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will we see a ~politics?
the reason why reddit feels so fractured is because all sides of the political compass are so split. id like to see one single ~politics channel and see how it works out, if everyone can keep it civil.
I feel like ~politics will only work once tagging is re-enabled and trust implemented. The subject matter is engenders such conviction that, left unmoderated, it pushes the shit-barometer lower and lower until a full-fledged shitticane makes landfall. Yes, we're handling it okay at the moment. I'd rather not reach the tipping point, though.
I think we should keep the option open of banning political discussion until appropriate moderation/trust tools are implemented.
Eh, it's an option, but I don't think we need to go full nuclear just yet. The discussions have been civil (except for that one asshat), and it's healthy for a community like this one to learn how to disagree with each other
Sure, not yet definitely. I think I'm just enjoying this place being a bit of a relief from what's happening on other sites.
How will we define what constitutes political discussion?
Fair question. I don't know off the top of my head ;-p
It's very much like pornography, in that you know it when you see it.
How do you make ~politics actually neutral and representative, instead of the left-leaning (leaning is generous) sub that is /r/politics? Of course any community image reflects its base, but that can be moderated with careful, well, moderation. Subs like /r/NeutralPolitics and /r/PoliticalDiscussion are pretty good at it; I'd suggest emulating them instead of /r/politics.
r/politics isn't "left-leaning", it's hard-center. Socialists (hell, even SocDems) are villainized.
I think that very much depends on your personal ideology. That said, what conservative viewpoints are encouraged and upvoted there? Here's the current front page of the subreddit. Of the 13 stories (that fit on my screen at once), I count five explicitly Trump-related articles (all negative), two more about the Eagles refusing to meet with Trump (painting the Eagles in a positive light), a highly upvoted post casting a Trump diplomat in a negative light, two stories with obvious left-leaning opinions (pro-immigration, pro-wealth redistribution), one highlighting the failures of the administration (Puerto Rico), and one about McConnell in which the top comment is the OP calling McConnell "scum."
How is that centralist? Maaaaaybe using an international scale you could consider it centralist (only factoring in places like France, Scandinavia, Germany, etc, and ignoring Poland, Spain, Greece, Turkey, etc), but /r/politics is explicitly about US politics.
To put it another way, can you find any links on the front page that promote a conservative or right wing viewpoint? The only one that comes close is an AP story about David Koch stepping down...but the comments obviously show it's upvoted because people are happy about it, with one of the top ones comparing him directly to Lucifer.
You're pretty much arguing for false balance. If a group is "centrist" by nature, it should be self-evident that they'll be heavily critical of far-right people like Trump and McConnell.
Personally, I would actually agree with you that /r/politics is left leaning and not hard centrist. Not because of the articles they upvote, just my impression of people's policy preferences from comments.
Yes, but they would be equally critical of far left people such as sanders. However, if you search Bernie Sanders on r/politics, the top posts are all positive, in a sharp dichotomy to the results you get if you search Donald Trump. To me, this looks left leaning.
Sanders is center-left. He gets attacked constantly, if the news is about his own agenda.
Trump is further right than Sanders is left, and he's a divisive figure even without considering his politics.
Perhaps Sanders is center left by international terms, but by U.S. politics, he is far left. He was calling for things that the democratic party as a whole thought was too far left. I agree that trump is divisive, and that adds to him being attacked constantly. If you could show me examples of Sanders being attacked in r/politics, I would greatly appreciate it.
I guess it isn't clear, but I don't use US-specific terminology.
As for attacking Sanders, it's pretty much any case where he's pushing his agenda, especially if he's opposing the mainstream Democrat agenda. He still does get plenty of love when he bashes the right. Here are some threads from the last 30 days:
Democrats gear up for 2020 — and Bernie Sanders still leads the pack
Bernie Sanders 'considering' another bid for president
Every Democrat Should Support Bernie Sanders’s New Labor Bill
Bernie Sanders lashes out at Congress over gun control after Santa Fe, Texas, shooting
Bernie’s army in disarray
Thank you for clarifying. I think the difference I see is that while r/politics is central by international standards, it talks almost exclusively about U.S. politics.
The only link with even somewhat negative comments is the last link. Even at that, it only has 13 upvotes, with a barely positive majority of upvotes (51%). Otherwise those are neutral at worst, with a smattering of positive comments about Bernie.
Those are controversial threads from the last month, demonstrating that even a slightly left-of-center but incredibly popular politician like Sanders doesn't have support by the supposedly "leftist" subreddit.
The fact that you refer to Sanders as a "slightly left-of-center" politician is all I need to know about how skewed your political compass is. And no, I don't give a damn what the rest of the world thinks; this is, and always has been, about /r/politics, which is a US-specific subreddit.
Have a great day.
This comment is toxic. Please read the docs to better understand the kind of discourse expected on tildes.
How is it toxic? I see nothing about cursing in the docs. If you're referring to my first sentence, then it still stands: if you truly view Sanders as only "slightly left-of-center," we have drastically different starting assumptions, and further discussion is pointless.
It's a hostile personal attack masquerading as an argument, a statement that you "don't give a damn" about my argument, and a sarcastic refusal to continue.
If you want to talk about this seriously I would be happy to, but at the moment I don't trust that you'll listen, let alone provide anything constructive. This comment certainly doesn't inspire faith.
"Skewed" is not a personal attack, it is an accurate description of how your compass appears to my point of view. Likewise, I can assume my compass is skewed to your point of view. It's all relative.
Also, the "don't give a damn" wasn't about your argument; it was about the rest of the world. Quite often when this topic comes up, plenty of non-Americans feel it's their place to inform Americans just how backwards their thinking is. Well...I don't really care. Considering this whole thread was spawned from discussing a subreddit focused on American politics, I don't see non-American perspectives as overly relevant. If you somehow see that as an attack, then I apologize; it was never meant to be one, merely a statement of fact.
And for what it's worth, I wouldn't go around condemning others too much. You've not added much constructive to the argument aside from "Well, the rest of the world disagrees." Okay? Let's move on, since what the rest of the world thinks is irrelevant to this topic.
I'm curious why you think that the "rest of the world" is irrelevant, particularly in the modern, globalist era we find ourselves in. Trump is being criticized by Canada, EU for trade and tariff disputes. Trump is currently attempting to broker peace negotiations with NK, bringing in SK and China for help. Chinese 'trade wars' and Russia 'meddling' and... So much of the current US political cycle is about negotiations with allies and enemies of foreign countries. Why not use ourselves as a measuring stick of other Nations and be able to criticize our weaknesses and flaunt our strengths? We can say "Saudi Arabia is more conservative than us, and we don't want more policies like X" or "Denmark is more liberal than us, and we want more policies like X". Or vice versa.
I think it's disingenuous and narrow-minded to simply say "I'm American and I don't care about Other Countries". Because we can't. We trade and have treaties and broker deals daily with the international community. We have to also frame our discussions of American politics in terms of the international community as well. Do we want America to be a Liberal society? Do we want America to be a conservative society? Which conservative policies do we admire from conservative countries? Which liberal policies do we admire from liberal countries?
The non-American perspectives are particularly relevant, and need to be considered. Our "PR" and how we're viewed and what our allies and enemies think of us is incredibly relevant to US politics.
Popcorn eater here:
As someone with one foot in the USA, and one foot out, I think it is really important for Americans of all stripes to learn that American political center is far right of the global center. Perspective is always good. I am near middle aged, and this has happened in my lifetime to a large extent.
edit: I've tried to point this out on r/politics and was thoroughly told to go to heck, "there is no way that is true." IMHO, Centrists in the USA are like the frog getting boiled alive in water which has slowly rising temperatures. They are not even aware. The American media bubble is something else, while this may be true of many countries, the effects seem extreme in the us. As an anecdote, I was in Portugal during 9/11. I read all the English papers and all I read about was how every country had our back. Even China wanted to share intelligence with us. The world rallied behind us. Meanwhile, I call my super liberal brother on the phone, who is attending a pretty liberal university, and he is going nuts worried about me and all of the "anti-American sentiment" abroad. It was like speaking to another planet where the laws of physics were different.
I do not think the rest of the world is irrelevant. I never said I don't care about other countries. I am, to use the dreaded term, more of a "globalist" than not. However, I think the political spectrum by which Western Europe orients itself is irrelevant when discussing US politics. Think of it the other way around: how often do politicians in Belgium have to frame their own ideologies in terms of American politics? Something tells me they wouldn't give a damn what Louisiana voters would think about their policies.
They can, and they do! I'm not sure how much you follow global politics, but there were recent elections in France in which one of the party leaders running was being compared to Trump on ideological grounds. While they might not look at specific intra-US political efforts, they do take notice and compare on broad strokes. I think that's important. We're not getting into the specifics of political leanings of different areas in France, but comparing ourselves to the leadership and general ideologies shown by their national government.
I could definitely see where arguing about values for a specific city or region in US with an individual from Europe might have little merit- they simply wouldn't be able to have the nuance to argue effectively, and vice versa. But to say that Western Europe is irrelevant at at a national level- I think that is a mistake.
Yes, I'm aware of Le Pen, and the rise of other nationalist movements like AfD. I'm not surprised that Le Pen was framed in the context of Trump, much like Trump was framed in the context of the Brexit vote as a general acknowledgement of nationalistic and populist movements worldwide. Occasionally prominent foreign leaders do make it into the US discourse (the obvious current example being Putin), just like I'd expect the US President to occasionally make it into European political discourse.
However, I'm referring to comparisons to a political spectrum. How often does a French policy get discussed in the context of US policy? Do the Tories reference the US right when defunding the NHS? Did Ireland bring up the US left when it voted to allow abortion? How often was US immigration policy and strategy brought into the migrant debate in Sweden?
Once again: I'm not saying that Western Europe is irrelevant. I'm not even saying we shouldn't consider what they do politically. All I'm saying is that calibrating your "Left vs Right" scale on European politics is pointless when explicitly discussing US internal politics.
Shutting down discussions you don't like, on any basis, is toxic and damaging to the discussion.
You said my one comment was "all [you] need to know", and painted me as having a fundamentally warped view of reality: All that does is shut down the discussion and attack me.
Trying to attack my contributions now is just more of the same.
Further, you're preventing the conversation from progressing by insisting the foundation of my argument is irrelevant. This isn't a foregone conclusion. American's aren't an exception. Either learn to exist in a discussion that uses terms you don't understand, or let the conversation go on without you.
In complete fairness, I was trying to shut down discussion. I was done. That's what my "Have a nice day" sign-off meant. Or do I have an obligation to continue? Does the structure of Tildes coerce users into continuing conversation until both parties happily come to an agreement?
Yes, and I already explained this: from my perspective, your view is warped. From your perspective, my view is warped. It's all relative. I'm not saying one view is inherently better or worse, I'm saying we're not even starting from the same a priori assumptions, which makes any kind of agreement very difficult. Hence my attempted sign-off.
You attacked mine first.
Literally my whole argument is that /r/politics is left leaning from the lens of American politics, which is the only lens that matters, considering it only concerns itself with American politics. There is little you can do to reshape that view, any more than I could convince you that voters in Amsterdam should be worried what residents of Arkansas should think about their politics.
That's what I was attempting to do. You're free to stop replying at any time.
Making an argument doesn't obligate you to defend it, but it doesn't allow you to declare everything done. Don't try to close up shop when you're done for the night.
I'm declaring that we're at an impasse, that your perspective is pretty much incompatible with mine. That's not an insult, that's not an attack. That's saying I've grown weary of the discussion and I'm done with it. If you're hoping to always have perfect agreement in all comment chains before they're allowed to be terminated, Deimos is gonna have to invest in a lot more server storage.
Then stop commenting.
Something something, "you first?"
See, we actually moved into a more interesting topic, the philosophy of terminating conversation threads. But hey, I'll just go ahead and sign off with what I first did many posts ago: Have a nice day.
Maybe you should start sharing an argument supporting your point rather than shutting down the discussion and refusing to humor a different state of mind
I've shared my argument in other posts plenty of times. I saw no reason to merely repeat myself, especially when tvfj started to repeat himself. The discussion was done at that point.
Or maybe you could bring something constructive to the table, instead of openly implying I'm closed minded?
I didn't see you explain what specific policies of Sanders you consider far left and why. If you shared that, we could move the discussion forward by countering your points or agreeing with them
You're not wrong about it being all U.S. politics on /r/politics, but the Overton window in the U.S. is so far right that anyone considered a centrist politician in any other part of the world is a "leftist" by American standards. Saying that's how it should be reeks of American exceptionalism and arrogance. I just believe if there is a scale for judging someone's politics it should be objective and not exceptional. Is this such a radical thought?
The point being made though is that it is not an impartial subreddit by the standards of the country it primarily discusses. It heavily leans to one side, which means it is not the neutral subreddit that some claim it to be.
To your other point, I agree that it would be better if everyone used the same scale. However, I am not sure you can call any scale for judging politcs objective.
The disagreement (at least as far as my initial reply that this whole thread has branched off of) is where the bias is, not whether or not it has a bias. I don't think anyone denies that r/Politics has a bias, or at least not anyone worth taking seriously...
My view is that it's strongly corporate Democrat, with a moderate population of Social Democrats, and a very small population of moderate Conservatives.
The left/right scale works well if you understand its basis as an economic scale between collectivist and hegemonic ownership (i.e. socialism and capitalism), and how that extends to things like rights and equality. I'm not sure I would call it objective, but it is a very useful tool.
That seems like an accurate description of its biases.
The left right scale is useful, yes, but its issue is that different people will put politicians in different places based upon which issues are important to them. If I believe that there should be stronger immigration control in the U.S., and it is something that I have very strong opinions on, I might judge a politician who does not believe that there should be stronger immigration control in the U.S. but whose other views are rather conservative as significantly more liberal than they actually are, and I might do the same in reverse to a politician who is otherwise liberal but believes in strong immigration control.
I would argue the left/right scale is also hurt by not differentiating between economic and social policy (ex. where would you put a right libertarian who believes in a small government but is a strong proponent of civil rights?) and tends to turn everything into a two sided issue when there are many more possibilities.
I'll try not to talk about the use of the word "liberal" here...
What you're talking about is basically just purity. A few "deal breaker" issues doesn't completely reclassify someone, just like having a few exceptional points of agreements (the opposite of "deal breaker" disagreements) doesn't reclassify the person entirely.
Right-libertarians believe in significantly more powerful corporations and strongly defend capitalism, so I would put them on the moderately far right. Promoting civil rights on the surface may pull them to the left, but in my experience right-libertarians would do away with things like the civil rights act, which is also a right-wing issue.
That's a problem in general, but I don't think this contributes to that necessarily. For instance, on immigration control, the left/right spectrum correlates to zero to maximum restriction on immigration. Any solution is going to exist on this spectrum, yet it doesn't create the false dichotomy of choosing between "free immigration" and "no immigration".
Yes, I think objective was the wrong verbiage. Thank you for fleshing that out.
Wait a second. It "reeks of American exceptionalism and arrogance" to use an American perspective when talking about explicitly American politics? Can you explain that one to me again?
I'm merely restating that you "don't give a damn what the rest of the world thinks". That's fine in a vacuum, which you prefer to think is where /r/politics resides. I agree with you that Right and Left are defined in a very specific way in the US (though this can probably be paired down to just a few policy decisions), but those definitions are the exception to established political ideologies throughout the world and should be recognized as such.
I didn't mean to offend if it came off that way. To bring it back on-topic: By US standards, /r/politics is far left, even though it's much closer to centrist/neo-liberal by international standards. Of course, this is just my opinion based on my anecdotal experience. Your mileage may vary.
I'd love if you could come up with a comprehensive list of "established political ideologies" that was actually universal in nature, instead of just common in whatever country/region you hail from. I have a feeling you're coming at this from just as much of a Euro-centric point of view as I'm using an American point of view. The only difference is that we're discussing American political discussion, not European political discussion.
I'm also using an American point of view. I'm just taking a step back and looking at it from a different perspective. I think we may have to agree to disagree if you're only interested in looking at the political compass in a strictly US-centric fashion.
Literally that's been my perspective from the very first comment: consider US politics from a US perspective. Not that radical.
Universal political terminology applies to America as well as it does everywhere else, to deny that is to claim that it's an exception. It isn't.
I think you mean "Western European political terminology." You'll have to cite some real sources if you want to claim that your definitions are universal in nature, applying throughout Africa, Asia, the Americas, and Europe.
Excuse me? Do you think there's something non-fundamental about equality and hierarchy? Frankly, claiming that you can't apply the political spectrum to anywhere outside of western Europe is a pretty significant claim.
I find it confusing that you excluded eastern Europe and places like China from this: Do you not consider Marxist-Leninist states to be left-wing?
I think it's pretty disingenuous to define your political spectrum based upon Western European politics, and then claim it's the universal lens through which all world politics should be seen.
I... Obviously you're just looking for excused to shut down discussion. This feels so much like the bullshit arguments on reddit. I'm going to start ignoring you now.
Feel free to. All I asked you for were some sources, and you're unwilling to provide them. You're right, it's starting to feel a lot like echo chambers on reddit.
Oh, and for what it's worth, this comment is toxic. Please read the docs to better understand the kind of discourse expected on tildes.
Please don't descend into trolling.
I'll admit I'm probably close to that line, but your behavior isn't exemplary either. It's less "trolling" and more "see how silly this sounds when someone tosses it back at you?"
I think this reflects the problem with false balance that was discussed above. Where people choose to identify the "center" is just as politicized as conversations about the left and the right and deserves just as much scrutiny.
I also think it's a problem to try and substitute the test of ideological centrism for quality, because those are two completely different types of things. I personally have found a lot of centrist conversations on reddit to be of low quality, and a lot of far-left conversations to be extremely high quality. And while I personally don't agree with a lot of right-wing stuff, I've definitely had conversations with those folks that I would regard as high quality, which have had nothing to do with whether or not those conversations adhered to centrism.
Part of the problem with centrism, which I don't see talked about enough, is that it misunderstands what it means to have a good, deep conversation, by substituting an ideological test for more important metrics of a good conversation like responsiveness, depth, engagement with evidence, consciousness of history, and sophistication of theories brought to bear to explain political dynamics.
There can be rich, nuanced dialog between people on a shared side of the ideological spectrum that allows people to learn, change, debate, prod, reconfigure beliefs in deep ways, carefully examine new issues unfolding in the news, all in ways that are healthy, informed, and high quality. It doesn't at all do justice to those conversations to just label them according to where they fall on a left-right partisan spectrum, because that's not a measure of quality and it often doesn't capture the more complex ideological dimensionality of the best conversations.
That being said, if one party had the impossible "perfect candidate," would there be no such thing as centrism? If there was literally nothing to attack/criticize them on, does that mean the community becomes aligned with them?
A community can shit on whomever they want, so long as they're deserving of it. A community shifts from being centrist once it embraces content that is fabricated solely to make the other side look bad or ignores the flaws of a politician entirely.
If one party did have a perfect candidate, there would still be such this a centrism. Arguably, the candidate would be a centrist, simply because that would be the only position that could be widely regarded as a perfect candidate.
Regardless though, my point is that Sanders and Trump both have several flawed ideas, yet, even when they were both equally viable candidates, r/politics shit on one significantly more than the other.
How so? Where are the contrasting views? I'm not asking for a policy of "One conservative post for every liberal post," but when there are literally zero non-liberal posts, it's easy to call it liberal leaning.
Which is why I included some comments in my post, such as the comparison of David Koch to Lucifer.
Sure. But as I noted, /r/politics is explicitly about US politics, and that's the framework I'm using to discuss this new replacement. As such, /r/politics is absolutely left leaning compared to the US political spectrum as a whole.
Are you including the likes of Russia, Turkey, Poland, Iran, Indonesia, Pakistan, India, Nigeria, etc in your calibration of your global political scale?
A large section of Republicans aren't that far from from some of those countries in ideology right now, minus the wholesale physical violence against the opposition.
However, you'd be hard pressed to find basically anyone who is openly socialist in our government (actually socialist, Bernie is a SocDem by all reasonable definition). Where are the far-left Democrats storming the factories and offices?
It seems a bit of a double standard to require far-left Democrats violently storming factories and offices, while simultaneously calling Republicans nearly ideologically equal to extremists in spite of not being violent.
You're correct in my quick characterization. But, I don't see most Democrats even being allowed to talk about storming the factories and offices. Open socialism isn't tolerated basically at all in our politics, capitalism is fairly non-negotiable. There basically aren't any Democrats that seriously argue for open borders. About the only place Democrats are actually and fully left on the whole is on some social issues.
We do routinely see Republicans push for removing almost every regulation and a constant attempt to destroy the EPA/CFPB/etc. We see them advocating for mass deportations, protecting discrimination via RFRA laws, and open Christian-nationalism. Some of these laws have actually passed places: RFRA laws, ICE, and the constant attempt to inject Christianity into government and tear down other faiths.
Our vice president Pence is literally a Christian Dominionist, and Fox News platforms all but the absolute craziest far right nuts. Meanwhile, so many Democrats still trip over themselves to compromise with these borderline fascists in the contemporary Republican party while sharing a disgusting degree of overlap in policy goals with the last shred of moderate Republicans.
It's honestly astonishing the degree to which someone would have to willfully blind themselves in order to deny how deeply right wing a great deal of this country's politics are.
I'm not entirely sure what you're arguing now. US Democrats aren't able to be as leftist as a Venezuelan politician, while US Republicans aren't quite as right-wing as Pakistani politicians?
False equivalence here. The Democrats aren't even able to be anything resembling far left. Center-left is the most left that is acceptable. Meanwhile the Republican party is openly accepting of far right ideologies. The furthest left that is regularly accepted is maybe a 4/10 with 6/10 (on a left-ness scale) being OK on narrow issues, rarely. The right has ideals that regularly sit at like 8/10 or more on a right-ness scale.
They aren't comparable.
Russia, where the largest opposition party to Putin's rightist United Russia is the Communist Party of the Russian Federation?
Turkey, where the #2 and #3 parties in opposition to AKP are center-left and far-left respectively? Nigeria, a country whose two foremost political parties are somehow even more tightly wound around center-right economics than the two parties in the US are?
India, a nation where 2 of the 7 major national political parties are openly Communist parties (CPI and CPI (M), specifically)?
Pakistan, a country where one of the three major political parties proclaims itself Socialist?
Indonesia, a country where half a century ago the communist movement was so large that the right wingers had to commit countrywide mass slaughter (killing millions) to shut down its left, and where even still the present-day president of the country in the post-Suharto era is from a center-left party?
Iran, where despite being a literal theocracy still managed to vote in a reformist centrist for president by a landslide in 2017?
Poland and Iran (and even then barely) are the only ones on your list genuinely fit your bill of attempting to claim world politics is significantly further right wing than US politics.
The US Republican Party absolutely stands happily alongside the rest of the major far right political parties amongst all countries that hold anything resembling real elections, and US electoral politics are not left of world electoral politics by any sane or reasonable measure.
I'm much more comfortable with that definition. It's a pet peeve of mine when people claim the US is one of the most right leaning countries in the world, and everyone is is magically left wing...when the US is quite obviously more liberal than any of those nations listed. However, if you restrict it to the Anglosphere, then yes, the US is generally on the right end of the spectrum.
I'm not all that in tune with European politics, but I do understand that Poland is much closer to the American right than most of western Europe. It is very religious and comparatively conservative. It's also a major European country with almost 40 million residents. It is generally my counterpoint whenever this discussion comes up (a European claiming the UK/FRA/GER axis is center, with everyone in US politics including Democrats far right).
But you're painting a painfully incomplete picture, and this omission or conflation is necessary for your premise to hold water. The key distinction required is that leftism is not liberal, and liberalism is not the left.
Of the articles highly upvoted in r/politics, how many can you find criticizing the Democrats from their left?
How many articles in r/politics are about abolishing ICE, ending drone strikes, attacking US & western imperialism, dismantling the police and the prison system, shutting down the military industrial complex, or destroying capitalism?
How often do you see r/politics attack the concept of the nationstate, that criticize borders and promote internationalism? How often do you see an article on r/politics speaking of the international working class (as it exists in a structural power relationship opposite the bourgeoisie, rather than the "middle class" that exists as an arbitrary liberal construct betwixt the poor and wealthy)?
How many articles in r/politics do you see upvoted that make even the most basic, barebones left-of-center criticisms of liberal darling Barack Obama or liberal heart-throb Trudeau?
Perhaps r/politics seems overtly leftist to you because you lack any meaningful exposure to the actual left and what we believe or what positions we hold. Every leftist I know who knows what r/politics is considers it to be painfully, irritatingly liberal.
I'm using "leftist," "liberal," etc fairly interchangeably, just like I'm using "right" and "conservative" interchangeably. For the sake of simplicity I am condensing the political spectrum to a one-dimensional scale. Yes, there are obviously nuanced differences, and near infinite additional dimensions you can add to describe political ideology (economic vs social views, authoritarianism vs classical liberalism, etc), but in my experience those quickly devolve into a "No True Scotsman" situation. Heck, if we want to be truly pedantic, we certainly shouldn't use "liberal," as the currently understood description of a "liberal" has nothing to do with those that are "classically liberal."
All I'm doing is using a rough approximation to discuss a phenomenon. Is /r/politics leftist/liberal/whatever enough for your tastes? Maybe not. Is there any right/conservative/whatever ideology commonly displayed there? No.
It feels like you didn't read anything beyond the first line of the reply, and then you sent what appears to be a scripted formletter style response to the objection in the first line. That's not a very good way to discuss a topic.
I did read the rest of your post, I just elected to not respond to your specific examples because they fall under the "No True Scotsman" fallacy I brought up. Essentially, /r/politics isn't left enough for you, thus it's not left.
... and this is just the fallacy fallacy.
you can't call something a fallacy if it doesn't meet the definition of the fallacy.
No True Scotsman has to be like, the most hideously abused, misused, and misunderstood fallacy. Right wingers seem to love calling it even when the most basic criteria for it are failed.
Are you by any chance trying to refer to me, here? If you are, that's an amazing assumption you're making. If you're not, then you're merely constructing a wonderful strawman. Which is it?
"Centrist" doesn't mean "unbiased". If I could find links promoting right-wing viewpoints, that would be evidence against what I'm saying.
Centrist doesn't mean unbiased, no, but centrist should mean viewpoints from both sides of the spectrum. I fail to see any viewpoints from the right on /r/politics.
Err, no, the "center" is as much a thing as the "left" or the "right", not a blend between them or some sort of middle-ground. They show exclusively centrist viewpoints, and either ignore or attack leftist or right-wing viewpoints.
Just like a leftist might have some more right leaning viewpoints sprinkled in, a centrist won't have only centralist viewpoints. Think of it like a Gaussian distribution with a right/left scale from 1 to 5: Even if the majority of your centrist population's viewpoints cluster around the 3, they will have some that spill out to 2 and 4. Further, your centrist population will have more right-leaning viewpoints than a left-leaning population, which would be centered on the 4 and spill out from 3 to 5.
Regardless. If you want to quibble on pedantics, then accept an apology for continuing to misuse the term when you originally misused it. The ideological mean of /r/politics is not near that mythically pure 3 of a centrist's ideology, after all (at least not from an American perspective...which is what /r/politics is specifically for).
This is all bunk. Implying that I'm talking about "mythical" and stringent viewpoints is either an unintentional or bad-faith misreading of my comment, I'll assume the former, and correct you: I was trying to make clear that the "center" isn't a special term for an unbiased or blended version of the left and right, but as its own defined area, even if it can ostensibly be defined as between the left and right.
If we must say which way they lean, they're obviously center-right. They all support capitalism, oppose strong regulation, and often oppose strong social services - all quintessentially right-wing politics. The only reason I didn't call them center-right is because they have a sizeable community that stretches slightly to the center-left, depending on the day, but they almost completely lack a legitimate left wing population.
Have you seen any popularity behind any left wing policies? Supporting the destruction of institutions of authority like the CIA/FBI/NSA/ICE/Police/the Military, or even something basic like opposing capitalism? r/politics is full of neoliberals who aren't so far right that they support mass-deportation and restricting rights, and are in no way "left wing".
Insisting on "an American perspective", and calling the historic and modern international and academic use of terms a "misuse" strikes me as American exceptionalism and celebrating ignorance.
During 2008-2014, /r/Politics was relatively against the Obama administration, too. It's less about parties and moreover unproductive/terrible policy in their eyes.
Not to mention, as the commentor before you said—they hate leftist viewpoints, like socialism.
/r/politics is Contrarian-Center/Libertarian, really—not right or left.
I've always felt that way. I read the new York times and the Washington Post. The majority of their headlines end up in /r/politics. The only bias I've seen is their focus on a given topic. For example, they won't prorudce stories where republicans look good. Or the WaPo article doing a fact check on Bill Clinton's talk on NBC last night. It's biased but it's not pushing fake news. I'd like a more neutral political section here but it's difficult when you have someone as vitriolic as Trump in the White House. most republicans think anything critical of him shouldn't be allowed in general.
Even the bastion of neutrality /r/neutralpolitics was thrown off when trump supporters started brigading it asking very leading questions. They came into threads with misinformation and sources that were verifiably false. It required some fairly heavy handed moderation to take them down. I'm not sure if it's still a problem there, but I stopped visiting. At the moment I just stick with the newspapers. Less editorial, more reporting.
I'm not sure if 'neutral' is something to strive for as a concept for politics.
Not a perfectly neutral ideology, but rather a neutral treatment of ideologies. /r/NeutralPolitics has in their mission statement: "The idea behind r/NeutralPolitics is to set up a neutral space where those of differing opinions can come together and rationally lay out their respective arguments. We are neutral in that no political opinion is favored here - only facts and logic." As in, just because the community is left leaning, dissenting viewpoints don't get immediately shot down and discarded. Further, left leaving viewpoints shouldn't be upvoted unless they have substance behind them.
I would absolutely say that's something to strive for in a catch-all politics subreddit.
The lack of downvotes probably gets us 74.9% of the way there.
Would you assume that such a theoretical section would cater only to the USA? I'm taking a guess based on your description of how you view the reddit section.
It obviously wouldn't have to be, but it seems like an internationally-exclusive topic, in contrast to things with broad appeal like ~food and ~creative.
I was around on reddit to witness the change from "international technology" to "American politics" as the dominant topic.
Another thought, does international politics even hold enough interest to an outsider? Are we resigned to the tyranny of the majority nationality?
Personally, I find myself interested in foreign politics (especially in the EU). It's seeming more and more like ~politics can be a testing ground for how we handle tagging, trust, and subtilde bubbling (as ~politics shouldn't just be dominated by posts from ~politics.usa just because the site is majority American)
I'm tempted to play with modeling this a bit, and see what I could come up with.
I'm not sure what would be considered a "good" balance of weighting lower-ranked posts vs activity, and also pruning high-vote topics that essentially got frontpaged so as not to break the weighting of other posts on these low-average vote tildes. Just ignoring extreme outliers works, but one could also take advantage of the fact that a ~politics.something.something post got extremely highly voted to decide that maybe other posts on that tilde could be worth more consideration instead.
I can't wait for tildes to go open source, I've got a little free time lately and would be happy to contribute
I assume that there would be local politics subgroups for people who are interested in them, and content that is very popular on those would be pushed up into their parent groups.
I have an interest in international politics, and do make an attempt at learning more so I know what is going on in the world, but the broad scope means I don't have a full understanding. Often it can even get confusing, especially when you are discussing a region where tribal/religious affiliation also comes into play.
Admittedly yes, I came about it with an American bias. However, remember that /r/politics is also explicitly about American news, not world politics.
I don't think you can have a truelly neutral political forum, nor should people try to get there. It's a good way to hide bias.
We all have political tendecies, and we should openly debate them, or have our own forums to debate, but trying to look neutral for that phanthom of "un bias news and politics" seems like a really bad idea
I'll reference /r/NeutralPolitics again. They don't enforce truly neutral viewpoints; they enforce a neutral community, one that isn't inherently supportive or antagonistic of one side of the ideological spectrum.
One problem I see is that the current community is heavily left-leaning. This may intimidate users with a more conservative viewpoint and keep them from participating, which would allow ~politics to become an unchecked echo chamber. I think overall we will need to have some kind of political subgroup in the near future to contain all of the political talk, but it will be interesting to see what it becomes.
I am already considering not expressing political views because of how upset my opinions have made a handful of people. Someone even has made and published a script to block my posts on here (if anyone wants it, i can link you :P).
Well, that's shitty. For what it's worth, I value your input. Hearing a voice of dissent is healthy for discourse, as it requires defense of our own beliefs and perspectives.
I disagree with most of what you post on political topics, but I've never found you a disrespectful debator
Another issue is that it's really fucking draining being the only person representing a perspective that is dissident. I don't have the benefit of depending on a team of like-minded people to help supply links and arguments, and any mistake I make in phrasing or whatever can be a "aha! gotcha! so everyone you represent is wrong" because they just aren't here.
edit: To be clear, I am not upset at people for this situation, and everyone I've interacted with is well within their rights to attack my ideas and arguments as strongly as they can!
We may come from opposite ends of the political spectrum, but as the blacksheep liberal / left / not conservative person in the family I can definitely relate to that. Representing everyone else especially, and whenever any news happens, nobody ever asks for your opinion, they instantly assume what you believe or represent...
Interactions face-to-face with someone, especially a parent, over things like politics or religion can get really intense - i learned to avoid those since my brain would just shut down! At least on tildes we can be patient and respond after a little bit of time to get over whatever emotions might come up.
We did just get more invites.
Yeah, the problem is that everyone I've mentioned tildes to thinking they might like to participate is uninterested. I'm also afraid of what will happen if I invite someone I don't know very well who would be helpful - because what happens if they say something that gets everyone angry and then I'm held responsible since I invited them?
Edit: also, inviting people just because they share my same political views (or similar ones) seems sort of slimy.
Ah, that sucks. Hopefully there'll be other well-reasoned dissenters that can help. This slide into echo chamber is an easy one.
Well, there's dissent, and then there's abuse. Part of tilde's mission is being a place that takes a firmer stance on the latter than Reddit is... and curiosity about what exactly that will entail is a large part of why I came.
If this site can run a respectful, mature political discussion, I'll be astounded and pleased.
Agreed. And so far I haven't seen much of the latter, though I could very well have missed it
I really do not understand why people made a script to block you. You seem to be a fine person who contributes value to discussions. As the other person said, if you could hunt a few more conservative people with your invites, it would probably be useful for ~ as a whole.
Well i think it's reasonable for the script to exist - publishing it could be seen as being too far, but if i place myself in the shoes of the person who made it then it is easy to see it as being a public service. From that user's perspective, I'm acting in bad faith. I'm being civil while promoting bad ideas, or I'm being civil while trying to get a rise out of people and make them look bad. I've said things that they just can't believe anyone could say without being an actual monster of a human being.
In my opinion this is just an example of the two-movies-on-the-same-screen thing i talked about in that trump thread. If someone has a model of reality, it is far easier for that model to stay mostly the same and just contort in the face of the most contradictory evidence than for it to change to something completely different.
So it is actually possible that I'm who this person thinks I am, and there's no easy way to know for certain. I guess the best test for a filter on reality like this is whether it can accurately predict the future. If I am a crypto-troll fascist rabblerouser who just likes to upset people and advance the neonazi agenda, but I do it while being super careful to appear friendly and polite, what would be the consequences of that? What sort of result would that produce down the line? If that happens, then maybe that model of reality is accurate.
On the other hand, if I'm just a person who is exactly as he presents himself, someone who is frustrated with what I perceive to be an establishment that doesn't care about justice, american working class people, and in some instances the success of america at all; frustrated by a corrupt media hegemony fighting tooth and nail to slander actual good people, etc. etc. who wants to try to do some small part to help mutual understanding and quell the conflict between the two polarized camps... but who might not be equipped to actually do so....
What would that model of reality predict about the future?
*shrug* sorry for writing a novel or if I come across as self-absorbed.
If I can find people who are interested, who i think are unlikely to say things that will trigger an upset (and get me in trouble as a consequence), I'll invite them.
You did not come across as self absorbed. I think you have a point with the two movies thing. However, I still struggle to see how someone politely suggesting an alternative viewpoint is automatically a troll. Its not like you were trying to claim the earth was flat, yet people somehow took more offense to your views then they guy who called for a catholic theocracy.
The catholic theocracy guy just came across as too fringe to be a threat though, didn't he? nobody's going to take that seriously (no insult intended to catholic theocracy guy - but being realistic, it is going to take a lot of work to help the idea get traction in the current environment). But in america at least, half of the country wielded their democratic power to decide who became the most powerful person on the planet, and they picked someone the other half is terrified of. It makes much more sense to have strong emotions about that.
Fair enough. I hope you do not get flamed for your ideas in the future on ~.
Why was the script created?
I don't know the exact motivation of the user, since I can't read their mind, but if I imagine myself in their shoes it was because of my comments on the abortion thread, the tim pool video i posted about tommy robinson, and just generally my responses to people on the trump post i made. Based on what the person who made it said, they believed that I was/am acting in bad faith. I am not certain if it's a falsifiable theory.
US Liberal / European Centrist here: where should I use my invites for conservatives?
My god, that's awful! I saw the post you made about your political views, for which I greatly respect your courage. I'm glad that there were at least a few people who were willing to engage with you without being disrespectful. Keep being you, and while you and I may not agree, I believe it's important that you have a voice and a seat at the table.
Most people there were very kind - the highest voted comment there was all about comity and humanity regardless of political perspective. I am not feeling oppressed, it's just I'm trying to weigh being open and sincere versus being far more delicate than i imagined would be necessary based on some comments I've gotten. I do not want to be offensive, I don't want to upset people - because that will just make the whole tension between the two poles we have worse.
The argument being made by a vocal minority is: I am being the worst kind of bad-faith troll, because I supposedly say "provocative" or "inflammatory" things in an attempt to upset people (which would not serve my purpose but that doesn't matter for this argument), but i do so in language that is polite and civil. So in doing so I'm doing the "just asking questions" thing, or similar, basically breaking the spirit of the rule against bad faith actors by staying within the confines of the letter of the law.
the other argument is that the above perception is due to biases i have about the audience I'm interacting with being difficult, dismissive, even hateful (etc.), and that is filtering through in the way I write things as condescension, or conveying some sense of superiority or that I'm unwilling to change my views.
I'm not sure if that is true or not. My awareness of the bias of the site is real, but I don't even know how i would go about policing my tone, much less doing so without feeling like a fake or a manipulator. I don't really want to be in here actively employing persuasion skills trying to coerce people into thinking or feeling a certain way - but if i am doing so for the purpose of promoting understanding and quelling upset emotions and not just trying to get agreement on my opinions, does that provide sufficient moral justification?
I don't agree with lots of your viewpoint but I've always seen you express them with good faith and moderation so... Shame on who made that script.
I don't see it as hostility. I mean, they expressed emotions but they are justified emotions. And in the absence of a block ability, i think it's perfectly reasonable to create a script like that for personal use - and if the belief is that others might benefit from such a script, then it's also reasonable to publish it. But it does speak to a question of whether it's wise for me to just speak my mind if it's going to be causing some people to become even more angry than they already are.
edit: i know I'm not responsible for every reaction I get, but i have to weigh whether my actions here hurt or help more overall.
That's pretty disheartening. I'm sorry. Really.
Though it might be a fair point that the lack of tools to hide content that a user finds upsetting drives that type of targeted behavior. Some people just can't engage views that they see as encouraging actively harming people they care about. Politics is always at some level personal, but sometimes the pain is too near to be open to disagreement. Letting people decide for themselves what content is too likely to upset them to see makes sense. Letting people decide what users to see is dangerous.
I've seen a few dissenting voices, and I appreciate their effort. It appears from my view that they aren't getting shouted down and are actually provoking better discussions. @Mumberthrax appears to be the de facto face for more conservative tilders, since he was the one who made the first popular topic about it, and he seems to be doing a good job of it.
[EDIT: Whelp, looks like I was wrong.]
Hmmm...
As many of you know, most of the political subs on reddit are either absolute cesspools or they're echo chambers.
If a ~politics is implemented, it's going to have to be very carefully monitored and heavily moderated in order to encourage high quality discussions.
This may not be realistic until the trust system is implemented, and the comment tagging system is improved.
I wrote like four comments in this thread and deleted them all. Reddit has me gun-shy
I'd prefer to see a ~geopolitics or ~internationalpolitics with sub~s.
Same with news ~s. I think the default position for everything should be international/world focussed with sub~ offshoots catering for regional issues.
Because people tend to place themselves at the centre of the world, so the dominant nationality tends to get the loudest voice. By making it explicit that the top level ~ is for internationally significant stories you help mitigate this happening.
Can't we just... not have anything political? Please, oh god, please.
I think the closest you'll come to an apolitical forum is filtering out political posts. Unfortunately, politics tends to permeate our lives and is certainly a topic worthy of discussion (at least in my opinion).
I don't like talking about it either but I don't support a full on ban on it. I've already unsubbed from topics I'm not interested in. If ~politics becomes a thing you could just unsub from it too.
You mean... like /r/Politics and /r/PoliticalDiscussion?
As for your main question, we probably will see a ~talk.politics or ~politics group at some future time. However, in these early days of testing and developing this pre-public website, it's not necessary yet. A group like this will grow organically out of future activity.
It's exceptionally difficult to keep knee-jerk, partisan rhetoric out of anything involving politics. But I suppose it's worth the effort to try!
Discussions of politics is always tough because it tends to make people emotional. Whether you're a leftist, rightist, or centrist someone will be upset about that. It's why I as a personal rule don't talk about politics to anybody. But regardless of all that I think we should still have a dedicated place for politics. People who get overly emotional to the point of aggression should be given a warning. This should go for any view and not just what the majority believes in. (Which I believe is more left leaning according to that poll)
A natural side effect when the rights of certain groups to exist and be treated with basic dignity becomes politicized. That's what worries me, can we have debate without that in the current environment?
I've seen a few discussions elsewhere where people discuss things objectively. The rules on that site (not Reddit) are extremely heavy handed but it gets the job done. So yes I'd say it's definitely possible. The right set of rules will need to be set in place for it to work though and punishment has to be one hundred percent equal to BOTH sides. Not just the side the majority agree with.
After getting involved in the gender discussion here, I don't think we need a ~politics anytime soon. I can't imagine how much that would segment the community and start establishing an echo chamber. Some form of non-biased (this is already impossible lmao) moderation needs to be established. It can't be community voting based or that creates selection bias and an echo chamber, and it can't be someone who is obviously on one side.
I agree but I'm also curious to see what "would" happen if we got one now rather than later. That gender pronoun thread already made it pretty clear that all sorts of people visit here and it was more or less civil. So having an unmoderated, (aside from the admins) downvote-less political ~ would be something very interesting to see.
I imagine it would eventually devolve into an echo chamber, like most do. But I'm interested to see what would happen too honestly. It could be a good experiment.
I'm hurt that no one in this thread has even mentioned the politics threads that have already happened. It's like ya'll are more caught up in the idea of a ~politics discussion space than the reality of how it's currently happening.
The problem of many political threads, like the problem of many philosophy threads, is the vagueness of the starting point. If you frame debate on a discussably narrow topic (and take care not to poison the well of good faith out the gate by attacking one ideological standpoint or another), you can have meaningful exchange. In go1dfish's terms, you should sacrifice a little bit of "honesty" (in the sense that you're not foaming at the mouth every time you mention "Trump" or "Sanders" or something) to encourage a wider diversity in opinion.