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It seems to me that part of the solution might be working to develop solutions that don't prevent the other side from achieving their desires. My ideal vision

It seems to me that part of the solution might be working to develop solutions that don't prevent the other side from achieving their desires. My ideal vision of how America works (e.g. the American dream as I see it) is that everyone is free to live according to their own way of life and society works for win-win solutions. However, it seems to me that both sides are afraid that if the other side wins they will try to force their lifestyle on them; and I think they are probably right.

vkou 9y ago
I want to live in such a way where I get to be a feudal lord, presiding over a large group of tenant farmers/sharecroppers/indentured servants. I want the freedom to employ the state's prisoners for my own gain, without paying them. I want the freedom to pollute, without being subjected to the tyranny of the EPA. In short, I want to be able to exercise power against those weaker, poorer, or less politically connected then me. My desires are almost certainly incompatible with yours. Politics is a process for distributing scarce resources. Brokering how, and when people can exert power to the detriment of others is an inescapable part of it. There are many bad actors who seek to do so - not as many as one might lead to believe, but they consistently find themselves at the top of the social food chain.
- harimau777 9y ago
  I agree that there are going to be situations where conflict between desires is unavoidable or where it is not possible to accommodate extreme desires; however that doesn't mean that finding compatible solutions is not the best approach in the vast majority of situations. I'd also point out that those are strategies to achieve desires, not desires themselves. The associated desires might be something like financial security, a sense of importance, freedom etc.
  - vkou 9y ago
    Compatible solutions that are palatable to both parties - compromise - is very important. Sometimes, though, compromise is impossible. If you say that 3+3=6, and I say that 3+3=10, you'd be a fool to compromise on 8. This is made all the more obvious when we consider which of us gets to frame the debate. If I really wanted 3+3 to be 10, I'd just demand that we make 3+3=14, and I'll get exactly what I want, once we split the difference. Everyone wants freedom, and everyone wants agency, and everyone wants health and happiness. There's plenty of all of those things to go around. Many of us also want power, though, which is more likely to be a zero-sum game.
    - frandroid 9y ago
      > I'd just demand that we make 3+3=14, and I'll get exactly what I want, once we split the difference. There's a lot of that happening...
  - gnaritas 9y ago
    The problem is there are desires for which there are no compatible solutions. One group desires to oppress another; those are the common issues we're polarized on. The right desires to oppress minority groups and the left refuses, there is no solution to this problem the right will accept as oppression is their goal. Conversely, the new extreme regressive left wants to oppress all who simply disagree with them in word; they oppose free speech, there is no solution here either. When two cultures cannot agree, the only real solution is to segregate them, the US is too big, it needs to break down into several smaller countries where different cultures can go their own direction.
- rev_null 9y ago
  Sounds like you need to incorporate.
- simonsarris 9y ago
  Amusing (or not) historical note, that sounds almost exactly like the Cavaliers (Virginia aristocrats) when they arrived in America. > The Cavaliers – the nobles who had fought and lost the English Civil War – fled to Virginia. Historians who cross-checking Virginian immigrant lists against English records find that of Virginians whose opinions on the War were known, 98% were royalists. > These aristocrats didn’t want to do their own work, so they brought with them tens of thousands of indentured servants; more than 75% of all Virginian immigrants arrived in this position. Some of these people came willingly on a system where their master paid their passage over and they would be free after a certain number of years; others were sent by the courts as punishments; still others were just plain kidnapped. The gender ratio was 4:1 in favor of men, and there were entire English gangs dedicated to kidnapping women and sending them to Virginia, where they fetched a high price. > The Virginians tried their best to oppress white people. Really, they did. The depths to which they sank in trying to oppress white people almost boggle the imagination. There was a rule that if a female indentured servant became pregnant, a few extra years were added on to their indenture, supposedly because they would be working less hard during their pregnancy and child-rearing so it wasn’t fair to the master. Virginian aristocrats would rape their own female servants, then add a penalty term on to their indenture for becoming pregnant. That is an impressive level of chutzpah. But despite these efforts, eventually all the white people either died, or became too sluggish to be useful, or worst of all just finished up their indentures and became legally free. The aristocrats started importing black slaves as per the model that had sprung up in the Caribbean, and so the stage was set for the antebellum South we read about in history classes. > The Virginian Cavaliers had an obsession with liberty, but needless to say it was not exactly a sort of liberty of which the ACLU would approve. [...] No, they said, we wouldn’t be free if we had to work, therefore we insist upon not working. No, we wouldn’t be free if we were limited by poverty, therefore we insist upon being extremely rich. Needless to say, this conception of freedom required first indentured servitude and later slavery to make it work, but the Virginians never claimed that the servants or slaves were free. That wasn’t the point. Freedom, like wealth, was properly distributed according to rank; nobles had as much as they wanted, the middle-class enough to get by on, and everyone else none at all. And a Virginian noble would have gone to his grave insisting that a civilization without slavery could never have citizens who were truly free. From: http://slatestarcodex.com/2016/04/27/book-review-albions-seed/ http://slatestarcodex.com/2016/04/27/book-review-albions-see...
- hkmurakami 9y ago
  Amusingly, we sort of get this by proxy by being owners of (significant) capital.
Florin_Andrei 9y ago
> It seems to me that part of the solution might be working to develop solutions that don't prevent the other side from achieving their desires. This would work well if the two sides lived on different planets on the opposite sides of the galaxy, each one outside of the other's light cone and causal domain.
objclxt 9y ago
> it seems to me that both sides are afraid that if the other side wins they will try to force their lifestyle on them; and I think they are probably right. ...it's not really that simple, though. It's not like you're picking two discrete options. Let's take a viewpoint like pro-choice/pro-life. A society that permits abortions doesn't prevent an individual from choosing not to have one. A woman who thinks abortion is immoral is free to hold and practice that belief herself...the "lifestyle" of being pro-choice is not forced upon her. Contrast that with a society that bans abortion.
- jawns 9y ago
  > A society that permits abortions doesn't prevent an individual from choosing not to have one. Yes, but the objecting individual is not fighting for his or her own rights. Pro-lifers consider themselves to be fighting for the rights of the unborn child. Similarly, a society that permits slavery doesn't prevent an individual from choosing not to own slaves. The society is not forcing its lifestyle on the objecting individual, per se, but it's forcing its lifestyle on the slaves, whom the objecting individual is concerned about.
  - narrowrail 9y ago
    These abortion rights opponents derive their arguments from the bible (for the most part). The same bible says that judgement is the domain of god, not humans. In other words, cherry-picking the ideas that serve their own goals.
    - narrowrail 9y ago
      Is there an actual argument against my claim from someone with better biblical knowledge?
- jimmyk 9y ago
  There are important cases where it is that simple. For example, people have different ideas about who should control certain resources. All sides can't get what they want.
tomjen3 9y ago
How do you do that with abortion? (Just picking a controversial topic) there is _literally_ no common ground and it is simply not possible for one group to live under, to them, acceptable rules that are also acceptable to the other group. You cannot have one group that demands the right to terminate a pregnancy and one group that believes it is literally murder ever coexist on friendly terms. You cannot ban guns and still make them freely available to people who want them. You cannot combat global warming and still enable people to drive as they desire. You cannot simultaneously allow trans people to use their preferred gender's bathroom while allowing the people who so desires to only have cis people of the same gender in the room. You cannot simultaneously allow drugs and ban them. Indeed, as the days go by I am becoming more and more convinced that the only solution is the one outlined in this essay: http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/06/07/archipelago-and-atomic-communitarianism/ http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/06/07/archipelago-and-atomic-...
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- zepto 9y ago
  The conflicts you list are all conflicts based on disagreements over the solutions to problems rather than based on what people want. To pick an example: Why is gun control even an issue? It didn't used to be - therefore something has changed that makes people want to ban guns. What is that? Is banning guns the only solution? You can use the same logic with most of these.
- munificent 9y ago
  > How do you do that with abortion? (Just picking a controversial topic) > there is _literally_ no common ground I don't think that's true. Ignoring fringe lunatics, everyone agrees that after a baby is born, they should not be allowed to be "aborted". Likewise, virtually everyone agrees that sperm and unfertilized eggs do not have rights as humans. Those two endpoints on the continuum are common ground. The question then is where do people stake their claims on the line between those endpoints. Some people think if the fetus is old enough to be viable if born that early, then it should be illegal to abort it. Others, if the fetus has a developed enough brain and heart to conceivably feel pain. Others, if its implanted. Others if it's fertilized. And, of course, it's not a straight line, but more like a space. Some fetuses, regardless of age, are not viable because of genetic deformities and people pick different regions in that space where they are comfortable with terminating. There is another axis in the space related to how the pregnancy occurred—rape, incest, etc. Within this space, you can find regions and boundaries where many people do have agreement. This is how governing works. There are no perfect solutions or black and white problems. It's about finding consensus and compromise, and picking something that is the most acceptable to the most people. The real problem, I believe, is that there are powerful people who want to deliberately sabotage that process to their own ends. They want to convince us that there is no common ground, and that those who have a different preference are evil people who cannot be tolerated, much less worked with. They've found that if you create an enemy for people, you can get them to show up for polls and keep people in power. That's the real goal. They don't give a shit about abortion. They care about tax law and gerrymandering and other legislation that keeps the powerful in power. But abortion gets them to the polls. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southern_strategy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southern_strategy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conservative_coalition https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conservative_coalition https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_Majority https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_Majority

vkou 9y ago

I want to live in such a way where I get to be a feudal lord, presiding over a large group of tenant farmers/sharecroppers/indentured servants. I want the freedom to employ the state's prisoners for my own gain, without paying them. I want the freedom to pollute, without being subjected to the tyranny of the EPA. In short, I want to be able to exercise power against those weaker, poorer, or less politically connected then me. My desires are almost certainly incompatible with yours. Politics is a process for distributing scarce resources. Brokering how, and when people can exert power to the detriment of others is an inescapable part of it. There are many bad actors who seek to do so - not as many as one might lead to believe, but they consistently find themselves at the top of the social food chain.

harimau777 9y ago
I agree that there are going to be situations where conflict between desires is unavoidable or where it is not possible to accommodate extreme desires; however that doesn't mean that finding compatible solutions is not the best approach in the vast majority of situations. I'd also point out that those are strategies to achieve desires, not desires themselves. The associated desires might be something like financial security, a sense of importance, freedom etc.
- vkou 9y ago
  Compatible solutions that are palatable to both parties - compromise - is very important. Sometimes, though, compromise is impossible. If you say that 3+3=6, and I say that 3+3=10, you'd be a fool to compromise on 8. This is made all the more obvious when we consider which of us gets to frame the debate. If I really wanted 3+3 to be 10, I'd just demand that we make 3+3=14, and I'll get exactly what I want, once we split the difference. Everyone wants freedom, and everyone wants agency, and everyone wants health and happiness. There's plenty of all of those things to go around. Many of us also want power, though, which is more likely to be a zero-sum game.
  - frandroid 9y ago
    > I'd just demand that we make 3+3=14, and I'll get exactly what I want, once we split the difference. There's a lot of that happening...
- gnaritas 9y ago
  The problem is there are desires for which there are no compatible solutions. One group desires to oppress another; those are the common issues we're polarized on. The right desires to oppress minority groups and the left refuses, there is no solution to this problem the right will accept as oppression is their goal. Conversely, the new extreme regressive left wants to oppress all who simply disagree with them in word; they oppose free speech, there is no solution here either. When two cultures cannot agree, the only real solution is to segregate them, the US is too big, it needs to break down into several smaller countries where different cultures can go their own direction.
rev_null 9y ago
Sounds like you need to incorporate.
simonsarris 9y ago
Amusing (or not) historical note, that sounds almost exactly like the Cavaliers (Virginia aristocrats) when they arrived in America. > The Cavaliers – the nobles who had fought and lost the English Civil War – fled to Virginia. Historians who cross-checking Virginian immigrant lists against English records find that of Virginians whose opinions on the War were known, 98% were royalists. > These aristocrats didn’t want to do their own work, so they brought with them tens of thousands of indentured servants; more than 75% of all Virginian immigrants arrived in this position. Some of these people came willingly on a system where their master paid their passage over and they would be free after a certain number of years; others were sent by the courts as punishments; still others were just plain kidnapped. The gender ratio was 4:1 in favor of men, and there were entire English gangs dedicated to kidnapping women and sending them to Virginia, where they fetched a high price. > The Virginians tried their best to oppress white people. Really, they did. The depths to which they sank in trying to oppress white people almost boggle the imagination. There was a rule that if a female indentured servant became pregnant, a few extra years were added on to their indenture, supposedly because they would be working less hard during their pregnancy and child-rearing so it wasn’t fair to the master. Virginian aristocrats would rape their own female servants, then add a penalty term on to their indenture for becoming pregnant. That is an impressive level of chutzpah. But despite these efforts, eventually all the white people either died, or became too sluggish to be useful, or worst of all just finished up their indentures and became legally free. The aristocrats started importing black slaves as per the model that had sprung up in the Caribbean, and so the stage was set for the antebellum South we read about in history classes. > The Virginian Cavaliers had an obsession with liberty, but needless to say it was not exactly a sort of liberty of which the ACLU would approve. [...] No, they said, we wouldn’t be free if we had to work, therefore we insist upon not working. No, we wouldn’t be free if we were limited by poverty, therefore we insist upon being extremely rich. Needless to say, this conception of freedom required first indentured servitude and later slavery to make it work, but the Virginians never claimed that the servants or slaves were free. That wasn’t the point. Freedom, like wealth, was properly distributed according to rank; nobles had as much as they wanted, the middle-class enough to get by on, and everyone else none at all. And a Virginian noble would have gone to his grave insisting that a civilization without slavery could never have citizens who were truly free. From: http://slatestarcodex.com/2016/04/27/book-review-albions-seed/ http://slatestarcodex.com/2016/04/27/book-review-albions-see...
hkmurakami 9y ago
Amusingly, we sort of get this by proxy by being owners of (significant) capital.

Florin_Andrei 9y ago

> It seems to me that part of the solution might be working to develop solutions that don't prevent the other side from achieving their desires. This would work well if the two sides lived on different planets on the opposite sides of the galaxy, each one outside of the other's light cone and causal domain.

objclxt 9y ago

> it seems to me that both sides are afraid that if the other side wins they will try to force their lifestyle on them; and I think they are probably right. ...it's not really that simple, though. It's not like you're picking two discrete options. Let's take a viewpoint like pro-choice/pro-life. A society that permits abortions doesn't prevent an individual from choosing not to have one. A woman who thinks abortion is immoral is free to hold and practice that belief herself...the "lifestyle" of being pro-choice is not forced upon her. Contrast that with a society that bans abortion.

jawns 9y ago
> A society that permits abortions doesn't prevent an individual from choosing not to have one. Yes, but the objecting individual is not fighting for his or her own rights. Pro-lifers consider themselves to be fighting for the rights of the unborn child. Similarly, a society that permits slavery doesn't prevent an individual from choosing not to own slaves. The society is not forcing its lifestyle on the objecting individual, per se, but it's forcing its lifestyle on the slaves, whom the objecting individual is concerned about.
- narrowrail 9y ago
  These abortion rights opponents derive their arguments from the bible (for the most part). The same bible says that judgement is the domain of god, not humans. In other words, cherry-picking the ideas that serve their own goals.
  - narrowrail 9y ago
    Is there an actual argument against my claim from someone with better biblical knowledge?
jimmyk 9y ago
There are important cases where it is that simple. For example, people have different ideas about who should control certain resources. All sides can't get what they want.

tomjen3 9y ago

How do you do that with abortion? (Just picking a controversial topic) there is _literally_ no common ground and it is simply not possible for one group to live under, to them, acceptable rules that are also acceptable to the other group. You cannot have one group that demands the right to terminate a pregnancy and one group that believes it is literally murder ever coexist on friendly terms. You cannot ban guns and still make them freely available to people who want them. You cannot combat global warming and still enable people to drive as they desire. You cannot simultaneously allow trans people to use their preferred gender's bathroom while allowing the people who so desires to only have cis people of the same gender in the room. You cannot simultaneously allow drugs and ban them. Indeed, as the days go by I am becoming more and more convinced that the only solution is the one outlined in this essay: http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/06/07/archipelago-and-atomic-communitarianism/ http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/06/07/archipelago-and-atomic-...

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
zepto 9y ago
The conflicts you list are all conflicts based on disagreements over the solutions to problems rather than based on what people want. To pick an example: Why is gun control even an issue? It didn't used to be - therefore something has changed that makes people want to ban guns. What is that? Is banning guns the only solution? You can use the same logic with most of these.
munificent 9y ago
> How do you do that with abortion? (Just picking a controversial topic) > there is _literally_ no common ground I don't think that's true. Ignoring fringe lunatics, everyone agrees that after a baby is born, they should not be allowed to be "aborted". Likewise, virtually everyone agrees that sperm and unfertilized eggs do not have rights as humans. Those two endpoints on the continuum are common ground. The question then is where do people stake their claims on the line between those endpoints. Some people think if the fetus is old enough to be viable if born that early, then it should be illegal to abort it. Others, if the fetus has a developed enough brain and heart to conceivably feel pain. Others, if its implanted. Others if it's fertilized. And, of course, it's not a straight line, but more like a space. Some fetuses, regardless of age, are not viable because of genetic deformities and people pick different regions in that space where they are comfortable with terminating. There is another axis in the space related to how the pregnancy occurred—rape, incest, etc. Within this space, you can find regions and boundaries where many people do have agreement. This is how governing works. There are no perfect solutions or black and white problems. It's about finding consensus and compromise, and picking something that is the most acceptable to the most people. The real problem, I believe, is that there are powerful people who want to deliberately sabotage that process to their own ends. They want to convince us that there is no common ground, and that those who have a different preference are evil people who cannot be tolerated, much less worked with. They've found that if you create an enemy for people, you can get them to show up for polls and keep people in power. That's the real goal. They don't give a shit about abortion. They care about tax law and gerrymandering and other legislation that keeps the powerful in power. But abortion gets them to the polls. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southern_strategy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southern_strategy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conservative_coalition https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conservative_coalition https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_Majority https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_Majority