Personally I think those who think politics are a mindkiller are just guilty of a jilted hubris; it’s easier to claim other people can’t change their minds than to accept that your arguments aren’t as universally compelling as you thought.
I can’t speak for everyone here, but I’ve had the experience of partially deconverting myself from a certain political philosophy, which was extremely… well, difficult is the wrong word, it usually didn’t take much effort or willpower or courage, but it did involve unwinding a tremendous amount of rationalization and defensiveness. I’m not trying to claim perfection now, either, but ever since then I’ve found it useful to remember how dogmatism feels from the inside when I’m feeling defensive about one of my current beliefs or when I’m tempted to try to convert someone else.
And that seems to generalize fairly well. “Politics is the mind-killer” doesn’t just mean everyone else’s politics. It means that your thinking on anything you have an identity stake in is automatically suspect, and that you’d better be damned careful if you want to make major decisions based on it. This does imply as a corollary that partisan (or otherwise identity-bound) discussions on the Internet are spectacularly unlikely to be productive, but “my politics are perfectly rational, it’s all the fault of those guys over there” is exactly the wrong message to be taking from it.
This does imply as a corollary that partisan (or otherwise identity-bound) discussions on the Internet are spectacularly unlikely to be productive, but “my politics are perfectly rational, it’s all the fault of those guys over there” is exactly the wrong message to be taking from it.
Orphan’s point is that this is precisely the message the OP seems to take.
That seems uncharitable. I can see there being issues that go largely unaddressed by most of the major identity groups out there but which nonetheless end up looking important if we view the political landscape through a different set of filters as OP suggested, and those shouldn’t run afoul of any of the pitfalls I brought up. They might be harder to find than OP’s implying, though; political factions might be slow-moving and broadly irrational, but they’re not entirely blind to potential unexploited planks.
The War on Drugs probably isn’t one: opposition to it is near-ubiquitous among the LW commentariat, but I think that’s because the groups most strongly supportive of it are badly represented around here. Judicial reform might be one, although I’d need to know which judicial reforms.
I can’t speak for everyone here, but I’ve had the experience of partially deconverting myself from a certain political philosophy, which was extremely… well, difficult is the wrong word, it usually didn’t take much effort or willpower or courage, but it did involve unwinding a tremendous amount of rationalization and defensiveness. I’m not trying to claim perfection now, either, but ever since then I’ve found it useful to remember how dogmatism feels from the inside when I’m feeling defensive about one of my current beliefs or when I’m tempted to try to convert someone else.
And that seems to generalize fairly well. “Politics is the mind-killer” doesn’t just mean everyone else’s politics. It means that your thinking on anything you have an identity stake in is automatically suspect, and that you’d better be damned careful if you want to make major decisions based on it. This does imply as a corollary that partisan (or otherwise identity-bound) discussions on the Internet are spectacularly unlikely to be productive, but “my politics are perfectly rational, it’s all the fault of those guys over there” is exactly the wrong message to be taking from it.
Orphan’s point is that this is precisely the message the OP seems to take.
That seems uncharitable. I can see there being issues that go largely unaddressed by most of the major identity groups out there but which nonetheless end up looking important if we view the political landscape through a different set of filters as OP suggested, and those shouldn’t run afoul of any of the pitfalls I brought up. They might be harder to find than OP’s implying, though; political factions might be slow-moving and broadly irrational, but they’re not entirely blind to potential unexploited planks.
The War on Drugs probably isn’t one: opposition to it is near-ubiquitous among the LW commentariat, but I think that’s because the groups most strongly supportive of it are badly represented around here. Judicial reform might be one, although I’d need to know which judicial reforms.