Wars have been fought, and thousands killed over imaginary gods that exist only as feelings.
It is foolish to dismiss such facts, or to expect it to just go away because you have proof that satisfies you. That is why it is depressing.
These people will fight you, with weapons if need be, because of their feelings.
Dismissal is wrong in so many ways.
What the hell am I dismissing, though? I am not particularly disputing the fact that the anti-progressive people are incredibly dangerous for the long-term survival of humanity and must be worked against in order to preserve it, with hopefully better results than what was shown by Democrats this election season.
Also, you are misinterpreting a single one line statement to disastrous effect.
It is meant to convey that there are no absolutes, only percieved differences based on frames of reference. Not that everything is everything else too.
Bullshit. There are absolutes. Mathematics is an obvious one. Mathematics gives us an
absolute base of truth, infinitely large in scope and magnificence. Science, as built on mathematics, also inherits some of that truthness, though obviously to a lesser extent - but it's still different from things that are either not based on mathematics, or based on the weaker mathematical base - like, for example, climate change denial. Which is one of the core staples of the modern anti-progressivism.
The entire point that weird is making is that you need to see it from multiple points of view and not be boxed (or bubbled) into one echo chamber. Which is a real problem today with people isolating themselves into filter bubbles and echo chambers, which is how we got to the polarized state we are in. Read the wiki page on the parable.
You know, I have seen the world from different viewpoints before, smjjames. I
know a lot of stuff about that from inside-out. The reason why I abandoned stuff like, say, denial of human influence on climate change, or belief in communism being a better economical system than capitalism, or basically every single thing that anti-progressivist people believe in, is because their facts, which the proponents of these theories have used to back their arguments up, were weak as hell once I've started poking around, investigating and trying to see the whole picture, while the opposition one were, in fact, pretty strong, and only
seemed weak because of those fucking echo chambers that you talk about.
Stop trying to make me "see the light", because I already saw it. And it didn't really pan out well for anti-progressivism. Very much not.
EDIT: for example, one of the most common ways I've heard some liberals talking about how the left/right divide is going to be overcome is that the conservatives will die off and liberals will win by default. I've been guilty of that sentiment in the past myself, but I'm really starting to question the thinking behind that. That's almost the exact definition of head-in-the-sand thinking and we as liberals should steer away from such sentiment. Pretending we don't have to engage with the opposition because "they'll be dead soon" is not the way forward.
Yes, obviously that strategy of dismantling anti-progressive agenda was wrong. But that doesn't mean that we should start to switch our goals. Merely our methods. As a part of them, it could be good to first go for a little bit of "engaging with opposition", though I doubt that it would really work out - remember, Republicans were the ones that almost defaulted the world economy over one fucking piece of legislation because "Nobama", not Democrats.
But any such kind of action must be done while keeping in mind that in the end, they must be prevented from implementing their horrible ideas to power long-term, because it would screw everyone and everything up.
I guess it
could help to clean the house of liberalism from the anti-liberal parasites, though. I think the thing that has to go first is the idea of "true identity", be in sexual, gender, or any other kind, as this sort of brand which is marked on your body from your birth, doesn't change over life and fully describes who you "really" are, how you should feel about stuff, how you should act in various situations, to a frighteningly deep extent, where you could substitute your entire persona with an additive fucking combination of these "true identity" labels, and people will somehow praise this as a "sign of your high individuality and rich internal something" - or use them as quick way to denigrate people real hard - and for the rest of their fucking lives, too, because you see, since it's a "true identity", it cannot be changed, and so if you're once a racist, you're now always have been and forever racist, both in the future and in the past, because people can't change - people just come out of the closet and reveal themselves for what they've been for their entire life!
That's probably one of the most shittier ideas that have come to be associated with liberals, and it hurts the cause of liberalism both strategically and ideologically quite a lot, since the degree to which it's being pushed by some people is bordering on fucking racism, version 2, and it obviously repulses a lot of people away.
Not that the anti-progressives are not in the habit of using labels, no, they use them a looooot, too, but they're at least "justified" in doing so because they're not, you know, liberal. They're
supposed to be worse than liberals at this.