The person making the argument could just be naive too.
I could see myself 25 years ago making such a statement in completely good faith, trying to see both sides and all that. But I was naive to think that both sides were also arguing in good faith.
But to be fair, that naive messenger would still be repeating an argument that originated in bad faith.
Heck I still find myself thinking this on a subconscious level. I can’t let go of the sense that we should be able to discuss things in good faith and make change through civil discourse.
I have to remind myself that history does not support my blind faith in the goodness of humanity like this.
Even people who have less than two seconds ago proven they are arguing in bad faith, my gut reaction is to give them another chance to come to the discussion properly.
It’s like pathological naivety, and yes, it’s just as harmful as the original bad faith argument when all it’s doing is echoing the bad faith argument.
I have been booted from many communities for asking what I thought was a genuine question. And at first been left wondering why a community would ban someone for asking questions and trying to learn. I’ve experienced this my entire life and only recently began to understand that it’s not some personal slight against my curiosity and ignorance. It’s a necessary safety measure for that community.
I’m just an idiot, questioning an asshole, but from everyone else’s perspective there’s two dumb assholes over here.
That s my issue with Lemmy. Why do we stick so hard to “the left” when we see daily reminders that “the left” has plenty of bad faith actors as well? Just look around on lemmy.ml or better yet hexbear.net
Well… Short answer talking about “the left” and “the right” is effectively doing something called “constructing a public”. These are are not just political constructs, they are political constructs that do certain things. Neither of these constructs have hard boundaries and throughout time they shift.
But there is a distinct difference. When you look at the right, while the presentation changes they have a fairly straightforward citable group of guiding philosophy traceable through a small handful of writing. If you read Thomas Malthus and Edmond Burke they will sound like slightly more archaic versions of modern pundits on the right. When you listen to the modern pundits you will notice that they are very repetitive and what differentiates one from another is more or less just presentation style. That repetition of talking points changes it’s arguements but never it’s foundation. Since it’s mostly in service of protecting a status quo where hereditary privilege is upheld it doesn’t have to get complicated. It just has to justify the world as it has been and that humans are sneaky, fundamentally flawed and morally defunct but that by structuring society as a winnowing process where playing the game the rightful and just few will rise to the top.
But when you look at “the left” it’s not an easy gradient, it’s a loose scattering of little clusters of very different ideologies and guiding philosophies. Since it largely works of a guiding concept of dissolution of established aggregated personal fortunes and radical anti-supremacist framework of various forms it’s not uniform. There’s anti-colonialism, anti-racism, anti-monopolist, anti-capitalist, anti-discriminatory, pro-neurodiversity, expanded personal rights, pro public service, pro democratic and anti democratic groups, pro freedom of movement, anarchists, and acedemic political theorists each with individual theories about how to bring about a state of all these things when none of this has in living memory existed. It’s not generally trying to defend a status quo but trying to feild test different ways of doing things… So basically everybody and their dog has a slightly different opinion of what is a good idea.
It’s kind of hard to see " bad faith actors" as it were because any two leftists might have almost no ideological overlap as far as praxis. They might not see each other as being part of the same tribe even if outsiders looking in would classify them as “left” and they might all claim to be “left” themselves… It’s not that it’s contradictory, it’s that the branching paths of divergent evolving philosophies have rambled off in a whole bunch of different directions and effectively become whole other creatures entirely.
It’s almost like it’s a multi dimension spectrum with axis like left<>right, conservatist<>progressive, liberalism<>socialism and more… but simply “the left” and “the right” are popular (but problematic) terms that everyone recognises but everyone has their own interpretation of. However, if you want to be more accurate in you political discussions, you’ll have to write full page monologues and that is often not the way of the Internet. It will more often fall on deaf ears than not. And therefor the louder voices with the simpler terms get a bigger audience and reach eventhough the things they are saying might not be as good.
Here in the states, even the most progressive Democrats are right of center compared to the industrialized world, and so those who are centrist are leftist by comparison, and those who are left wing are seen as radical, even when we talk about how the justice system, between its false conviction rate, law enforcement brutality or propensity for cruel (if usual) punishments, needs to be either massively overhauld, or disassembled and redesigned from the beginning.
But any state or society that decides it needs to cull the population for any reason has failed as a community, and therefore has failed as a state or a society.
Also centrists, like their conservative brethren, fail to recognize that the misery experienced by the bottom rung strata is extreme and heinous, and the neglect by institutions to act on it as if it were a crisis is heinous itself (and might compare to crimes against humanity). And this is what fuels radical direct action (even terrorism) from the left.
(Curiously, Osama Bin Laden said as much was what drove his own terror campaign, including the 9/11 attacks, though he was also pissed at George H. W. Bush’s gulf war, what he thought he could resolve with his mujahideen army. But the Gulf War from the US position was less about Kuwait and more about securing oil for import to the US.)
(And yes, left-wing violence gets into tankie territory, what is a paradox of wanting to create a functional, peaceful public-serving society that isn’t exploited from the top, and being unable to compute how to get there without breaking one’s own principles. We radical leftists are not good at this yet.)
But the Gulf War from the US position was less about Kuwait and more about securing oil for import to the US.
I mean, that’s one and the same. Saddam was responding to slant drilling from Kuwait into oil rich southern Iraqi oil fields. That’s why he burned the Kuwait wells on his way out. It was retaliation for what he claimed was a violation of Iraq’s sovereignty.
The Kuwaiti wells, and the slant drilled wells into Iraqi territory, were operated by American petroleum companies and their affiliates. And the US incursion into Iraq, with the intention of destroying the Iraqi offensive capacity, was about restoring the ability of Kuwaiti drillers to access Iraqi fields. 2003 made that redundant. But the initial Desert Storm was intended to prevent Saddam from threatening cross-border drilling operations into the future.
Is this centrism or is it just a bad faith argument from a bigot?
The person making the argument could just be naive too.
I could see myself 25 years ago making such a statement in completely good faith, trying to see both sides and all that. But I was naive to think that both sides were also arguing in good faith.
But to be fair, that naive messenger would still be repeating an argument that originated in bad faith.
Heck I still find myself thinking this on a subconscious level. I can’t let go of the sense that we should be able to discuss things in good faith and make change through civil discourse.
I have to remind myself that history does not support my blind faith in the goodness of humanity like this.
Even people who have less than two seconds ago proven they are arguing in bad faith, my gut reaction is to give them another chance to come to the discussion properly.
It’s like pathological naivety, and yes, it’s just as harmful as the original bad faith argument when all it’s doing is echoing the bad faith argument.
I have been booted from many communities for asking what I thought was a genuine question. And at first been left wondering why a community would ban someone for asking questions and trying to learn. I’ve experienced this my entire life and only recently began to understand that it’s not some personal slight against my curiosity and ignorance. It’s a necessary safety measure for that community.
I’m just an idiot, questioning an asshole, but from everyone else’s perspective there’s two dumb assholes over here.
That s my issue with Lemmy. Why do we stick so hard to “the left” when we see daily reminders that “the left” has plenty of bad faith actors as well? Just look around on lemmy.ml or better yet hexbear.net
Well… Short answer talking about “the left” and “the right” is effectively doing something called “constructing a public”. These are are not just political constructs, they are political constructs that do certain things. Neither of these constructs have hard boundaries and throughout time they shift.
But there is a distinct difference. When you look at the right, while the presentation changes they have a fairly straightforward citable group of guiding philosophy traceable through a small handful of writing. If you read Thomas Malthus and Edmond Burke they will sound like slightly more archaic versions of modern pundits on the right. When you listen to the modern pundits you will notice that they are very repetitive and what differentiates one from another is more or less just presentation style. That repetition of talking points changes it’s arguements but never it’s foundation. Since it’s mostly in service of protecting a status quo where hereditary privilege is upheld it doesn’t have to get complicated. It just has to justify the world as it has been and that humans are sneaky, fundamentally flawed and morally defunct but that by structuring society as a winnowing process where playing the game the rightful and just few will rise to the top.
But when you look at “the left” it’s not an easy gradient, it’s a loose scattering of little clusters of very different ideologies and guiding philosophies. Since it largely works of a guiding concept of dissolution of established aggregated personal fortunes and radical anti-supremacist framework of various forms it’s not uniform. There’s anti-colonialism, anti-racism, anti-monopolist, anti-capitalist, anti-discriminatory, pro-neurodiversity, expanded personal rights, pro public service, pro democratic and anti democratic groups, pro freedom of movement, anarchists, and acedemic political theorists each with individual theories about how to bring about a state of all these things when none of this has in living memory existed. It’s not generally trying to defend a status quo but trying to feild test different ways of doing things… So basically everybody and their dog has a slightly different opinion of what is a good idea.
It’s kind of hard to see " bad faith actors" as it were because any two leftists might have almost no ideological overlap as far as praxis. They might not see each other as being part of the same tribe even if outsiders looking in would classify them as “left” and they might all claim to be “left” themselves… It’s not that it’s contradictory, it’s that the branching paths of divergent evolving philosophies have rambled off in a whole bunch of different directions and effectively become whole other creatures entirely.
It’s almost like it’s a multi dimension spectrum with axis like left<>right, conservatist<>progressive, liberalism<>socialism and more… but simply “the left” and “the right” are popular (but problematic) terms that everyone recognises but everyone has their own interpretation of. However, if you want to be more accurate in you political discussions, you’ll have to write full page monologues and that is often not the way of the Internet. It will more often fall on deaf ears than not. And therefor the louder voices with the simpler terms get a bigger audience and reach eventhough the things they are saying might not be as good.
Because “the left” is a set of principles not a group of people?
Same can be said for “the right”, so I’m missing the point.
Here in the states, even the most progressive Democrats are right of center compared to the industrialized world, and so those who are centrist are leftist by comparison, and those who are left wing are seen as radical, even when we talk about how the justice system, between its false conviction rate, law enforcement brutality or propensity for cruel (if usual) punishments, needs to be either massively overhauld, or disassembled and redesigned from the beginning.
But any state or society that decides it needs to cull the population for any reason has failed as a community, and therefore has failed as a state or a society.
Also centrists, like their conservative brethren, fail to recognize that the misery experienced by the bottom rung strata is extreme and heinous, and the neglect by institutions to act on it as if it were a crisis is heinous itself (and might compare to crimes against humanity). And this is what fuels radical direct action (even terrorism) from the left.
(Curiously, Osama Bin Laden said as much was what drove his own terror campaign, including the 9/11 attacks, though he was also pissed at George H. W. Bush’s gulf war, what he thought he could resolve with his mujahideen army. But the Gulf War from the US position was less about Kuwait and more about securing oil for import to the US.)
(And yes, left-wing violence gets into tankie territory, what is a paradox of wanting to create a functional, peaceful public-serving society that isn’t exploited from the top, and being unable to compute how to get there without breaking one’s own principles. We radical leftists are not good at this yet.)
I mean, that’s one and the same. Saddam was responding to slant drilling from Kuwait into oil rich southern Iraqi oil fields. That’s why he burned the Kuwait wells on his way out. It was retaliation for what he claimed was a violation of Iraq’s sovereignty.
The Kuwaiti wells, and the slant drilled wells into Iraqi territory, were operated by American petroleum companies and their affiliates. And the US incursion into Iraq, with the intention of destroying the Iraqi offensive capacity, was about restoring the ability of Kuwaiti drillers to access Iraqi fields. 2003 made that redundant. But the initial Desert Storm was intended to prevent Saddam from threatening cross-border drilling operations into the future.