Not really. If you don't want to talk about Israel, fine, then we can ignore that part of my post.

You can tell an American made this graph because Americans don't understand that politics is non-ordinal.

Also, there are no conspiracy theories needed. Conservatives and socialists do conflict with their employers, because "liberal" is good for business: tolerance and open borders means a bigger labor pool and reduced wages; free trade means their suppliers have to be more competitive, and they can sell to a larger audience; public goods and infrastructure, funded from labor income taxes, are indirect subsidies for businesses. (N.B.: the American business right / Canadian-British "blue tories" are basically cheapskate liberals. They're liberals who don't want to pay taxes, who don't want to pay for their externalities or have their externalities regulated. I told you, politics is non-ordinal.)

The "very liberal" category in this graph (:downs:) would include socialists and communists and social democrats. Those are socially liberal people but not economically liberal. So these "very liberal" people conflict with their employer, because they generally do not believe their employers should be able to get away with half of the **** they do.

The "libertarian" category in this graph is, um, fine I guess. I think American libertarians tend to be socially moderate, which is whatever. But they're economically liberal in a classical and extreme sense, which makes them uncomfortable working for companies that seek rents and subsidies and lobbies for public goods and anti-competitive regulations and such (i.e. all big companies).

The "conservative" category in this graph (:downs:) would be the socially conservative and economically liberal. They'd be okay with the business side of things, less okay with the tolerance and open borders side of things. And that's the problem. Modern workers really do need to have a cosmopolitan mindset to work effectively with people from other cultures, and especially to develop and sell products into foreign markets. If saying "Happy Holidays" instead of "Merry Christmas" makes you feel uncomfortable, well, that's pretty much a microcosm of your whole career right there.

The "very conservative" category in this graph (:saddowns:) is both economically and socially illiberal. Totally incompatible with business and capitalism in a modern world.

Just to make one point clear:

Yes, I am saying that socialists are better equipped for the modern business world than a very conservative person.

I don't want to enter this discussion, because I've demonstrated in my other interactions with you that I've got some personal problems (if you'd like to know, I have crippling perfectionism and maybe even some undiagnosed, mild Aspbergers... and see now that my activity here is clearly a symptom of avoidance coping).

But let me just say one thing, and you can take it however you like: there are times when you write certain very strong statements in such a cavalier way that people are bound to be whipped into a frenzy, even if you just were stating your opinion in passing.

Eversor seems to be a very functional individual, and even he has gotten into fights with you before, maybe because of this.

Of course I don't think you should necessarily think that you need to stop, and normal people can adapt to it. I think even I have found a way to adapt to it, actually.

No, it's not that I don't want to talk about it. It's just that I'm surprised that you'd try to make an argument by making an analogy to something that's not only controversial, but that's been controversial in this thread. Obviously I wasn't simply going to agree with you. That should be fairly clear from conversations we've had in the past (hence why I posed the question. It wasn't a rhetorical question). I genuinely laughed because of how tactless this was. (And I don't judge you harshly because of it. It's amusing to me more than anything else.)

But I think in context, the remark you made actually clarifies my initial point.



I think it's indisputable that when Israelis suffer rocket attacks and develop PTSD that they are victims of rocket attacks and PTSD. That really should be indisputable, because, after all, it's a tautology. What's more controversial -- and shouldn't be, because it's really only a restatement of what I just said -- is that those are really bad things to live with, even if in general life is much worse for Gazans than it is for Israelis, especially during war.

What's even more controversial still is whether it is Israelis or Palestinians who are "the" victims. But why do we even care about that? Why does there have to be one "real" victim? The idea that ethnic groups should compete with each other over who has the privilege of being called a victim isn't something that many would take for granted. The idea that another person's/group's suffering is somehow less substantive or is negated by another group's suffering isn't obvious. The idea that my suffering needs to be acknowledged as greater than your suffering in order for me to feel recognized also is not obvious. The idea that the recognition of suffering does not need to be a zero-sum game, but in America it is.

I don't know if this pathology is peculiar to American politics, but I haven't seen it in other countries I've lived in. And it's definitely rampant in American politics.

For what it's worth, I think this is a central theme animating Tarantino's Hateful Eight. I think the movies message is that the story of America is the story of diverse groups of people being carved up into tribes, each tribe feeling as though it has the right to exact horrible violence against the other because each sees itself as the true victim, and believes that victimhood grants the legitimate right to seek violent revenge against others.

Canadian blue tories have a definite phony persecution complex (imo they could stand to do with a whole lot of real persecution). But I'm pretty sure they got it from watching Fox News.

I suppose I'm arguing that everyone in American politics is a poor judge of their own deservingness of victim status and of others. "I belong to a group that has been historically oppressed, and therefore I, as an individual, deserve special recognition for my pain that others don't because they don't happen to belong to a recognized oppressed minority"? What kind of argument is that?

It doesn't seem like it matters to you whether conservatives have good reasons to feel like victims. It doesn't seem to matter to you that other groups are just as capable of the paranoia you accuse conservatives of being (and, to be clear, I'm not saying their anxieties are rooted in reality). You seem already to have made up your mind that their sense of victimhood is fake, because there are others whose claims of victim status you believe are more deserving than theirs.

I forget if it was in this thread or the gun thread, but if I recall correctly, Reid has an aversion to discussing negative attributes in the abstract if he thinks that conservatives exhibit them in a way that is uniquely bad. I think he's trying to avoid a logical fallacy in which the blame is spread to both sides of an issue without merit.

I only skimmed this discussion so I might be barking up the wrong tree here.

The point wasn't to say Israelis have not experienced PTSD from rocket attacks, the point was to point out the disparity in what people claim is persecution. In my view, what Israelis do to the Palestinians is actually persecution, and while that doesn't justify Hamas, the victim narrative is spun in a way to make the suffering of Israelis to Palestinians equal. It's not, just like how the persecution of Muslims of the past decades has been worse than anything Christians have gone through.



This is not a view I hold. Your understanding strikes me as an op-ed rephrasement of the alt-right "oppression olympics" meme.

But to the point, yes, all people are victims of forces outside of themselves. It sounds to me like you're saying "since victimization is awful, no valid comparisons can be made". No, they can be.



Yup, "all victimization is equal so therefore you can't say anything about it politically".

Haha, what did I say.

It doesn't seem you really have an argument, just an assertion. What you're saying is "people are literally incapable of judging victimization, therefore it's all bull****".

If you think it's just impossible, then you've made your point, a weak one, with no reasoning, so I don't think it's very valuable. I do think though, that victimization is something people can understand, and neutral attempts to garner information from politics and history will allow comparative studies on the topic.

I think the difference between the two of you might come down to different interpretations of the word "deservingness".

Suppose someone belongs to a historically oppressed group. On a typical day, say that this person reacts to negative things that happens to them by thinking: "This happened to me because I am a victim of society".

In some cases this may be true. In others it may not be. Arguing that one interpretation is better than the other is tantamount to claiming to have a definitive worldview that makes the other possibility not even worth talking about, even offensive.

Although I may be missing the larger context of the discussion here, since I didn't read back everything that was written.

Sometime back in the thread, you mentioned that I'm only skeptical of anonymous sources that contradict my beliefs. You know, you're probably right about that. It's basically unavoidable that we read things through the lenses we were given. Yes, everyone does that. No, it's not just conservatives. I think it would be a stupid assertion to make that kind of argument, that liberals see the world accurately and conservatives don't. That's not something I believe.

Anyone can take the skeptical argument to its extremes. Just how much can you know something? We shouldn't delve, but there are really good skeptical arguments against any justification of belief. Any one person committed enough can convince themselves of nearly any claim, using enough skeptical reasoning. What that means to me is, at a certain point, skepticism becomes pointless. You can't just go around treating every uncomfortable subject with skepticism. Note that this doesn't mean you must embrace every conclusion as essential truth. But until those bridges in what qualifies as justifications are gapped, people won't be able to conclude either way.

I think we both agree that the growing rift between the "two Americas" - the liberal and the conservative one - is concerning. Having a population grow divided is not good. It seems to me, where we disagree is how to approach solving the issue. I find I'm much more willing to separate camps into right and wrong camps - that in these debates, there is often a viewpoint that is more correct. But then, how do I justify my beliefs? What arrow is the one guiding me? I try, probably not entirely successfully, but I give an attempt, to read social, psychological, historical, and other research by relatively disinterested parties. It's not foolproof, and I obviously can't interpret it without bias as much as any of it still embeds hidden biases of the authors. But I think, if we're to compare three sources: conservative apologia, disinterested views, or liberal apologia, then I believe the disinterested views are more accurate. Not always, but more often than not.

On the other hand, I may be wrong about this, but it's my suspicion: you seem to read a bunch of conservative apologia on centrist websites. You want to listen, to hear them out. And in doing this, you seem to hold a deeper skepticism than I towards truth - you seem to think it's impossible to decipher history and politics from neutral sources and arrive at a more accurate conclusion, and that all viewpoints have validity, and that it's not really possible to be right or wrong about certain topics, or may even express deeper skepticism towards the ability of us to suss out the most accurate views from the cacophony of the world around us. You seem to think it's not possible to arrive at any real conclusions on political topics. On the other hand, believe it or not, I don't think I spend much time reading liberal apologia.

Now, I'm not trying to be accusatory here. I'm wondering why you seem to think coming to conclusions about political issues is so hard, or why you seem to express skepticism that somebody could say harsh things about Republicans without just expressing an unjustifiable political bias.

Maybe it's a question of temperament: you assume other people desire to be as opinionated as you yourself are, and are interested in putting as much thought into what's right and wrong for all time as you seem to have spent.

This may come across as anathema to you, but for some of us, the words "truth", "right", "wrong", and "neutral" are dangerous things to focus too much on.

Personally, I don't particularly care for attempts to shift a conversation one way or another based on conclusions that one of us may have reached and taken as a prior going into the discussion. Rather, I see conversation as a sort of dance in which we simply extract lines of reasoning from one another, but not necessarily caring if anything said is "true" or not. Who knows, really?

If something is said that rings totally false, eventually Jon`C will make fun of it anyway.

I don't feel I'm putting those words on a pedestal. When I say "neutral", I acknowledge that all people are biased, and so a "true neutral" doesn't exist. But that doesn't mean there's not a difference between any sources.

Same with "truth". We can't know the exact truth of very much, but that doesn't mean all statements must be held in equal regard.

What I'm saying is - I'm not under the impression we should seek out the pure truth of the matter, but this phony "ah weighing political opinions can't be done," as though it's an insurmountable task to make conclusions on topics, itself has the effect of shutting down discussions, often where they're most important.

I'm thus raising the question of how we determine truth about political topics. I tend to think just reading apologia for various sides and taking the mean is not an effective way to go about that, which I think is how many centrists determine what's true - a sort of blind mean over many topics.

Certainly, if Eversor is doing this, he should be called out for it.

But I don't mean to play referee here: these were just observations. You may have been making a subtle point that didn't need them.



Yes, I agree, this seems quite bad. I wouldn't presume to know if that is what's happening here though (though Eversor might have an opinion).

That said, I do think it's a bad idea to get too bogged down on meta issues like this, so don't mind me too much for bringing it up. It might be more straightforward for the two of you to go on with making your respective points. But thank you for obliging my curiosity on your reasoning here.

This is just offensive.

[quote=Donald Trump]
You don't know until you test it, but I think, I really believe I'd run in there, even if I didn't have a weapon, and I think most of the people in this room would have done that too
[/quote]

https://www.cnn.com/2018/02/26/politics/trump-florida-school-without-a-weapon/

I might have given him the benefit of the doubt here if he weren't a pathological liar, but... even if that was what he honestly thought, a normal person see how tactless and idiotic this kind of talk is.

Also, yes, I know, he's just a plain old moron.

Striking how similar this is to that Ben Carson clip, right? No recognition that the people there were in a life and death situation, and the suggestion that he would somehow transcend the dangers of the situation if he were there, presumably because he has some heroic personality-type, which people on the scene are at fault for not possessing.

I’m sure Donald Trump would handle the situation the same way he’s always handled being called to risk his life for public service.

Pay a doctor to lie about his bone spurs.

No, I'm not saying "since victimization is awful, no valid comparisons can be made". Since you missed the gist of what I was saying, why don't you go back and tell me why I wouldn't? I'm not trying to end the conversation with some big conversation-ending slam. I think just we're talking past each other. Maybe instead of having a big confusing fight where misunderstanding is mixed with disagreement, this way we can at least get to the point where we actually understand what we disagree about.

If there's one thing the Trump brand and name are associated with, it's selfless altruism.

So what you're saying is, if I understand correctly, that in a case like Israel-Palestine, both sides are actually victimized. The problem is, everywhere but especially in American politics, we instead seek for just "the victim" and "the oppressor" instead of understanding that most situations have a give and take. Is that correct?

Ok, so here, let me give you a little more guidance, Reid. Take, for example, what you said here:



I know why you originally brought up Israel and Palestinians, and why you were comparing it to the relative standing of Muslims and Christians in the US. But I also brought up Israeli rocket attacks in the first place because I thought they were illustrative of my own view. Remember, here's what I said:



Given what I say here, maybe you can respond by anticipating how I would correct your misreading of my view, if you were me?

Alright that last post of mine may not have been necessary, given your last response (although write if you have more to say). Hold on, responding to what you wrote above. (Might take a little while).

Yeah, it's not far off. The form many political discussions take in the US is that you win if you show your side is the underdog. If you have demonstrated that one group has it worse than another, you've proved that they alone are worth sympathy, and the concerns of others can be disregarded. But the relative suffering of one group compared to another -- the fact that X suffers less than Y -- does not make X's suffering and pain any less real, or any less significant to X. That way of arguing fails to recognize X's legitimate concerns. It is to look past them, because it's thought -- rather arbitrarily -- that taking X more seriously could only come at the expense of Y. Or, even, there's the claim that Y has it so bad means X's problems are not serious. If you're X, that argument is going to be infuriating. Not only do you have real problems, but people are effectively telling you that your concerns aren't as serious as you say they are, and they're giving you explanations for that view that are completely unrelatable to you.

To be sure, I'm not saying that everyone suffers,and therefore nothing can be done to address anyone's grievances. I'm saying that the way of arguing that I'm criticizing actually contracts the circle of people whose problems we take seriously, and privileges some over others, by virtue of the perception that they are more entitled to victim status than others.

Back of the line, Eversor.

A progressive heap would be more efficient.

So - by and large I agree. If we're comparing the struggles of most people - trying to dismiss one person's suffering is not okay. For instance, if a person pretends a white person who's poor doesn't struggle because they're white, then yeah, that's stupid. I feel that's a very Tumblr, teenage social justice view, though, I honestly don't think, for instance, most people would say poor white people have no problems - I think the intersectional argument is that they might have less problems, but intersectionality should only be used as a heuristic by people who actually know what it is and care - it doesn't guarantee anything about a person, it's just a loose guideline.

I'd like to point out that there are a few complications to this view, though. For one, people can have basically "false suffering". Yeah, in some sense, a teenage girl is suffering if her father cuts her monthly credit card allowance from $15k to $10k. But I would argue that, when compared to the plight of say, a child born into poor family in an inner city - this sort of suffering can indeed be disregarded as unimportant. So I think there is an element of exactly how much and what kind of suffering is at hand, and that some kinds can be dismissed, or said to be less important than others.



This is not as clear to me. I think it is both possible and rather common that attention paid to one person's suffering can eliminate the attention paid to another's. Especially when Y has grievances that are worse than X's. If X's grievances gets so much of the spotlight that Y is ignored - then yes, taking X more seriously is coming at the expense of Y.

I'm going to quote Martin Luther King Jr. here, because I think it's very relevant:



Particularly, the last line: '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."'

I think that, yes, by placing front and center the suffering of X - you can definitely put Y so far on the backburner their suffering is never addressed. And I think that's the relevant idea: it's not about the truth of whether X suffers, it's about the attention given to it, and if that attention blocks out other urgent voices.



I'm not going to say there wasn't a large block of voters who voted for Trump because of serious grievances. Lower income white people have been suffering, and that suffering is very real. But they aren't the voice of the Republican Party. They thought Trump was, but Trump's a liar. Neither the Republicans nor the Democrats actually care about their grievances. Nor do the Democrats do all that much to help minorities. I mean, they do more than nothing, but they don't do that much. The voices that you actually hear - the most prominent ones, are not people reflecting the voices of people in America. Universally, if you're disadvantaged in any way, no one listens, no one cares.

Which leads me back to the discussion of Republican voters. Do you think a majority of GOP voters are suffering? In what way are they suffering? Do you think they deserve more attention, or less, compared to, say, poor whites or blacks?

That's what Black Lives Matter was about, by the way. It wasn't saying "white people don't matter, hehe". That's what the right-wing strawman of it was. It was actually about having a voice, reflecting the feelings of Martin Luther King Jr: that if black people waited around forever waiting for white people to pay attention to their suffering, they never would, because wealthy white people historically only pay attention to themselves. And look at what the reaction was: "blue lives matter", "all lives matter". It was about taking the discussion off of that topic, to draw discussion away from suffering black people.

And that's the problem. It's not about the fact of whether white people suffer, it's about attention.

As regards Jones' post about the progressive stack, the progressive stack is a malformed, stupid approach to tackling the problem. It's not about creating specific rules to police who can talk and when.

Realistically, when I think of a typical Trump supporter getting "persecuted", what comes up in my mind is something like this. Or this.

Of course, that's not perfectly representative.. but given the vast majority of Trump voters were middle class white voters, who are still doing pretty well.. which doesn't mean they don't have any problems, like, wages have stagnated, and rural America is so neglected it's literally falling apart, but, many of these people still live relatively comfortable lives. I'm not saying they don't suffer, but frankly I'm not sold that this is worth paying as much attention to. Who really needs the most concern right now?

As far as Israel: yes, rocket attacks suck. However, in the mainstream reporting on Israel at least in America, you find a tendency to only emphasize how awful things are for Israelis, but pay little to no attention to the suffering of Palestinians. It's not that Israelis don't suffer any, though, but Palestinians are basically ignored.

I guess what I'm asking with all of this is: shouldn't the attention we give to suffering be somewhat in proportion to how much they are suffering? Is it not a problem if only certain kinds of suffering dominate the spotlight?

The progressive stack thing was meant jokingly, of course. If I had a deep enough appreciation for the discussion here to say something serious, I'd have refrained from basing it on something that is itself somewhat of a joke.

First of all, it's funny to me that you substituted X for whites and Y for African Americans. The whole point of using the symbols in the first place was that what I was trying to describe something that can happen to anyone, no matter who they happen to be. Your substitution undoes that.

Second, going back to the first paragraph quoted here more specifically, another thing I was trying to do what get you to think about things from X's perspective, whoever X might be. Sure, it's possible that Y starts getting more attention. But then imagine how that feels to X. Probably not very good.

But I think that this reveals the faulty reasoning behind this whole analysis of keeping score on victimhood. The assumption here is that there's some finite amount of attention out there, and that it ought to be dispensed in proportion to the suffering that is out there. That might seem very reasonable as an argument, but I don't think it squares with reality. Whose attention is finite? Who is the person whose attention should be diverted to things in proportion to how significant they are in reality? We all live in silos, we all see whatever we happen to see given the media we consume. There's an infinite stream of content constantly being spewed out on nearly every issue imaginable. If a person/group isn't satisfied with how much attention they get under those circumstances, what circumstances could possibly satisfy them?

You can say that there's dissonance, and that there's a misalignment between our thoughts about who's suffering and the reality of the matter. But there's equally a misalignment between our thoughts about how much attention any individual group gets, and how much attention they actually get. And the whole struggle for attention -- making it all about attention -- means that the desire to seek attention is probably infinite, because I can't imagine that reality would ever align with fact, and the desire for attention would ever be consummated.

Third, you keep saying something that seems really wrong to me. You keep saying something that sounds like this:



I can't imagine that you actually mean what you're saying here. You must be saying this even though you mean something else, but you said this more than once, so I don't know! Obviously, the thing that is important, the thing we care about, is addressing the suffering itself, not the recognition of the suffering. We want to stop the police brutality against African Americans; it wouldn't be enough if African Americans merely felt that everyone recognized the humiliations they endure.

I do think that this has been the goal of a lot of liberal politics in the past few years. The idea has been to make the political personal and to divorce politics entirely from policy and make it all about competition over recognition. It shouldn't surprise anyone that that kind of politics doesn't help anyone, and leads to endless conflict between groups who feel constantly beleaguered, as if they're losing the attention war (whether they are or not), and think they're more deserving of attention and recognition than their foes. (And, I should highlight again, that to make matters worse, this is seen as a zero-sum conflict.)



Oooph. Good luck with that. I think the train's left the station with that one.



Sure, there's a difference between legitimate and illegitimate claims. However, I probably think that the illegitimate claims are more evenly distributed across demographic lines than you do. (Operative word there is more.)

If we care about things in proportion to suffering, then we shouldn't be talking about Israel and Palestine at all, and should talk instead about the Sinai insurgency in Egypt, the Oromo conflict in Ethiopia, wars in Nigeria, Darfur, Boko Haram, the Somali Civil War, the Kashmir conflict, war in Iraq and Afghanistan, or even the Mexican Drug War. Each of these conflicts have resulted in drastically more deaths than the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in 2017 and 2018 alone (as in, by a factor of 10, or even 100). Yet we never talk about some of them, and we have a severely exaggerated sense of how important the Israeli-Palestinian conflict actually is, and how many people die because of it.



I'm sure that Palestinians and Palestinian advocates feel ignored. It's a large part of the Palestinian narrative that Palestinians are forgotten, and it has been for many decades. But the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is also one of the most prominent issues on the agenda of the international community. Don't you think that Nigerians and Somalis wish that they got even a small portion of the attention that Palestinians get internationally? (And, yes, I'm being facetious. I'm trying to point out how ridiculous fighting for attention is.)

Haven't read it, but from the summary, it sounds like this guy was onto something w.r.t. society paying more attention to abstractions instead of reality (in this thread, the semblance of compassion for suffering rather then the actual alleviating of suffering):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Society_of_the_Spectacle

The reason is because Israel is a westernized liberal democracy and we expect such countries to behave differently today. Lots of people are upset about the conditions in Somalia, but it's also not shocking or enraging because as far as westerners are concerned the Somalians have no mores to break. Israel does.

Plus, what are you gonna do to Somalia? Boycott 'em? lol.

That's a reason, no doubt. I think another reason is that many western countries believe they have a stake in the conflict (as in, take themselves to be responsible for it) because of the role the international community (specifically the United Nations, but not exclusively) played in the creation of the State of Israel and, by extension, the Palestinian refugee problem.

But this all just supplements my main point, I believe. The reasons why we care about issues -- whether rightly or wrongly -- isn't reducible to how much human suffering they cause. It probably shouldn't be.

I disagree with the latter.

For starters, the international community didn't want anything resembling Israel as it is today. The United Nations had a starkly different vision for what the country should be, and western countries (particularly Britain) actively tried to halt migration in order to prevent Israel from becoming a thing. As-is, it's not a product of the international community at all, the Jewish diaspora deserves all of the credit.

Secondly, it's far from the only example. Criticism of Israel is not dissimilar to the criticism of South African apartheid (outside of the United States, at least). The international community had nothing to do with South Africa. Arguably the British and Dutch had some culpability, and Canada for teaching the South Africans how to do it, but they were an independent country and the architects of their own horrors.

I think if western opinions are being swayed at all by perceived complicity in the I/P conflict, it's encouraging the Americans to uncritically adore Israel. Not criticize them.

Absolutely.

TBT, I couldn't force myself to get through whatever you and Reid were debating above, but clearly human suffering isn't the most important factor in our emotional investment.