re: We have nothing in common.

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Most want to eliminate the current criminal penalties I believe,

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"I don't support rape but I don't think it should be illegal and I don't want any preventative measures taken and if someone does rape I want them protected in my city and will do my best to prevent the cops from arresting them......... But like I said......... I don't support rape."

Or we just take the whole country and tell libs to frick off.

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Far as I can tell, this is a fabricated demographic, or their numbers are far overblown. I haven't met a single lefty that wants open borders.

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It’s a huge part of the Democratic Party platform.

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You don’t give half of the country to people who hate and want to destroy it.

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Which half is that?

From where I'm sitting, it looks like both "halves" would be happy to destroy my country as long as they get what they want.

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One of them is my cousin who got a teaching job in Boston and had to quit and move back home because she was so "disraught" over Trump winning and had a mental breakdown. I am not making that up.

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Hate to laugh at that but that is the makeup of these people. Truly deranged individuals. Hope he/she/it gets the mental help they need to cope with MAGA

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I haven't met a single lefty that wants open borders.

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I haven't met a single lefty that wants open borders.

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I don't know if there are many that actually believe in open borders but there are many that argue in that extreme.

This guy writes about how moderates have come to take extreme positions and why we are where we are. It makes some sense to me.

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American liberals and conservatives don’t differ in explicit beliefs all that much. In a non-parliamentary system, the two parties coalesce at just-visibly-left- and just-visibly-right-of center. There’s no need to go any further, and per Hotelling’s Law it’s a bad idea anyway. And yet on countless individual issues, every debate is a crazy fight to the death between two groups who are convinced the other is radical to the point of insanity.

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Let’s take a minor, low-stakes issue, such as, I don’t know, abortion. Looking at Gallup’s data, it looks like just under 20% of people think abortion should never be legal, just under 30% think it should always be legal, and half the country thinks it should be sometimes legal. What you’d naively expect from a democratic system is that we’d have some compromise, such as: it’s legal, but not all the time. The exact number fluctuates, but that’s been the general tendency since Gallup started collecting data in the 70s.

But every enforced law establishes an Overton Window of what’s acceptable. And if you have a strong view, the opposite end of the Overton Window is always visible in high relief. To someone who wants abortion banned in all circumstances, a partial ban means that the electorate has accepted the idea that abortion could be okay, some of the time, which means more widespread availability is theoretically possible. And to someone who wants it legal under all circumstances, the converse is true: a ban on late-term abortion indicates that it’s potentially okay to ban some kinds of abortion.


But every enforced law establishes an Overton Window of what’s acceptable. And if you have a strong view, the opposite end of the Overton Window is always visible in high relief. To someone who wants abortion banned in all circumstances, a partial ban means that the electorate has accepted the idea that abortion could be okay, some of the time, which means more widespread availability is theoretically possible. And to someone who wants it legal under all circumstances, the converse is true: a ban on late-term abortion indicates that it’s potentially okay to ban some kinds of abortion.

1. People opposed to abortion in all circumstances eventually become a majority of the electorate, perhaps because of the whole skepticism-of-birth-control thing.

2. People who are in favor of abortion in all circumstances somehow discover an argument so compelling more than half the country buys into it, even though people have been arguing about this issue for generations. (While this is implausible to me, basically everyone who spends time arguing about anything online implicitly assumes that they might somehow discover the rhetorical skeleton key that counters every counterargument.)

3.Endless back-and-forth.

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If you’re a moderate, you’re necessarily on philosophically shaky ground. You’re relying on the Overton Window, which provide a buffer between what you think is a reasonable compromise and what level of extremism in either direction is anathema. This creates a ratcheting effect: given the opportunity, you’d prefer a democratically-decided law to be a bit more extreme than what you’d pick if you were the sole dictator, simply because random drift will push it in the other direction. So the moderate restrictionist pushes for a slightly more extreme view; and the moderately pro-choice person tries to keep a few more options open.

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This is a recipe for endless conflict, for low-value, pathologically dishonest rhetoric, and for a constant stream of legislative and judicial outrages on both sides.

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If It Looks Like a Slippery Slope, It Is (To Someone Else)

I've only ever cut ties with one family member over politics. He's an avowed socialist. I just can't get past it. The ridiculous part is he's a History teacher! I can't hide my disgust, and I don't want him spouting his garbage around my kids.

I have other very liberal family members who can keep politics to themselves like the rest of us, but he can't. It's annoying not only because no one wants to talk politics at family gatherings, but also because he's preaching a toxic ideology.

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why do they fight the wall tooth and nail?

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see the article, 3 posts above