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> It always comes down to the other team is bad and immoral or whatever, our team is the best, go chosen sports team, you can do no wrong. That's a pretty sup

• nitwit005 7y ago
  Did people take their stances for or against slavery as a result of careful consideration the issue, or did people mostly follow the example of those in their social group and choose to support their own "side"? Unfortunately, I suspect it's mostly the later.
• tnel77 7y ago
  Seems like a dramatic example, but you are technically correct.
• baddox 7y ago
  Yes, but the normal political process in wealthy democratic countries simply does not give much influence to the average individual. Obviously government policies can and do have huge consequences for many individuals, civil rights being a very notable example. But when's the last time you got to vote on a civil rights issue, and even if you did, how much effect did your research and vote have on the outcome? The reason people tend to just choose a political "team" and root for that team is that there is individual value to that process. If feels good to be part of a team, to cheer with your team's victories, and to complain about your team's losses. That's a big part of what is so fun about sports fandom. It doesn't depend on your actual individual influence on the outcome, which everyone correctly realizes is nearly negligible.
• TaylorAlexander 7y ago
  You can both be right, if we take the parent comment to mean “often” when they say always. A lot of political discussions I see are quick to point the finger at the other side without realizing the non-partisan nature of the problem.
  • davidw 7y ago
    Sure, there are absolutely people who treat, say, political parties like sports teams. But there are a lot of sincere people trying to right wrongs or improve our world out there too. And there are genuinely evil people who seek only to further their own self interest, or power, or both.
    • bluGill 7y ago
      Most people think they are sincere while promoting their own side good other side evil. All (not both!) sides do good and bad things both sides have evil people. However most people will overlook the bad someone on their side does because it is "a small thing", while jumping on the accusation bad thing someone on the other side does (often without any evidence, or minimal evidence that is played up).
      • davidw 7y ago
        At different points in history, different sides have been fairly objectively 'good' or 'bad' on various issues. Slavery was bad. Nixon was a crook. Of course people are complicated and you have to look at the entirety of things, which makes it complicated, but still, I don't buy the "both sides" stuff either.
        • someguydave 7y ago
          Have you ever read a serious defense of slavery or of Nixon? If not, perhaps that's a good place to start trying to humanize the other side?
          • bobthepanda 7y ago
            You don't even necessarily have to do this. Polemics against homosexuality and trans issues are still an extremely potent political issue today. You can still get fired from your job or kicked out of housing in many states for merely being openly gay. As a gay man it would be completely unconsciable to support Republicanism as it exists today, because the overwhelming majority of people in the party are somewhere between apathetic and enthusiastic about denying my rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
• SuoDuanDao 7y ago
  counterexample: interventionism. An awful lot of people who were vocally against interventionism during the Bush administration became grudgingly accepting of it during the Obama era. I think that's the kind of politics GP is referring to.
  • ben509 7y ago
    > An awful lot of people who were vocally against interventionism during the Bush administration became grudgingly accepting of it... You'd think that. It was amazing to see the mass protests while W was president that simply evaporated as soon as Obama was in office. But I disagree that people changed their minds. People were still protesting while Obama was president, and anti-war writers like Greenwald kept up a consistent position. What went on is the press, really a handful of editors, simply spiked stories about the wars and the protests, and by starving them of media coverage, they didn't weigh on people's minds so heavily. The higher-ups in a news office have to make judgement calls about what a news program is going to focus on, and to them some stuff feels more or less newsworthy depending on who's in office. It could be some shadowy conspiracy, or, more likely, just their personal unconcious biases.
    • notJim 7y ago
      I think both of these things are true, actually. It does seem that some on the left are fine with war as long as it's a Democrat doing it. For example, look at Hillary Clinton's complicity during the Honduran coup, and how little criticism she received for it. Or deportation and drone strikes under Obama, as another example. However, it's also true that the anti-war movement died off partly due to failure essentially, as the Iraq War proceeded with essentially no resistance from elected officials, and no coverage from the mainstream media. I think this, more than partisanship, explains why it's basically dead in the water now. If the movement fails to achieve its goals, people will eventually go home. This all happened within W's term. Protest altogether didn't die out under Obama, however, Occupy Wall Street started in 2011, and was heavily critical of Obama's coziness with the finance industry. Within left movements that exist now, many seem to see a through-line from Occupy Wall Street. Overall, this speaks to the narrative about tribalism, because there's a tendency to see the opposing group as one mass, when in reality, there are different groups within each side that may disagree with each other as much as they do the nominally-opposed groups. This tendency is also exacerbated by the two-party system in the US that smushes what would really be 3-6 parties together into two.
• imgabe 7y ago
  You can believe that certain actions people do are wrong with demeaning them as subhuman evil beings. In fact, if you want them to stop doing those things you dislike without resorting to physical violence, acknowledging our shared humanity is the first step.
  • deleted 7y ago
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  • bilbo0s 7y ago
    Well, you have to be careful there, because it very much depends on how acute the situation has become. If the situation is acute enough, you really shouldn't be talking at all, you have to move to action. For less important issues, sure, talk it out. Like most domestic political issues, those are just little things. No one's dying, no one's being enslaved. So talking it out is actually not only the preferable choice, but the correct choice. But for acute issues, say something like slavery, or Germany processing thousands of Jews through death camps weekly, or even domestically if some guy goes to shoot up a Walmart, the time for talk has past. I suppose we could ask them to stop, just as a formality, but any answer other than "We'll stop immediately and unconditionally" has to be met with force. That's the whole reason we have police, because sometimes, it's just not practical to "talk it out" in the hopes that the bad actor stops doing what they're doing. Certainly with slavery we probably waited far too long to stop the behavior, and that hesitation made forcing an end to the problem worse than it otherwise would have been. It's a good reminder that in life, as a general rule, it's always best to handle acute issues as soon as possible. Now what's funny about all of the animosity today, is that other than the problem of domestic terrorism, there are no acute issues. So there is nothing really worth fighting over. (Again, stopping mass shooters excepted. And I'm not sure anyone is arguing against that idea anyway?) So it's kind of perplexing to me that people get so mad over issues these days? As most of the issues seem so petty in a historic or even cultural sense.
    • mcguire 7y ago
      Cynic here! I'd just like to point out that "Germany processing thousands of Jews through death camps weekly" didn't matter to anyone until after the war was over. (Well, anyone outside Germany. And there were people who knew what was going on and tried to show it to the world, but there are cranks everywhere.)
• larnmar 7y ago
  Slavery is a really exceptional (in a bad way) example of a political disagreement. In that particular disagreement, one side was clearly (in retrospect) right, the other was wrong. Nowadays we’re all on the right side, the wrong side looks obviously wrong, and there’s no real room for doubt. Most political disagreements are nothing like this. Most political disagreements come down to some combination of (a) a trade-off between two reasonable values or (b) differing predictions about the consequences of a particular policy in the future. If “slavery vs not slavery” is your go-to example of what a political disagreement looks like, then you’re likely to fall victim to the sorts of bad thought habits (other side evil!) that lead to dumb polarisation and tribalism.
  • davidw 7y ago
    It's an extreme example, for sure, but there are things out there that have right and wrong answers and where it's not all just some game.
    • ephextom 7y ago
      The very reason other issues make for less incisive examples (than slavery, genocide) is that they are less clear-cut, and more beholden to complexities and tradeoffs. It's a rhetorical trick to invoke slavery/genocide, and then group all the other controversial positions held by my political opponents as being in the same category of clear right/wrong. But if they really were so clear-cut, they'd be invoked as broadly indisputable, standalone examples just as much as slavery and genocide are.
      • davidw 7y ago
        Slavery was very much an accepted practice by a lot of people then. There are tons of issues that are not clear cut, like, say, the optimal rate of taxation. It's healthy to argue about those things and try different approaches. Other things, like trying to subvert democracy, are clear as day.
        • larnmar 7y ago
• zentropia 7y ago
  We don't need slavery today because we have machines. But in the past if an empire didn't practice slavery implied that other empires will conquer you and slave you. So slavery was required for survival. It's today that this debate is clear. In ancient times, the reverse was true.
  • mushi 7y ago
    I think you missed the point here - slavery over which the US fought a civil war was not in ancient times nor did it protect US from becoming enslaved.