I see at least as much of that attitude with BLM and Occupy Wall Street and many of the other elements who make up the left - the Womyn’s Studies major who is appalled that she has a huge college debt and no employment prospects, the single mother who never acquired a husband, the BLM activist who is astounded that people who resist arrest tend to fare poorly, the affirmative action beneficiary who discovers that STEM employers care more about your math grades than the color of your hide. And the precious snowflake who reacts with horror when her expectations of safe spaces and reassurance are met with the realization that facts don’t care about your feelings.
Do you think ethical vegetarians who protest animal farming are primarily motivated by the benefits that would to come to them personally if meat consumption universally stopped?
Even if I grant you that there is an element of “what’s in it for me?” in all social causes, presenting someone’s pro-equality position as catering to self-interest is nothing but distracting. Your conclusion is simply that a society accepting of all gender variations would be an overall good, even for cis white males. That’s not really controversial, but for some reason you felt it necessary to use some controversial concepts to lead us to this non-controversial destination.
If you are of the opinion that you can proceed to think thoughts and make sense of the world around you without generalizing, by all means have at it. I wish you luck.
Ethical vegetarians would no longer feel like we were mercilessly intruding upon the rights of animals, their right to life and to some measure of self-determination that’s violated by animal farming practices. They’d feel that we, as a species, were more ethical. All of these things are outcomes they deem desirable.
Do you not see that there is no yardstick by which to decide anything is “good” or “desirable” except by reference (indirect or otherwise) to whether they are good for us, personally, each of us, as we do our assessments?
Don’t try to make it out as somehow lesser or more coarse or less idealistic. There’s not a damn thing idealistic about self-abnegation and sacrifice. All idealism is enlightened self-interest, as well it should be.
That’s idiotic. I think that gay marriage is a positive move for giving them the same right as everybody else, but as a straight person it doesn’t do anything for me personally.
I think it’s more that, every non-white race, non-straight sexual orientation or non-male gender has a source of support in popular society, if you will, but not white straight males.
A white man may come across articles on Yahoo praising a black woman for becoming the first such 4-star general in the Army, or a TV segment harshly criticizing a politician for referring to Mexicans as “wetbacks”, or a newspaper praising the latest LGBT thing, or a commercial/ad in which it is considered funny for a woman to slap a man in the face, etc. But it would be rare, if ever, for him to see articles/TV shows/news reports criticizing a politician for using the term “cracker” to refer to white people, or praising a high school’s “White Caucasian Heritage Month,” or criticizing a TV show that promotes violence by women against men.
And so that sort of thing creates a perception of a double standard, which such white straight men would consider unfair.
Now, many will of course say, “But white straight men are already privileged in a million other, unseen, subtle, nuanced ways!” Yes…but those are, ***unseen, subtle, nuanced ***ways. They’re not ways that readily jump out to a viewer’s attention the same way that “Vacuum cleaner TV commercial portrays husbands as incompetent oafs for the 100th time” does. And so the perception exists. It’s a huge reason why Trump got elected.
Yes, but why does their deserving of that right cause you to support their having that right? Is there a reason that you wish people to have what you feel they deserve? If so, what is that reason?
Dude, that is some seriously convoluted bullshit you’re spouting there. Do you really think it’s so damn hard to sympathize with other people that nobody could possibly be capable of it? That says a hell of a lot more about you than it does about anybody else.
I favor gay marriage for the same reason I favor allowing open access to the Moon and outer space. I can’t think of any good reason to not allow either of these things.
Now, I’m under no delusion that being the type of person who is in favor of gay marriage makes me feel warm and fuzzy inside, even if I’m not aware of these feelings. However, I’ve never marched in the streets to show my support in favor of gay marriage. I’ve never shed any tears or lost any sleep over the issue. It’s not THAT important to me either way…probably because I don’t see how it would affect me either way.
But I am still in favor of it because I’m generally in favor of things that have no evidence of actual harm.
Your argument doesn’t seem consistent with the notion of free will, by the way. If people have free will, they can support anything without any regard to their self-interest. You seem to be arguing that this is impossible.
You misconstrue me. I find it very easy to sympathize with other people. I openly desire to live in a world of voluntary cooperation in which people are all involved in trying to make each other happy, and therefore anything I do that helps other people directly serves that desire of mine, and hence it makes me feel good about myself, it fulfills my desire to help make the world a better place, it gives me a good warm feeling inside to know I care about other people.
But those are all things that benefit me, in the larger ultimate sense.
No, as I said to Telperion, it is OK to do something or support an idea or hold an opinion without knowing why you do it.
I do think that if you have a reason for doing something, that stated reason implies that you find the outcome more desirable than its absence. Obtaining a desirable outcome is in one’s best interest, pretty much by definition.
I don’t see this as inconsistent with free will at all. People like to be happy; the pursuit of happiness is rather famously associated with freedom, it’s what people tend to do with their freedom. You can pursue your own misery instead, it’s your freedom (or mine for me or whatever), I mean, people can opt to do that and there’s no constraint on their freedom, but it’s sort of a batshit-weird thing for a person to do with their freedom if you see what I mean. Pleasure and happiness and joy and all that are, well, umm, pleasant and happy-making and fun and stuff, so I tend to assume people do things, freely, to bring about what they think will indeed make them happy.
And that includes things like warm fuzzy feelings about making the world a better place and being compassionate to others and so on and so forth. Very much so.
And depriving people of stuff, reciprocally, not only makes them miserable, it can do a nasty job on our own self-esteem. That’s a price tag any time we choose to monopolize resources or power and leave others deprived of them. Then in addition to that, deprived people really are potentially dangerous people, and rightly so, they may rise up and confront the injustices and unfairnesses we’ve imposed on them if we do monopolize resources and power.
So if we’re going to opt to be oppressors, not only do the goodies we manage to monopolize have to be enticing, they have to be worthy of those price tags, and it all gets compared not to being on the losing end of the struggle to acquire but to the general reciprocity of sharing and not oppressing. And no, I don’t think it’s worth it to anyone. Price is too high and the goodies aren’t enough to make it worth it.
The catch, of course, is that we don’t have magical wish-granters offering us a world without oppression as one of our choices. I know that, in case some of you are wondering if I somehow missed that point. And it’s a different question when the options are “do you want to be one of the oppressors (winners) or one of the oppressed (losers)”. Now there’s reason aplenty why someone might prefer to be on the higher side of the relevant jackboots. I see that, too.
But that doesn’t mean oppression, itself, is in the best interests overall of those who happen to be those winners. Oppression itself doesn’t benefit anyone. People engage in it because the game is already in place when we’re born, and those are the rules, struggle to win or end up losing.
The key word is perhaps “fault”. I’m saying I understand quite well why people oppress, it makes sense in context, due to the rules of the game, and that I do not regard the situation as anyone’s fault.
Being the party in power doesn’t mean what you seem to think it does. Democrats are not saints, first of all. And, they are extremely diverse. Kind of a hallmark of Democrats. A Latina field worker has different priorities than a libertarian white male (yes, white male) Silicon Valley executive, though they may belong to the same party. There are still many people fighting over the same piece of pie.
Second point, California has been trending Democrat for a long time, but there is a huge population of far more conservative folks, especially inland. They vote too. And there is a huge population of poor immigrants. California’s issues are not easily solvable by anyone. And, it isn’t a country. For example, shitty overpriced healthcare will be the norm in the US as long as there is no universal healthcare.
I’ll not respond to the OP because I read it twice and I still can’t understand what argument he is making. If someone can summarize it for me I’d be grateful.
I don’t want to take us on a sidetrack, but this is not consistent with the notion of free will at all. If I have to have a reason to do something, that means my choices can be predicted just by knowing my inclinations and tendencies, thereby making me deterministic. Free will permits individuals to act randomly, without any reason (apparent or otherwise).
But when the top players of the game only work to entrench those rules, then surely we can yell at them and blame them for entrenching those rules, yes? Even if we understand their motivates. Even if we know they, as individuals, didn’t create the game. We can still blame the ones in charge for their complicity in perpetuating the game and not making it easier for all of us to play. At a bare minimum, by calling out these people we let their heirs know what we won’t put up with.
If we want to be absurdist about it, then yes, it’s innocent victims all the way down because we are all the outcome of decisions made generations ago. But in any snapshot of time, there’s always a group of people who know they’re making life hard for a segment of the population and they don’t give a good got-damn about it. We don’t help matters any by pointing our fingers self-righteously at an even broader segment of the population (e.g., “White suburbanites who live in segregated suburbs”) and blaming them for everything. But we get absolutely nowhere by pretending we’re all innocent victims who all have the same vested interest in making changes. Some of us really aren’t all that innocent. And some of us really will lose a lot of if we move away from the status quo.
As a Christian musician, I have no problem with people having their mating rituals. I do have a problem with trying to force me to perform at their ritual or ruin me financially.
Demanding an artist create or perform against their sincerely held beliefs, or destroy their business, finances, and life. Shop around ahead of time to find the one artist who will not want to use their artistic skills for such a situation.
This whole thread is bugnuts on a scale I don’t think I’ve seen in an AH3 thread before.
people aren’t rational
I’d argue most people veer wildly between rational and irrational decisions to the extent that an outside observer would be hard pressed to determine the motivations and rationales involved. Further, we can all pretty easily be put into situations where we will be fundamentally selfish. That does not mean people cannot also be utterly altruistic or compassionate, just that neither of those poles (rational/irrational and selfish/selfless) is safe to assume as a consistent ‘baseline’ population attribute.
a significant percentage of people either don’t think other people matter as much as the thinker, or don’t actually get around to thinking about other people As People at all, further complicating point 2.
see point 1
a statistically important percentage of people will purposefully screw themselves over as long as they feel like they are, by their action, equally or more massively screwing over someone else they dislike, or who they feel has harmed (or even only tried to harm) them, which REALLY gums up the works in point 2.
to Shodan specifically: I’m not your teacher so you get to look the studies up yourself, but it isn’t that people making bad choices get bad outcomes. It’s that when non-dominant group members DO make good choices, those choices do not benefit them as much as they benefit members of the dominant ‘in’ group.
see point 1 one more time.
monstro is killing it up in here.
AH3, I like you (from what I know of you here), but you managed to put an awful lot of assumptions and stereotypes and really nasty verbiage into that OP and I’m kinda disappointed, to be totally honest.
