zlacker

>>Mayson+(OP)
Before making moral evaluations, it's really useful to look at these situations, and try to automatically reverse the "polarity" of the actors involved. If you see people doing something and you think they're on your side, imagine a similar scenario in which people are taking the same actions for a cause you are violently opposed to, or on behalf of a group you find deplorable. And vice versa. This helps reduce the chances you'll get confused and take a hypocritical position.

>>karate+mh
or even simpler, stop being on a side, then you don't have to do mental tricks like "reversing the polarity". you can just see things for the way they are, without personal identity invested in the situation. this is exactly what being independent is.

>>clairi+gi
This isn't just partisan "sides." It's also sides of specific legal questions.

I don't think "just stop picking a side regarding abortion, gun ownership, or gay marriage" is a reasonable solution. These are political wedge issues, but they are also legal questions with answers that can affect your daily life. Of course you want it to go a certain way!

>>notrid+fl
no, stop thinking of sides at all, and especially don't start with a side first. start with reasoned first principles (the constitution is a good start) and continue to reason your way to a position on any given issue that is consistent with those first principles, sides be damned. the only reason you pay attention to sides is identifying with and wanting to defend a side in the first place. don't worry about defending and entrenching. have earnest conversations. if your position is constantly getting barraged with hard-to-argue counterpoints, then consider changing your position. it's not that hard.

>>clairi+Sp
Don’t pick sides.

Read old document written in specific political tradition.

^ That’s where you jumped the shark.

Less biased philosophy might be Camus, or Freire. Camus if you’re feeling cheeky, Freire if you’re feeling academic.

Freire describes forced import of culture and solutions to problems by financiers on people far away. It is far more objective look at freedom than the Constitutions goal of agency capture people far away.

Camus snarks about the absurdity in the belief we can ever truly understand one another given lack of direct access to each other’s bodily states and memory.

Both push back against the idea of allowing external influence to guide us in different ways. The Constitution is an aristocratic doctrine of acceptable forms and limits of state coercion which are routinely ignored. It’s scripture to hold up as an appeal to imagined authority Freire and Camus don’t believe exists.

>>waitTh+v52
ok, so you've criticized the constitution for the acts of unspecified people who later misappropriated it. can we only misappropriate the constitution, or perhaps, some people can take the same document, flawed or not, and derive a reasoned, even egalitarian and/or benevolent, position from it? do you see how that doesn't invalidate the document's principles, or its potential use as a starting point of reasoning?

>>clairi+4w2
By saying it can be interpreted correctly or incorrectly and you’re on … the side… of those who interpret it correctly is another violation of your simple philosophy.

You are one of seven billion in an aimless universe with no higher purpose. Your preferred political philosophy is not a universal constant everyone values. Continuing to lean on it does not make your perspective more valid. It just proves changing one’s mind in the face of pushback and new evidence is harder than you cavalierly put it.

>>waitTh+EM2
but i didn't make a qualitative judgment nor take a side. i said you can base a reasonable position on the constitution, as one of many potential starting points.

negative qualitative judgments like yours don't really add to the discussion, because the apparent objective is to tear down rather than build. why not try reasoning to a positive position instead?

>>clairi+f13
Because I’ve already walked the path you laid out 20 years ago. I’ve read the letters of the Founders too. That you insist it be used as a basis is a bias I can build things without.

Paraphrasing Jefferson, we should bin the Constitution every 19 years. But Madison felt the future owed the past, so we teach our kids to abide a dead man’s idea of a proper political framework. Paraphrasing Jefferson again; the dead do not rule the living. Paraphrasing Hume then; commit the Constitution to the flames.

From my reference frame you need me to import a specific philosophy when understanding of physical laws are all that’s needed to build.

I’m not being qualitative; there is no theory of science, no quantity of evidence the Constitution is responsible for engineering anything. Plenty of evidence people built together before it existed. From my reference frame you’re demanding more work than necessary to solve human problems.

You’re qualifying my behavior as negative because you’re not getting what you want, but the Constitution does not include a provision to provide you that. shrug

>>waitTh+3b3
let me put it plainly then: you're being evasive because you don't want to be vulnerable. the nihilism you've thrown up is a shield you wield to avoid taking a stance on anything, lest you be attacked for it.

but it doesn't work, see? so might as well stand for something, rather than nothing, if that strategy doesn't make you invulnerable anyway.