Where is the Common Ground?

[WilliamSeger]

Your case is illogical and unsound. Among other problems, caring about things isn't a binary proposition.

You'd like to divide the "half" who "don't care" into those who don't care at all and those who don't care enough to vote for someone else? Suit yourself, if you think that helps.

 

[kellyb]

I think this is relevant here:

No, that's about gun control.

 

[acbytesla]

Wow, way to misinterpret that link.

I don't think so. I've seen articles like that for years. It preaches distance and is really another person telling us to be cold dispassionate and selfish.

No. The problems with empathy (which isn't synonymous with concern for others) is empirically demonstrated psychology. Your straw man attempt at a refutation demonstrates one of its fundamental flaws: it makes you respond emotionally rather than logically.

Sorry, no. There is NOTHING wrong with empathy. It's only when we consider what life is in someone else's shoes that we really can begin to care or find actual solutions. Empathy is not an obstacle to logic or intellect.

 

[acbytesla]

Indeed, Democrats are likely to be more empathetic than Republicans. Which also means they are more illogical, more prone to be swayed by emotions, more prone to ignore unintended consequences, and actually less tolerant of people with different views.

Huh? Less tolerant? Such as? Seriously who's views am I not tolerant of?

Racists? That's true.
Sexists? You got me there.
People that think it is ok to discriminate against homosexuals and transgendered people. Yep.

Beyond this group, who am I intolerant of?

 

[Ziggurat]

There's research demonstrating that empathy makes people intolerant?

More than that, research demonstrates empathy can even make people more violent.

You didn't read the link, did you?

No, I desperately wish it were not true. If it were not true, I would hold out hope that republican elites could be persuaded by evidence to seriously consider things like single payer healthcare and lifting the cap on social security and criminalizing torture.

Wow. How magnanimous to hope that your opponents will agree with you.

I get absolutely no joy out of my diagnosis of selfish and sadistic rot in the heart of the party's policy elites.

I said nothing about joy.

And you're basically claiming that policy disagreements are due to a fundamental flaw (a lack of empathy in this case) in your opponents. Common ground can be found with people who are merely mistaken, but when you're positing that your opponents are evil, then finding common ground isn't even desirable. So I think my analysis is spot on.

 

[Ziggurat]

Huh? Less tolerant? Such as? Seriously who's views am I not tolerant of?

You personally? No idea. I made no claims about you. Democrats on average? Like I said, people with different ideas than them. This isn't news.

The left doesn't want common ground. That's why they police their own to prevent that from happening.

 

[kellyb]

More than that, research demonstrates empathy can even make people more violent.

You didn't read the link, did you?

It does not show that more empathetic people are less tolerant.

The closest it (the link to the link) showed was that everyone can be manipulated by experiment or circumstance to be more vindictive on behalf of a witnessed victimization of another.

And you're basically claiming that policy disagreements are due to a fundamental flaw (a lack of empathy in this case) in your opponents. Common ground can be found with people who are merely mistaken, but when you're positing that your opponents are evil, then finding common ground isn't even desirable. So I think my analysis is spot on.

It would be highly desirable if it were possible.

You are aware of the fact that US rightwingers embrace selfishness as a virtue and reject empathy more than any other major political group in the entire Western world, right?

 

[kellyb]

You personally? No idea. I made no claims about you. Democrats on average? Like I said, people with different ideas than them. This isn't news.

Oh, please. When did likelihood of facebook unfriending after a specific election become the gold standard metric for psychological research? LOL

eta:
Actual science:
https://www.politico.com/magazine/s...berals-arent-as-tolerant-as-they-think-215114

But these differences didn’t affect the larger picture: Liberals were as discriminatory toward conservative groups as conservatives were toward liberal groups. And Brandt’s findings have been echoed elsewhere: Independently and concurrently, the labs of John Chambers at St. Louis University and Jarret Crawford at The College of New Jersey have also found approximately equal prejudice among conservatives and liberals.

 

[acbytesla]

You personally? No idea. I made no claims about you. Democrats on average? Like I said, people with different ideas than them. This isn't news.

The left doesn't want common ground. That's why they police their own to prevent that from happening.

A biased survey conducted by a highly biased man pushing an agenda.

I want common ground, but I am not interested in being Neville Chamberlain to Trump.

 

[Distracted1]

The premise of your question is unproven.

Yet there is evidence for it.
Trump retains very high approval ratings amongst Republicans, despite his extreme deviations from typical Conservativism (take his stance on tariffs, as an example, or the massive deficits his policies are creating). One would expect a luke-warm support of him by the Republicans at best.

Concurrently, he expresses disdain for people who's ancestry links them back to those "********" countries, which also happen to be predominantly brown. He talks and acts like a racist.

Taking these bits of evidence together, the hypothesis that a substantial amount of the Trumpsters' support for this administration is rooted in wholehearted approval of his racist attitudes seems a reasonable one.

I can attest that with two exceptions every openly racist person I know is also a big Trump fan. Whilst those who are not racist (at least overtly)- yet found themselves voting for Trump (or in three cases, voting libertarian or not voting for any presidential candidate) because of opposition to the Democratic Party, find him to be a disgrace.

 

[Delvo]

No, I don't believe all trumpers are racists; I think a goodly number of them just don't care that Trump and "half" his base are... They just don't care that racism has real consequences to real people...

That's just another way of saying they're all racists (just some more active and some more passive).

You're still denying the truly, actually non-racist option: righties considering racists such a rare and far-off thing, so unconnected from most people's real-world experience, that they seem to be a deservedly tiny, rightfully irrelevant, almost hypothetical speck in the big picture, having nothing to do with what most real people think, say, or do. It's hard to believe any particular sort of movement is really a big deal if you never meet a member of it or have one of their events come to your town. It becomes just something you know technically describes somebody somewhere who has nothing to do with you, and some people out there accuse each other of a lot, but those accusers are the same ones who also accuse you of it yourself, and you know it's a lie in that case, so you have no reason to believe it in most other cases either...

For a parallel from a progressive perspective, just think of any straw man you see the left getting painted with too much that you know does describe some few real people somewhere out there who have no relevance to your own progressivism. Just recently I saw someone saying modern progressives want to end any & all law enforcement. I have no doubt that somewhere out there, there are some lefties who want to end law enforcement, but why would the rest who don't want that and have never met anybody who does ever identify with them? Or for somewhat more of a classic, Soviet infiltrators and their collaborators; there certainly were Soviet infiltrators & collaborators trying to influence American Cold War politics to the left, but why would the rest who weren't among them and had never even met one ever identify with them?

The equivalent of the argument you just made is an attempt to impose exactly that kind of identity on you anyway no matter how irrelevant it actually is to your real identity. "Lefties don't mind being on the same side with people who want no law enforcement at all." "Lefties don't mind being on the same side with Soviet infiltrators." The invalidity is transparently obvious... which means anybody who seriously actually makes that kind of claim is being transparently obviously dishonest.

 

[kellyb]

I can attest that with two exceptions every openly racist person I know is also a big Trump fan. Whilst those who are not racist (at least overtly)- yet found themselves voting for Trump (or in three cases, voting libertarian or not voting for any presidential candidate) because of opposition to the Democratic Party, find him to be a disgrace.

I know many racists who are Trump fans, and one lady who I think is not a racist who's a fan. Her deal is that she just thinks "racism is an overblown issue".

I don't think Ben Carson is a racist. He's just...apparently flattered to be in the administration and super loyal to the party, maybe? Thinks Democrats will always be worth voting against because Satan? Intellectually, he strikes me an obedient human sponge when it comes to absorbing the ideas and professed opinions of others.

 

[3point14]

No, that's about gun control.

I don't think so. I think that's about almost everything.

 

[WilliamSeger]

That's just another way of saying they're all racists (just some more active and some more passive).

You're still denying the truly, actually non-racist option: righties considering racists such a rare and far-off thing, so unconnected from most people's real-world experience, that they seem to be a deservedly tiny, rightfully irrelevant, almost hypothetical speck in the big picture, having nothing to do with what most real people think, say, or do.

I'll stop you right there, because that's not what I'm saying, which I'll phrase another way: Not all of Trump supporters are racists, misogynists, or xenophobes, but the fact that Trump is all of those things (and more) is obviously not a deal-breaker. All the various reasons why that's so (including living in a bubble where those things don't affect them) are a different issue.

 

[BrooklynBaby]

I'll stop you right there, because that's not what I'm saying, which I'll phrase another way: Not all of Trump supporters are racists, misogynists, or xenophobes, but the fact that Trump is all of those things (and more) is obviously not a deal-breaker. All the various reasons why that's so (including living in a bubble where those things don't affect them) are a different issue.

Trump is none of those things. The problem is that the Democrats just declare Trump is a racist, homophobe, xenophobe, misogynist, bigot, etc. like they do the rest of us, based on nothing, and like they have been doing long before Trump was even a candidate. It is what all of the progressives in Europe called everyone who might vote for Brexit during the run-up to the vote, and who actually did vote for Brexit after the initiative passed. It is just what you guys do. What Trump actually does is irrelevant because he was already labeled all of those things before he actually did anything. (Lying about what he said during the speech where he announced he was running reflects more on the the people who do the lying than than on Trump.)

The unfortunate truth is the Democrats' single issue for the mid-terms amounts to "You're a racist if you don't vote for us."

 

[Fudbucker]

Trump is none of those things. The problem is that the Democrats just declare Trump is a racist, homophobe, xenophobe, misogynist, bigot, etc. like they do the rest of us, based on nothing, and like they have been doing long before Trump was even a candidate. It is what all of the progressives in Europe called everyone who might vote for Brexit during the run-up to the vote, and who actually did vote for Brexit after the initiative passed. It is just what you guys do. What Trump actually does is irrelevant because he was already labeled all of those things before he actually did anything. (Lying about what he said during the speech where he announced he was running reflects more on the the people who do the lying than than on Trump.)

The unfortunate truth is the Democrats' single issue for the mid-terms amounts to "You're a racist if you don't vote for us."

1. Based on nothing? Even you can't possibly believe that. The laundry list of Trump's deplorable behavior is long and detailed.

2. It is not just Democrats.

"You used to belong to a conservative party with a white-nationalist fringe. Now it’s a white-nationalist party with a conservative fringe. If you’re part of that fringe, what should you do?"
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opin...ffcabeff946_story.html?utm_term=.2161abb14d6a

I don't know why he lowers himself to such a low, low standard and debases our country," Mr Corker told CNN during an interview in the Capitol, marking an escalation in the rhetorical fight between the two. "He is obviously not going to rise to the occasion as President of the United States."
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/...-unfit-office-tennessee-twitter-a8017341.html

 

[WilliamSeger]

Trump is none of those things.

Beyond reasonable doubt, he is.

The unfortunate truth is the Democrats' single issue for the mid-terms amounts to "You're a racist if you don't vote for us."

Seriously? Is that what Fox News is telling you?

If Democrats have a single issue for the mid-terms, it's that only Congress can put the brakes on this disastrous administration. They will be talking loudly about the things he and his corrupt Cabinet have actually done, so don't expect Fox to give it much coverage.

 

[acbytesla]

I'll stop you right there, because that's not what I'm saying, which I'll phrase another way: Not all of Trump supporters are racists, misogynists, or xenophobes, but the fact that Trump is all of those things (and more) is obviously not a deal-breaker. All the various reasons why that's so (including living in a bubble where those things don't affect them) are a different issue.

Trump is none of those things.

Trump is ALL OF THOSE THINGS. Do you actually believe he's not? Can you say "cognitive dissonance"?

 

[Roger Ramjets]

Empathy is overrated.

It's perfectly understandable why you would say that. Just like a person who was blind from birth might say that 'sight is overrated' a person with no empathy can't understand what is so great about it.

But perhaps you are right. Perhaps empathy is overrated - after all it's only what makes us human. What's so great about that? Sharks don't have empathy, and they have a wonderful life (so long as they keep swimming).

Without empathy, humans would not be able to cooperate on the level required to build complex civilizations and develop advanced technologies. But you may think that is overrated. What is so great about living in a polite society with all the comforts of modern technology, when we could be running around naked flinging poo at strangers?

empathy is not synonymous with concern for others.

That's right, but it is a necessary component of empathic concern.

2. It is not just Democrats.

Sure it's not just Democrats, but it is just leftists. Any Republican who isn't 100% behind Trump is a RHINO. There is no middle ground - either you are for him or against him. And if you are against him you must be a leftist.

But don't worry, it won't last forever. As time goes on and Trump becomes more and more unacceptable the number of RHINOs will increase until... suddenly the party turns on him and Trump becomes the RHINO. You will know this is about to happen when Fox starts putting a 'D' after his name.

 

[Ziggurat]

It's perfectly understandable why you would say that. Just like a person who was blind from birth might say that 'sight is overrated' a person with no empathy can't understand what is so great about it.

I didn't say it was useless, I said it was overrated. These are very different claims. And all you can offer in response is that straw man plus an appeal to emotion.

Sure it's not just Democrats, but it is just leftists. Any Republican who isn't 100% behind Trump is a RHINO. There is no middle ground - either you are for him or against him. And if you are against him you must be a leftist.

After your little rant about how I don't have any empathy and want to live in a poo-slinging society, this claim that it's just Republicans who can't accept a middle ground is more than a touch ironic.

Oh, and it's RINO, not RHINO.