20 ms·

This one gave me the most pause: > “Silicon Valley is incredibly unwelcoming to alternative points of view. Your curiosity, if it is sincere, is the very rare

by Yhippa 10y ago

This one gave me the most pause: > “Silicon Valley is incredibly unwelcoming to alternative points of view. Your curiosity, if it is sincere, is the very rare exception to the rule.” Substitute "Silicon Valley" for any major liberal enclaves, like universities and cities, and I think you see the same thing. I am skeptical by nature and try to take a scientific view of new ideas. However I feel like I get shouted down every time I merely bring up a contrarian view. People start throwing link after link of facts and don't want to even reason about ideas. It's hopeless and I end up keeping my mouth shut.

gambiting 10y ago
I think it's because "alternative point of view" immediately makes me think of someone saying that global warming is fake, and yeah,I'm not willing to debate that, it's just not worth my time. I'm curious what sort of ideas you have in mind though.
- Yhippa 10y ago
  Let's take illegal immigration. Is it wrong for this administration to enforce our current laws? If so maybe the laws need to be crafted to something different. While I don't agree with this administration's methodology this is probably the first time in a while I have seen the reality of our existing laws being executed and now we're seeing the effects of that. I am generally pro-immigration but I like to challenge my own thoughts and biases to make sure I don't have any blind spots.
  - dmode 10y ago
    Immigration laws were already being enforced vigorously. Obama administration set the record in deportation and was often called the "Deporter in Chief". And all of this was done without raising xenophobia and labeling a group of people as hard criminals and rapists.
    - darkmouth 10y ago
      I think they are referring to the protests that arose when media reported that non-violent illegal immigrants are being deported.
      - davidw 10y ago
        Like when a mother was separated from her sons? I wonder why that might set people off...
        dlp211 10y ago
        Furthering your point. Consider that Paul Ryan also doesn't want to deport dreamers/daca or break up families [1] is it any surprise. This isn't a partisan POV, there are legislators on both sides of the aisle that recognize the complexity of the problem and that ultimately it doesn't make sense to be so black-and-white. Our immigration process is severely broken especially for migrant workers. They are an integral part of our economy and would, in most cases, choose to come here legally if they were given the opportunity. What we should be doing is giving these people work visas with a path to citizenship. We have already seen the adverse effects of eliminating illegal immigrants from being able to work as farm labor, crops rot in the field [2], and when prices rise, it will present opportunities to importers to put farmers out of business for good. I should also state that I have no issues with deporting, though I don't understand why we don't incarcerate, unauthorized immigrants who commit violent crime(s). These people should be removed from our society. [1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/plum-line/wp/2017/01/13/in-remarkable-exchange-with-undocumented-mom-paul-ryan-exposes-cruelty-of-trumpism/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/plum-line/wp/2017/01/13... [2] http://www.forbes.com/sites/realspin/2012/05/17/the-law-of-unintended-consequences-georgias-immigration-law-backfires/#12c47f96404a http://www.forbes.com/sites/realspin/2012/05/17/the-law-of-u...
        deleted 10y ago
        [deleted]
    - jlewis7272 10y ago
      </sarcasm>
  - darkmouth 10y ago
    I am a staunch liberal and I don't understand the hostility towards deportation of illegal immigrants either. Calling illegal immigrants undocumented immigrants doesn't make the illegal part go away.
    - cr0sh 10y ago
      Deportation probably wouldn't be such a problem if they weren't also deporting legal residents along with the "illegal" ones. Yes - this happens. We still don't know how many Sherriff Joe and other officials in Arizona deported. It was basically a program here of "if you're brown enough, don't speak enough english, and can't produce any docs on the spot" you had a good chance of being rounded up, sent to an ICE facility, then deported. Even if you were a born-here American - just because you were of Mexican descent, and didn't learn english.
      - leesalminen 10y ago
        Serious question: why would an American citizen choose to not learn the national language? Doesn't that disadvantage you severely in life?
        darkmouth 10y ago
        The other day I was at a mexican restaurant and the waiter forgot to bring water. I got up and went to the kitchen to ask where the water cooler was. The woman who saw me was unable to understand what "water" meant. Water. Let that sink in.
        eli_gottlieb 10y ago
        Ok, so ask, "Donde esta el agua?".
        splintercell 10y ago
        It's not just about 'choice', I live in a predominantly Russian neighborhood with a Russian wife, but no matter how hard I try I can't learn Russian because they all very conveniently speak English. Similarly, if you're Hispanic, it would be hard for you to learn English if everyone else around you speaks a convenient language (i.e. Spanish), even if they could speak both the languages easily. It's kind of a trap, you'd learn English more easily if you left Spanish speaking community, but because you don't know English, it's hard to leave that community.
  - davidw 10y ago
    General immigration reform along these lines is what's needed: http://johnhcochrane.blogspot.com/2014/06/the-optimal-number-of-immigrants.html http://johnhcochrane.blogspot.com/2014/06/the-optimal-number... http://www.cnn.com/2016/08/29/opinions/making-legal-immigration-attainable-johnson/ http://www.cnn.com/2016/08/29/opinions/making-legal-immigrat... Because the current system is really broken: see what it's like to try and immigrate, legally, from Mexico if you just want to do manual labor.
    - Yhippa 10y ago
      > Because the current system is really broken: see what it's like to try and immigrate, legally, from Mexico if you just want to do manual labor. See, this is what would be most interesting for me to discuss with my friends. There is obviously a demand for those services that Americans possibly don't want to do (I'm not completely clear on if they want to or not). What can we do to make this a more sane process for everybody involved? I thought there was some progress in the past and the Republicans were almost on board but it never got over the hump for whatever reason.
      - davidw 10y ago
        > What can we do to make this a more sane process for everybody involved? It probably doesn't involve starting from the premise that they're "bad people". My answer would be more along the lines of "ok, you can come and work, just register and complete this background check, and you'll be good to go in a month". It might involve a longer wait for citizenship or no access to certain benefits, which is something that is, of course, already in place for legal immigrants, or other compromises, but making otherwise honest people 'illegal' isn't really working. Letting honest people go through an easy process also has the benefit of 'separating the wheat from the chaff' - if you see someone who is sneaking around or otherwise not documented, you have a much stronger reason to think they're up to no good, rather than simply washing dishes on the sly.
      - naravara 10y ago
        >Republicans were almost on board but it never got over the hump for whatever reason. The "whatever reason" you're grasping at is the latent racism of the Republican base. As much as you want to believe the focus is on "illegal" immigration the Republican base understands this as a coded dog whistle for not liking Brown people. It's not about a marketplace of ideas, it's about signaling which tribe you align with. The marketplace of ideas happens in the policy world, not the political world.
  - jlewis7272 10y ago
    Are you pro-immigration or pro-illegal immigration?
    - aetherson 10y ago
      I'm both. I mean, I'd love to not be pro-illegal immigration, and if we significantly loosened our immigration laws (not to the point of genuine open borders, but to the point where a reasonable person had a path to permanent residency in the US without it being a lottery), then I'd be anti-illegal immigration. But with the status quo, I'm pro-illegal immigration.
  - TheCoelacanth 10y ago
    > Is it wrong for this administration to enforce our current laws? No, but it is wrong if it breaks other laws in the attempt to enforce the law. Any realistic attempt to deport millions and millions of people will almost invariably run afoul of the 4th amendment because there would be no way to find that many people without unlawful searches.
- JustSomeNobody 10y ago
  Your comment is very interesting. You immediately started "shouting down" the OP. Only at the end, did you ask about their ideas.
- gred 10y ago
  "I'm willing to listen ${them}, as long as they don't question ${sacred_cow}" is a key aspect of the unwelcoming behavior described by the interviewee. To use your example, I'd wager that most global warming skeptics (especially the ones that you'll meet in SV) have a more developed and nuanced perspective than "global warming is fake". Sure, we don't have infinite time or patience to fully understand and empathize with each other, but even a cursory exploration should be able to put the caricature in your head to rest.
  - drewrv 10y ago
    Pretty much everyone uses heuristic filters to decide what's worth consideration and what isn't. If a lay person's opinion of a scientific theory is outside the scientific mainstream, it's probably bunk. What is the goal in trying to understand their perspective on this issue? I don't get offended when people refuse to listen to my alternative views on the late Roman Empire.
    - gred 10y ago
      There's probably no downside... until there are twenty sacred cows, the aggregate heuristics are filtering out half of the country, and Trump is commander-in-chief...
      - Bartweiss 10y ago
        I keep seeing people who are staunchly on the left ask "what's the downside?", and it baffles me. As someone generally non-conservative, I spend a bizarre amount of time going "The downside is everything you're seeing right now! You can't say that America is in crisis and then say that there's no problem with these techniques!" Even if the sacred cows are all 100% correct, losing is a downside. There's no point in celebrating how correct we are about something while completely failing to act on that knowledge.
  - Bartweiss 10y ago
    > "I'm willing to listen ${them}, as long as they don't question ${sacred_cow}" More broadly, this seems to be how most of politics (especially recent American politics) operates on either side. Anything is open to debate and discussion as long as it doesn't seriously threaten to make someone change their behavior. You can even persuade someone to change their views, as long as their new views can support the thing they want to keep doing. Humans (myself included) are amazing at rationalizing, and hate serious challenges to their deeply held positions. But I do think it's a useful pattern to recognize. The best tool I know for genuinely well-intentioned debate is to open with "What would make you change your position on ${issue}?" Unless both people can consciously identify a point or set of points that would be sufficient to alter their belief/behavior, there's not much chance of progress.
sxcurry 10y ago
Except that the contrarian views frequently turn out to be lies, and I can't spend all my time debating lies. Please suggest a contrarian view that's worth discussing.
- Yhippa 10y ago
  > Except that the contrarian views frequently turn out to be lies What do you mean by this?
  - darkmouth 10y ago
    global warming, evolution, abortion, birth control, LGBT, Size of military, refugees
    - pklausler 10y ago
      You forgot crime rates, taxation relative to other developed countries, the causes of the Civil War, and whether there really are footprints on the Moon.
    - baseten 10y ago
      degree of earth curvature, extent of lizard population in federal government, which party gets to sacrifice infants to baal this month, who controls the weather on tuesdays, etc.
    - dustinmr 10y ago
      If you don't see how these comments prove his points, you should reread over and over and over again until you do. Every analysis of "How the hell did he win?" that I've seen has basically been that no one else listened to the people outside the population centers, or outside mainstream thought. He did and crafted a campaign based on it. So listen. Just because you disagree or think they are lies, or whatever, doesn't mean you won't learn something about why those people think the way they do. No one is saying you have to agree. Credit to the author for actually listening.
  - skylan_q 10y ago
austenallred 10y ago
I moved to San Francisco from a rural town, and I would feel 10x more comfortable sharing my liberal viewpoints in a small, deeply-red town than I would insinuating something anything less than 100% left-leaning at work here. People disagree in small town Utah, and it would be uncomfortable. In San Francisco you're ostracized. It even makes me nervous to leave my name attached to a comment like this, knowing that my co-workers browse HN and will see it.
- Florin_Andrei 10y ago
  > I moved to San Francisco from a rural town, and I would feel 10x more comfortable sharing my liberal viewpoints in a small, deeply-red town than I would insinuating something anything less than 100% left-leaning at work here. Maybe because in the latter case you're at work, as opposed to talking to folks in the neighborhood at home? EDIT: lol, I'm posting a reply to a comment talking about ideological intolerance and shutting down of discussion, and my post is downvoted with no explanation. :) ROTFL "It's the other side who are always doing this", for sure. Yeah.
- tylerwhipple 10y ago
  I went from Salt Lake City to San Francisco as well. I have always been quite liberal on issues and it had never been a problem, but when discussing issues in SF I felt I had to be very careful with what I supported. I always felt my friendships/employment was threatened if I disagreed. I had a good friend/startup founder once say anyone who supported Trump deserved to be fired and blacklisted.
  - dahart 10y ago
    Ha! I'm also a Salt Lake native transplant to San Fran. In Utah, I am a socialist pinko commie. In San Francisco I'm (apparently) somewhere between a libertarian and a tea party republican. At least, that's my story. I'm exaggerating for effect, and in the spirit of fun. But I was literally publicly berated at work once on the company forum for not being liberal enough, not having views consistent with California democrats, and not contributing enough money to the party. I never feared for my job though, that's awful. I could have actually been a conservative and I wouldn't have had to worry. There were conservatives in the company, though they did keep rather quiet about their views. Someone who makes a blanket statement about firing anyone with impure thoughts... it happens, but let's hope it was only a moment of weakness or anger on your friend's part.
cylinder 10y ago
Same thing, even with long-time friends, if I am trying to counter their hysteria (they're reading and sharing "fake news," too, and I just want to point out the inaccuracy of their statements or test them with logic, I'm called an "alt-right fascist." Honestly, the level of discourse in this country is an absolute joke. It doesn't matter what side you are on.
- digler999 10y ago
  > the level of discourse in this country is an absolute joke This is the main reason I'm thankful for HN and the mods. Reading and participating in the discussions has challenged me to work on my discourse technique. Particularly with reigning in my level of emotional investment in my positions, which for me is and has been difficult.
  - arca_vorago 10y ago
    This indeed, and I'm still learning. I had an exchange with another veteran that was anti 2nd amendment and I got really heated about it (because I am a huge constitutionalist), and I got in trouble with dang who chastised me in a way I felt was unfair (the guy made fun of my ptsd and got no rebuke from him), but after stepping away and coming back I realized dang was right, I was being overly aggressive and emotional, and in doing so I ruined the level of discourse. That incident really has stuck in my mind, in that even on topics of passion, a calm more detached approach can eek out information and points of view we wouldn't otherwise get. That's a hard but important lesson for even the best of us to learn. Especially for myself being a combat vet type of alpha male who learned the contrarian and abrasive style of debate from Christopher Hitchens. (Though I think that method still has a time in place, I think there are less situations where it's appropriate)
- puranjay 10y ago
  What gets my goat is the kind of shouting down I get whenever I take any contrarian stance on non-GMO foods, or God forbid, vaccination. I know that vaccines are critical and that there is nothing wrong with them. But to not even admit the possibility that there might be a link between vaccines and some health problems is, to me, very anti-science. My understanding for science has always been to question all assumptions, even ones you think are your sacred cows.
pklausler 10y ago
If your "ideas" are in conflict with facts, get better ideas.
- pklausler 10y ago
  Downvote my statement all you like, but it's the core of the scientific method.
  - splawn 10y ago
    ...as well as all rational thought.
- throwaway713 10y ago
  A "fact" is just a statement with a probability distribution attached to it. If your prior is different than someone else's, your posterior is going to be different as well.
  - jstimpfle 10y ago
    True, but how arbitrary are probability distributions for topics like homeopathy, 9/11 Truth, Young earth creationism? Spend a few hours investigating "facts" and arguments on all sides and smell where the bullshit is.
  - freen 10y ago
    What about the probability distribution of the fact that you are a carrot?
    - throwaway713 10y ago
      There's still a probability distribution — it's just a very tightly peaked one that for all practical purposes is indistinguishable from a Dirac delta distribution. Generally speaking, the physical sciences produce highly peaked distributions (literally, in the case of particle physics) and the social sciences produce more of what I would call flat lines with a few lumps in them. That includes most political "facts". Quantitative accuracy requires extremely high quality data and statistical inference, which when applied to social issues is impractical for the foreseeable future.
ComradeTaco 10y ago
I spent a summer working for some very conservative business owners. They asked me what I felt about the great society program during Johnson. I said that I thought it was a fine program that lifted a lot of people out of poverty. The following day they presented me a framed photo of Joseph Stalin. It's not just liberals that can be closed minded.
- splintercell 10y ago
  That's kinda hilarious. If I talked about virtues of small govt, and the guy next day hands me a one way ticket to Somalia (or some stuff like that), I would find it extremely hilarious. Keep in mind, giving a framed photo of Stalin is totally different than screaming "You're effing Stalin!" (which he didn't do).
  - Bartweiss 10y ago
    Done kindly, this sort of thing isn't just funny but an insulator against actual silencing. (I can't speak to how the Stalin photo was meant, but it sure could be funny.) If someone is outraged by your support for social programs and calls you a Stalinist, it's way harder to feel threatened when you're looking at a framed photo of Stalin your boss gave to you. Similarly libertarianism/Somalia or whatever other over-the-top pairing applies. It's part of why I tend to defend this sort of humor as not inherently wrong - when it's well-meant it helps ensure that people don't feel threatened or ostracized. The sting has been taken out of the attack, so there's more room to get along.
- SmellTheGlove 10y ago
  1. That's really funny, actually, as long as it didn't lead to you being fired or marginalized at work. You can give each other a hard time while still getting along. 2. Was the picture frame any good? Worst case, free frame! 3. OK, serious this time, who brought up politics at work - you or the bosses? I work at a big company and people generally avoid politics and religion, and people do seem to actively pretend they don't hear it when someone tries to go there. At a smaller shop, who went there?
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
hkmurakami 10y ago
The fact that your post is the top comment, with other posters shouting at you, seems to be good proof of the people who are keeping their mouths shut while silently agreeing with you.
- sgift 10y ago
  "Shouting" ... I don't know, people disagree, ask questions. Seems all quite civil to me. If that's shouting I fail to see what a discussion looks like.
  - hkmurakami 10y ago
    Take at look at the tone of the comments that are disagreeing. They are dismissive and accusatory in their choice of expression. It's not a choice you'd make if you're truly interested in hearing out and understanding the other person's perspective. The comments to me look like they're more interested in winning the debate.
convoces 10y ago
>try to take a scientific view >People start throwing link after link of facts You get upset when people present you with links to facts to respond to your proposed ideas? I can sympathize that it is definitely no fun if you feel like your ideas aren't getting the attention they deserve, but if you have trouble defending the ideas in the face of factual sources, maybe it's possible that one could reconsider those ideas in the face of new evidence? After all, that's the basis of scientific thinking.
- Bartweiss 10y ago
  I'm assuming "link after link" is pointing to a Courtier's Reply kind of issue - people throwing out thousands of pages of "required reading" to ensure that the bar for discussion is unreachably high. If you slog through it all and persist, they toss out another reading list instead of responding to the specific claims. There's no good fix for this, of course. Sometimes an idea has been rebutted so often that people aren't willing to digest and summarize the links (like "people didn't come from monkeys so evolution is false!") Sometimes the answer is genuinely subtle and there is a reading list to have useful views (lots of monetary economics, or relatively subtle biology like "how could eyes arise by chance?") Sometimes a person is just so wrong it's a category error and their claim can't be rebutted because it's meaningless. But it's also a real problem. There absolutely are people who stonewall valid points (or easily answered questions) by handing out endless obligations. And it's not particularly clear which one you're getting until you've done all the work - it's not even guaranteed that the other person is right about whether their content is relevant! So having been handed useless books as "required reading", I hugely sympathize with the complaint. But I don't really know a good answer except "stop debating people who pull this".
- godshatter 10y ago
  As a person who has a contrarian view on an issue that is highly politicized, it often turns out that those links of "facts" are links to web blogs that agree with the person that explain why the contrarian view is wrong. I suspect the original poster has looked at a few of the links before, found legitimate grounds to discuss possible flaws in their logic, and has been shut down. There is definitely a tendency (on both sides) to collect links to "approved" viewpoints and push them as fact without being able to back them up with valid argumentation.
throwaway713 10y ago
As someone who frequently plays devil's advocate, I'll usually argue the opposite viewpoint of the person I'm speaking with just to see how they think, and I've found there are two types of people: those who become emotional and angry, and those who engage in logical debate. This seems to be more of a personality trait than a political thing.
- christophilus 10y ago
  I do the same. I have found that both conservatives and liberals get angry. But by far, the harshest are liberals, in my experience.
  - maxerickson 10y ago
    I get irritated pretty quickly if I think someone is playing devils advocate straight. If I'm having a discussion with a person, I don't want to have a discussion with an inverted caricature of my views.
- jstimpfle 10y ago
  There are just no arguments for homeopathy or Young Earth Creationism. It's a natural reaction to get angry when someone argues in clearly illogical ways and is not open to rational discussion. (it's natural not because "rational" is somehow "better", but because of the helplessness of the situation). Not every "idea" is valuable to be heard. That said, you don't state what topics you argue.
- antisthenes 10y ago
  I've found people who do this to be incredibly toxic, mostly because more often than not the opposite viewpoint has been disproved by a body of scientific literature with which the "devil's advocate" is entirely unfamiliar. In that case, playing the contrarian is nothing more than trolling. When doing this, make sure the opposite viewpoint is at least as valid as the one you're arguing against.
- yestoallthat 10y ago
  I think the difference is obedience (to whatever world view exuding from whatever real or imagined authority figures) and drawing self worth (or, more realistically, constant background fear) from that, and being grounded as a person and having opinions about things which one is free to re-inspect and change without losing anything. It doesn't matter so much what people think but why they think it, or rather, if they think or parrot it.
sgift 10y ago
> People start throwing link after link of facts and don't want to even reason about ideas. It's hopeless and I end up keeping my mouth shut. So, you take a contrarian view. People respond with facts. So, where's the problem? You don't like the facts? Don't want to hear them or what exactly?
- pklausler 10y ago
  The facts had a liberal bias.
  - jat850 10y ago
    Facts don't have any bias, as I understand it. The collection of facts presented or absorbed can be picked or ignored with bias.
- psyc 10y ago
  It is trivial to cherry-pick facts that support a controversial, higher-level framing / viewpoint.
  - sgift 10y ago
    Then it should be easy to provide facts which disprove their point and start a discussion.
- tetromino_ 10y ago
  People respond with long lists of facts, but do not bother to reason about them or put them in context, instead presuming that there is only one way to interpret the facts - the way that supports their preferred narrative. And keep in mind that there is a difference between fact and "fact". It is a fact that a scientific instrument recorded a certain value or that a particular person voiced a particular opinion. Everything beyond that - that the instrument is working as intended, that the person's memory and reasoning and honesty can be trusted, that the data point is representative of similar situations, that it is at all relevant to the question at hand - has some amount of uncertainty associated with it.
- 10y ago
RangerScience 10y ago
I'm more-or-less on the other side of the fence, complete with getting thrown link after link of... well, not sure I want to call them "facts". I find two tricks to be useful: Avoid statements, ask questions. Asking for summaries is good. Play a little game: How little time can you spend getting the other person to spend the most time on their response? You win if you spend a minute and they spend an hour. Note: Doesn't work in person, but in person, it's easier for everyone to stay calm.
- hkmurakami 10y ago
  Questions are used when you want to learn about the other person. Statements are used when you want to make a point. Which one a person employes will tell you a lot about their intent.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
deanCommie 10y ago
White conservatives saw the attention disenfranchised groups were receiving in terms of trying to even the balance of justice (legal and social) and thought "Hey what about us!" I'd support this point of view if 99% of "alternative views" didn't end up being some form of "Immigrants are rapists", "Brown people are terrorists", and "Climate change is a Chinese conspiracy". There is a difference between having an open mind and having a sieve for a brain.
jimnotgym 10y ago
What if the liberals are right? It was proposed to me a couple of weeks ago (by a French guy who had spent a few years stateside) that there was a more simple reason for Trumps success. To him a racist, bigoted, misogynist, misanthrope, with a complete lack of taste, wild delusions about his place in the world, a gaudy tower with his name on it, and the idea that (despite his wife being foreign) that immigrants are not dangerous was exactly what lots of Americans aspired to be. The American Dream of a quiet wife stuck at home making pie, while you are out in the woods with a 12 gauge in your pickup truck. Like the twitter comments last week on the video where some guy takes his belt off to whip a young child, and people are saying 'if more liberals had been beaten like that, then perhaps they wouldn't be so out of control'. Add to that the 'I don't believe in experts crowd', an almost Homer Simsonesque desire not to think too deeply. Then there is the alt-right, particularly the channers. They seem to confuse their right to say repugnant things with some kind of right to be listened to. Yes on 4chan you can say the most appalling slurs to each other, but why should society listen? Maybe the US elected a hateful president because there are a lot of repugnant people there? Maybe the liberals are right to defend their patch from this creeping menace with zero tolerance? Maybe that is just society pushing out those that don't fit. Personally I wonder if this is America becoming the next superpower to destroy itself. The inflated idea about its own importance may lead to it losing site of its place in the world by becoming more insular. Another empire consigned to history?
- xyzzyz 10y ago
  Have you even read the article you're commenting under?
- PKop 10y ago
  I would suggest getting out of your bubble (I'm not trying to insult you). But the way you disparage rural people and assign false motives to so many shows (in my opinion) that you are grossly ill-informed about those of which you speak. And I think (if you read the original article) this is what frustrates so many across the country. Whether all, or some, or none of what you attribute the motivations of Trump voters to exist.... you're completely unaware of soooo much more that guides them. For example: https://www.commentarymagazine.com/articles/our-miserable-21st-century/ https://www.commentarymagazine.com/articles/our-miserable-21... Please take a minute to read it all. From the economic wasteland that much of middle America has become, to the massive addiction to prescription drugs & heroin, and widespread unemployment.... is it any wonder that people would want to try something completely new? But no... keep throwing around your labels. Keep calling people racist bigot homophobe, sexist. That will surely convince the guy with no job prospects that it's all in his head, and his heart. Not the emptiness in his pocket. "Maybe the liberals are right to defend their patch from this creeping menace with zero tolerance?" -- And this last election was a line in the sand, for many defending there patch from the "intolerance" of the far left. I suggest you read the original post at the top, and take some of the comments to heart.
Joeri 10y ago
Things aren't like that here in belgium, but one thing I've noticed about the left which seems to apply everywhere is that they are ideologically petrified. The real problems of the world require left-leaning policies, but the actual policies the left are peddling are dated, harmful and missing the point. I feel like all the left needs to do to make a huge leap forward is to take an axe to their existing book of policies and reason things out again from first principles, but due to the constant attacks from the right they end up digging in around wrong policies. In the end, left and right are artificial divides anyway, with not a single leftist or right wing viewpoint being exclusively held on that side. Identity cannot be divided into two sides, it is more complex, and the same applies to solutions. The key to good solutions is understanding where people with different viewpoints come from, without vilifying them, and then injecting the best aspects of everyone's ideas into a shared lattice. There are subjects where people are never going to see eye to eye, like abortion, but in most subjects if you keep discussing and not demonizing you can figure out a common ground. I had this experience myself coming from a strong left background and then working with a far right conservative, who I ended up liking, understanding, arguing and finally agreeing with. Nowadays we're both somewhere in the middle. As long as people on both the left and right can remember that the others are not evil, just different, and ignore the media (who really cause the toxicity) then things can be fixed.
- jimnotgym 10y ago
  I think you have hit the nail on the head, the old ideas of left and right are soon to be obsolete. This current Trump/Brexit world may be the last hurrah of the luddites. What will be the point in labour rules, when everything is delivered by robot? How will Thatcher/Reagan low corporate tax economies fare when there are no workers paying tax. I think it is time for a new politics that addresses globalisation, technology and the internet, but I fear it will take a calamity, and the death of the current political dinosaurs before it is a reality
  - Gargoyle 10y ago
    I suspect a lot of the Trump voters agree. The "bomb throwing" aspect is probably a lot bigger than it first appears. They don't really believe Trump is going to fix things, but they know for damn sure he's going to break a lot of things that aren't working.
DanBC 10y ago
The common thing about your example is you. Maybe it's the way you're talking about these "contrarian" views that's the problem, and not other people.
pbreit 10y ago
Same for conservative enclaves. Don't kid yourself.
nodesocket 10y ago
Unfortunately San Francisco is one of the most intolerant areas in the entire United States when it comes to political ideology. Metallica's James Hetfield (a bay area native who just left) said it best [1]... "They talk about how diverse they are, and things like that, and it's fine if you're diverse like them." [1] - http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-4053156/Sad-true-Metallica-singer-James-Hetfield-says-moved-San-Francisco-sick-elitist-attitudes.html http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-4053156/Sad-true-Met...
speby 10y ago
I think you're half-right because you're missing the fact that this applies to any major conservative enclaves as well. I'm a conservative (fiscally, mostly, but socially progressive) and often, but not always, vote for Republican candidates I like. However, I find that the conservative/Republican "world" is just as hostile to opposing viewpoints as the liberals are of opposing viewpoints of their own. We're all guilty as charged in this regard.
QML 10y ago
Honestly, as a moderate, I feel as if this country has turned into two divorced parents who are willing to sacrifice the future of their children just to get back at one another. At the moment, people seem to be voting for the candidates that's the biggest "fuck you" to other side, neglecting the fact that a country is best when the interests of all its citizens are put at heart.
- joelx 10y ago
  This comment is right on and needs more attention.

by Yhippa 10y ago

gambiting 10y ago

I think it's because "alternative point of view" immediately makes me think of someone saying that global warming is fake, and yeah,I'm not willing to debate that, it's just not worth my time. I'm curious what sort of ideas you have in mind though.

Yhippa 10y ago
Let's take illegal immigration. Is it wrong for this administration to enforce our current laws? If so maybe the laws need to be crafted to something different. While I don't agree with this administration's methodology this is probably the first time in a while I have seen the reality of our existing laws being executed and now we're seeing the effects of that. I am generally pro-immigration but I like to challenge my own thoughts and biases to make sure I don't have any blind spots.
- dmode 10y ago
  Immigration laws were already being enforced vigorously. Obama administration set the record in deportation and was often called the "Deporter in Chief". And all of this was done without raising xenophobia and labeling a group of people as hard criminals and rapists.
  - darkmouth 10y ago
    I think they are referring to the protests that arose when media reported that non-violent illegal immigrants are being deported.
    - davidw 10y ago
      Like when a mother was separated from her sons? I wonder why that might set people off...
      - dlp211 10y ago
        Furthering your point. Consider that Paul Ryan also doesn't want to deport dreamers/daca or break up families [1] is it any surprise. This isn't a partisan POV, there are legislators on both sides of the aisle that recognize the complexity of the problem and that ultimately it doesn't make sense to be so black-and-white. Our immigration process is severely broken especially for migrant workers. They are an integral part of our economy and would, in most cases, choose to come here legally if they were given the opportunity. What we should be doing is giving these people work visas with a path to citizenship. We have already seen the adverse effects of eliminating illegal immigrants from being able to work as farm labor, crops rot in the field [2], and when prices rise, it will present opportunities to importers to put farmers out of business for good. I should also state that I have no issues with deporting, though I don't understand why we don't incarcerate, unauthorized immigrants who commit violent crime(s). These people should be removed from our society. [1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/plum-line/wp/2017/01/13/in-remarkable-exchange-with-undocumented-mom-paul-ryan-exposes-cruelty-of-trumpism/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/plum-line/wp/2017/01/13... [2] http://www.forbes.com/sites/realspin/2012/05/17/the-law-of-unintended-consequences-georgias-immigration-law-backfires/#12c47f96404a http://www.forbes.com/sites/realspin/2012/05/17/the-law-of-u...
      - deleted 10y ago
        [deleted]
  - jlewis7272 10y ago
    </sarcasm>
- darkmouth 10y ago
  I am a staunch liberal and I don't understand the hostility towards deportation of illegal immigrants either. Calling illegal immigrants undocumented immigrants doesn't make the illegal part go away.
  - cr0sh 10y ago
    Deportation probably wouldn't be such a problem if they weren't also deporting legal residents along with the "illegal" ones. Yes - this happens. We still don't know how many Sherriff Joe and other officials in Arizona deported. It was basically a program here of "if you're brown enough, don't speak enough english, and can't produce any docs on the spot" you had a good chance of being rounded up, sent to an ICE facility, then deported. Even if you were a born-here American - just because you were of Mexican descent, and didn't learn english.
    - leesalminen 10y ago
      Serious question: why would an American citizen choose to not learn the national language? Doesn't that disadvantage you severely in life?
      - darkmouth 10y ago
        The other day I was at a mexican restaurant and the waiter forgot to bring water. I got up and went to the kitchen to ask where the water cooler was. The woman who saw me was unable to understand what "water" meant. Water. Let that sink in.
        eli_gottlieb 10y ago
        Ok, so ask, "Donde esta el agua?".
      - splintercell 10y ago
        It's not just about 'choice', I live in a predominantly Russian neighborhood with a Russian wife, but no matter how hard I try I can't learn Russian because they all very conveniently speak English. Similarly, if you're Hispanic, it would be hard for you to learn English if everyone else around you speaks a convenient language (i.e. Spanish), even if they could speak both the languages easily. It's kind of a trap, you'd learn English more easily if you left Spanish speaking community, but because you don't know English, it's hard to leave that community.
- davidw 10y ago
  General immigration reform along these lines is what's needed: http://johnhcochrane.blogspot.com/2014/06/the-optimal-number-of-immigrants.html http://johnhcochrane.blogspot.com/2014/06/the-optimal-number... http://www.cnn.com/2016/08/29/opinions/making-legal-immigration-attainable-johnson/ http://www.cnn.com/2016/08/29/opinions/making-legal-immigrat... Because the current system is really broken: see what it's like to try and immigrate, legally, from Mexico if you just want to do manual labor.
  - Yhippa 10y ago
    > Because the current system is really broken: see what it's like to try and immigrate, legally, from Mexico if you just want to do manual labor. See, this is what would be most interesting for me to discuss with my friends. There is obviously a demand for those services that Americans possibly don't want to do (I'm not completely clear on if they want to or not). What can we do to make this a more sane process for everybody involved? I thought there was some progress in the past and the Republicans were almost on board but it never got over the hump for whatever reason.
    - davidw 10y ago
      > What can we do to make this a more sane process for everybody involved? It probably doesn't involve starting from the premise that they're "bad people". My answer would be more along the lines of "ok, you can come and work, just register and complete this background check, and you'll be good to go in a month". It might involve a longer wait for citizenship or no access to certain benefits, which is something that is, of course, already in place for legal immigrants, or other compromises, but making otherwise honest people 'illegal' isn't really working. Letting honest people go through an easy process also has the benefit of 'separating the wheat from the chaff' - if you see someone who is sneaking around or otherwise not documented, you have a much stronger reason to think they're up to no good, rather than simply washing dishes on the sly.
    - naravara 10y ago
      >Republicans were almost on board but it never got over the hump for whatever reason. The "whatever reason" you're grasping at is the latent racism of the Republican base. As much as you want to believe the focus is on "illegal" immigration the Republican base understands this as a coded dog whistle for not liking Brown people. It's not about a marketplace of ideas, it's about signaling which tribe you align with. The marketplace of ideas happens in the policy world, not the political world.
- jlewis7272 10y ago
  Are you pro-immigration or pro-illegal immigration?
  - aetherson 10y ago
    I'm both. I mean, I'd love to not be pro-illegal immigration, and if we significantly loosened our immigration laws (not to the point of genuine open borders, but to the point where a reasonable person had a path to permanent residency in the US without it being a lottery), then I'd be anti-illegal immigration. But with the status quo, I'm pro-illegal immigration.
- TheCoelacanth 10y ago
  > Is it wrong for this administration to enforce our current laws? No, but it is wrong if it breaks other laws in the attempt to enforce the law. Any realistic attempt to deport millions and millions of people will almost invariably run afoul of the 4th amendment because there would be no way to find that many people without unlawful searches.
JustSomeNobody 10y ago
Your comment is very interesting. You immediately started "shouting down" the OP. Only at the end, did you ask about their ideas.
gred 10y ago
"I'm willing to listen ${them}, as long as they don't question ${sacred_cow}" is a key aspect of the unwelcoming behavior described by the interviewee. To use your example, I'd wager that most global warming skeptics (especially the ones that you'll meet in SV) have a more developed and nuanced perspective than "global warming is fake". Sure, we don't have infinite time or patience to fully understand and empathize with each other, but even a cursory exploration should be able to put the caricature in your head to rest.
- drewrv 10y ago
  Pretty much everyone uses heuristic filters to decide what's worth consideration and what isn't. If a lay person's opinion of a scientific theory is outside the scientific mainstream, it's probably bunk. What is the goal in trying to understand their perspective on this issue? I don't get offended when people refuse to listen to my alternative views on the late Roman Empire.
  - gred 10y ago
    There's probably no downside... until there are twenty sacred cows, the aggregate heuristics are filtering out half of the country, and Trump is commander-in-chief...
    - Bartweiss 10y ago
      I keep seeing people who are staunchly on the left ask "what's the downside?", and it baffles me. As someone generally non-conservative, I spend a bizarre amount of time going "The downside is everything you're seeing right now! You can't say that America is in crisis and then say that there's no problem with these techniques!" Even if the sacred cows are all 100% correct, losing is a downside. There's no point in celebrating how correct we are about something while completely failing to act on that knowledge.
- Bartweiss 10y ago
  > "I'm willing to listen ${them}, as long as they don't question ${sacred_cow}" More broadly, this seems to be how most of politics (especially recent American politics) operates on either side. Anything is open to debate and discussion as long as it doesn't seriously threaten to make someone change their behavior. You can even persuade someone to change their views, as long as their new views can support the thing they want to keep doing. Humans (myself included) are amazing at rationalizing, and hate serious challenges to their deeply held positions. But I do think it's a useful pattern to recognize. The best tool I know for genuinely well-intentioned debate is to open with "What would make you change your position on ${issue}?" Unless both people can consciously identify a point or set of points that would be sufficient to alter their belief/behavior, there's not much chance of progress.

sxcurry 10y ago

Except that the contrarian views frequently turn out to be lies, and I can't spend all my time debating lies. Please suggest a contrarian view that's worth discussing.

Yhippa 10y ago
> Except that the contrarian views frequently turn out to be lies What do you mean by this?
- darkmouth 10y ago
  global warming, evolution, abortion, birth control, LGBT, Size of military, refugees
  - pklausler 10y ago
    You forgot crime rates, taxation relative to other developed countries, the causes of the Civil War, and whether there really are footprints on the Moon.
  - baseten 10y ago
    degree of earth curvature, extent of lizard population in federal government, which party gets to sacrifice infants to baal this month, who controls the weather on tuesdays, etc.
  - dustinmr 10y ago
    If you don't see how these comments prove his points, you should reread over and over and over again until you do. Every analysis of "How the hell did he win?" that I've seen has basically been that no one else listened to the people outside the population centers, or outside mainstream thought. He did and crafted a campaign based on it. So listen. Just because you disagree or think they are lies, or whatever, doesn't mean you won't learn something about why those people think the way they do. No one is saying you have to agree. Credit to the author for actually listening.
- skylan_q 10y ago

austenallred 10y ago

I moved to San Francisco from a rural town, and I would feel 10x more comfortable sharing my liberal viewpoints in a small, deeply-red town than I would insinuating something anything less than 100% left-leaning at work here. People disagree in small town Utah, and it would be uncomfortable. In San Francisco you're ostracized. It even makes me nervous to leave my name attached to a comment like this, knowing that my co-workers browse HN and will see it.

Florin_Andrei 10y ago
> I moved to San Francisco from a rural town, and I would feel 10x more comfortable sharing my liberal viewpoints in a small, deeply-red town than I would insinuating something anything less than 100% left-leaning at work here. Maybe because in the latter case you're at work, as opposed to talking to folks in the neighborhood at home? EDIT: lol, I'm posting a reply to a comment talking about ideological intolerance and shutting down of discussion, and my post is downvoted with no explanation. :) ROTFL "It's the other side who are always doing this", for sure. Yeah.
tylerwhipple 10y ago
I went from Salt Lake City to San Francisco as well. I have always been quite liberal on issues and it had never been a problem, but when discussing issues in SF I felt I had to be very careful with what I supported. I always felt my friendships/employment was threatened if I disagreed. I had a good friend/startup founder once say anyone who supported Trump deserved to be fired and blacklisted.
- dahart 10y ago
  Ha! I'm also a Salt Lake native transplant to San Fran. In Utah, I am a socialist pinko commie. In San Francisco I'm (apparently) somewhere between a libertarian and a tea party republican. At least, that's my story. I'm exaggerating for effect, and in the spirit of fun. But I was literally publicly berated at work once on the company forum for not being liberal enough, not having views consistent with California democrats, and not contributing enough money to the party. I never feared for my job though, that's awful. I could have actually been a conservative and I wouldn't have had to worry. There were conservatives in the company, though they did keep rather quiet about their views. Someone who makes a blanket statement about firing anyone with impure thoughts... it happens, but let's hope it was only a moment of weakness or anger on your friend's part.

cylinder 10y ago

Same thing, even with long-time friends, if I am trying to counter their hysteria (they're reading and sharing "fake news," too, and I just want to point out the inaccuracy of their statements or test them with logic, I'm called an "alt-right fascist." Honestly, the level of discourse in this country is an absolute joke. It doesn't matter what side you are on.

digler999 10y ago
> the level of discourse in this country is an absolute joke This is the main reason I'm thankful for HN and the mods. Reading and participating in the discussions has challenged me to work on my discourse technique. Particularly with reigning in my level of emotional investment in my positions, which for me is and has been difficult.
- arca_vorago 10y ago
  This indeed, and I'm still learning. I had an exchange with another veteran that was anti 2nd amendment and I got really heated about it (because I am a huge constitutionalist), and I got in trouble with dang who chastised me in a way I felt was unfair (the guy made fun of my ptsd and got no rebuke from him), but after stepping away and coming back I realized dang was right, I was being overly aggressive and emotional, and in doing so I ruined the level of discourse. That incident really has stuck in my mind, in that even on topics of passion, a calm more detached approach can eek out information and points of view we wouldn't otherwise get. That's a hard but important lesson for even the best of us to learn. Especially for myself being a combat vet type of alpha male who learned the contrarian and abrasive style of debate from Christopher Hitchens. (Though I think that method still has a time in place, I think there are less situations where it's appropriate)
puranjay 10y ago
What gets my goat is the kind of shouting down I get whenever I take any contrarian stance on non-GMO foods, or God forbid, vaccination. I know that vaccines are critical and that there is nothing wrong with them. But to not even admit the possibility that there might be a link between vaccines and some health problems is, to me, very anti-science. My understanding for science has always been to question all assumptions, even ones you think are your sacred cows.

pklausler 10y ago

If your "ideas" are in conflict with facts, get better ideas.

pklausler 10y ago
Downvote my statement all you like, but it's the core of the scientific method.
- splawn 10y ago
  ...as well as all rational thought.
throwaway713 10y ago
A "fact" is just a statement with a probability distribution attached to it. If your prior is different than someone else's, your posterior is going to be different as well.
- jstimpfle 10y ago
  True, but how arbitrary are probability distributions for topics like homeopathy, 9/11 Truth, Young earth creationism? Spend a few hours investigating "facts" and arguments on all sides and smell where the bullshit is.
- freen 10y ago
  What about the probability distribution of the fact that you are a carrot?
  - throwaway713 10y ago
    There's still a probability distribution — it's just a very tightly peaked one that for all practical purposes is indistinguishable from a Dirac delta distribution. Generally speaking, the physical sciences produce highly peaked distributions (literally, in the case of particle physics) and the social sciences produce more of what I would call flat lines with a few lumps in them. That includes most political "facts". Quantitative accuracy requires extremely high quality data and statistical inference, which when applied to social issues is impractical for the foreseeable future.

ComradeTaco 10y ago

I spent a summer working for some very conservative business owners. They asked me what I felt about the great society program during Johnson. I said that I thought it was a fine program that lifted a lot of people out of poverty. The following day they presented me a framed photo of Joseph Stalin. It's not just liberals that can be closed minded.

splintercell 10y ago
That's kinda hilarious. If I talked about virtues of small govt, and the guy next day hands me a one way ticket to Somalia (or some stuff like that), I would find it extremely hilarious. Keep in mind, giving a framed photo of Stalin is totally different than screaming "You're effing Stalin!" (which he didn't do).
- Bartweiss 10y ago
  Done kindly, this sort of thing isn't just funny but an insulator against actual silencing. (I can't speak to how the Stalin photo was meant, but it sure could be funny.) If someone is outraged by your support for social programs and calls you a Stalinist, it's way harder to feel threatened when you're looking at a framed photo of Stalin your boss gave to you. Similarly libertarianism/Somalia or whatever other over-the-top pairing applies. It's part of why I tend to defend this sort of humor as not inherently wrong - when it's well-meant it helps ensure that people don't feel threatened or ostracized. The sting has been taken out of the attack, so there's more room to get along.
SmellTheGlove 10y ago
1. That's really funny, actually, as long as it didn't lead to you being fired or marginalized at work. You can give each other a hard time while still getting along. 2. Was the picture frame any good? Worst case, free frame! 3. OK, serious this time, who brought up politics at work - you or the bosses? I work at a big company and people generally avoid politics and religion, and people do seem to actively pretend they don't hear it when someone tries to go there. At a smaller shop, who went there?

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

hkmurakami 10y ago

The fact that your post is the top comment, with other posters shouting at you, seems to be good proof of the people who are keeping their mouths shut while silently agreeing with you.

sgift 10y ago
"Shouting" ... I don't know, people disagree, ask questions. Seems all quite civil to me. If that's shouting I fail to see what a discussion looks like.
- hkmurakami 10y ago
  Take at look at the tone of the comments that are disagreeing. They are dismissive and accusatory in their choice of expression. It's not a choice you'd make if you're truly interested in hearing out and understanding the other person's perspective. The comments to me look like they're more interested in winning the debate.

convoces 10y ago

>try to take a scientific view >People start throwing link after link of facts You get upset when people present you with links to facts to respond to your proposed ideas? I can sympathize that it is definitely no fun if you feel like your ideas aren't getting the attention they deserve, but if you have trouble defending the ideas in the face of factual sources, maybe it's possible that one could reconsider those ideas in the face of new evidence? After all, that's the basis of scientific thinking.

Bartweiss 10y ago
I'm assuming "link after link" is pointing to a Courtier's Reply kind of issue - people throwing out thousands of pages of "required reading" to ensure that the bar for discussion is unreachably high. If you slog through it all and persist, they toss out another reading list instead of responding to the specific claims. There's no good fix for this, of course. Sometimes an idea has been rebutted so often that people aren't willing to digest and summarize the links (like "people didn't come from monkeys so evolution is false!") Sometimes the answer is genuinely subtle and there is a reading list to have useful views (lots of monetary economics, or relatively subtle biology like "how could eyes arise by chance?") Sometimes a person is just so wrong it's a category error and their claim can't be rebutted because it's meaningless. But it's also a real problem. There absolutely are people who stonewall valid points (or easily answered questions) by handing out endless obligations. And it's not particularly clear which one you're getting until you've done all the work - it's not even guaranteed that the other person is right about whether their content is relevant! So having been handed useless books as "required reading", I hugely sympathize with the complaint. But I don't really know a good answer except "stop debating people who pull this".
godshatter 10y ago
As a person who has a contrarian view on an issue that is highly politicized, it often turns out that those links of "facts" are links to web blogs that agree with the person that explain why the contrarian view is wrong. I suspect the original poster has looked at a few of the links before, found legitimate grounds to discuss possible flaws in their logic, and has been shut down. There is definitely a tendency (on both sides) to collect links to "approved" viewpoints and push them as fact without being able to back them up with valid argumentation.

throwaway713 10y ago

As someone who frequently plays devil's advocate, I'll usually argue the opposite viewpoint of the person I'm speaking with just to see how they think, and I've found there are two types of people: those who become emotional and angry, and those who engage in logical debate. This seems to be more of a personality trait than a political thing.

christophilus 10y ago
I do the same. I have found that both conservatives and liberals get angry. But by far, the harshest are liberals, in my experience.
- maxerickson 10y ago
  I get irritated pretty quickly if I think someone is playing devils advocate straight. If I'm having a discussion with a person, I don't want to have a discussion with an inverted caricature of my views.
jstimpfle 10y ago
There are just no arguments for homeopathy or Young Earth Creationism. It's a natural reaction to get angry when someone argues in clearly illogical ways and is not open to rational discussion. (it's natural not because "rational" is somehow "better", but because of the helplessness of the situation). Not every "idea" is valuable to be heard. That said, you don't state what topics you argue.
antisthenes 10y ago
I've found people who do this to be incredibly toxic, mostly because more often than not the opposite viewpoint has been disproved by a body of scientific literature with which the "devil's advocate" is entirely unfamiliar. In that case, playing the contrarian is nothing more than trolling. When doing this, make sure the opposite viewpoint is at least as valid as the one you're arguing against.
yestoallthat 10y ago
I think the difference is obedience (to whatever world view exuding from whatever real or imagined authority figures) and drawing self worth (or, more realistically, constant background fear) from that, and being grounded as a person and having opinions about things which one is free to re-inspect and change without losing anything. It doesn't matter so much what people think but why they think it, or rather, if they think or parrot it.

sgift 10y ago

> People start throwing link after link of facts and don't want to even reason about ideas. It's hopeless and I end up keeping my mouth shut. So, you take a contrarian view. People respond with facts. So, where's the problem? You don't like the facts? Don't want to hear them or what exactly?

pklausler 10y ago
The facts had a liberal bias.
- jat850 10y ago
  Facts don't have any bias, as I understand it. The collection of facts presented or absorbed can be picked or ignored with bias.
psyc 10y ago
It is trivial to cherry-pick facts that support a controversial, higher-level framing / viewpoint.
- sgift 10y ago
  Then it should be easy to provide facts which disprove their point and start a discussion.
tetromino_ 10y ago
People respond with long lists of facts, but do not bother to reason about them or put them in context, instead presuming that there is only one way to interpret the facts - the way that supports their preferred narrative. And keep in mind that there is a difference between fact and "fact". It is a fact that a scientific instrument recorded a certain value or that a particular person voiced a particular opinion. Everything beyond that - that the instrument is working as intended, that the person's memory and reasoning and honesty can be trusted, that the data point is representative of similar situations, that it is at all relevant to the question at hand - has some amount of uncertainty associated with it.
10y ago

RangerScience 10y ago

I'm more-or-less on the other side of the fence, complete with getting thrown link after link of... well, not sure I want to call them "facts". I find two tricks to be useful: Avoid statements, ask questions. Asking for summaries is good. Play a little game: How little time can you spend getting the other person to spend the most time on their response? You win if you spend a minute and they spend an hour. Note: Doesn't work in person, but in person, it's easier for everyone to stay calm.

hkmurakami 10y ago
Questions are used when you want to learn about the other person. Statements are used when you want to make a point. Which one a person employes will tell you a lot about their intent.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]

deanCommie 10y ago

White conservatives saw the attention disenfranchised groups were receiving in terms of trying to even the balance of justice (legal and social) and thought "Hey what about us!" I'd support this point of view if 99% of "alternative views" didn't end up being some form of "Immigrants are rapists", "Brown people are terrorists", and "Climate change is a Chinese conspiracy". There is a difference between having an open mind and having a sieve for a brain.

jimnotgym 10y ago

What if the liberals are right? It was proposed to me a couple of weeks ago (by a French guy who had spent a few years stateside) that there was a more simple reason for Trumps success. To him a racist, bigoted, misogynist, misanthrope, with a complete lack of taste, wild delusions about his place in the world, a gaudy tower with his name on it, and the idea that (despite his wife being foreign) that immigrants are not dangerous was exactly what lots of Americans aspired to be. The American Dream of a quiet wife stuck at home making pie, while you are out in the woods with a 12 gauge in your pickup truck. Like the twitter comments last week on the video where some guy takes his belt off to whip a young child, and people are saying 'if more liberals had been beaten like that, then perhaps they wouldn't be so out of control'. Add to that the 'I don't believe in experts crowd', an almost Homer Simsonesque desire not to think too deeply. Then there is the alt-right, particularly the channers. They seem to confuse their right to say repugnant things with some kind of right to be listened to. Yes on 4chan you can say the most appalling slurs to each other, but why should society listen? Maybe the US elected a hateful president because there are a lot of repugnant people there? Maybe the liberals are right to defend their patch from this creeping menace with zero tolerance? Maybe that is just society pushing out those that don't fit. Personally I wonder if this is America becoming the next superpower to destroy itself. The inflated idea about its own importance may lead to it losing site of its place in the world by becoming more insular. Another empire consigned to history?

xyzzyz 10y ago
Have you even read the article you're commenting under?
PKop 10y ago
I would suggest getting out of your bubble (I'm not trying to insult you). But the way you disparage rural people and assign false motives to so many shows (in my opinion) that you are grossly ill-informed about those of which you speak. And I think (if you read the original article) this is what frustrates so many across the country. Whether all, or some, or none of what you attribute the motivations of Trump voters to exist.... you're completely unaware of soooo much more that guides them. For example: https://www.commentarymagazine.com/articles/our-miserable-21st-century/ https://www.commentarymagazine.com/articles/our-miserable-21... Please take a minute to read it all. From the economic wasteland that much of middle America has become, to the massive addiction to prescription drugs & heroin, and widespread unemployment.... is it any wonder that people would want to try something completely new? But no... keep throwing around your labels. Keep calling people racist bigot homophobe, sexist. That will surely convince the guy with no job prospects that it's all in his head, and his heart. Not the emptiness in his pocket. "Maybe the liberals are right to defend their patch from this creeping menace with zero tolerance?" -- And this last election was a line in the sand, for many defending there patch from the "intolerance" of the far left. I suggest you read the original post at the top, and take some of the comments to heart.

Joeri 10y ago

Things aren't like that here in belgium, but one thing I've noticed about the left which seems to apply everywhere is that they are ideologically petrified. The real problems of the world require left-leaning policies, but the actual policies the left are peddling are dated, harmful and missing the point. I feel like all the left needs to do to make a huge leap forward is to take an axe to their existing book of policies and reason things out again from first principles, but due to the constant attacks from the right they end up digging in around wrong policies. In the end, left and right are artificial divides anyway, with not a single leftist or right wing viewpoint being exclusively held on that side. Identity cannot be divided into two sides, it is more complex, and the same applies to solutions. The key to good solutions is understanding where people with different viewpoints come from, without vilifying them, and then injecting the best aspects of everyone's ideas into a shared lattice. There are subjects where people are never going to see eye to eye, like abortion, but in most subjects if you keep discussing and not demonizing you can figure out a common ground. I had this experience myself coming from a strong left background and then working with a far right conservative, who I ended up liking, understanding, arguing and finally agreeing with. Nowadays we're both somewhere in the middle. As long as people on both the left and right can remember that the others are not evil, just different, and ignore the media (who really cause the toxicity) then things can be fixed.

jimnotgym 10y ago
I think you have hit the nail on the head, the old ideas of left and right are soon to be obsolete. This current Trump/Brexit world may be the last hurrah of the luddites. What will be the point in labour rules, when everything is delivered by robot? How will Thatcher/Reagan low corporate tax economies fare when there are no workers paying tax. I think it is time for a new politics that addresses globalisation, technology and the internet, but I fear it will take a calamity, and the death of the current political dinosaurs before it is a reality
- Gargoyle 10y ago
  I suspect a lot of the Trump voters agree. The "bomb throwing" aspect is probably a lot bigger than it first appears. They don't really believe Trump is going to fix things, but they know for damn sure he's going to break a lot of things that aren't working.

DanBC 10y ago

The common thing about your example is you. Maybe it's the way you're talking about these "contrarian" views that's the problem, and not other people.

pbreit 10y ago

Same for conservative enclaves. Don't kid yourself.

nodesocket 10y ago

Unfortunately San Francisco is one of the most intolerant areas in the entire United States when it comes to political ideology. Metallica's James Hetfield (a bay area native who just left) said it best [1]... "They talk about how diverse they are, and things like that, and it's fine if you're diverse like them." [1] - http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-4053156/Sad-true-Metallica-singer-James-Hetfield-says-moved-San-Francisco-sick-elitist-attitudes.html http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-4053156/Sad-true-Met...

speby 10y ago

I think you're half-right because you're missing the fact that this applies to any major conservative enclaves as well. I'm a conservative (fiscally, mostly, but socially progressive) and often, but not always, vote for Republican candidates I like. However, I find that the conservative/Republican "world" is just as hostile to opposing viewpoints as the liberals are of opposing viewpoints of their own. We're all guilty as charged in this regard.

QML 10y ago

Honestly, as a moderate, I feel as if this country has turned into two divorced parents who are willing to sacrifice the future of their children just to get back at one another. At the moment, people seem to be voting for the candidates that's the biggest "fuck you" to other side, neglecting the fact that a country is best when the interests of all its citizens are put at heart.

joelx 10y ago
This comment is right on and needs more attention.