6 ms·

or even simpler, stop being on a side, then you don't have to do mental tricks like "reversing the polarity". you can just see things for the way they are, with

or even simpler, stop being on a side, then you don't have to do mental tricks like "reversing the polarity". you can just see things for the way they are, without personal identity invested in the situation. this is exactly what being independent is.

hirundo 4y ago
I think of the abortion issue as like a necker cube. You can view the optical illusion as extending inward or outward. But it is difficult to see it both ways. You could easily see it as flat, but then you aren't really seeing it at all. Partisans may object "but in the abortion case it is objectively extending inward and the other perspective is the optical illusion". But that objectivity is a moral illusion.
- clairity 4y ago
  remember that the abortion issue, as a matter of law, is about the state's interests in the body. it does not litigate religious or social mores, but most of the "debate" is of this latter type. i personally agree with the recent supreme court ruling that abortion rights shouldn't rest on privacy protections, but rather on a robust reading of the constitution that bodily autonomy is a fundamental right above and beyond states' interests (nation state or US state). i'd extend this to the issues of euthanasia and suicide as well. the state should have a very narrow and rigorously limited set of concerns (foreign relations and interstate disputes, in the case of the US federal govt).
  - krapp 4y ago
    >remember that the abortion issue, as a matter of law, is about the state's interests in the body. it does not litigate religious or social mores, but most of the "debate" is of this latter type. It seems specious to claim this when the states' interests in the body in this regard (as well as gay marriage and any other rights formerly predicated on the right to privacy asserted in Roe) are based on conservative Christian beliefs and mores.
    - clairity 4y ago
      there's a whole body of political science literature that would heartily debate that stance. at most, political discourse and religious discourse grew up together and influenced each other, but to say one is based on the other is a rhetorical diversion at best. gay marriage shouldn't be predicated on privacy either. two people want equal protection under the law as any other two people who have enjoined their lives together. that's basically it. certainly the gender/sex of those two people isn't the state's concern, because reproduction is not a state concern, but rather a private matter.
      - dane-pgp 4y ago
        > reproduction is not a state concern But population growth rate (or decline) is absolutely a concern of the state, and reproduction is a significant contributor to that. In fact, one could argue that if a state has an interest in providing health care (including things like contraception) then it must have an interest in reproduction too.
        clairity 4y ago
        no, it absolutely is not, for a democratic republic like the US. the US is designed to have a minimal federal government that doesn't interfere in the individual life and liberty of its residents. this is very unlike governments that came before it and even peer governments now, like the social democracies of europe. our federal government was not meant to be a central planner, but rather simply an interstate and international arbiter. therefore, it cannot have any interest in population control in any way. that's up to the will of the people, and only the will of the people. it's not even a state concern because it would encroach our civil liberties, which are inalienable by the constitution.
        dane-pgp 4y ago
        Providing free (at the point of use) health care, and making sure children don't go hungry, and even providing tax benefits to couples who raise children, are all perfectly constitutional policies that don't encroach on civil liberties. All of those policies can be motivated by a state/federal desire to grow the population. In fact, some people believe that the federal government has a legitimate interest in providing a free (or discounted) service for healthy women to abort healthy children at any stage of their pregnancy, so if the government has an interest in preventing children then surely it can have an interest in producing them.
  - specialist 4y ago
    Adopting the reactionary, revanchist rhetoric which the southern plantation owners used to justify their continued subjugation of others, contrary to the will of the majority, is the opposite of being "independent".
karaterobot 4y ago
If you've got an opinion on some issue, especially a strong one, then you're on a side, and there is an 'other'. Be careful not to conflate a sense of your own independence with a sense of your own lack of biases or immunity to human irrationality.
- clairity 4y ago
  no, you don't have to think in sides. you can have a position and discuss your position with others. you don't have to think of them as your enemy, but rather your conversation partner, someone who can help you expand your perspective and perhaps even change your mind.
  - int_19h 4y ago
    At the end of the day, all those discussions still result in actual decisions. In some cases, those decisions affect people in a very negative way. Given that, why shouldn't one see someone advocating for decisions that will negatively affect them as an enemy?
    - clairity 4y ago
      because it doesn't help in the long run, even if it soothes the feathers in the short.
      - int_19h 4y ago
        Someone being an enemy or not is a matter of degree of conflicting interests. Acknowledging that someone really is the enemy when they're actively trying to hurt you is just common sense. Whether you choose to fight them or not is a different question.
  - watwut 4y ago
    But practically, this is simply not true and the more important debate the less it is true. Simple historical example: slaveholder says Frederic Dougles should be slave. Douglas does not want to be whipped nor slave again. They are enemies, full stop. Not partners. Same examples exist with any other country history. Simple current example: Take the model abortion legislative currently proposed. It literally says that raped 10 years old must give birth regardless of threat to her health. These people are not partners. They are in fact threats and if they win, actual raped kids will he harmed.
notriddle 4y ago
This isn't just partisan "sides." It's also sides of specific legal questions. I don't think "just stop picking a side regarding abortion, gun ownership, or gay marriage" is a reasonable solution. These are political wedge issues, but they are also legal questions with answers that can affect your daily life. Of course you want it to go a certain way!
- clairity 4y ago
  no, stop thinking of sides at all, and especially don't start with a side first. start with reasoned first principles (the constitution is a good start) and continue to reason your way to a position on any given issue that is consistent with those first principles, sides be damned. the only reason you pay attention to sides is identifying with and wanting to defend a side in the first place. don't worry about defending and entrenching. have earnest conversations. if your position is constantly getting barraged with hard-to-argue counterpoints, then consider changing your position. it's not that hard.
  - NoraCodes 4y ago
    > the only reason you pay attention to sides is identify with and wanting to defend a side in the first place True! For example, I inherently have a bias towards wanting LGBTQ people to have the right to participate in society through marriage, anti-discrimination laws, etc because I'm LGBTQ. I suspect a lot of black people have a bias towards wanting anti-discrimination legislation so they don't get discriminated against, too. Does that strike you as unreasonable?
    - clairity 4y ago
      no, why should it? i want those things for disadvantaged groups as well. that doesn't mean that i've chosen a side and will defend it to the death against the bad ol' "others". everyone can be part of the same tribe. no other tribe needed. and it's ok if we don't all agree on the same things at the same time. (i'm not going to pretend that i'm always cool, calm and collected in real life. far from it, i'm as flawed as the next person. but when it comes to thinking about this stuff, and striving to be more consistent with my own principles, this is the way i think myself out of all the partisanship i see around me.)
specialist 4y ago
> this is exactly what being independent is. "I think that, a) you have an act, and that, b) not having an act is your act." -- Linda Powell, Singles [1992]
fzeroracer 4y ago
Not having a side is a nice idea until your opponent forces you into a side. Then they complain when you defend yourself or you must give into their side. Like when someone is arguing that people with your attributes should be killed or should have less rights than other people you don't have a choice in the matter. If you have a coworker yelling about how gay people are inferior to their openly gay coworker, there's no getting out of choosing a side.
- clairity 4y ago
  that's a strawman. we're talking about how to have dialogue with people who hold cognitively dissonant viewpoints (to you), and sometimes that means the dialogue is context- and time- dependent. if one person is literally attacking another person verbally or physically, well, then you should possibly step in or call for help. but that's not "taking sides" so much as intervening against violence.
hiptobecubic 4y ago
No it's not. Being independent just means your personal identity isn't "My political party is X." There's still your mental image of yourself and it shapes your opinions ("What would do I think the kind of person I want to be would think about an issue like this?"). This is pretty much inescapable.
- clairity 4y ago
  we're saying the same thing. you're distinguishing biases formed of life experience that can't be avoided (but can be consciously corrected to some extent), which is implicitly acknowledged. the point was not to pile partisan identification on top to further distort things needlessly, this latter part being a conscious choice we can deliberately avoid.

hirundo 4y ago

I think of the abortion issue as like a necker cube. You can view the optical illusion as extending inward or outward. But it is difficult to see it both ways. You could easily see it as flat, but then you aren't really seeing it at all. Partisans may object "but in the abortion case it is objectively extending inward and the other perspective is the optical illusion". But that objectivity is a moral illusion.

clairity 4y ago
remember that the abortion issue, as a matter of law, is about the state's interests in the body. it does not litigate religious or social mores, but most of the "debate" is of this latter type. i personally agree with the recent supreme court ruling that abortion rights shouldn't rest on privacy protections, but rather on a robust reading of the constitution that bodily autonomy is a fundamental right above and beyond states' interests (nation state or US state). i'd extend this to the issues of euthanasia and suicide as well. the state should have a very narrow and rigorously limited set of concerns (foreign relations and interstate disputes, in the case of the US federal govt).
- krapp 4y ago
  >remember that the abortion issue, as a matter of law, is about the state's interests in the body. it does not litigate religious or social mores, but most of the "debate" is of this latter type. It seems specious to claim this when the states' interests in the body in this regard (as well as gay marriage and any other rights formerly predicated on the right to privacy asserted in Roe) are based on conservative Christian beliefs and mores.
  - clairity 4y ago
    there's a whole body of political science literature that would heartily debate that stance. at most, political discourse and religious discourse grew up together and influenced each other, but to say one is based on the other is a rhetorical diversion at best. gay marriage shouldn't be predicated on privacy either. two people want equal protection under the law as any other two people who have enjoined their lives together. that's basically it. certainly the gender/sex of those two people isn't the state's concern, because reproduction is not a state concern, but rather a private matter.
    - dane-pgp 4y ago
      > reproduction is not a state concern But population growth rate (or decline) is absolutely a concern of the state, and reproduction is a significant contributor to that. In fact, one could argue that if a state has an interest in providing health care (including things like contraception) then it must have an interest in reproduction too.
      - clairity 4y ago
        no, it absolutely is not, for a democratic republic like the US. the US is designed to have a minimal federal government that doesn't interfere in the individual life and liberty of its residents. this is very unlike governments that came before it and even peer governments now, like the social democracies of europe. our federal government was not meant to be a central planner, but rather simply an interstate and international arbiter. therefore, it cannot have any interest in population control in any way. that's up to the will of the people, and only the will of the people. it's not even a state concern because it would encroach our civil liberties, which are inalienable by the constitution.
        dane-pgp 4y ago
        Providing free (at the point of use) health care, and making sure children don't go hungry, and even providing tax benefits to couples who raise children, are all perfectly constitutional policies that don't encroach on civil liberties. All of those policies can be motivated by a state/federal desire to grow the population. In fact, some people believe that the federal government has a legitimate interest in providing a free (or discounted) service for healthy women to abort healthy children at any stage of their pregnancy, so if the government has an interest in preventing children then surely it can have an interest in producing them.
- specialist 4y ago
  Adopting the reactionary, revanchist rhetoric which the southern plantation owners used to justify their continued subjugation of others, contrary to the will of the majority, is the opposite of being "independent".

karaterobot 4y ago

If you've got an opinion on some issue, especially a strong one, then you're on a side, and there is an 'other'. Be careful not to conflate a sense of your own independence with a sense of your own lack of biases or immunity to human irrationality.

clairity 4y ago
no, you don't have to think in sides. you can have a position and discuss your position with others. you don't have to think of them as your enemy, but rather your conversation partner, someone who can help you expand your perspective and perhaps even change your mind.
- int_19h 4y ago
  At the end of the day, all those discussions still result in actual decisions. In some cases, those decisions affect people in a very negative way. Given that, why shouldn't one see someone advocating for decisions that will negatively affect them as an enemy?
  - clairity 4y ago
    because it doesn't help in the long run, even if it soothes the feathers in the short.
    - int_19h 4y ago
      Someone being an enemy or not is a matter of degree of conflicting interests. Acknowledging that someone really is the enemy when they're actively trying to hurt you is just common sense. Whether you choose to fight them or not is a different question.
- watwut 4y ago
  But practically, this is simply not true and the more important debate the less it is true. Simple historical example: slaveholder says Frederic Dougles should be slave. Douglas does not want to be whipped nor slave again. They are enemies, full stop. Not partners. Same examples exist with any other country history. Simple current example: Take the model abortion legislative currently proposed. It literally says that raped 10 years old must give birth regardless of threat to her health. These people are not partners. They are in fact threats and if they win, actual raped kids will he harmed.

notriddle 4y ago

This isn't just partisan "sides." It's also sides of specific legal questions. I don't think "just stop picking a side regarding abortion, gun ownership, or gay marriage" is a reasonable solution. These are political wedge issues, but they are also legal questions with answers that can affect your daily life. Of course you want it to go a certain way!

clairity 4y ago
no, stop thinking of sides at all, and especially don't start with a side first. start with reasoned first principles (the constitution is a good start) and continue to reason your way to a position on any given issue that is consistent with those first principles, sides be damned. the only reason you pay attention to sides is identifying with and wanting to defend a side in the first place. don't worry about defending and entrenching. have earnest conversations. if your position is constantly getting barraged with hard-to-argue counterpoints, then consider changing your position. it's not that hard.
- NoraCodes 4y ago
  > the only reason you pay attention to sides is identify with and wanting to defend a side in the first place True! For example, I inherently have a bias towards wanting LGBTQ people to have the right to participate in society through marriage, anti-discrimination laws, etc because I'm LGBTQ. I suspect a lot of black people have a bias towards wanting anti-discrimination legislation so they don't get discriminated against, too. Does that strike you as unreasonable?
  - clairity 4y ago
    no, why should it? i want those things for disadvantaged groups as well. that doesn't mean that i've chosen a side and will defend it to the death against the bad ol' "others". everyone can be part of the same tribe. no other tribe needed. and it's ok if we don't all agree on the same things at the same time. (i'm not going to pretend that i'm always cool, calm and collected in real life. far from it, i'm as flawed as the next person. but when it comes to thinking about this stuff, and striving to be more consistent with my own principles, this is the way i think myself out of all the partisanship i see around me.)

specialist 4y ago

> this is exactly what being independent is. "I think that, a) you have an act, and that, b) not having an act is your act." -- Linda Powell, Singles [1992]

fzeroracer 4y ago

Not having a side is a nice idea until your opponent forces you into a side. Then they complain when you defend yourself or you must give into their side. Like when someone is arguing that people with your attributes should be killed or should have less rights than other people you don't have a choice in the matter. If you have a coworker yelling about how gay people are inferior to their openly gay coworker, there's no getting out of choosing a side.

clairity 4y ago
that's a strawman. we're talking about how to have dialogue with people who hold cognitively dissonant viewpoints (to you), and sometimes that means the dialogue is context- and time- dependent. if one person is literally attacking another person verbally or physically, well, then you should possibly step in or call for help. but that's not "taking sides" so much as intervening against violence.

hiptobecubic 4y ago

No it's not. Being independent just means your personal identity isn't "My political party is X." There's still your mental image of yourself and it shapes your opinions ("What would do I think the kind of person I want to be would think about an issue like this?"). This is pretty much inescapable.

clairity 4y ago
we're saying the same thing. you're distinguishing biases formed of life experience that can't be avoided (but can be consciously corrected to some extent), which is implicitly acknowledged. the point was not to pile partisan identification on top to further distort things needlessly, this latter part being a conscious choice we can deliberately avoid.