to basically conclude that there is a large fraction of the population you simply can't live with. That leads to some pretty bad situations.
It also snowballs, because if you focus enough on any issue you will develop very strong opinions and feel like they are non-negotiable. So there is no end. The reality is that all beliefs are tolerable because we currently tolerate them. Only actions can be intolerable.
Would you please stop posting dismissive, hostile, and/or unsubstantive comments to HN? You've been doing it a lot, and it goes against the site guidelines. So does complaining about downvotes. If you would please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and practice the spirit of this site more earnestly, we'd appreciate it. I know it isn't easy, but it isn't easy for any of us—and we've had to ask you this multiple times before.
I'm talking about your comments as a whole, which contain many examples of dismissiveness, hostility, and unsubstantiveness. Your first comment upthread was obviously unsubstantive, and the later one was unsubstantive, hostile, and broke the site guideline against going on about downvotes.
>> we've had to ask you this multiple times before > Really? Name them.
> Your first comment upthread was obviously unsubstantive
Which one? The one asking for a source on an incredible claim? That's not welcome on HN?
Regarding the cases you linked to, only the first and last are valid. The second and third (which are the same, so I have no idea why you posted two links) don't violate any HN guidelines, as a careful reading of the conversation would make obvious.
You're right actually; that one was ok. The reply was not ok.
I'm also not ok with "Don't be ridiculous, dang"—responding to a request not to break the site guidelines by flagrantly breaking them again signals bad faith and a desire not to use the site as intended. If I were going strictly by probability, it would make the most sense to just ban you for that, because commenters who react that way almost never reform. I won't do that now, but please just correct how you're posting here. It isn't hard. All you have to do is take the site guidelines to heart and choose to practice them.
Another poor sign is that we've had this kind of conversation before. As I explained to you in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18581673, it's a poor use of our time and energy to play the cross-examination game with commenters who don't adhere to the guidelines and react with endless questions when we point that out. Users who do that nearly always turn out to be a liability for the community.
I already addressed that under the very comment you linked to. The fact that you readily accuse me of breaking the rules but then consider discussing the merits of that accusation as "too tiring" and "playing a game of cross-examination" is very concerning.
Also, notice how some of my comments are, without any valid reason, being falsely flagged and silently hidden from view. What do you make of that?
I have no intention of emailing you to "appeal" this retaliatory ban, because you've made it clear that you will ban anyone for questioning the merit of your accusations. You've made a mockery of the HN moderation process.
At this point it seems clear that you don't want to use HN as intended, so I've banned this account. If I've guessed wrong (moderation is guesswork, and we do guess wrong), you're welcome to email [email protected] and give us reason to believe that you'll use the site as intended from now on.
Edit: you added your last paragraph after I posted that. Actually, we frequently unban people and are happy to, as long as we believe they'll follow the guidelines in the future. We don't ban people for asking questions—we spend countless hours answering them. What doesn't make sense is to play the infinite concern-troll game, which can easily suck all our resources away from the rest of the site. Since we've had these exchanges before with no effect and you've continued to break the site guidelines, I made that call. I believe that the bulk of the community understands why we have to do this, even if it means guessing wrong sometimes, and supports it as long as we're willing to correct mistakes.
This feels like the prisoners dilemma scenario, where cooperation with the other side is riskier than ratting them out. Neither side is particularly incentivized to cooperate, so what’s to give?
Being respectful of elected officials is totally different from being respectful of their supporters.
For example, I can directly blame a senator for her votes. If her vote was for something I think is indefensible (like the Iraq War), showing disrespect is acceptable and deserved, as long as it's non-violent.
However, not all of her voters might have expected or condoned that vote. Even if they did, their responsibility for the vote is a small fraction of the senator's.
Joe Biden gave us a great example of this recently when he praised himself for getting along with segregationist colleagues. Treating them with respect was unwarranted because they didn't treat tens of millions of black Americans with respect.
This can't be overstated. I think the tendency to treat politics like sports and develop a strong emotional connection with a political figure that you will never have any personal knowledge of is a huge part of what leads us to the inability to stop feeling attacked by each other (and, in reaction, attacking each other). E.g. if I am making some broad criticism, I make it clear I'm talking about politicians, not constituents. I don't talk shit about "Republicans" in the abstract. The difference may seem small, but the point is that just because I think Trump is a stupid asshole doesn't mean I think people who voted for Trump are.
And New Yorkers prefer the sound of ocean waves to the sounds of car traffic and jet engines. So what?
What the public prefers is irrelevant. The content of public discourse is dictated by the acoustics of the media environment. We are trapped inside a terrible, gigantic conch, which resonates with the frequency of scandals and sound-bytes and dampens the sounds of thoughtful debate.
I see self-censorship in public political discourse, and that gives too much room for charlatan entertainers to suck up all the oxygen in the room. The negative discourse is not what the general public is engaging in.
Fully 40 years ago I remember more public debate about politics than today. I'd characterize that as having been semi-productive. The newsertainment pundits today just try to rile people up. It's anger for-profit. Getting pissed off is a product you buy by watching or following a professional agitator. And that is not public discourse, in my view.
What the US needs is instant runoff (via ranked choice) voting.
Short of that, people with your mindset need to volunteer, fundraise, and vote. Otherwise those parties will never match the scope of the current duopoly.
Instant runoff only really resolves the spoiler effect. I think it's extremely unlikely we'd see a third party come even close, including with instant runoff, to taking power. I'd look at the problem numerically. Imagine a state has 100 representatives sent to congress. And we know this state is let's say 30% republican, 30% democratic, 20% libertarian, 20% green. What would you say their representation should look like? Everybody's going to say the exact same thing: 30 republicans, 30 democrats, 20 libertarians, 20 greens. The only problem is that you only get that distribution with proportional representation, which as a nice side effect also would do away with gerrymandering since you don't need to carve a state up into representative districts anymore.
The downside here is that proportional voting doesn't stand a bat's chance in hell of ever getting enacted because it really would lead to a major upheaval in DC. And the very people that would be 'losing their jobs' are the ones that'd need to work to pass it, which would be a tremendous undertaking. You'd need a 2/3rds majority in both the house and senate to start the process, and then you'd need 38 of the 50 states to ratify the change. And at the end of this process the two major political parties, who are in control of every single major political body in the United States, would have just ceded a tremendous amount of power.
The funny thing is, I see merit in both parties. I like conservatism when it comes to the 1st and 2nd amendment protection, freedom of religion, etc, but I hate how the right treats the environment as a resource to be wasted, used, and abused. I think the libertarian stance on drugs is a little too extreme (I think drugs should be legal, but that they also shouldn't necessarily be easily accessible - people should still have to jump through a few hoops to get them). Rinse and repeat of a lot of issues.
If it were possible to transcend parties and vote just for candidates that represented my nuanced beliefs, I would switch in a heartbeat. Instead I'm forced to prioritize which issues are most important to me, and then plug my nose and vote for the party that best represents just those (even though said party comes with a lot of undesirable baggage).
Have you considered voting Libertarian for federal positions and a mix of Democrats and Republicans for state and local positions (depending on size of city/state and specific concerns)?
1st, Turkey would've gladly assisted the US in this case, and urged the US for action.
2nd, jurisdiction is irrelevant. Saudi Arabia benefits from many deals regarding arms with the US. There are other ways to protect US citizens from being murdered. And it would have the full support of congress.
Isn't the American president a barometer or descriptive reflection of the democratic population? Or does one define American conservatism by reciting a prescription of what people ought be when they say they're conservative?
Similarly I presume the rise of Boris Johnson with Brexit is a reflection of the British people, regardless of whether he has his conservative credentials in order.
If there's one thing that unites us all, it is intense and hypocritical tribalism.