I mean, of course. I’m really intransigent on the matter of baby murder. If you say, “Sure, that dude shook his six months old baby to death, but let’s adopt a moderate position on it, it’s his baby after all,” I’d completely reject that reasoning.
I have no problem with pro-lifers taking an immoderate position on baby murder. My disagreement with them is on their definition of “baby” and of “murder.”
Sometimes it also makes sense either when the facts are actually somewhere in the middle, or when the issue only screws people up if the law/society is on either of the sides but doesn’t, or screws a lot fewer of them, if it’s in the middle; or when the issue’s genuinely undetermined.
Whether some people are genuinely trans doesn’t seem to me to be one of those issues. Whether humans vary considerably and people with all of the assorted variations that aren’t directly and clearly damaging others should be respected doesn’t seem to me to be one of those issues, either. But I’m going to argue pretty vehemently against what reads to me like a claim that ‘every issue must have exactly two sides with no genuine middle or third (or fourth or more) axis, and one of those sides will be entirely correct and the other one entirely wrong.’
Automatically assuming that the middle’s always better is a bad idea, of course. But so is automatically assuming that the middle’s always worse; and so is automatically assuming that there are always exactly two sides.
Let’s take on the concept of criminal justice. Criminal justice is a balance between freedom and order. Completely lax criminal justice, the world is run by organized crime or petty criminals and there is no real freedom anyway. Too much criminal justice is a police state.
There is no perfect system. It is a balance. Even in the best system, some guilty people will go free, and some innocent people will be convicted beyond a reasonable doubt. The balance is the best possible system.
What I do see more today, and what I am going to have to increasingly push back on, is people minimizing or dismissing the other side. Because that “never happens.” Innocent people are never convicted, say the advocates for more order. The justice system is always abusing people who never, ever deserve it, say the advocates for more freedom. People make these arguments so they can continue to bray from the soapbox, continue to believe they are the ones that are morally pure and without fault. I’ve had enough.
Who automatically assumed that the middle’s always worse? Did you see that in this thread, or somewhere else? Don’t feed this boogeyman.
There are places when it makes sense to serve “the middle.” Determining right and wrong isn’t one of them.
i.e. here are places where we can talk about “the middle”
These are areas where we must talk about the middle, because in a democracy, nobody can have it all, everything can’t change at once, and sometimes we just don’t have enough information to safely take the maximal position.
But those are procedural issues serving the issue of democracy. Issues of right and wrong can’t be evaluated that way. We can talk about larger bucket of rights outweighting a smaller bucket of wrongs, but that doesn’t validate the rightness or wrongness of the constituent parts.
That’s the issue that I have with a lot of centrist-posing people. They conflate the virtue of democratic procedural moderation with the morality of the underlying issues and act shocked when people push back on “why can’t you be happy with partial rights? It’s what most people want for you.”
What does the below mean, if not that the only reason for choosing the middle ground is that one doesn’t have the votes to override the “other side”?
And if there’s never any other reason to choose the middle ground, then how is that not saying that the middle’s always worse than one of the sides?
I have no problem whatsoever with people objecting to being offered only “partial rights” when “partial rights” means “you only get some of the rights that other people do”.
But we’ve all got only partial rights – because the only way to give somebody total rights is not to give anyone else any. Or to have room enough that everybody can readily just move away from everyone else and live entirely on their own – except that a) humans are a social species and almost none of us, if any, do well entirely on our own and b) there are way too many of us to pull that off.
Person A loves having their bandmates over and all of them playing Really Loud, With Amplifiers, At All Hours. Person B loves quiet, listening to the birds, and being able to sleep at night. Neither of them can afford to move to a hundred square miles that nobody else lives in, even if they can find such a place. What we generally wind up with (presuming that what we wind up with isn’t a free-for-all no-holds-barred neighborhood battle that won’t come out well for anybody) is a law saying something like ‘no noise over X decibels in residential areas and no noise over Y decibels between 10 PM and 7 AM’. We don’t wind up with that law only because there aren’t enough votes to impose either what Neighbor A or Neighbor B wants. And we don’t wind up with that law because either Neighbor A or Neighbor B is essentially Wrong. We wind up with that law because, if we’re going to live together (and we have to), the middle is the right place for that law.
That’s not at all the same thing as a law saying that Neighbor A can shop anywhere in the community but Neighbor B can only shop at certain stores, not because Neighbor B has been banned for screaming at the salesclerks or for stealing, but because some store owners don’t like Neighbor B’s skin or gender or religion.
This is quite thoroughly treated in the parts of my post that you didn’t quote.
I’ve re-read it. I don’t see that.
ETA: maybe some earlier post in the thread?
There are areas of conflicting goods where the best answer will be somewhere in the middle. For instance, I want cleaner water and I want to spend less on water treatment. I think it’s safe to assume that EVERYBODY wants clean water and also wants to spend less. In situations like this (which are extremely common) a “centrist” position is usually the best choice. I might differ from you as to how to value those two goods, and so we might prefer different options. But there’s no question of “good or bad”, we both agree that cleaner water AND spending less money are good. And we mostly can agree that compromises will have to be made in practice to get some of each.
Things get stickier when we don’t agree on what is good. Is sexual autonomy for women a good or bad thing? Is equality of the races a good or bad thing? Is respecting people’s chosen gender identity a good or a bad thing? These are all examples where the left feels those items are an important good that’s worth making compromises to get more of, and the right is ambivalent about. So the “two sides” tend to be a position that focuses on the benefits of “getting more of this good” on the left, and a position that focuses on the costs of making any changes to the status quo on the right. That doesn’t lead to constructive discussion.
Oddly, abortion CAN lead to constructive discussion, because if you frame it as the good of bodily autonomy vs. the good of protecting something-that’s-close-to-being-a-child, a large fraction of people recognizes that both of those are valuable goods, and meaningful compromises can be reached – often in the form of fetal age limits that vary depending on important features of the situation. (It turns out that almost no one favors killing healthy fetuses a day before their due date, and almost no one thinks a mother’s life should be risked in favor a newly formed zygote, for instance, for instance.)
So to some extent, we can change the polarization of a discussion by how we frame it. But to the extent that we really have different ideas of what’s good, that can be harder.
Or worse, deliberate policies to get people riled up, just to make money for the commercial venture doing it. News media, social media, all seem to thrive on conflict, and if there isn’t enough conflict for their bottom line, they seem to have no qualms about manufacturing some.
You really can’t think of any question whatsoever on the trans-rights spectrum where there is legitimate room for disagreement?
Roe v. Wade was a moderate, compromise outcome. Most pro-choice supporters seemed happy with the rights it offered, which were not unlimited. It explicitly did not take women’s bodily autonomy to a polarized extreme.
I see this very differently. The only “good” here is having clean water. Spending is neither good nor bad, it’s simply a constraint. When we decide to tolerate some number of unhealthy pollutants in the water due to financial constraints, we didn’t discover the “middle way” of lead poisoning. The middle way we found is exactly how much we’re willing to poison ourselves before the financial costs become too objectionable.
When the alternative is no legislation at all, then of course the middle way is better than nothing, and an achievement worth celebrating. But nobody ought to interpret that as having found a “good” level of lead poisoning.
As mentioned just upthread, there are things about which there can be general agreement about what is the “good/right” thing and the reasonable disagreement is about means/cost at this time. And, about what form does a feasible way forward about means and cost take, that’s where middle ways and incrementalist progress can come into play.
(Though one of the issues with incrementalism is that at every incremental step there will be someone who will feel fully satisfied to have gotten there, say “good enough” and drop out, or worse yet begin actively resisting further change. For those for whom the issue is truly existential that will be seen as a betrayal.)
Still, I can do nothing if there’s people who believe I must be with them 100% of the way 100% of the time on 100% of the issues, or else I am as bad as an outright opponent. So I don’t lose sleep over that.
Hmm. I disagree. Money isn’t itself a good, but it can generally be exchanged for something you want. Whether that’s lower taxes so you can spend the money yourself, or a new playground, or staff to keep the dump open more hours.
(and that new playground might give you a way to reduce your kid’s exposure to lead in your soil.)
This is a bit of a word game, but it’s a fine analysis as long as we all understand that identifying a tradeoff doesn’t make any amount of lead poisoning “good”. It reflects the reality that some people will accept an amount of lead poisoning for financial reasons. It’s a necessary evil that we accept as part of the reality that we make joint decisions in a society. Some people prioritize money enough that they’re willing to drink a little (or in some cases, quite a lot) of toxic lead, and they vote. it’s better to abide by the legislative decision rather than leave it to trial by combat.
All of this is well and good, my only problem with the centrist pose is the knee-jerk idea that both sides have good ideas that are worth hearting. That’s not true. We have to listen to both sides because they vote, and compromise is necessary to get something rather than nothing. But the good that’s reflected here is simply the inherent good in letting everyone have a voice so we don’t kill each other.
I wonder where you got those figures from. By the process of gluteonumeric extraction? But if what you said is true, that makes me wonder what factor is deflecting it away from the usual eighty-twenty rule. For example, on the SDMB it’s a fair assumption that 80% of the posts are made by 20% of the members (and vice versa). I pulled the 80–20 ratio not from the usual source but from Vilfredo Pareto’s work.
Often it’s somebody else who they expect to be drinking the lead. They don’t think it’s going to affect them.
Sometimes it’s not true. Sometimes it is true. Again, the knee-jerk idea that one’s opponents have no ideas worth hearing is no improvement over the knee-jerk idea that they always do.
I somewhat typoed when I wrote this:
This should have read “that’s not always true”. You shouldn’t automatically assume that all sides of a debate are acting non-maliciously, or have a solid factual grasp of the issues, or have any interest at all in achieving an outcome that’s good for anyone. Some people are there just to derail all hope of doing anything at all.
This is my gripe against the centrist posers, they want to hide behind “I take ideas from both sides” as if its a virtue in itself, when one side has a demonstrable motivation of wanting to hurt, persecute, or neglect others. Nobody gets brownie points for considering both sides when one side is obviously full of malice and ignorance, except to the extent where we’re procedurally required to do so in certain situations.
Ah. That I agree with.
That was a humber widely spread around a few years ago.
Here’s a Pew report from 2019 that says 80% of tweets come from 10% of users:
This one from 2023 says 92% of tweets come from 10% of users:
https://thesocialshepherd.com/blog/twitter-statistics
why would you expect a Pareto curve to apply here, when there are bots and commercial accounts and other high volume posters? If it were all individuals who were posting as individuals you might have a point, but there’s lots of skew here due to different types pf accounts and their different purposes.
We can informally answer the questions as to SDMB …
From the hamburger menu choose “users” (on a mobile you may have to click “more” under “my posts” to see it.)
Tben sort by the “posts made” or “posts read” column to get an idea of how much readin’ and writin’ is done by who.
The data’s not easily downloaded, but it’s not hard to get a qualitative feel for the quantities in the fat part of the exponential decay curve.