5 ms·

At some level I will be a permanent victim of movies and media, and as such there are absolutely politicians that I hate, but I've been trying to acknowledge to

At some level I will be a permanent victim of movies and media, and as such there are absolutely politicians that I hate, but I've been trying to acknowledge to myself that, generally speaking, most of their voters mean well [1], even if they are voting for politicians that I think are disgusting. As such, I've tried to not "hate" them, even if I don't particularly like a good chunk of them either. [1] Though I have to say that some of the "build the wall" rhetoric around immigrants has made me question this.

TomSwirly 5y ago
> most of their voters mean well Can you give some sort of reason why you have this impression?
- tombert 5y ago
  I have conservative members of my family, who I admittedly don’t talk to very often anymore, but when I do I do get a vibe that they believe what they’re saying. They genuinely think that Donald Trump really Made America Great Again, and that Joe Biden exist to destroy America. I don’t agree with either of those statements, and I think their actions as a result of these beliefs are bad, but I do think they want things to be best for America, though I think they have a different definition of “best” Obviously this is anecdata, but you asked why I believed this.
  - pierrebai 5y ago
    I whole-heartedly agree with you. People love to demonize who they disagree with, assuming that disagreement is just a proxy for the fact the others are idiots. In reality, it is merely that they hold different values, their source of true facts they believe in are different and prioritize different things.
  - bellyfullofbac 5y ago
    Making decisions with global, or even national, ramifications is a complex thing, but people seem to take shortcuts when they decide if something is good or bad. In your example, people may think "Trump MAGAed" because "He's fighting China, China's been stealing our jobs, and we liked jobs.", although the way Donald did the tariff wars, it disadvantaged American companies and consumers, making the American economy/jobs situation that little bit worse. (At least Covid happened and it eclipsed the whole problem).
bellyfullofbac 5y ago
I'm not so sure about meaning well. If you read https://www.slatestarcodexabridged.com/I-Can-Tolerate-Anything-Except-The-Outgroup https://www.slatestarcodexabridged.com/I-Can-Tolerate-Anythi... , it feels like there's a lot of decisions nowadays that's taken because it will hurt/offend the "other team", with post-facto justification why the decision benefits "me/our side". It seems like people have been losing their pride in their selves that now they're invested in their "football teqm" winning in the arena of politics.
- asdfman123 5y ago
  Well, they take the perspective that the "other team" is hurting the country, so hurting them helps the country. Almost all evil comes from the over-application of morality. "My team is good, and their team is bad, and it is good to hurt bad people." The problem is that democracy depends on cooperation. If you insist on winning at all costs, the other side adopts your tactics and it becomes a no-holds barred power struggle. Democracy is in short a system where people can struggle for power without killing or unjustly imprisoning each other.
  - bellyfullofbac 5y ago
    > Well, they take the perspective that the "other team" is hurting the country, so hurting them helps the country. It seems like the perspective gets taken to - as I write above - justify, after-the-fact, "why I've decided the same way my herd decided". There is a lot of grasping for easy answers ("Yeah, he must be being controlled by China, that's a good enough answer for me!") and cognitive dissonnace when challenged, that usually ends with people being angry so the challenger stops..
    - asdfman123 5y ago
      When you view something as extremely morally important, you're willing to cross a lot of moral boundaries and make a lot of rationalizations. Full moral consistency is almost impossible: you're always balancing self-interests with other higher ideals, etc., and there's always some dissonance. This is just a more problematic example of people striking that kind of moral balance.
golemotron 5y ago
It might help to see it as class based. I know I started to feel better about myself when I realized that, being well educated and in tech, I was part of the upper class in the US and it's not good to look down on those who are not.
coldtea 5y ago
>but I've been trying to acknowledge to myself that, generally speaking, most of their voters mean well [1], even if they are voting for politicians that I think are disgusting. Some remedies: (1) Actually talk to those voters and get to know them at a human level, don't just group them as an undefined mass of "people who vote badly". (2) Try a mental game where you imagine your side has the wrong arguments or is talking from privilege, etc., and study what the other side is saying (even the naive people there, but even more so the smarter and less naive people there), trying to see how they are right. Find arguments why your (current) position is wrong. (3) Then try for a month, to see all those sides (voters for R or D for example), as an outsider, who doesn't agree with either side. Check what people not belonging to either side have to say - e.g. political outsiders, academics doing a critique of both parties, pundits, commenters, and philosophers from a previous century not giving a damn for today's politics. (4) Finally, see the ideas of today as from 2121, the same way we see the ideas of 1921 today. Then as from 3021 B.C. Don't assume a monotonic increase in agreement of the future with your current ideas, or the prevalent ideas of today, but that history goes back and forth in ideological fashions (including what's "good"). >[1] Though I have to say that some of the "build the wall" rhetoric around immigrants has made me question this. Here are some examples of (2) in this case: (1) Note that the idea of borders and citizenship is already the idea of a wall. And nobody, not even the "good guys" you voted for, ever challenged those. (2) Note that the wall is defensive (we don't want no any more to come) and not actively harmful, then see how the good guy politicians that are feigning the idea unacceptable and inhuman, often advocate for foreign wars and interventions that actively harm millions. (3) Note that those in favor of "building the wall" might have issues in their communities or work that e.g. a FAANG engineer might never experience as problems because they have different job prospects. Consider if your private interests were directly harmed by immigration (e.g. you are living in close quarters with poverty striken immigrants, taking to petty crime and so on, or because your low skill job industry prefers immigrants to lower costs and you're either out of a job or have your wages slashed). And inversely, if you're say a Republican: (1) Note that your family doesn't have very deep roots here. Just 400-200 years ago they passed some other people's non-wall (and killed a lot of them) to grap the land. If, say, you're a Kowalski or a Smith, you're not fooling anyone that you're the rightful owner of this land. B...tc please, your ancestors didn't come traversing the Bering Strait, you're not Clovis. If you're, like, second generation, your parents were bona-fide wall climbers. Perhaps they did it legaly through Ellis Island for example, but do you think they'd stopped if they were denied there, but had some other way in? (2) Note that the Wall is established on land (TX, NM, FL, AZ, CA) stolen from the very country its people tries to keep out. It's even in the names of the states, all Spanish. Who are you fooling? (3) Note that if you're out of a job, it might have more to do with clean shaven, suit wearing anglosaxon bosses preffering cheap immigrant labor, and less about the immigrants themselves. Plus, if those immigrants were legitimised, and given an easy way to citizenship, would they still be a cheaper option to undercut your wage?

TomSwirly 5y ago

> most of their voters mean well Can you give some sort of reason why you have this impression?

tombert 5y ago
I have conservative members of my family, who I admittedly don’t talk to very often anymore, but when I do I do get a vibe that they believe what they’re saying. They genuinely think that Donald Trump really Made America Great Again, and that Joe Biden exist to destroy America. I don’t agree with either of those statements, and I think their actions as a result of these beliefs are bad, but I do think they want things to be best for America, though I think they have a different definition of “best” Obviously this is anecdata, but you asked why I believed this.
- pierrebai 5y ago
  I whole-heartedly agree with you. People love to demonize who they disagree with, assuming that disagreement is just a proxy for the fact the others are idiots. In reality, it is merely that they hold different values, their source of true facts they believe in are different and prioritize different things.
- bellyfullofbac 5y ago
  Making decisions with global, or even national, ramifications is a complex thing, but people seem to take shortcuts when they decide if something is good or bad. In your example, people may think "Trump MAGAed" because "He's fighting China, China's been stealing our jobs, and we liked jobs.", although the way Donald did the tariff wars, it disadvantaged American companies and consumers, making the American economy/jobs situation that little bit worse. (At least Covid happened and it eclipsed the whole problem).

bellyfullofbac 5y ago

I'm not so sure about meaning well. If you read https://www.slatestarcodexabridged.com/I-Can-Tolerate-Anything-Except-The-Outgroup https://www.slatestarcodexabridged.com/I-Can-Tolerate-Anythi... , it feels like there's a lot of decisions nowadays that's taken because it will hurt/offend the "other team", with post-facto justification why the decision benefits "me/our side". It seems like people have been losing their pride in their selves that now they're invested in their "football teqm" winning in the arena of politics.

asdfman123 5y ago
Well, they take the perspective that the "other team" is hurting the country, so hurting them helps the country. Almost all evil comes from the over-application of morality. "My team is good, and their team is bad, and it is good to hurt bad people." The problem is that democracy depends on cooperation. If you insist on winning at all costs, the other side adopts your tactics and it becomes a no-holds barred power struggle. Democracy is in short a system where people can struggle for power without killing or unjustly imprisoning each other.
- bellyfullofbac 5y ago
  > Well, they take the perspective that the "other team" is hurting the country, so hurting them helps the country. It seems like the perspective gets taken to - as I write above - justify, after-the-fact, "why I've decided the same way my herd decided". There is a lot of grasping for easy answers ("Yeah, he must be being controlled by China, that's a good enough answer for me!") and cognitive dissonnace when challenged, that usually ends with people being angry so the challenger stops..
  - asdfman123 5y ago
    When you view something as extremely morally important, you're willing to cross a lot of moral boundaries and make a lot of rationalizations. Full moral consistency is almost impossible: you're always balancing self-interests with other higher ideals, etc., and there's always some dissonance. This is just a more problematic example of people striking that kind of moral balance.

golemotron 5y ago

It might help to see it as class based. I know I started to feel better about myself when I realized that, being well educated and in tech, I was part of the upper class in the US and it's not good to look down on those who are not.

coldtea 5y ago

>but I've been trying to acknowledge to myself that, generally speaking, most of their voters mean well [1], even if they are voting for politicians that I think are disgusting. Some remedies: (1) Actually talk to those voters and get to know them at a human level, don't just group them as an undefined mass of "people who vote badly". (2) Try a mental game where you imagine your side has the wrong arguments or is talking from privilege, etc., and study what the other side is saying (even the naive people there, but even more so the smarter and less naive people there), trying to see how they are right. Find arguments why your (current) position is wrong. (3) Then try for a month, to see all those sides (voters for R or D for example), as an outsider, who doesn't agree with either side. Check what people not belonging to either side have to say - e.g. political outsiders, academics doing a critique of both parties, pundits, commenters, and philosophers from a previous century not giving a damn for today's politics. (4) Finally, see the ideas of today as from 2121, the same way we see the ideas of 1921 today. Then as from 3021 B.C. Don't assume a monotonic increase in agreement of the future with your current ideas, or the prevalent ideas of today, but that history goes back and forth in ideological fashions (including what's "good"). >[1] Though I have to say that some of the "build the wall" rhetoric around immigrants has made me question this. Here are some examples of (2) in this case: (1) Note that the idea of borders and citizenship is already the idea of a wall. And nobody, not even the "good guys" you voted for, ever challenged those. (2) Note that the wall is defensive (we don't want no any more to come) and not actively harmful, then see how the good guy politicians that are feigning the idea unacceptable and inhuman, often advocate for foreign wars and interventions that actively harm millions. (3) Note that those in favor of "building the wall" might have issues in their communities or work that e.g. a FAANG engineer might never experience as problems because they have different job prospects. Consider if your private interests were directly harmed by immigration (e.g. you are living in close quarters with poverty striken immigrants, taking to petty crime and so on, or because your low skill job industry prefers immigrants to lower costs and you're either out of a job or have your wages slashed). And inversely, if you're say a Republican: (1) Note that your family doesn't have very deep roots here. Just 400-200 years ago they passed some other people's non-wall (and killed a lot of them) to grap the land. If, say, you're a Kowalski or a Smith, you're not fooling anyone that you're the rightful owner of this land. B...tc please, your ancestors didn't come traversing the Bering Strait, you're not Clovis. If you're, like, second generation, your parents were bona-fide wall climbers. Perhaps they did it legaly through Ellis Island for example, but do you think they'd stopped if they were denied there, but had some other way in? (2) Note that the Wall is established on land (TX, NM, FL, AZ, CA) stolen from the very country its people tries to keep out. It's even in the names of the states, all Spanish. Who are you fooling? (3) Note that if you're out of a job, it might have more to do with clean shaven, suit wearing anglosaxon bosses preffering cheap immigrant labor, and less about the immigrants themselves. Plus, if those immigrants were legitimised, and given an easy way to citizenship, would they still be a cheaper option to undercut your wage?