> Wesleyan has a rich history of activism and protest, and not always entirely peaceful (Roth’s predecessor, Doug Bennet, had his office firebombed at one point).
Arson is not protest. Arson is a VIOLENT type of activism, which is legally classified as terrorism.
Trump (or anybody) shouldn't be allowed to punish folks for speech or peaceful protest. Unfortunately, folks are calling VIOLENT acts like arson and battery "protest", and threats of bodily harm "speech" ("harassment" or "assault" under most US criminal law) -- we should be in favor of the government stepping in to protect people from arson, battery, and assault/ harassment.
> he did not give in to the illiberal demands of the left to chill speech post-2020,
Roth has been president since 2007. What was his response to Nick Christakis's struggle session (plenty of video of that) or Erika Christakis leaving Yale, after she penned an e-mail that students should be able to handle Halloween costumes they find offensive?
The American Left has been illiberal and going after speech for decades; it didn't start post-2020.
If the state is illegitimate then it is permissible or perhaps an obligation to topple it, according to people like the revolutionaries that founded the USA. That is, it doesn't necessarily matter what is legal or not, if the state misbehaves then you should put it to the guillotine or fire or bear arms or whatever suits you.
As an outsider it's always funny to see people write about the "American Left", as if there were any leftist movements of national importance in the US. As if Food Not Bombs had at some point had a majority in congress or something, it's just a ridiculous idea. If that happened there would be a bloody purge, Pinochet style but bigger.
> The American Left has been illiberal and going after speech for decades; it didn't start post-2020.
Good that the free-speech absolutist Musk is there to ban everyone on Twitter who calls him out on his lies, trying to buy democratic elections, and do nazi salutes.
> Arson is a VIOLENT type of activism, which is legally classified as terrorism.
Lithium-ion batteries in badly made cars are prone to ...combustion.
Just so. The First Amendment assures the right to peacefully assemble and speak your mind, not to commit arson. Violent attacks aren't free speech and should always be prosecuted.
> But they vote a straight blue ticket because that's what they learned to do back in the 1960s.
and
> but still votes red because she was raised in a religious household and came of age during the peak of the right's lean toward peddling to christians.
There's no explanation for why the old man votes "blue" other than he learned it in the 60s. OTOH, the woman votes "red" because "she was raised in a religious household" and started voting when The Right was "peddling to christians".
"peddling" -- that's a pretty negative term.
I don't know if it's ironic or demonstrative that an article about how difficult it can be to have political conversations produces a comment thread with such biased viewpoints.
> learned there are still plenty of people that were unhappy the south lost the civil war and want to remedy that
Did you peel that back to the next layer? Did they want to reintroduce slavery? Or did they want independence from a distant government?
I knew folks in the South who thought some of the craziest racist things and probably would've been OK with slavery (I did hear them promote segregation).
At the same time, the vast majority folks I knew who defended the Civil War or wanted secession didn't want slavery or segregation, but local (and often less) government. Did they misunderstand the role of slavery in the Southern secession? Usually. Does that change their _current intent_? No.
The latter group (which was much larger) should be engaged with on the issue of local government and secession, especially in the context of folks in Blue States who've been rattling about secession under Trump.
The particular problem with class 1 ( want independence from a distant government ) is to gain enough political power to effect change is they necessarily incorporate class 2 ( want to reintroduce slavery ), this necessitates the use of POSIWID
Unfortunately I don't think the group of 'just want to secede' is "much larger" than those willing to commit civil rights violations after years of practical experience living in the south. The people saying it in the context of the blue states doing it mostly realize it won't work, and the amount of civil rights violations either way skyrocket in the process.
> "healthcare should be for everyone" is a great claim to make. but then the question is implementation. how will you get rid of the current system and replace it with a more equitable one?
And as importantly, what does "more equitable" or "fairer" mean? More broadly, how do people define "better"?
In the US, a major issue is that The D and The R have radically different ideas of what those words mean, even though they agree on the high level objectives like "healthcare should be for everyone".
Framing has always been used in political debate just to target certain values; what may have changed (or not) is as a deliberate tactic to keep people divided: folks who do not speak the same language cannot communicate.
On a lot of issues, I think 80% of folks are in 80% of agreement, but the partisans (whether politicians or activists) are framing the issue to prevent that consensus, because the partisans want something in the 20% that 80% of folks don't agree with.
> For the last 20 years at least, the leadership of the two main political parties in the US have largely invested in messaging around the values that they represent.
Except that the "values" each promotes are often inconsistent with other "values" they promote, sometimes to the point of absurd irrationality, e.g. marijuana vs tobacco or alcohol.
And other "values" are completely independent, but correlate so highly that "tribalism" is a much better explainer, e.g. abortion and guns.
> and into a world where the parties policies are aiming to realize fundamentally different visions of the world, based on fundamentally different values.
That's not new.
On a very high level, the two major parties do want everyone to be healthy, wealthy and wise -- the issue is that they disagree on what those words mean, and what should be sacrificed (and by whom) to achieve it, which means the two major parties have always had very different visions of the future.
> If you discover that someone has completely different values from you, then discussing policy isn't going to be useful anyway, because there's no way you'll agree on a single policy when you have different fundamental values.
And that right there is a call to tribalism: Don't bother with Those People, They Have Different Values, They Aren't Like Us.
> Don't bother with Those People, They Have Different Values, They Aren't Like Us
I didn't say that you shouldn't bother with people. I said that discussing _policy_ is not useful if you don't agree on _values_. It's the wrong level of abstraction. To put it in a plain analogy: discussing the best route to get to your destination isn't useful if you don't agree on where you are going.
If you want to engage with someone with different values, then the values are where you need to start. If you want to engage with someone on the best way to get somewhere, you need to start by making sure you both agree on where you want to go.
"It is better that ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer" is a value statement; in the US, some folks agree with it, some do not.
Under your argument, folks who disagreed about that value statement shouldn't bother discussing criminal justice policy; I think that's erroneous and part-and-parcel of Don't Bother With Those People.
Yes, _some_ policy conversations might be futile if folks have completely opposed values, but I don't think we should apply that generally.
We MUST work with people who hold different values than us, without trying to change their values so that they become part of Us.
I think there are parts of the policy that people wouldn’t be able to agree on because of differences in values.
To look at another example, some people view the purpose of prisons as being primarily for causing suffering and to punish people. Other people don’t care much either way about suffering and see prisons as a way to remove people from society. Some people think the purpose of prisons should be rehabilitation, and see suffering as practically counterproductive. Some people don’t believe that if the state is taking someone’s freedom they have an ethical obligation to minimize that persons suffering. Some people don’t believe in the concept of prison at all.
There are a lot of views there, and while you might be able to get some of the people with differing views to agree on policy some of the time, the goals are significantly different and that’s going to be a significant obstacle in shaping a meaningful policy in all but perhaps a few isolated cases.
TNG was lit much like other action/adventure shows when it debuted in 1987, e.g. MacGyver, Magnum PI, Simon & Simon, The A-Team (which ended that spring) -- the Bridge and hallways were much brighter than even a sitcom, I'd bet as a specific aesthetic choice of The Future Is Bright.
When DS9 debuted a few years later, it was stepping into a cultural mindset that had embraced Dark And Gritty in broader entertainment. That series is still much brighter than many shows today, but that's because of a technological revolution (including costs) rather than a change of "TV as an art form rivaling movies".
Yes, there is a mindset within Hollywood circle(jerk)s that so-dark-I-cannot-see is "more sophisticated, serious, and artful", but viewers broadly think it is idiotic. (Also, 2-and-a-half or 3 hour movie runtimes.)
> In most fields (film, painting, music, etc), there are standards -- agreed upon to varying degrees, sometimes almost unanimously, sometimes with only a plurality -- based on objective or almost-objective criteria. In other words, there are "measurable" criteria that expert or even merely good practitioners can agree on. In these cases the word "quality" is often used as a shorthand for possessing these kinds of properties. In this sense, ascribing quality is functionally different from a mere opinion, linguistically and technically.
Could that be selection bias, where people who think X is "quality" promote other people who agree and push down those who disagree?
At that point, it may be true Agree X has found something objective and measurable, but they're using circular reasoning: these metrics are important because they show "quality", and we know it is "quality" because of those metrics.
It's true as I noted there is no final god-like arbiter. But that is not really an interesting observation imo. Taking that perspective to its logical conclusion we end up in a world where values are utterly flat and relativist, and the only thing we can say is that we can't say anything about anything.
It's also true the selection-bias you described exists, in some cases to the point of collective delusion. But note how I can say that and you can immediately think of cases that fit and cases that don't...
On balance there is something real and (despite my first sentence) I want to say "objective" in most cases of expertise. In practice everyone lives as if that were true, even if they are arguing otherwise.
Regardless, even if you want to make the most contrarian, relativist case possible, the phenomenon of expertise (simply viewed as a social pattern) does exist and governs nearly every domain where people talk about "quality".
Are there $150 pairs which are better than every $10 or $20 pair? Sure.
But there are plenty of $150 headphones which have the same quality as a $10 pair of earbuds. People overpay for brand names, for trendy styles, for good marketing/ branding, etc. Price _alone_ is not an indicator of quality.
> Meaning quality is more important than quantity.
It's not a binary choice.
Price is a non-linear factor here: "quality" may be prohibitively expensive as a single purchase, even if it is less expensive over X years than re-buying a cheaper item every year.
In the US, shopping trends are clear that many people (perhaps most) value quantity very highly, to the point that they will sacrifice "quality" which is loosely defined and more subjective. IME this also ties into Americans being very price conscious.
Arson is not protest. Arson is a VIOLENT type of activism, which is legally classified as terrorism.
Trump (or anybody) shouldn't be allowed to punish folks for speech or peaceful protest. Unfortunately, folks are calling VIOLENT acts like arson and battery "protest", and threats of bodily harm "speech" ("harassment" or "assault" under most US criminal law) -- we should be in favor of the government stepping in to protect people from arson, battery, and assault/ harassment.
> he did not give in to the illiberal demands of the left to chill speech post-2020,
Roth has been president since 2007. What was his response to Nick Christakis's struggle session (plenty of video of that) or Erika Christakis leaving Yale, after she penned an e-mail that students should be able to handle Halloween costumes they find offensive?
The American Left has been illiberal and going after speech for decades; it didn't start post-2020.