version

Well-known member
This seems to be a real thing at the moment and so many are acting in such bad faith that it's becoming harder and harder to navigate. You take a look at more or less any political discussion online and there are people supporting some appalling things falling back on it simply being a matter of opinion and anyone getting testy or hostile being the real bigots. The whole 'enlightened centrism' thing is a bit grim too as surely there are some things you can't really compromise on or sit in the middle of?
 

luka

Well-known member
Yeah well Contradictions inherent in liberalism are being used against it. Vimothy is thrilled. He hates liberalism and is always banging on about its contradictions. His favourite subject. The intolerant tolerance. Why aren't we free to burn the mosque down etc
 

version

Well-known member
The 'Reasonable' Rebels - https://www.washingtonpost.com/outl...oned-reason-civility-old-south-said-that-too/

So it felt frustrating: When I read Weiss, when I listened to Shapiro, when I watched Peterson or read the supposedly heterodox online magazine Quillette, what was I reminded of?

My childhood home is just a half-hour drive from the Manassas battlefield in Virginia, and I grew up intensely fascinated by the Civil War. I loved perusing soldiers’ diaries. During my senior year in college, I studied almost nothing but Abraham Lincoln’s speeches. While I wrote my thesis on a key Lincoln address, Civil War rhetoric was almost all I read: not just that of the 16th president but also that of his adversaries.

Thinking back on those debates, I finally figured it out. The reasonable right’s rhetoric is exactly the same as the antebellum rhetoric I’d read so much of. The same exact words. The same exact arguments. Rhetoric, to be precise, in support of the slave-owning South.

If that sounds absurd — Shapiro and his compatriots aren’t defending slavery, after all — it may be because many Americans are unfamiliar with the South’s actual rhetoric. When I was a kid in public school, I learned the arguments of Sen. John C. Calhoun (D-S.C.), who called slavery a “positive good,” and Alexander Stephens, the Confederacy’s vice president, who declared that the South’s ideological “cornerstone” rested “upon the great truth that the Negro is not equal to the white man.”

But such clear statements were not the norm. Proslavery rhetoricians talked little of slavery itself. Instead, they anointed themselves the defenders of “reason,” free speech and “civility.” The prevalent line of argument in the antebellum South rested on the supposition that Southerners were simultaneously the keepers of an ancient faith and renegades — made martyrs by their dedication to facts, reason and civil discourse.

It might sound strange that America’s proslavery faction styled itself the guardian of freedom and minority rights. And yet it did. In a deep study of antebellum Southern rhetoric, Patricia Roberts-Miller, a professor of rhetoric at the University of Texas at Austin, characterizes the story that proslavery writers “wanted to tell” between the 1830s and 1860s as not one of “demanding more power, but of David resisting Goliath.”
 
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luka

Well-known member
Of course everyone here is a liberal (except vim and craner ((declared fascists)) and maybe, maybe third ((millennial Islamic commie))) especially those who vociferously avow otherwise.
 

version

Well-known member
Yeah well Contradictions inherent in liberalism are being used against it. Vimothy is thrilled. He hates liberalism and is always banging on about its contradictions. His favourite subject. The intolerant tolerance. Why aren't we free to burn the mosque down etc

But today I see what Lincoln feared. Nearly daily, I read some new figure appealing to antebellum reasoning. Joining the reasonable right seems to render these figures desirable contributors to center-left media outlets. That’s because, psychologically, the claim to victimhood can function as a veiled threat. It tricks the listener into entering a world where the speaker is the needy one, fragile, requiring the listener to constantly adjust his behavior to cater to the imperiled person.

With this threat, the reasonable right has recruited the left into serving its purpose. Media outlets and college campuses now go to extraordinary lengths to prove their “balance” and tolerance, bending over backward to give platforms to right-wing writers and speakers who already have huge exposure.

In the human body, viruses use the shells of immune cells to trick other cells into letting them in. Principles like freedom and equality have functioned, through time, as the American immune system, warding off sickness. But they can also be co-opted. As they were more than 150 years ago, ideas like freedom of speech, diversity and respect are now being used to turn opponents of conservatism into helpless hosts, transmitting its ideas.


If you hear somebody lament, as Bret Stephens does, that political “opinions that were considered reasonable and normal” not too long ago now must be “delivered in whispers,” it might be antebellum reasoning. If somebody says — as Harris has — that our politics are at risk of ignoring common sense, logic or the realities of human biology, it might be antebellum reasoning. If somebody such as Nicholas Kristof says they don’t like noxious thinkers but urges us to give them platforms for the sake of “protecting dissonant and unwelcome voices,” it might be antebellum reasoning. The truth is that we have more avenues now for free expression in America than we’ve ever had.

If somebody says liberals have become illiberal, you should consider whether it’s true. But you should also know that this assertion has a long history and that George Wallace and Barry Goldwater used it in their eras to powerful effect. People who make this claim aren’t “renegades.” They’re heirs to an extremely specific tradition in American political rhetoric, one that has become a dangerous inheritance.
 

luka

Well-known member
The EDL types pretending to care about gay rights so as to bash muslims or sort of grimly funny I spose. And of course they've identified a genuine tension there.
 
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droid

Well-known member
Of course everyone here is a liberal (except vim and craner ((declared fascists)) and maybe, maybe third ((millennial Islamic commie))) especially those who vociferously avow otherwise.

Wuh?
 

version

Well-known member
The thing with the parents protesting against their kids being taught about homosexuality in school was a difficult one. How do you afford people freedom of religion but also afford gay people the same rights as everyone else when the former are protesting the latter due to their faith? Any compromise eats away at someone's freedoms.
 

Leo

Well-known member
freedom of religion gives you the right to believe whatever you want. it does not give you the right to impose your beliefs on anyone else (because they, like you, have the right to believe whatever they want).
 

luka

Well-known member
The thing with the parents protesting against their kids being taught about homosexuality in school was a difficult one. How do you afford people freedom of religion but also afford gay people the same rights as everyone else when the former are protesting the latter due to their faith? Any compromise eats away at someone's freedoms.

I refused to walk on those gay rainbow roads they painted for pride. Might turn me gay.
 

luka

Well-known member
The thing with the parents protesting against their kids being taught about homosexuality in school was a difficult one. How do you afford people freedom of religion but also afford gay people the same rights as everyone else when the former are protesting the latter due to their faith? Any compromise eats away at someone's freedoms.

My stepdad is a social worker in Barking and Dagenham where all the other social workers are African and they tried to make them wear rainbow lanyards and all the social workers were like fuck off are you mad
 

version

Well-known member
freedom of religion gives you the right to believe whatever you want. it does not give you the right to impose your beliefs on anyone else (because they, like you, have the right to believe whatever they want).

Yeah, but I think that's the argument that's being made. People feel that other people's beliefs are being imposed upon them when their kids are being taught about homosexuality against their wishes and other people feel that not teaching kids about homosexuality is depriving them of their rights and freedoms because they're being treated differently to heterosexual people so there's this push and pull where there can't really be any compromise without chipping away at someone's rights or what they believe are their rights.
 

version

Well-known member
I don't know how extreme this sort of thing gets in real life but I've seen people online complaining about things like being unable to debate the relative merits of genocide. I mean how do you debate that?
 

version

Well-known member
Obviously people need to discuss things to understand them but if you take something like genocide and debate it as though the two positions are equally reasonable and its just a matter of opinion, particularly on a platform like Reddit where thousands of people can see it, then it strikes me as quite dangerous.
 
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