People can be very comfortable sitting on an unbalanced rock, until it tips.
The US is in a bad state today because people have forgotten how to speak to each other respectfully, they don't agree to disagree, they violently disagree. Fear mongering and labeling will only make things worse.
Both sides need to stop explaining, justifying and funding their bad apples by pointing to the other.
In medical terms, stop tying to cure an infection with another infection of your own.
40 years ago the right wing decided to build its platform on a combination of white people, Christianity, and conservative social and sexual mores.
This went swimmingly for a while but none is the fastest growing religion, white people are headed to be the largest minority instead of a majority by 2040s, and more liberal perspective on sex is becoming increasingly common.
https://www.pewforum.org/2019/10/17/in-u-s-decline-of-christ...
https://www.census.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2015/cb15-tps...
https://www.pewresearch.org/global/2020/06/25/global-divide-...
To be specific we have gone from half of people believing homosexuality should be accepted to 72% in the last 20 years. White people are slated to become merely the largest minority by 2044, and Christians went from 77% to 65% in 14 years.
If your bread and butter is white people, who have strong feelings about sexual mores and jesus by 2044 you are going to be looking at 10% of the population down from closer to 50% in 1980. Hell leave out the sexual mores and white Christians are sliding from 64% heading towards 25%. The republican party hasn't had anything like an acceptable game with any other group in decades.
They are losing the country because they built their house on sand and they are freaking out about it instead of making a coherent plan half their party is already off the deep end and wont be dragged back.
Also consider that many politicians in power (especially at the national level) won't be alive in 2044. It's worth it to the conservative ones to slow the rate of change a bit, even if they know that some changes are inevitable.
Trump's record with Hispanic voters was actually fairly good, though not great. Many Hispanics do not even consider themselves people of color and Democrats cannot take this fairly huge group for automatically granted.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/five-myths/five-myths...
Hispanics and Black Vote for Republican Party
2020:32% 12%
2016:28% 8%
2012:27% 6%
2008: 31% 4%
2004: 44% 11%
2000: 35% 9%
1996: 21% 12%
1992: 25% 10%
1988: 30% 11%
1984: 34% 9%
1980: 37% 14%
Trumps record with Hispanics is only average even grading on a curve and life isn't graded on a curve. Objectively 32% is garbage. Trump got only an average of 25% of nonwhite voters and 58% of white voters in 2020.
Once you have as many nonwhite voters as white you need 43% of the non white vote plus 58% of the white vote to win the popular vote.
"The National Popular Vote Interstate Compact (NPVIC) is an agreement among a group of U.S. states and the District of Columbia to award all their electoral votes to whichever presidential candidate wins the overall popular vote in the 50 states and the District of Columbia."
https://www.nationalpopularvote.com/
This is the crisis for the republicans not the fake crisis of perpetual riots, BLM, or hordes of brown people crossing the border.
The best republican performance in history with with nonwhite voters was 39% in 1956 and its just not good enough.
> 2020:32% 12%
> 2016:28% 8%
Am I the only person who sees these two lines as a tremendously stinging rebuke to the Democratic Party and the progressives in particular given what an utterly deplorable individual the incumbent and those who surrounded him were? Sounds like a growth opportunity for the Republicans more than a crisis, which speaks volumes about how the progressive message is being perceived among minorities they are claiming to be helping.
This isn't a stinging rebuke of the progressive agenda its just an example of a certain percentage either buying what Trump or Republicans are selling or prioritizing conservative values like sexual or reproductive issues over other concerns. It was and is inevitable.
The thought process that if an odious man like Trump can garner 32%/12% then a more reasonable person could do better isn't I think correct.
Half of the grand old party has gone off the deep end. A more reasonable person will never make it through the primary in the first place because the crazies wont let it happen and if they did then for every thinking mans vote they obtained they would lose 2 crazy. Take a look at Donald Trump you are looking at peak Republican. If you wanted to make a monument to Republican presidents you could start the tour with Lincoln and end with Trump because he is either the last Republican president or the father of the first dictatorship.
Much as I would be happy about the end of the Republican party, thinking that they're finished or don't know what they need to do to win again is fantasy. The Democrats need to distance themselves from antagonistic progressiveism that is driving voters into the arms of the Republicans immediately or they stand a pretty good chance of losing future elections. That is what the minority voting numbers of 2020 show.
I assume you mean to ask this rhetorically, as if the notion is absurd. But this is pretty much the gist of the paradox of tolerance. What would you suggest doing about intolerant people when reason fails?
However, I also think to a first approximation, virtue ethics has better consequentialist outcomes than naive consequentialist ethics does.
So I don't have an answer to the PoT; I just don't think it's a slam-dunk argument against tolerance at all. I espouse tolerance first and foremost for the sake of its ideal, and I hold that ideal because I prefer its generalized outcomes.
In other words, I can't help but notice that the Paradox of Tolerance is largely used as a tool to justify plain intolerance.
In other words, the Nazi ban is one case where the dialog went like this:
"Come on, this is pointless, they can just use other symbols and dogwhistles. You'll fall into an escalating spiral of swatting down new Nazi symbols, negatively affecting pretty much everyone but Nazis."
"Yeah but look, we won't fall into an escalating spiral of free speech restrictions. Because they won't change their symbols, ever."
And they were right. I don't entirely understand why, but clearly they were right. My standing theory is that Nazis are either really dumb or in some sort of symbiotic relation with the constitutional protection office where going to jail is actually their goal. Works for me.
Tl;dr: my rule-consequentialist ethics don't have a problem with "liberalism, except where Nazi paraphernalia and holocaust denial", since those modifications have clearly demonstrated their worth and limited character.
You are seriously suggesting that "nobody else" is ever going to attempt what the Nazis did, ever? We've got billions of years until the sun makes Earth uninhabitable. History clearly shows us these things are cyclical. Also, your point about symbols is wrong, they are constantly looking for new dogwhistles and using them.
It seems like you're either lost in the weeds or have some obtuse agenda. This 'intellectual' sophistry is meaningless to 99% of your fellow humans. I don't see how anything you've said negates the paradox of tolerance-- there is a line to be drawn or fascists win, it's that simple to me and I cannot imagine an argument that would convince me otherwise.
The issue at hand is that the evidence is picked at contextual extremes, and then extrapolated.
You need way more verification that the intolerant have the power you think they have; there is v often a silent majority that would step in if things escalated.
And what "reason" might that be and how did it fail? :-)
Just this week the local school cancelled a vaccination clinic because people believe covid isn't real and that the vaccine is there to put chips in you. That "the lord Jesus" is their immune system. These people will change the law from underneath you if you let them. They don't care about the truth.
Try listening to people you want to convince before trying to convince them. This approach doesn't have a 100% success rate, but it has a higher chance of success than your current approach has. The catch is you have to be open for them to convince you that your closely held beliefs are wrong. If you're not, and you dismiss everything they say out-of-hand, how can you expect them to be open to your ideas?
They cannot be convinced despite a plethora of opportunities given, not due to a lack of them. That's how I know quite well that they don't care about the truth. If you were to argue with these people you'd be eaten alive, as would anyone else.
This isn't chess, they make up the rules and knock over the pieces as they go. Again, no care for the truth. You cannot change that. The only thing we can do is outnumber them.
Your religious right may have been a real national force in 1980, but not now. It’s just a boogie man.
This is only true if you expand “religious” to mean “based on moral axioms regardless of source”, but then, any argument for or against doing (or allowing, or prohibiting) anything would be religious.
> From what I’ve seen on American media, almost all of it is religiously motivated.
OTOH, yes, the American anti-abortion movement is almost entirely a product of politically weaponized Christian conservatism.
> It doesn’t matter that fundamentalists don’t identify themselves as fundamentalist.
While the religious groups involve overlap with Fundamentalism (which is a particular subset of Protestantism), they aren’t all Fundamentalist.
Based on the moral axioms you’ve chosen. Axioms are, by definition, unsupported and unsupportable.
> Unless your moral axioms are fundamentally flawed, which is what I’ve described above.
No, what you described above was belief that was “religiously motivated, or based on non- religious logical fallacy.” Axioms are the roots from which logic works, they aren't based on logic, fallacious or otherwise. And there's no reason moral axioms that conflict with abortion need to be religiously motivated, either.
Sure, you might view any moral axioms thst disagree with yours as “fundamentally flawed”, but that doesn’t salvage your earlier description.
1. There is a secondary organism (life) within the womb upon conception.
2. That life will become a human being. Therefore:
3. That life must be given the same rights to not be killed that other (fully grown) human beings have.
Where is the religion or logical fallacy in that line of thought?
We even see aspects of this logic applied within common law, in that a pregnant woman (regardless of the length of pregnancy) that is murdered is considered a double-homicide.
I think it's unhelpful to approach a highly-contentious subject with the thought that the people on one side have absolutely no logical reason for believing what they do. I say logical, because the implication that something is religious is a way in modern rhetoric to defuse the opposing view by implying that the person holding it is not approaching from any sort of empirical worldview, but instead only deriving their argument from some ancient document of (whichever) religion.