The poster above said that “greater freedom” is the goal. Freedom does not consist of forcing someone to serve you against their will.
Greater freedom of people to live their lives. You are either free from the government, or you are free from the whims of other people. I’d rather be free from the whims of my neighbor deciding that he likes my stereo, so he murders me for it than to be free from a government that tells him that he may not.
Opportunities, actually. This insistence that conservatives have that liberals want to equalize outcomes is disingenuous in that it is rebutted every time it is brought up, but it doesn’t matter, it is repeated over and over, no matter how false you should know it is by now.
Right, it is definitional. If you think that the rights of a clump of cells is more important than the rights of a human being, then you consider it social progress when the rights of human beings are dismissed. If you think that white people are better than other races, and therefore deserve the advantage that they get for living in a society that rewards people for being white, then you consider it to be progress when businesses are free to discriminate against their customers and employees.
So, why don’t you list out the things that you consider to be social progress, and lets compare notes to see if there are any similarities, or if your idea of progress is what makes things better for you, even if it worsens the lives of others.
I would refute them on the terms that you have laid out. I would challenge your very definition of decency and morality, as you consider decency and morality to force women to have no rights to their own bodies, to demand that people not be allowed to express their love for the one that they love, and subject students to government mandated religious indoctrination.
Do you have a similar argument that justifies your desire to discriminate against your fellow citizen for the color of his skin, that makes your discrimination more moral than tolerance?
Affirmative action is also a subtle and nuanced issue. There are some areas that I am for it, and some that I don’t know that it makes sense.
Ultimately, though, it should be recognized that there are those who have a severe lack of opportunity, and those people should be given a chance to make up for what society neglected them in the first place.
Who has ever been forced to serve someone against their will since we abolished slavery? What you might mean to say is that a business owner, who runs a public accomodation, was required to, as part of the voluntary agreement that the business owner made when he opened the business, accommodate everyone, and only turn away customers based on non-protected attributes, like not wearing a shirt or shoes.
Do you also consider health codes to be forcing people to keep food at proper temperatures against their will?
Freedom also does not consist of withholding rights and privileges from one group but not another.
Besides, fighting for the “freedom” to be a bigot just makes someone sound like an asshole.
Fighting for the freedom for someone else to expose themselves as a bigot though…
You don’t need to discriminate against customers and employees to expose yourself as a bigot.
In other words, you want only those freedoms that you believe to be subjectively good.
You didn’t answer about guns? Is the freedom you talk about a freedom to own an M-16? Or is that not one of the freedoms on your list?
If I were going to do a list of areas where some say we’ve made progress, and areas where some say we’ve taken a step back since about 1960, it might be the following:
Steps forward:
- Civil rights for minorities, especially blacks.
- Women’s rights, on many fronts including Roe v Wade.
- Gay rights, especially marriage.
- Expanded healthcare access via Medicaid, Medicare, S-Chip, ACA. It’s been incremental, but it’s moved in the right direction.
- Gun rights…The supreme court affirming individual gun rights in the Heller decision was huge.
- Overall tolerance for diversity of ethnicity, nationality, religion, race…that part is better than the old days, as corporations seem more open to many types of people & families are more diverse than the olden days.
- Marijuana legalization - Long overdue, but moving in the right direction on a state-by-state basis, which is fine with me. I don’t smoke it, but I can understand legalizing it.
Steps back:
- Nuclear family & children born to a one-parent household.
- Increase in drug use, and Opioid addiction tearing millions of families apart.
- Workers ability to negotiate via unions has been decimated, and resulted in more economic insecurity for the working & middle class.
- Affirmative Action - It’s actually helped some of the steps forward, but there is a principle here that makes me uncomfortable and makes me want to re-examine this program.
- Abortion - With RVW came more abortions than pre-RVW. Is that a good thing? I’m not comfortable with it. I am glad that the abortion rate has come down in the last few decades though.
- Churches - Some would argue that the decline in church attendance is good. I don’t think so. Churches are what often keeps us attached to our local communities & drives our volunteer work. I think losing this is to the detriment of a society.
- Voting rights - They are under attack by Republicans. This must be stopped.
- Debtors prisons - This has been a recent phenomenon in some areas of the US. Not a good thing, in my view.
I think the difference is a lot more subtle than that. I’m a liberal, and I do want to equalize outcomes. I suspect you do, too.
The place where we differ with conservatives on this is more fundamental. The liberal, evidence-supported position is that the lack of equality in outcomes means that the equality of opportunity isn’t there yet. That is – outcomes are a way to measure whether we’re getting opportunity equality right, because the science tells us that there aren’t any significant differences between these groups.
The conservative position, as best I can understand it, is that we’ve achieved equality of opportunity, but that hasn’t resulted in equality of outcome. And they use all this other obscuring language to avoid coming right out and saying what they mean, which seems to be “See? We told you <group X> was inherently lazier/dumber/incapable of making good decisions.”
Agreed except on 5. I don’t really think of that as a step back, but not really progress either.
Not sure what this has to do with progressivism. People have been born to single parents throughout history. The nuclear family is actually an aberration, and I don’t know if it is good for our society that families are as independent units as they are.
Eh, this is a step forward, in a way, as when it was minorities struggling with a crack epidemic, we started locking people up. Now that it is white people that are struggling, we are starting to have sympathy for addiction, and starting to push treatment over punishment.
We have a ways to go, and obviously, people suffering and dying from opioid addiction is not a good thing, but that is one of the things that I am optimistic about seeing improvements.
True.
It’s hard to say. There are no actual laws or rules or even real guidelines for AA or how it is to be implemented. It is just that some entities have looked at their makeup, seen a lack of diversity, and added diversity as a quality that is worth evaluating in acceptance decisions.
Some entities probably take it too far, but most do not take it nearly far enough. I see many more complaints about the former than the latter.
Life sucks for people who are born into it. It’s painful, it’s disappointing, and the only thing that you can really hope for is that your death is quick and painless. To force people to put people into it that aren’t even wanted seems more than a bit cruel.
That’s not even getting into the rights of women, as well as the opportunities that they may have that they wouldn’t have had they been forced to carry and raise an unwanted child.
This is an interesting one. I am a believer in social entropy, that social institutions require constant inputs of energy in order to maintain their order. Church kind of filled that roll. It was a bit of an entropy sink, keeping communities whole, when the world is trying to pull them apart.
The difference is, is that I don’t think that it is church that people need to turn to, it is any community activity and organization. You don’t need the religion to have the community.
Agreed, and even more so, it should not be copied. My biggest fear on the subject is that democrats start doing the same in response.
Not really debtor prisons, but I know what you mean. People should, IMHO, only be locked up because they are posing a threat to society, and never should be because they are poor.
No, I want to make a floor to outcomes. I don’t want there to be a ceiling.
No matter how poor you are at living your life, you should be able to maintain food clothing and shelter, as well as some of the more basic of wants. We provide disability for people who have a physical injury or deformity that prevents them from having a job that supports them, but as mental issues are not as obvious, we do not provide disability for people who have mental injury or deformity that prevents them from having a job that supports them.
I want to see people with mansions and yachts, and I don’t think that everyone can have one, so I have no interest in making sure that everyone can.
But, I don’t want to see people with mansions and yachts, while the people outside their gated communities starve.
I agree with this, and have made the point in this or a related thread recently. But, we aren’t actually looking to make the outcomes equal, we are looking at outcomes, and seeing the disparity, we can demonstrate that the opportunities are not equal.
Right, and if they can insist that everyone has the same opportunities, then they can claim that they are the party of responsibility, and that everything that they have they earned. The problem is when it runs into the reality that a poor black kid living in near homeless conditions with parents who have turned to drugs does not have the same opportunities as a wealthy child who has a private tutor.
Just having breakfast alone increases test scores substantially. You cannot argue that two kids have equal opportunities when one goes to school tired and hungry, with no parent to check over his homework, and the other gets out of his tempurpedic mattress bed, has a specially formulated breakfast, and goes over his homework with a private teacher.
Keep in mind that my list wasn’t meant as something “to do” or not “to do” with progressivism or conservatism for that matter. Just a comment on some areas where we’ve made strides and other areas where we have not. I think in our country, and most countries around the world, there is higher poverty associated with one-parent families. In almost all areas, 2-parent families produce better outcomes. I’m not sure how we fix this problem, but it is a problem.
Do you notice that there’s something unique about items 4 and 5? Those two items – and only those two – are areas in which the US is radically different from the entirety of the industrialized world. With respect to #4, the US remains the only advanced democracy on earth without guaranteed universal health care for all its citizens, the only country on earth where, ultimately, access to health care depends on having the means to pay for it, where it’s considered a commodity like a washing machine instead of a basic human right. I would question whether any of the things you named in item 4 are really advancements because this “expanded access” doesn’t exist in most red states, and millions of people remain uninsured across the nation, and thousands die prematurely because of it. Those things aren’t really advancements because they don’t fix the underlying structural issues and hence are inherently problematic and self-limiting, in the same sense that climbing up on a ladder is certainly going in the right direction if you want to go to the moon, but it’s never going to get you there.
And your item 5, the Heller ruling, is just catastrophically regressive. The US gun homicide rate is more than 22 times higher than the average in other high-income countries. That’s not a few percentage points. It’s a national tragedy. The CDC concluded that more children die of gunshots in the US than the total in 12 other comparable countries combined. According to a Pew survey, nearly half of Americans – 44% – personally know someone who has been shot. Those are the kinds of numbers you might expect in a war zone, not in a putatively peaceful country.
Thus, (4) and (5) together define America as a place where there is no guaranteed right to health care (and indeed, virulent opposition to the idea of such a right) but an absolute and inviolable right to get shot.
We may be saying the same thing. I want (as a minimum) the bell curve of outcomes to be the same between groups, not for every single person to have an identical outline. What the bottom of that bell curve should look like we also probably agree on, but I think it’s a little bit different problem.
OK, well my timeline started in 1960 in my post, as I was trying to capture the beginning of a decade with alot of social change. And all of the things listed on #4 came after 1960 and resulted in more people getting insurance via public or private means. And this includes Red States, even though you say it doesn’t (people in Red States get Medicare, Medicaid, S-Chip, and ACA subsidies). And we’re now at less than 9% uninsured. It’s not perfect, and progress needs to be made. But it is an area where improvements have been made…i.e., progress. If you deny that, then you’re ignoring facts.
On #5, I think Heller was the first time that SCOTUS explicitly said that individuals (not militias, not soldiers) have a right to own a firearm. I think this is good, as I think the 2nd Amendment was trying to enshrine that as an individual right. I guess if you don’t like that, then that’s your problem. Also, since the early 90’s, the murder rate in the US has decreased, which is good. It is way too high. But the trend has improved.
Why are you telling me? I didn’t say anything about “greater freedom”, I said the price of the Republican’s emotional contentment - homosexuals being treated as second class citizens unable to procure the same goods and services as me - is too high. The cost of not treating homosexuals as second-class citizens - the Republican being emotionally traumatized but not affected in any meaningful way - is not.
I’m not denying that the ACA and Medicaid expansion is progress. I was also not denying that climbing a ladder gets you closer to the moon, but it doesn’t constitute a lunar space program. I’m denying the fallacy that it’s progress that is capable of achieving the desired end goal of unconditional universal coverage at roughly the same cost as the rest of the world, such as the OECD average. This isn’t possible as long as private insurance is the primary means of funding medically necessary health care, unless there is a fundamental change in philosophy recognizing health care as a basic human right rather than a commodity that must be purchased, available commensurate with ability to pay. Such a fundamental change would require both the insurers and the health care providers to be so highly regulated that the system becomes tantamount to single payer. There is no sign whatsoever that the fundamental mercenary model of health care in the US is ever going to change.
This is not in any way responsive to my comment. It’s just saying that I think Heller was a bad ruling, and you think it was good. I’m not going to re-ignite the gun debate or the debate on the Heller ruling here, but wow, those are pretty audacious comments coming from someone accusing me of “ignoring the facts”. Changes in the murder rate with changes in demographics and social conditions over time are completely irrelevant to the gun violence problem and are similar to the trends in other countries. The fact remains that the US rate of gun violence is completely off the charts compared to all economically similar rich industrialized countries. Denying that there’s a gun problem in the US is just denial of reality. It’s unproductive and helps promulgate the problem.
^^^
I forgot to mention in the above that although some red states have recently moved to accept Medicaid expansion, there are still 14 that have not. Medicaid is at any rate so sorely inadequate that it’s a good illustration of how the fundamentally mercenary attitude and approach is wrong. Compared to UHC, Medicaid coverage is limited, requires a stringent means test, and is even subject to clawbacks after death.
As opposed to freedoms that are subjectively harmful? I’m not sure I understand the question.
I personally believe people should have the freedom to own means to defend themselves and their homes. Do I think that freedom is absolute such they should be able to acquire all manner of military weaponry with no oversight? No.
It was responsive to your comment, because you talked about gun violence, and I mentioned that murder rates have decreased, which is a good trend.
I think there’s a gun violence problem in America, and I’m willing to do things to make it better. I have not denied there was a problem. But I think we do, in this country, have a right to own a firearm, and that should not be sacrificed.
I think that within a decade, every state will have the Medicaid expansion. Check back with me in 2029. Medicaid covers 74 to 75 million people, and is valuable to that population. It’s not my favorite, but it does a great service to millions in the US.