People with extreme political views ‘cannot tell when they are wrong’,study find
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“We suspect that this is because the task is completely unrelated to politics – people may be even more unwilling to admit to being wrong if politics had come into play,” said PhD student Max Rollwage.
One conclusion they drew from their study, published in the journal Current Biology, was that the failure of metacognition held true across the political spectrum.
They said this suggested radicalism was based on a way of thinking that “transcends political inclinations”.
A very good point. I believe many of us already knew that such thought processes are not exclusive to politics. An example is the cult of personality behind Elon Musk and his companies; that in they eyes of many people, Elon is absolutely pure of heart and can do no wrong, and those beliefs are firmly held even despite Elon appearing in the news every other month for some new controversy.
When we strongly believe in something, we tend to seek out evidence that supports our viewpoint, and conveniently ignore any evidence to the contrary. Everyone is guilty of confirmation bias to some extent. But we can recognise when it happens, and minimise its impact. I believe it is good practice to refuse to put labels on both yourself and others, and to avoid taking anything at face value - especially influential people with charismatic personalities. Above all, question everything.
"well yeah the democrats do bad shit. . . . . . . .because they're CENTRISTS"
I'm sorry but I am not utilising my actual innate sense of empathy, to try to empathise with right wingers on why they by and large feel the need to cut back on social assistance, curb minority rights(gay rights for example), decide what women(and men) can do with their own bodies, and so on so forth. Keep in mind that all of those things that I stated inherently lack empathy in their thought process, and are all current points of contention with the right wing. If you vote for right wing parties that follow those agendas, you are in turn supporting those ideals unless, you explicitly go out of your way to try and change your parties stance on those issues.
You don't get to stand by and watch as a president from your party attempts to ban an entire race/religious group from entering his country, and at the same time call for empathy from the left. You don't get to stand by as your president locks children in cages, and expect "civility" from the left. Anyone that supports these things are entrenched in their views, and anyone that idly stands by and maintains their "centrist" view on these issues, was too lazy/uninterested to listen to your rapport anyway.
There are things in question beyond just "Children in cages" for centrist's or people who prefer moderate approaches though.
You're essentially creating a false dichotomy and throwing everyone to the side you require them to be on to make the sweeping generalizations you're making.
fascism loves centrism because apathy enables fascists to get away with incrementally worse shit until you end up with a superpower nation going full nazi, as is the case right now
But apathy and centrism are totally different things and conflating them to be he same is just wrong
As I understand it, this discussion is mostly about the "enlightened centrist" meme which is basically an apathetic centrist - they can't be bothered with complex moral judgements so decide to equate all bad things done by two sides of a political spectrum as exactly the same.
Okay, but if you only refer to "centrism" in your criticisms, as opposed to referring to 'enlightened centrism', you're showing that you can't be bothered with (not complex whatsoever) nuance, which is worse.
It's kind of like going 'those FEMINISTS'
i'm talking about a lack of commitment and conviction in the context of political entropy if that helps clarify, if you don't care or your views are constantly moving to the middle ground of both sides you're only going to be exploited by the more extreme parts of whichever side is going to be more willing to use you for their own means
I'm not entirely sure what part of this you aren't getting. "Centrists" by and large tend to vote Republican, but often carry some left leaning views(typically in the way of social issues). Trump didn't win solely because he stirred up 63 million racists, I would garner a guess that at least 30-50% of his voters would classify themselves as more towards the center, but voted for him based solely on one or more of these main things: Conservative economic policies, conservative Social issues(gay marriage, abortion), Gun Control, and of course Immigration. That's what I have a very big problem with. I fail to see how any of those main points of contention outweigh the laundry list of disgusting shit that Trump had promised to do prior to even winning the primary, no less the election itself.
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The centrists that voted Democrat based on social issues, and selflessly did so knowing that they may personally feel damage towards some of the freedoms/views they hold(be it in terms of taxes, gun rights, religious beliefs, etc), were the true Centrists, the centrists that weighed both sides and decided to vote for the side with vastly more potential to experience change from within, from the people that voted for them.
The centrists that voted Republican based on gun rights, religious beliefs, or their personal finances, are the phony centrists, the centrists that voted for a party knowing full well how damaging the rhetoric and platform of its leader was going to be to millions of US citizens. The Republican party for the past ten years refused to reach across the aisle and work with the Democrats; showing a complete unwillingness to change their core values at all. If a centrist is truly a centrist, they should aim to meet somewhere in the middle, and vote for a party that has shown a willingness to do so.
Those types of centrists are who I am mainly talking about, and they vastly outnumbered the former types of centrists I mentioned. They showed a clear lack of values by voting for a party that was going to tear down the rights of not just a few minorities, but quite literally all minority groups. If they remotely valued their social progressiveness, or had a genuine desire to meet somewhere in the middle, they would have never been able to bring themselves to vote for a candidate like Donald Trump.
You can absolutely convince someone to loosen their views on gun control, or at least work with them on it, but how do you negotiate with someone who deems an entire nationality is filled with rapists, and what does a moderate view on such rhetoric look like? Are only some of them rapists? Is that the "moderate" take on that? Or how about abortion, where the already documented "moderate" approach is to allow abortion, but only in the case of rape?
These are people who feel the system is allowing them to suffer as well. People are inherently selfish in that regard. This is where you lack empathy. You think they do it simply because they hate minorities, but they do it because the right's fed them lies that immigrants and democrats are going to remove their only supports, and they aren't getting any perceived hope from the other side. The people in the midwest that swung the states were working to poor class who see their ways of life disappearing and there's nothing to replace it. Trump played on that. Stop telling them their concerns don't matter. Because they are very real to them. They are active voters because they feel their life depends on it. And people like you do nothing to assuage them. I'm hoping that the broken promise Trump gave about the jobs for the midwest helps offset things, but if the only party talking to these people is R it could become another problem because hope is better than nothing.
Also dick move calling me trump supporter. The only thing I agree with R on is gun control and I voted straight Dem this year, and I've got the post history to prove it. So congrats on blinding yourself once again. I'm in this thread because it seems stupid to me that people want to proselytize to only democrats who already are voting Dem. And actively demonize anyone that's on the fence as if that wins them more votes.
Adding on to this, you CAN feel empathy for people who do bad things. Many of the people who vote for and/or support these policies aren't doing so out of malicious intent or willful ignorance but because they've been manipulated and lied to through a systematic process of cultural manipulation. Many of these policies will end up hurting them perhaps even more so than a lot of people who belong to groups that are being targeted but have the financial or social advantages to avoid some of it.
Plus, all of us are affected by the same processes of cultural manipulation (through cognitive/implicit biases), even if we don't realize it. There are probably things all of us believe that are incorrect or even harmful that we don't realize because we haven't thought about it. Even you are probably affected. Even people who vote democrat and not republican probably hold some troubling views about stuff. Likewise, there are people who vote republican who are not as extreme in their beliefs as others. There's no black-and-white cutoff between people with the right intentions and the people with the wrong intentions. And ultimately, we're going to have to get at least some of the people leaning the other way to lean this way in order to change things for the better.
The centrists you're referring to are Republican-leaning because they're often vulnerable parts of the middle and working class who had a mediocre recovery or none at all. They are 'true centrists' as much as any other kind, they are relatively non-ideological and vote in their interests. The difference is they found that one party had nothing to offer them except suggestions they move to areas of growth, which also happen to be areas they run. That's a pretty serious hole in your argument for willingness to reform. They have no incentive to and any progressive will tell you they resisted change in 2016.
Trump's appeal was halting the squeeze on these people in two main ways: altering our trade philosophy and a mix of lowering taxes and deregulation. In one sense, he wanted to blunt the creative-destructive quality of capitalism through protectionism, which is where immigration comes in, while eroding state-related limits on the growth and sustainability potential of struggling parts parts of the country in between its coasts. The Democratic candidate was the mirror opposite of this in 2016, and didn't care that this was the case since she either felt like their vote wasn't needed or it was guaranteed. She expected to inherit the Obama coalition, which didn't turn out, while failing to talk about jobs and campaign in the key rust belt states. Her husband, once popular with the blue collar, scrambled to compensate.
As a result, there was a profound Obama-Trump voter phenomenon disproportionately in those states, and it contributed a lot to her loss since she also failed to get the turnout Obama did. You're essentially proposing those people vote Democrat anyway because something you made up about true centrists.
You have it backwards. Parties cater to interest groups, not the other way around. There's also a contradiction in your thought in that you're calling for centrists to vote in abstract solidarity with something you care about, but this rewards Democratic shedding of the old union demographic and appeal to middle america in general, which key to the rise of Trump not only to the presidency but within the GOP.
This means you're simultaneously advocating for a disincentive, but to be honest I think I'm delving into this too much and you only came up with this argument to explain away reasons why some centrists wouldn't vote Democrat.
That reform strategy makes no sense for other reasons. The country is separating along cultural blue and red lines not only as political identities become something people increasingly define themselves with, but more and more people move to parts of the country like them, meaning those single issues you brought up will have less of an overlap with the other party as time goes on. For your gun control example, a party built on an archipelago of cities and satisfied with such is not going to ever thaw on gun rights. The entire gun culture is visibly built on a wider American culture of small property owners and their self-management, which has a strong countryside character.
You shouldn't be treating all political ideas as if they need to come from some form of core value and just a core value. Obviously, everything is derived from your core values to an extent but political ideas can't just be a 1:1 replication as many topics are far abstracted away from those core ideals.
Just as an example...
Core ideal: Suicide is bad
Actual political issue: Suicide rates in prison.
The topic of suicide rates in prison is so broad that while your intentions still line up with the core ideal of suicide being bad, there's so many facets of exploration to the topic that it's unthinkable. As new topics are brought up where your opinions on the topic lie on the political spectrum can shift drastically while you're still adhering to that core value.
Political opinions are complex and your stance on a topic can shift while still lining up with your ideals. They're core values for a reason. They help drive your political stance but they don't define it themselves.
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