This is starting to feel slightly perfunctory.
Maybe you're exhausted because, rather than substantive debate being a constructive and invigorating process where views are challenged and reformed to account for counterarguments, it's just treated like a series of blows you need to block and counter. I can tell you, from experience, that that's much worse: it's draining rather than stimulating, and it treats insight as zero sum.
I'm not sure why you say "for," as if it's something that happened to me, rather than something I did and chose. The point is that circumstances are not forcing you to adopt extreme positions or responses, and being outnumbered in political arguments is not special or unique, so I'm a little puzzled to see someone else go through the same thing and immediately decide it must mean everything is terrible and broken.
Why can't someone be humble
and detail the ways the world is busted and needs to be remade? Well, technically nothing, but that's a pretty thin line to walk. It's pretty hard to have a full appreciation for how complicated the world is and how difficult its problems are and still feel confident you know what's best for it.
Am I supposed to infer from that "too" that I would've been right to think you were talking about me anyway?
I'm not sure how much it describes you. You don't elaborate on your thought process. I don't recall hearing much of anything about the internal workings of how these beliefs are formed, and I don't see much indication that if I put out a good counterargument (or even note a clear contradiction) that it's accounted for in any way the next time the topic comes up.
Obligatory:
Who else would argue with
everything you don't like? Well, nobody, I guess, but most of us have made our peace with the idea that objectionable opinions will exist and not every single one of them needs to be contradicted every time. At minimum, I think the goal should be to only engage if someone is prepared to register something more substantive and persuasive than mere contradiction. Otherwise, it's not really in service of the belief, it's just to make ourselves feel better.
It probably doesn't help that most of the conservatives I do get exposed to don't exactly display much in the way of intellectual rigour.
The quality of disagreement you get is almost totally within your own control. Nearly every time I try to give you a serious and substantive discussion on any of this, a) it's really short-lived and/or b) I get a complaint about why I'm bothering to argue with you as opposed to someone else.
I don't think this is really how to consider competing ideas, anyway. Are you actually forming beliefs by just aggregating whatever forum arguments you run into and dismissing the underlying philosophy based on their quality? Because that's arguing
people, not
ideas. If you're considering the underlying ideas themselves, you just need to find the best formulations of it and grapple with those.
Some things you just can't be nice about, I guess.
That's fine, but your response here has shifted. You started off saying "it doesn't matter how respectful I am," and now you're saying "I can't actually be respectful about this stuff." So if you admit this stuff has to be talked about this way, why the initial confusion about why it's met with hostility?
I would think it depends on how aggressive the status quo is in the first place more so than how strongly one agrees or disagrees about whether it should continue to exist in its current form.
The salient point is that, in any situation where you treat the status quo as an aggression, you've erased any distinction between civility and attack, and that has pretty huge implications both for how you end up talking to people, and how they end up responding. You can take whatever posture you like, but I'm specifically explaining why the responses you're met with are a result of these foundational and philosophical choices, and not just something awful people are attacking you with out of nowhere.
Also, why am I not surprised that you don't exactly hold my personal views in high regard (or possibly don't get the "intellectual moorings", but like you said, that's its own discussion)?
Probably because I've straight-up told you I disagree with a lot of it. I didn't think it was a secret. I'd be surprised if you were surprised.
Anyway, I'm fairly confident I understand the intellectual moorings of the things you advocate pretty well. I think understanding the idea you're disputing
on its own terms and still being able to explain why it's wrong is a prerequisite for disagreeing with it at all, let alone publicly. Which can be pretty frustrating when you see little indication that the person you're arguing with is doing the same.
As for the matter of suspending civility and debate, I'd have to ask what exactly about these particular views that you don't consider sufficiently exceptional.
Which views? A big part of the problem here, I think, is that I'm talking about a pretty wide variety of disagreements and the posture in all of them, and you're talking about, presumably, the worst of the worst. It would pay to be much more specific in a lot of these responses, I think.
You'd think so, but now everyone's arguing about the politics of the movies as well - you could start a "Is Die Hard a Christmas movie" thread now and it stands a good chance of turning into arguments over Sgt. Powell's tragic backstory ageing badly or whatever.
That's kinda my point: people are arguing about the politics of movies even when they don't really have much in the way of explicit politics. There is no neutral ground in the culture war.
The big leap comes when people decide that anything which
could influence the culture, even indirectly or unquantifiably, should therefore be subject to the same level of scrutiny and debate as things which directly and explicitly do so. In other words, sure, random things in movies and TV shows change how we think. But that doesn't make them as important as community policing standards, or whatever.
That all things feed into culture is true (and this is yet another area where cultural conservatives basically were saying decades ago what progressives are suddenly championing), but it doesn't follow from that that all of them can or should be interrogated all the time for it.
Perhaps "getting on with their lives" isn't really an option in some cases.
I'm sure this is true in some cases, but I don't think most people's day to day lives are appreciably different now than they were two years ago. I think the overwhelming majority of the impact is psychological. Which is not to say it doesn't matter, but which is to say that at least some of this is self-fulfilling and elective.
Even if this were true, however, you'd be answering your own question earlier, re: why is there so much arguing and why is everything a battle. Because here, you're positing the possibility that some people have no choice but to fight on every front. You can bemoan this as awful and inevitable, but I'm not sure how you can find it confusing and surprising, given how vital you argue it is in other parts of the same post.
Closed Thread
.
If interacting with these people is a negative experience you should not expose yourself to it.
Maybe we need one of these threads every few months
, there like a big Christmas office party.
