This explanation feels a lot more colored by personal opinion than the rational approach taken above.
Well, he's really just talking about identity politics and dealing with ideas on their merits, which is certainly a fair example to use - it should be a quintessential liberal principle (the "tyranny of the majority" notion) that all perspectives, including the minority perspective, should contribute to a broad potpourri of world views, including a whole bunch of them that are ultimately determined to be wrong on their merits. No one's views should be dismissed or given an exalted status based on their position in society, their sex, their race or their sexual orientation - the rejection of the notion that women or blacks can't be trusted with the vote because their views are inherently of lesser worth, for example.
The regressive left approach is to invert the matter completely and say, to use an extreme example that I've seen in various contexts, "if you're a man, shut up and listen to women on women's issues, you have nothing worthwhile to add to the conversation".
Anyway last post on the subject as I'm likely to get accused of threadjacking again.
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Last edited by CorsiHockeyLeague; 05-30-2016 at 12:01 PM.
A good reason not to pigeon-hole people into one category based on a single political stance. IE: Being for free education = pinko commie basterd. Or being against bloated government spending = hardline, soulless capitalist. Regardless of what you believe about anything else.
It's one of the most frustrating things that can infect any discussion (as it so often does here). Instead of rational discussion based on the merit of any point, it is VERY common to hear responses that basically boil down to the following:
"You only think that because you are (liberal/conservative)"
"You have too much bias! You (liberals/conservatives) are always like that."
"Just another example of (liberals/conservatives)!"
People are so grossly entrenched in partisanship. Just look at Fuzz's comments above. Might he have liberal bias? Sure. But you don't actually make any point at all when you say "Liberal bias! Your perception is based on bias!" when it's more valuable to actually address the point of view based on merit.
Everyone has a certain bias on every issue, so why we continue to comment on bias like it's a detractor to the argument is beyond me. So lazy.
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Well, he's really just talking about identity politics and dealing with ideas on their merits, which is certainly a fair example to use - it should be a quintessential liberal principle (the "tyranny of the majority" notion) that all perspectives, including the minority perspective, should contribute to a broad potpourri of world views, including a whole bunch of them that are ultimately determined to be wrong on their merits. No one's views should be dismissed or given an exalted status based on their position in society, their sex, their race or their sexual orientation - the rejection of the notion that women or blacks can't be trusted with the vote because their views are inherently of lesser worth, for example.
The regressive left approach is to invert the matter completely and say, to use an extreme example that I've seen in various contexts, "if you're a man, shut up and listen to women on women's issues, you have nothing worthwhile to add to the conversation".
Anyway last post on the subject as I'm likely to get accused of threadjacking again.
I'd kind of like to poke it one more time. I do agree the "regressive-left" does exist (anti-GMO, Anti-Vax, etc...), however, just like we don't want to center health policy around people that have no clue what their talking about, we don't want to center any policy around people that are actually wrong about their points. So while, they are free to express themselves, there is a certain point where you just have to say "Nope, you're wrong. Let the rest of us move on and you can yell at the clouds if you please." to these people.
Sorry, but opinions based of incorrect information need to be corrected, whether its a person on the "left" or the "right" or basically any person in general. If you learn the new information, and find a way to ninja your brain into still believing your old way somehow, as long as it's based on the new information, I don't care (IE: religion and creation of the Earth. If you want to believe that God started the big bang, and thus your religion is still valid, that perfectly fine by me. If you're going to keep trying to convince me that the Earth is significantly younger than it is because you read it in a 4 thousand year old book, sorry, nothing of what you say on this matter holds any weight anymore, because it's based on a idea that has been proven to be incorrect.)
If you are operating and basing your opinions on information you believe to be right, but isn't, you are behind and need to be educated or go live in the woods and let the rest of humanity grow without you needlessly holding us back.
Well, he's really just talking about identity politics and dealing with ideas on their merits, which is certainly a fair example to use - it should be a quintessential liberal principle (the "tyranny of the majority" notion) that all perspectives, including the minority perspective, should contribute to a broad potpourri of world views, including a whole bunch of them that are ultimately determined to be wrong on their merits. No one's views should be dismissed or given an exalted status based on their position in society, their sex, their race or their sexual orientation - the rejection of the notion that women or blacks can't be trusted with the vote because their views are inherently of lesser worth, for example.
The regressive left approach is to invert the matter completely and say, to use an extreme example that I've seen in various contexts, "if you're a man, shut up and listen to women on women's issues, you have nothing worthwhile to add to the conversation".
Anyway last post on the subject as I'm likely to get accused of threadjacking again.
Well I started the thread and I think this discussion is excellent, so please continue if you feel compelled to.
My primary concern is that this may result in an occurrence similar to what we are seeing in the US right now; a hard shift in dialogue towards the far right in response to an increase in social freedoms.
Women's Rights goes "too far"? "Men's Rights" movement in response.
Transgender Rights goes "too far"? "Anti-Trans" movement in response.
The disenfranchisement of the far right wackjobs is palpable right now, and there will be a rise of (and already has been a rise of) socially regressive demagoguery going forward.
The US is, I believe, one of very few western jurisdictions where religious fervor is on an upswing. Canada is far more grounded overall, so while there will certainly be groups and individuals seeking to move the discussion that way, I think their power and voice will be limited. If anything, we're more at risk of hard left whackjobs taking control of the narrative.
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Well I started the thread and I think this discussion is excellent, so please continue if you feel compelled to.
How about I just put it in spoiler tags so people don't complain.
Spoiler!
Quote:
Originally Posted by MattyC
I'd kind of like to poke it one more time. I do agree the "regressive-left" does exist (anti-GMO, Anti-Vax, etc...)
I'm not sure this actually qualifies. Obviously enlightenment values like reason and evidence, and the value of scientific inquiry, are tied to liberalism traditionally because it took so much effort to get those views equal standing in the face of orthodoxy. But I think being anti-intellectual and anti-scientific is separate. On the other hand, as I'm typing this I'm sort of talking myself into it... I guess if you're generally pro-science, as the left has traditionally been, denying scientists on the basis of anti-corporatism (the whole GMO "it's Monsanto propaganda" or "you're blinded by Big Pharma thing) is pretty much along the same lines. Apply reason and evidence-based decision making across the board, not just when it comes to ideological safe havens like climate change. Okay, I've talked myself into agreeing with you. Do... do I just delete this paragraph now?
Quote:
however, just like we don't want to center health policy around people that have no clue what their talking about, we don't want to center any policy around people that are actually wrong about their points. So while, they are free to express themselves, there is a certain point where you just have to say "Nope, you're wrong. Let the rest of us move on and you can yell at the clouds if you please." to these people.
Agreed completely. There is always a bandwidth problem - as the world becomes more complex, the average person (even the average genius) can only have a limited sphere of knowledge where they're totally expert at. Then there's a broader sphere of knowledge where you're not an expert, but you can speak competently, and a broader one still where you're sort of informed but could stand to be more informed. In my view, on most issues, people stand in the third circle but act like they're in the second or first.
Quote:
Sorry, but opinions based of incorrect information need to be corrected, whether its a person on the "left" or the "right" or basically any person in general. If you learn the new information, and find a way to ninja your brain into still believing your old way somehow, as long as it's based on the new information, I don't care
This isn't really the issue - the wrong perspectives should ultimately lose out in a marketplace of ideas. The issue is twofold. First, with respect to identity politics, the notion that some views are inherently more or less valuable on certain topics owing to the identity of the speaker - in terms of the speaker's inherent characteristics. This isn't to say that a woman might have an important and different perspective on, for example, violence against women in media, but the fact that she's a woman does not inherently exalt her perspective. Her experience may allow her to express views that a man would be less likely to come to without that experience, and it may turn out that those views are right or valuable and we wouldn't have gotten them if she hadn't been given equal opportunity to voice them. The result is that the determination of what ideas win out in the long term is determined solely on the merits of the ideas themselves, ideally.
The second issue, which is the problem with "ideally", is that human beings aren't designed very well and we have a very strong censorship urge. The result is that in many cases, historically, those minority viewpoints are silenced. These days, we have the same problem in the opposite direction: your view may be de-valued if you don't have the traditionally oppressed identity. That's all well and good to some extent, because we have the bandwidth issue described above: we don't really have a lot of time to waste listening to the Westboro Baptist Church and the KKK. But then concept creep happens, and people with reasoned views (which you may or may not agree with ultimately) are not permitted to speak in the first place, because apparently, we're sure they're wrong before they open their mouths. Concept creep allows this to be extended not just to the people from whom we've heard everything they have to say - like the WBC and KKK - but everyone we disagree with. They don't get to be heard at all.
I annoyingly keep having to post Milo Yiannopoulos stuff on this because he's such a damned effective troll that he keeps getting the reactions that prove the point perfectly.
Spoiler!
Don't watch that if you don't want to be annoyed. Guy just busts in on college republican event with a whistle, sits on the stage and blows it incessantly so that no one can hear the speakers, while his friend in the hat just yells at them. Black republican girl comes up and says that they're not respecting their right to have an event, and gets called a white supremacist.
Quote:
If you are operating and basing your opinions on information you believe to be right, but isn't, you are behind and need to be educated or go live in the woods and let the rest of humanity grow without you needlessly holding us back.
The problem is where people presuppose their own rightness. And everyone does this, particularly when you inject morality into the conversation. Those kids disrupting the event in that video are sure they're right and that the people who want to have their GOP event are wrong, and not just wrong, but bad, evil people with bad, evil views, so it's okay to silence them. Just like the Christian right used to do with anyone who'd say "it's okay to be gay". Well, that resulted in a long and difficult struggle for equal rights... so, now that that progress has been made, it's our turn to use the same illiberal tactics because now we're sure we have the high ground? #### right off with that.
__________________ "The great promise of the Internet was that more information would automatically yield better decisions. The great disappointment is that more information actually yields more possibilities to confirm what you already believed anyway." - Brian Eno
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The US is, I believe, one of very few western jurisdictions where religious fervor is on an upswing. Canada is far more grounded overall, so while there will certainly be groups and individuals seeking to move the discussion that way, I think their power and voice will be limited. If anything, we're more at risk of hard left whackjobs taking control of the narrative.
So much this. I think the worst consequence of being neighbours with the American giant is the infection of our public dialogue with American culture wars. The influence of religious evangelicals and fundamentalists on public policy in Canada is negligible. This isn't Kansas or Tennessee. I can kinda understand how growing up in the Bible Belt of the USA might turn a liberal into a hard-line culture warrior, always vigilant lest liberal policies like access to contraception be rolled back. It's another thing entirely for a young leftist in Toronto to act as though she's battling against powerful entrenched social conservationism, and any day now she could be living out the Handmaid's Tale.
Canadians are far too eager to embrace American political and social narratives, instead of taking a step back from the Colbert Report, Fox News, and the Huffington Post, and assessing the climate in the country they actually live in.
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I actually don't see the threat from a boogeyman "Left" at all. From my own experience, the vocal hard left in this country seems to be pathetically inept at almost everything and mostly doesn't vote, and we have never elected a national NDP government.
Even here in Alberta we elected an NDP government that is far from what I would consider hard-left, and it took a mammoth protest-vote to do it where I doubt two-thirds of NDP voters will do it again.
There are some leftist nutjobs. Don't feel like they're a threat though.
was listening to 770 today, which you know tends to lean fairly conservative and they were basically saying what I had said initially, that one of them anyway felt it was perhaps a move to make the party more electable. So I'm not alone in my cynicism. Didn't have a chance to listen to the whole segment, it was around 9:30.
I must be a complete cynic, because I always assume that every single thing every single political party does is to be more electable. They have some constraints on their ideologies, but that just gives them fuzzy constraints that they can operate in.
I actually don't see the threat from a boogeyman "Left" at all. From my own experience, the vocal hard left in this country seems to be pathetically inept at almost everything and mostly doesn't vote, and we have never elected a national NDP government.
Even here in Alberta we elected an NDP government that is far from what I would consider hard-left, and it took a mammoth protest-vote to do it where I doubt two-thirds of NDP voters will do it again.
There are some leftist nutjobs. Don't feel like they're a threat though.
Zealotry is dangerous, whether it's anti-vaccine or anti-climate change. Ill-informed suspicion of scientific consensus is probably the most dangerous part of the human evolutionary path going forward.
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was listening to 770 today, which you know tends to lean fairly conservative
Not so much anymore since they got rid of Rutherford and Adler. Now the daytime duo is Breakinridge (who is fairly centrist maybe leaning a bit conservative) and Kingkade (who is fairly centrist leaning a bit liberal). Both of them completely support almost all gay issues including marriage if I remember correctly.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Fuzz
and they were basically saying what I had said initially, that one of them anyway felt it was perhaps a move to make the party more electable. So I'm not alone in my cynicism. Didn't have a chance to listen to the whole segment, it was around 9:30.
It's surely to make themselves more electable but it also signifies a gradual change in the thinking of the membership. Personally I don't really care if every member agrees or disagrees with any position as long as I agree with the party policy and platform.
I actually don't see the threat from a boogeyman "Left" at all. From my own experience, the vocal hard left in this country seems to be pathetically inept at almost everything and mostly doesn't vote, and we have never elected a national NDP government.
Even here in Alberta we elected an NDP government that is far from what I would consider hard-left, and it took a mammoth protest-vote to do it where I doubt two-thirds of NDP voters will do it again.
There are some leftist nutjobs. Don't feel like they're a threat though.
Sorry, I should have been more thorough with my point. I wasn't intending to suggest that the far left is a significant threat, merely that if one extreme or the other were to gain a more dominant voice in Canada, it would be the left rather than the right that would do so. Neither is a credible threat to a country that tends to sit far more to the left compared to our southern neighbour - even the Harper Conservatives.
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