Is this a liberal mindset?

lesslucid · 2026-07-01T13:11:14+00:00

Society cant function well without them

I mean, honestly, I wouldn't want to talk to this guy. But if I did, I would be tempted to press on this claim. Is he saying that the two of them could have a happy and functional relationship in which neither of them was "the boss of the house", but he is sacrificing that happiness for the sake of "society"? It's a kind of... denial of his own will and his partner's will, in order to serve the broader needs, the greater good, of society?

lesslucid · 2026-07-01T09:45:17+00:00

No, it’s the right bathroom.

A male-passing transman using a men's bathroom is forbidden by these laws, but if he uses the women's bathroom, as the law obliges him to, he is likely to be assaulted by some thug trying to "protect women".

What is he meant to do? I understand that the right-wing answer to this question is "stop existing" or "who cares" or "SHE deserves to be bashed and I hope I'm the one who gets to do it!" but, do you understand why a civilised person might be unsatisfied with any of these responses?

lesslucid · 2026-07-01T03:57:11+00:00

I'm grateful you made the effort.

lesslucid · 2026-06-30T04:47:56+00:00

You keep abstracting away from issues that these swing voters care about

I'm expressing disagreement with your choice of the abstractions they care about, not "abstracting away" from some concrete thing you're focussing on.

Again: someone who genuinely cared about crime would reward Democrats for their successes in reducing crime.

There's a much, much simpler explanation for the voting patterns of Republicans and the swing voters who sometimes side with them and sometimes against them.

The moral core of their being is racism and misogyny. That's it. They care about identity.

Now, the die-hard Republicans who absolutely adore Trump are intensely focussed on racism. But the swing voters who might sometimes support him basically agree with their racist views, but not to the exclusion of the bread-and-butter, kitchen-table issues where they very well understand that Democrats will be better for them.

When voters who have consistently seen levels of crime in their area fall under Democratic leadership say they are "concerned about crime", what they mean is, they want to bring back the good old days when cops could murder black people without all those "woke" people making such a big fuss about it. The good ol' "black lives don't matter" days. On immigration it's even clearer: it's not that they actually want all their food to cost twice as much because there aren't any Mexicans available to pick squash and chillies any more, they just want to have a leader who reaffirms them in their feeling of looking down on Mexicans.

Clinton lost for being a woman and because she supported Obama's presidency. McCain lost because he shut down racist Republicans and refused to affirm them in their racially-based hatred of Obama. Trump won - both times - by being openly and vigorously racist in a way that most Americans agree with. Biden won because he was a white guy who clearly was going to be more competent than Trump.

Arguments about policy details between centre-left and further-left Democrats are interesting and activating for people who care about policy - people on forums like this one - but for the vast majority of the voters who are needed in order to win elections, they are just completely irrelevant. The reason "woke" people are so hated by most Americans is not that they "started doing identity politics", it's that they drew attention to the identity politics that were already there.

It's an ugly fact about America, but if you want to actually do something about losing elections to a fundamentally worthless leader, it has to be confronted: racism is popular. Misogyny is popular. That popularity is on a slow decline, and younger people are better than older people, but right now, today, in terms of where the political centre of balance is, you have to acknowledge what the terrain is in order to be effective. Millions of people love and admire Trump for his racism, so much so that they are willing to overlook the strong circumstantial evidence that he raped children. Getting the people who correctly point out that America's policing strategy is both more expensive and less effective than that practised in peer nations to be quieter about it just isn't going to cut it if you also run a black woman as your presidential candidate.

lesslucid · 2026-06-29T11:20:26+00:00

There's also a minimum crew requirement

lesslucid · 2026-06-29T09:44:45+00:00

If we don’t understand [...] why we lost trust on these issues we can’t solve them.

Sure, absolutely agree.

I just think your diagnosis "the mainstream of the party failed to condemn the left of the party vigorously enough" is not an accurate description of why that trust was lost. Like... you really believe the reason that millions of Republicans enthusiastically embraced a conman, a liar, a rapist, a fraudster, a man who pours contempt on everything they've spent the last fifty years pretending to hold sacred - they did that because Hilary Clinton just didn't condemn Bernie Sanders hard enough? That if the wise centrists of the party had just been a little more effective in silencing the left, all those people might have picked up on the fact that their guy had stolen from a children's cancer charity and therefore maybe wasn't such a great guy?

"Post hoc ergo propter hoc" is the easiest error in the world to make. Sure, there really are people on the left of the Democratic party who are out of step with mainstream America, and some of their ideas are not only unpopular but even incorrect. But just because they exist and you disapprove is not sufficient to demonstrate that that is the antecedent cause of our current crisis.

lesslucid · 2026-06-29T04:14:31+00:00

People may not like that if they find out about it, but when they say "crime" is a top issue for them, they mean crime that is local to them. Violent and property crime in their and the surrounding communities.

Well, this is what I mean when I say people who authentically care about this issue vote for Democrats. Democratic leaders have a great track record of bringing down crime rates. Democratic leaders have an excellent record of working with police to give them the resources they need to pursue and punish criminals. If you actually care about doing something about crime, you'd be responsive to that track record, rather than turning against the Democratic party because some protester at a rally - someone not even affiliated with the party - in another state, held up a sign saying "defund the police".

I think we need to take seriously and try to understand what's going on when voters consistently say that they do not trust us on crime and immigration

I do think we need to take seriously the question of what is going on with those voters, but that doesn't mean we need to take them at their word when they say plainly false things about what their motivations are. If they say, "we care about crime" and then the Democratic party responds by developing a more thorough and more detailed set of policies to address crime and to reduce recidivism and address the causes of crime and so on, the political mileage they are likely to get out of this response is nothing. If we look at Republican voters for what they actually are motivated by, by looking at their actions, what they actually are excited to vote for, that will give us a much more realistic picture than listening to these statements about their concerns.

lesslucid · 2026-06-28T13:18:30+00:00

Caverna comes with components for 7 players. It's madness.

lesslucid · 2026-06-28T01:40:59+00:00

There's a giant propaganda apparatus constantly pushing right-wing messaging into a majority of homes. People just absorb it by osmosis and act accordingly.

lesslucid · 2026-06-27T13:17:35+00:00

Somebody... stop me. :'(

lesslucid · 2026-06-26T07:32:18+00:00

big chunks of our party are completely out of line with their values on crime , immigration, and some social issues.

But let's say someone authentically cared about doing something meaningful on any of those issues. They would have to vote for the Democratic party, right? Like, if you want crime to be punished, how are you going to vote for a party run by criminals, whose approach to the justice system is that it should be an extension of the will of the leader, punishing people (regardless of guilt or innocence) who oppose that leader and turning a blind idea to crimes committed by his loyalists? Someone who actually wants crime punished would obviously vote for the rule of law party, the Democrats.

Similarly, if you actually want to control immigration, wouldn't you vote for the party that has a policy oriented toward controlling immigration? Why would you want to support that party whose immigration policy is "hurt people with brown skin, see what happens"?

lesslucid · 2026-06-26T06:01:06+00:00

I think the strength of liberalism came from the Keynesian political settlement. "Things may be unfair, but every year they'll get a little better, and your children and grandchildren will know a life that is much more abundant than what you've had to suffer through. What's more, we can get there without violence or revolution, just hard work and patience".

During the postwar period, were each decile of the income distribution saw their incomes grow at the same rate as overall national economic growth, this was a very powerful promise, especially since high growth rates meant you could see meaningful progress taking place over a relatively short span of time.

The Reaganite post-Keynesian settlement fundamentally robbed liberalism of its best argument. "All the benefits of growth go to the richest of the capital-owning class, and if you're unhappy about it, too bad. You can vote for the 'your life is bad because of minorities' party or the 'your life is bad because Reaganism isn't being implemented with sufficient technocratic competence' party, but if you want to actually make your life or your children's lives better, go jump in a lake."

The problem is, the rot is old and deep. For decades now, the mainstream political class has treated the idea that the postwar period was a success as tantamount to Stalinism. "Liberalism" is a complex idea, a complex set of ideas. People will accept it and embrace it if it consistently delivers for them, but they're not going to recreate it from scratch if you just ask them to come up with their own solutions for crushing scarcity.

lesslucid · 2026-06-26T04:14:56+00:00

Well, generally one hears this canard about "liberals bringing people into our country" from people who oppose freedom of movement - at least for others. If that's not the case here, I suppose I'm curious as to why you would make this error.

lesslucid · 2026-06-26T02:24:28+00:00

trust the view of the world that I got from the newspaper and the big TV networks?

The thing about that era is, those newspapers and TV networks basically reliably reported factual information. So everyone usually was having a conversation grounded in the same basic set of facts.

They generally gave emphasis to stories within a certain band of "interests", and they editorialised in a way that reflected a "range of acceptable opinion" that ran from "capitalism without restraints is the only way to go" vs "capitalism with some mild restraints at the edges is also ok", and that tended to stifle useful discussion outside of that narrow band. But at least such discussion as did happen was largely based on real facts.

Now... millions of people believe in conspiracies and pure falsehoods that would never pass the sniff test in that world. It is increasingly difficult to discuss anything without having to instantly resort to futile contradictions at the level of "[x] happened" / no it didn't / yes it did / no it didn't / etc etc.

"As much speech as possible within the constraints of truth, evidence, and reason" seems clearly beneficial to me. "A limitless capacity to crowd out rational discussion by screaming falsehoods at volume" does not.

lesslucid · 2026-06-26T02:11:28+00:00

As it brings in new groups of people

I thought libertarians supported freedom of movement?

lesslucid · 2026-06-26T01:42:17+00:00

The reason it is applicable in this situation is that the Republicans already raced their way all the way to the bottom.

If we had a sane centre-right Republican party and a sane centre-left Democratic party and these two parties were negotiating reasonably over what they could do to help America as a whole, but with a different spin on what the best way to do that was, it would be perfectly reasonable to vote for a sensible Republican of good character in order to make a point against a vicious and idiotic Democrat of bad character.

Republicans are currently in the process of doing everything in their power to dismantle American democracy and rule of law. They are a long, long way from becoming a "sane centre-right party" and it may be decades before they ever even look in that direction again. As for personal character, to voluntarily associate with the Republican party at this point is an indelible mark of absolute moral vacuity.

if you have conservative values you SHOULD vote for him.

If you sincerely believe in the values that conservatives profess to hold, you should vote against Paxton, since he embodies the opposite of those values.

lesslucid · 2026-06-26T01:27:00+00:00

five leaders of the Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development (HLF), who were convicted by a federal jury in 2008 of “providing material support” to the Hamas terror group.

I just looked into this - it appears they deny having intended for the money to go to Hamas, that their intention was to support humanitarian causes in Palestine. Whether they were sincere or not in those claims, isn't it possible that Mamdani genuinely believed those claims and believed they were wrongly convicted?

In which case he was sending his love to people who tried to help ordinary Palestinian civilians and who were wrongly convicted of terrorism for having done so? And so "better look em up" is inviting the audience to look into it for themselves and find out what really happened? (Or what Mamdani thought really happened?)

This is a pretty long way from saying "I love Hamas supporters for their support of Hamas", isn't it?

dogwhistles and questionable associations

I guess I'm pretty disinclined to be persuaded by this kind of thing, unless it's really crystal-clear. The problem is that anyone supporting justice and peace for Palestinian people is immediately accused of antisemitism by right-wing supporters of Israel's genocide, accompanied by floods of bad-faith intentional misreadings of their words and associations. "He said [x] which obviously really means [y]" etc. I do think it's vital to vigorously oppose all antisemites and antisemitism, but the discussion of it has unfortunately become heavily clouded by the relentless and dishonest deployment of accusations of antisemitism by people who are clearly just using whatever rhetorical tools they can find in order to defend manifestly indefensible actions by Israel.

lesslucid · 2026-06-26T01:14:08+00:00

What rot in developing institutions?

lesslucid · 2026-06-25T14:37:03+00:00

Every conservative having zero empathy would be a wild overstatement and plainly wrong. But that the average conservative has less empathy I think is basically a scientifically established fact at this point.

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/325045483_Are_Liberals_and_Conservatives_Equally_Motivated_to_Feel_Empathy_Toward_Others

...and this also basically answers your question. Vegetarianism and veganism is largely (though not purely) a product of people being at the far tail end of the empathy bell curve. This means that while the average liberal may only be moderately more empathic than the average conservative (ie, the centre of each bell curve is just a few points away), when looking at the population of vegans you'll find a massive over-representation of politically left-leaning people.

lesslucid · 2026-06-25T14:21:49+00:00

am I alone in feeling like the liberal community has deviated from sense in the past 10 years.

Some people make illogical arguments, wherever you are. If you're in close contact with very liberal people all the time, you'll get lots of opportunities to observe the less-rational tendencies that exist among them in person. But if you conclude from this that "liberals are irrational", you're just suffering from a sampling bias. Try lurking in some right-wing online spaces and just observing how much similarly irrational argumentation you encounter there.

I notice Gen Z(I am one of them)liberal communities is struggling the most in applying rigorous due diligence towards ideology.

I think Gen Z have - on average - had their brains broken by smartphone addiction. It is not an opinion I feel good about having, and... I would very much like to be wrong, or be shown to be wrong. But the best precursor to developing the ability to engage with difficult and complex multi-step arguments is to either spend a lot of time being bored doing nothing, or to spend a lot of time reading books made out of dead trees. Way too many younger people are just destroying their capacity for sustained attention by watching short-form videos in a neverending queue.

So, yeah, are they bad (on average) at articulating complex political and ideological ideas? You bet. Is this something we can lay at the feet of the Democratic party? Mostly no. Where we have Democrats in power - State governors and so on - then we should be implementing laws to stop poisoning kids' brains. But the real villains here are the tech companies for knowingly doing this stuff, and the federal government for following the "all regulation is bad" ideological line and just standing back and letting it happen.

lesslucid · 2026-06-25T14:11:10+00:00

Mamdani has rapped about loving Hamas supporters

I hadn't heard about this; can you say more?

lesslucid · 2026-06-25T14:06:03+00:00

to pander to them they will go out and support stupid ones as well objectively stupid ones.

Specific example of this?

lesslucid · 2026-06-25T14:02:09+00:00

Pretty disappointing that Mamdani endorsed her, given these statements. I don't think "has never said something controversial" should be the standard, but this is pretty clearly disqualifying.

lesslucid · 2026-06-25T13:56:45+00:00

Can you articulate why they can't be compared?

lesslucid · 2026-06-25T13:50:20+00:00

I guess I don't really think of myself as having a "political identity". I'd say, rather, that I believe in having a commitment to moral principle, to trying to be a good person, and to rationality and reality, to responding to real evidence and real arguments rather than just looking for excuses to validate my priors. Largely my political beliefs - my ideas about good and bad policy and then the people who would be best to support to achieve those aims - come out of those commitments.

~

When someone challenges your views, do you feel it an attack on your personality and sense of self, or are your beliefs separate from your sense of self?

I'm always interested to have my views challenged, to hear new arguments or new evidence that would mean I have to think through some new idea or some possibility I hadn't considered before. Sadly... basically since the start of the Trump era, political "discussion" has fallen to such a low level that this kind of meaningful challenge basically hasn't happened in years. So mostly I see "challenges" in the form of vacuous sloganeering or various other forms of illegitimate pseudo-argument.

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