Having spent most of my life with political views outside the mainstream, I am always perplexed by the people who are only friends with those who agree with them. Most of my formative years I was a communist. If I adopted that approach I would’ve never spoken to anyone! Even during my years as a normie Dem I was living in a Republican area so that was completely untenable. I didn’t even encounter this phenomena until I went to law school in a big liberal city.
People like that seem to always have a) trendy political views; b) live in a politically homogenous urban area; c) primarily knowingly interact with people of different perspectives through their family or social media (or both). Knowingly being the key word, because there’s a connection between how strident and loudly expressed their political opinions are and how likely people of another stripe are willing to voice the opposite. Usually the only ones who do are the same, for lack of a better word, assholes on “the other side,” thus reinforcing each side’s belief in the awfulness of the other.
Meanwhile, I’m friends with numerous Trump voters. None are Nazis. None are anymore racist than the average Clinton/Biden voters I know (bigotry is a spectrum, not a binary). They certainly have opinions and beliefs I disagree with but they also have opinions and beliefs that I agree with and others that I find reasonable even if I don’t agree.
I cannot recommend highly enough to people that if you don’t regularly do it, have discussions (in real life, NOT through social media) with people who disagree with you politically. Not with the goal of changing their mind but just to learn their mind. Because if your theory of politics is that anyone who disagrees with you is evil and that politics is (as Freddie rightly says) important, there’s no way to have a functioning democracy.
Thank you for that article about use of restraints in schools. I am a social worker for kids with developmental disabilities some of whom receive restraints. One of the kids I support also had his arm accidentally slammed in a door when being put into seclusion like the article mentions. I agree this should not have happened... But you gotta love the idea that what the field needs is more restrictions in what we are allowed to do and correlating punishments for workers, not for the workers to have adequate pay and benefits to do dangerous and extremely stressful work, allowing them to attract and keep qualified workers, along with the funds to create adequately supportive school environments for these kids. what's the other options for a kid who is regularly violent at home and school? he can attend school where restraints are used. or maybe he can be home schooled by his parents, who arent special education teachers -- in my state parents can be paid for this at least, but then *they* are the ones dealing with the violence and the feelings of shame and isolation that come when your kid is violent toward his family. or, if the family has the resources, the kid can go to a day treatment center with little academic instruction provided, surrounded only by other kids with disabilities, after many torturous months on a waiting list, following the same guidelines the schools do for restraints -- but the center has more resources to make it a safe and less stressful environment (resulting in fewer behaviors).
"By the way: yes, politics are life and death, which means that your first responsibility is to be politically EFFECTIVE, and refusing to ever be cordial to those who you must inevitably interact with and bargain with is not being effective, at all."
Every single person on the left should print that out, tape it to the bathroom mirror, and read it aloud before going to bed and after getting up.
RE: Restraining children in schools, I can't help but think of the comparison to policing. So many people act so outraged when there's a case of a person who resists arrest, and the officer uses force to overcome that resistance. Like, what's the alternative here? Are these people really proposing a world where the police officers politely request to arrest you, and then you get to either accept or decline?
Obviously we can talk about what kinds of things should and should not be crimes, and under what circumstances officers should be allowed to arrest people. But it seems blindingly obvious to me that the government has a monopoly on the use of force and there are some situations where government agents should be allowed to arrest you even if you don't want to be arrested, and use force to overcome any resistance.
> it’s absurd to believe that I have more moral responsibility to someone born one mile north of the US-Mexico border than someone one mile south of that border, a distinction that could not be more random or arbitrary.
The left do talk about birth as if it was some private individual activity, like landing with a parachute. It's peculiar how opposed this is to the normal understanding of both world views: in birth, the left are atomised individuals, while the right are instinctive members of a collective.
From the right's point of view, you have a greater moral duty of care to people born in your own house and, to a lesser extent, to those born in the houses of people who were themselves born in the same house as you, than you do to perfect strangers. The four walls of each house are just as arbitrary as borders, but they're not the point.
(The left, needless to say, love their children just as much, but it does tend to be viewed as something of a peccadillo, and not what you imagine happening in socialist utopias like Sweden, where childcare is performed by the state.)
I'd argue that the reason that you have a greater moral responsibility to Americans than Mexicans is simply that you are an American. It's the people who you owe your care to, not the soil or the boundary. To call this claim absurd is to run the very great risk of realising that you can say the same thing about all moral claims.
Big fan of the glimpse into your archives in the digest post. I'm new to your writing, so I missed most of your past work.
Having spent most of my life with political views outside the mainstream, I am always perplexed by the people who are only friends with those who agree with them. Most of my formative years I was a communist. If I adopted that approach I would’ve never spoken to anyone! Even during my years as a normie Dem I was living in a Republican area so that was completely untenable. I didn’t even encounter this phenomena until I went to law school in a big liberal city.
People like that seem to always have a) trendy political views; b) live in a politically homogenous urban area; c) primarily knowingly interact with people of different perspectives through their family or social media (or both). Knowingly being the key word, because there’s a connection between how strident and loudly expressed their political opinions are and how likely people of another stripe are willing to voice the opposite. Usually the only ones who do are the same, for lack of a better word, assholes on “the other side,” thus reinforcing each side’s belief in the awfulness of the other.
Meanwhile, I’m friends with numerous Trump voters. None are Nazis. None are anymore racist than the average Clinton/Biden voters I know (bigotry is a spectrum, not a binary). They certainly have opinions and beliefs I disagree with but they also have opinions and beliefs that I agree with and others that I find reasonable even if I don’t agree.
I cannot recommend highly enough to people that if you don’t regularly do it, have discussions (in real life, NOT through social media) with people who disagree with you politically. Not with the goal of changing their mind but just to learn their mind. Because if your theory of politics is that anyone who disagrees with you is evil and that politics is (as Freddie rightly says) important, there’s no way to have a functioning democracy.
Thank you for that article about use of restraints in schools. I am a social worker for kids with developmental disabilities some of whom receive restraints. One of the kids I support also had his arm accidentally slammed in a door when being put into seclusion like the article mentions. I agree this should not have happened... But you gotta love the idea that what the field needs is more restrictions in what we are allowed to do and correlating punishments for workers, not for the workers to have adequate pay and benefits to do dangerous and extremely stressful work, allowing them to attract and keep qualified workers, along with the funds to create adequately supportive school environments for these kids. what's the other options for a kid who is regularly violent at home and school? he can attend school where restraints are used. or maybe he can be home schooled by his parents, who arent special education teachers -- in my state parents can be paid for this at least, but then *they* are the ones dealing with the violence and the feelings of shame and isolation that come when your kid is violent toward his family. or, if the family has the resources, the kid can go to a day treatment center with little academic instruction provided, surrounded only by other kids with disabilities, after many torturous months on a waiting list, following the same guidelines the schools do for restraints -- but the center has more resources to make it a safe and less stressful environment (resulting in fewer behaviors).
Nagle's essay on immigration is profound and comprehensive. Were there any considered responses to it?
BTW, I take it that readers know that Cesar Chavez was indignantly against immigration for the reasons outlined in the essay.
https://americanaffairsjournal.org/2018/11/the-left-case-against-open-borders/
"By the way: yes, politics are life and death, which means that your first responsibility is to be politically EFFECTIVE, and refusing to ever be cordial to those who you must inevitably interact with and bargain with is not being effective, at all."
Every single person on the left should print that out, tape it to the bathroom mirror, and read it aloud before going to bed and after getting up.
Thank you for hating the left case against open borders while still liking Angela Nagle.
RE: Restraining children in schools, I can't help but think of the comparison to policing. So many people act so outraged when there's a case of a person who resists arrest, and the officer uses force to overcome that resistance. Like, what's the alternative here? Are these people really proposing a world where the police officers politely request to arrest you, and then you get to either accept or decline?
Obviously we can talk about what kinds of things should and should not be crimes, and under what circumstances officers should be allowed to arrest people. But it seems blindingly obvious to me that the government has a monopoly on the use of force and there are some situations where government agents should be allowed to arrest you even if you don't want to be arrested, and use force to overcome any resistance.
> it’s absurd to believe that I have more moral responsibility to someone born one mile north of the US-Mexico border than someone one mile south of that border, a distinction that could not be more random or arbitrary.
The left do talk about birth as if it was some private individual activity, like landing with a parachute. It's peculiar how opposed this is to the normal understanding of both world views: in birth, the left are atomised individuals, while the right are instinctive members of a collective.
From the right's point of view, you have a greater moral duty of care to people born in your own house and, to a lesser extent, to those born in the houses of people who were themselves born in the same house as you, than you do to perfect strangers. The four walls of each house are just as arbitrary as borders, but they're not the point.
(The left, needless to say, love their children just as much, but it does tend to be viewed as something of a peccadillo, and not what you imagine happening in socialist utopias like Sweden, where childcare is performed by the state.)
I'd argue that the reason that you have a greater moral responsibility to Americans than Mexicans is simply that you are an American. It's the people who you owe your care to, not the soil or the boundary. To call this claim absurd is to run the very great risk of realising that you can say the same thing about all moral claims.