Let's make fun of Trump, bash him, etc. while we can!

[Bob Butler 54]

(08-29-2016, 02:06 PM)pbrower2a Wrote:

(08-29-2016, 01:17 PM)ob Butler 54 Wrote:

(08-29-2016, 09:38 AM)pbrower2a Wrote: Values lock -- one cannot legitimately understand why others hold the views that they have, and probably can't legitimately express the views of others.

So how can someone be wrong?

1. Intellectual inadequacy, a/k/a stupidity or ignorance.
2. Insanity and delusion.
3. Gross inadequacy of moral standards, as with sociopaths and sadists.
4. Selling out to the highest bidder.
5. Myopic class interest.
6. Brainwashing.
7. Fear -- fear the tyrant who can do anything to one or the God that can have one burn in Hell for the slightest deviation.
8. Revenge-seeking against old enemies.

I would start looking in other places, though my list contains rewords of yours.

Self Interest:  If one is living day to day, having trouble finding a good job, living on Main Street day to day, one is apt to sympathize with Demand Side economics, approve of government assisted health care and otherwise lean blue.  If one has a large stock portfolio, is secure in one's job, has a large inheritance, then tax breaks to the wealthy, reduced capitol gains taxes, and paying one's own way rather than sharing burdens through tax and spend seem like good ideas.

Cultural Difference: One inherits a lot of one's parent's beliefs.  What worked for them gets preached to the new generation.  Churches and schools are a similar sources for explanations of how things work and ought to work.  For many, it is hard to let go of one's upbringing.

Situation Difference:  If one is living in wide open spaces, self reliance and independence can be productive, prudent and wise.  There is just more travel involved to get together and play team games.  If one lives in an urban area, the opposite can be true.

These are three common, broad and bland examples, but there are a lot more reasons for sincere disagreement.  If one is in the habit of solving a given problem in a given way, and it generally works, there is going to be sincere resistance to giving up the tried and true for an untried scheme.

Now, I'm not saying the things on your list never happen.  I just prefer to assume that someone I disagree with is intelligent, sane, and acting reasonably based on the world as he sees it.  I will try to maintain a benefit of the doubt as long as reasonably possible.  Someone might come from a different environment, a different culture, and thus have different world views and values.  However, I assume that the culture evolved to suit the place he came from.  Common cultures come to exist for a reason.  Understanding said reasons is a vital part of the process of political discussion.  If one hasn't made a sincere attempt to understand where the other guy is coming from, one shouldn't knee jerk instantly assume that he is evil, stupid, insane, brainwashed, etc...

That is the biggest difference between us.  I am ready to assume sincere differences between cultures, world views and values.  You are far more apt to assume that anyone who disagrees with you has major league mental or moral problems.  I consider the assumption that any disagreement in world views and values must be due to some sort of moral or mental deficiency to be a major and most problematic symptom of values lock.  Anyone who assumes that your list of reasons for disagreement above are common reasons for political disagreement is apt to be having values lock problems.

I was looking for some reasons for someone being absolutely wrong so that we could rule out others. Ethnicity, religion, region, and class cannot make one wrong as can idiocy, superstition, malice, perversion*, lunacy, or cowardice. Using such a technique as brainwashing to convince those on the wrong side of an ethnic, religious, regional, or class divide of some revolutionary way of thought will itself be wrong should it be tried. If one can develop some high ethical standard based on one's core beliefs then one has some justification worthy of recognition.

Someone can be terribly wrong for any of the reasons that I mentioned. Seeing the world differently because one has lived in the Ozarks all one's life and is a Protestant of Scots-Irish origin instead of mid-town Manhattan and being a Catholic of Puerto Rican origin is not wrong or right -- either way. One's environment can be a very pervasive and indelible truth. If one likes where one is, then one may have a good cause to defend the assumptions that go with the environment. We are going to accept environmental differences or we are going to have horrible strife, perhaps as in Spain in the 1930s or in the dissolution of Yugoslavia.  We will need solutions that make ethnicity, religion, region, and class irrelevant to the solution. Yes, I know how nasty history can be. History is a violent, obscene tale written to no small extent in the blood of innocent people.

Don't fool yourself: this Crisis could end in the rifting of America into multiple new entities. and not even along state lines. Such would be an ugly mess. People on the wrong side of some demarcation line because of their religion or ethnicity could be in big trouble. Getting the dubious privilege to stay where one is might depend on acquiescence in second-class citizenship (I am thinking of the large black minority in the South which could face Jim Crow policies again). Remember that in such rifting, majority rule could be the choices that a local lynch mob makes. Yes, lynch mobs  make their decisions by majority vote -- very reliably. That's why we have constitutional protections that ensure that certain decisions that majorities can impose upon a helpless minority not be made.

One could recognize the legitimacy of other people's viewpoints because of some environmental factor from ethnicity to age to the rural/urban/suburban divide.

Class differences? There could be successor polities that accept the principle that maximal inequality is the best way to get the economic growth necessary to escape post-Crisis poverty. If one is a worker in such a place, then the surest way to the improvement of one's situation will be to emigrate -- no matter how over-heated the local economy is.  Some could even adopt Karl Marx as a Founding Father. Such will fail.

I could easily see myself fitting in in some foreign countries than in some of the post-Crisis polities of America. Maybe in such a Crisis I will be fortunate to find that my polity has shown its intention to join Canada after some shaky period of independence.

We may be in such deep trouble that the United States of America as we know it may be irrelevant by the end of the Crisis. The United States will not be the first great entity to splinter as its political order becomes unsustainable. We messed up badly when a bare majority chose to realign the basis of political representation to the permanent advantage of that temporary majority. Democracy can die that way.  


*Homosexuality is OK.

I don't know.  Ethnicity as in the KKK of a century or so back, religion when a fundamentalist is examining evolutionary biology, politics effecting the understanding of global warming...  Some quite understandable culturally driven factors can make you pretty (expletive deleted) wrong.  The different and quite firm opinions on the effectiveness of large government social programs and the usefulness of supply vs demand side stimulus are of a like nature.  It is possible to see how the cultural divides came to occur, why people believe as they do, but resolving the conflict is very problematic.

I'm not so worried about enough people being brainwashed to start a revolution, nor a social upheaval led by the stupid and insane.  I worry more about the intensely sincere normal.

I do watch the spirals of violence.  I don't disregard major upheaval as impossible.  I just don't see things starting to go critical yet.  There was a bump of blacks killed followed by cops killed earlier in the summer, but the response was 'this has got to stop' not 'they got one of ours, we must get two of theirs.'  The long hot summer wasn't nearly as long or hot as the summers I recall from my youth.

We'll see.