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Doomposting
- Thread starter Revoltingest
- Start date
Everyone is wrong except me.
I found this thread, which exemplifies hostile
partisanship, & also the prejudice based upon
impressions referred to in post# 106....
The Pitifully Flawed, Unreliable Judgment Behind Voting for Trump for "No War"
Excerpted from the OP....
Many Trump voters said they elected him instead of Hillary Clinton because he was "less warlike." Now a war with Iran is basically a reality, almost entirely thanks to Trump's ill-conceived handling of foreign relations and negotiations.
This, in my opinion, is a stark reminder for anyone who knows such Trump voters to thoroughly dismiss and disregard their political judgments in the future as unreliable, irrational, and flawed. We would all be better served by ignoring their input on future matters of considerable political gravitas.
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I see no right or wrong....just opinions.
The problem arises when some people's children
believe their opinions are The Truth. All others
are as wrong as Satan's toe jam.
More often than not, I see this more as a matter of "whose ox is gored," at least when determining which side is "more harmful" than the other.
I don't see it as a false equivalency when saying something like "to the average worker bee, their life will be essentially the same regardless of which side holds power." The "equivalence" is in the eye of the beholder.
On important issues like economics and foreign policy, both sides have been pretty much the same. Both sides support capitalism and both sides support US interventionism/imperialism. Just that by itself is harmful enough, and both parties support such policies with equal enthusiasm.
You compared Dems & Pubs!
One's age affects perspective too. I recall back
when Dems opposed civil rights legislation that
Nixon signed. Johnson expanded the Vietnam
War, but Nixon ended it & also cancelled the draft.
Over the last half century, I watched the trophy
for Greatest Evil be passed back & forth.
Younger posters won't have see that history as
vividly as one who lived thru it.
And we must recognize that what's evil or good
to you won't always be the same for me. Nobody
gets to own The Truth in matters subjective &
value laden.
When you say "to make the other side look bad," is that in the context of a moral judgment on a personal level or an actual political stance?
The reason I ask is that one could probably find many equivalencies and similarities between US liberals and conservatives. There's a great deal of overlap between both positions - and they probably agree on more things than either of them are willing to admit. Of course, there are still plenty of issues on which they disagree.
But in recent years, there's been a certain political tactic involving shaming and moral condemnation - in order to propagate the idea that an individual or group of individuals are "deplorable," "evil," or otherwise irredeemable and should be shunned as a pariah for life. It's usually in that context where "false equivalency" comes into the argument, not so much related to the actual concepts or alleged actions, but the intensity of the condemnation.
Because if we were talking solely about abstract concepts or specific, provable actions and comparing them to each other, then it should be easy enough to address those concepts, point by point, to see where there's differences and similarities and make a reasonable determination of whether there is any kind of "equivalency." It doesn't have to be that mysterious - or even all that much to argue about.
But this isn't about that. This is about someone's ax to grind, the desire to blacken and impugn politician X from political party Y, and declare most (or all) of them to be "evil" and "deplorable." There's nobody more evil than X, and anyone who suggests otherwise has to be resolutely rejected out of hand.
My view is more that of an outsider looking in. I'm kind of a history buff, and my observations of history are that there's always been a certain "amoral" flavor within politics and government in general. Politics tends to be more practical and pragmatic, while the moralistic, sanctimonious, melodramatic side of it is for public consumption and propaganda purposes. Not that I don't believe governments and politicians should be moral, but I recognize the reality that much of the time, they don't really think in those terms.
Government is amoral. Politics is amoral. Humanity is evil, and we're all guilty. How's that for doomposting?
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I remember when the Dems were pretty well divided, particularly on issues like war, peace, and civil rights. That '68 Chicago Convention turned out to be a fiasco.
I suppose good and evil can be defined also by their motives. The actions associated with war might be the same, although they become different depending on the motives and causes behind a decision to engage in warfare. Sometimes there's a good reason or a just cause, even if it might mean engaging in activities that some regard as evil.
Hey now, as a card carrying member of US, I'm deeply offended by your suggestion that we should be fair and tolerant in our assessment of THEM.
They're THEM for a reason you know.
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Either or both.
I oppose the obsession with equivalence.
There can be faults in common, with differences
in frequency & severity both known & unknown.
Answering the last question....
No.
"Jan 7, 2020"
Three years and one month old. Pretty sure I'd view most of my posts about religion from back then quite differently now, let alone ones about politics.
Like I said, I assumed you had recent posts in mind when you made this OP. Was that an incorrect assumption?
I can see multiple issues on which comparing the harmful impact of each party does come down to personal priorities, and those are the issues where I think rhetoric like "basket of deplorables" is most narrow-minded and unproductive.
Economic policy is a solid example, although it seems to me that in the last several years, the GOP has also entirely dropped the ball on that well beyond the Democrats, which says something considering that the latter haven't exactly been prioritizing the concerns of the working class.
Foreign policy is a trickier one. Before Biden's presidency, I would have agreed that both parties were quite similarly damaging in terms of their hawkish, interventionist policies. Biden himself voted for the Iraq War, although he has acknowledged that as a mistake. Hillary Clinton was even more hawkish, and so was Obama, who had ostensibly peaceful campaign promises but ended up becoming part of the exact same status quo. It also doesn't help that Michelle Obama is bosom buddies with George W. Bush, a bona fide war criminal.
On the other hand, Trump almost pulled the US into a war with Iran, and he continually antagonized China carelessly and unnecessarily. Ever since a wing of the GOP became fixated on following Trump and his politics, they have become unpredictable, volatile, and unstable. I wouldn't trust Trump or anyone with similar politics and a similar attitude with the red button, nor would I trust them not to recklessly start another avoidable and useless war.
But all of this also brings up another question: if both parties are similar in terms of foreign and economic policy, isn't that even more reason to compare them on the basis of other issues, where they differ more significantly? There's a solid case to be made that even on those two fronts, the GOP's platform has slid back into being the more dangerous one in recent years.
Even if many average worker bees won't feel an economic difference between the two, there are numerous other issues that could affect many in the working and middle classes—such as treatment of undocumented immigrants, access to reproductive health care, and health insurance policies. This is without touching on their management of the pandemic, where Republican policies have led to large-scale loss of life and illness.
A lot of the arguments I have seen in various outlets arguing that "both sides are terrible" or invoking the horseshoe theory have come from purported "centrists" or other commentators who don't oppose capitalism and don't criticize both parties on that basis. If anything, they sometimes do quite the opposite: they demonize socialism by equating all forms thereof to those enacted in the USSR and Maoist China while extolling the perceived virtues of capitalism or repeating American nationalistic rhetoric that glorifies capitalist countries and demonizes allegedly communist or socialist ones—the same kind of discourse that underpinned a lot of support for the Vietnam War.
In my opinion, pushing back against this is useful because it denies proponents of a troubling status quo the opportunity to use legitimate issues as a springboard to advance problematic politics. Populists tend to use talking points that may seem relatable to the average person, but their actions and actual policies usually end up going in the diametrically opposite direction or, at the very least, harming and scapegoating certain minorities for purely ideological and religious reasons.
PureX
Veteran Member
If the accusation is accurate, then they have "demonized" themselves. But when one cannot accept that, he looks for ways of shifting the blame, and changing the focus, to make the accuser become the accused. It happens ALL THE TIME here and elsewhere, especially among those who align themselves with a republican party that has become a whole pack of "demons" these days.
Oh, does the thread not illustrate fomenting
partisan division & hostility because it's past
its "best by" date? And the latter part of the
thread deals with impressions & inferences
being mistaken.
The point of linking it is to show that we should
honor the spirit of the forum, ie, keep it about
the issues, & not the poster. But that's straying
from the OP, which is about not having liberals
& conservatives duking it out with a new thread
bashing some politician for the purpose of
making the entire other side look bad.
I have no idea what this has to do with the points I have made here or how it is relevant to them. Did you create this thread to discuss concerns about threads that are a few years old (or older)?
Okay, this is more germane to the topic. Which of those threads did you have in mind?
Both sides have their accuracy.
But the problem is using it to demonize.
I could say several stinging yet accurate things about you.
Should I, just cuz they're true?
Nah.
We should strive for civility, not hostility.
PureX
Veteran Member
We should strive for honesty, first. Civility without honesty is just a cover up.
I'd responded to a specific request you made.
But you think the link is too old....without
addressing what's in it at all.
Posting it again....
More proof the right wing is essentially comprised of closet fascists
Actually, we are supposed to "cover up" some
of our views. Imagine if I told people how stupid,
ignorant, bigoted, & worthless they are.
You should thank me for honoring RF's rules,
& not going all Alec Baldwin on everyone.