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This started out as a conversation in another thread but I've been wanting to talk about this for a while and I think I've successfully crystallized out some thoughts on the subject.
There's been a swing towards favouring the "Decent Republicans" recently, and a bit of split on the board (in numerous threads, actually) about the republican voters who voted last election and the election before as if it was all "games as usual", as it were, assuming that Bush was just like any other politician and not the extremist that he and his agendamongers really are. Ordinary, decent republicans who rely on the political process to continue more or less as it should with people on both sides playing by the rules (these rules are usually unanalyzed in these decent republicans and don't often amount to much more than "don't be annoying" and are mostly directed at the left when they perceive them to be being "emotional" or "rude" or something, rather than anything to do with facts or common sense or genuine political behavior or thought) should be respected and brought on board. Clearly they will be put off if we continue to stridently characterize all Republicans as greedy, hate-filled and hypocritical, seems to be the message (which is probably a true thing worth saying, but I have a small yet *significant* problem with it).
This is what was posted...
"As liberals, we ought to be open-minded, tolerant, and accepting of other individuals. Just as we would not discriminate against race, gender, sexual orientation, or handicap; we should at the very least recognize that most people are good, honest people no matter their political affiliation."
... and, in my head, this doesn't work.
There are logical reasons we don't discriminate on the grounds of race, gender or sexual orientation. Discrimination on these grounds is based on conflation or bigotry, these discriminations are based on uninformed assumptions.
"Discrimination" has become a value-laden term and it's ordinary meaning has been lost somewhat in the political debate, these days it seems to be a catch-all term for criticism, legislation, all kinds of behavior. It's a little poorly used, this word. What we usually really mean by it is *baseless* discrimination, discriminating against someone on grounds that make no sense or simply aren't true. The suppositions, for example that blacks are somehow irredeemably more primitive and violent than white people, that women are too weak and emotional in comparison with men to do "serious" jobs, gays want to radically alter the foundations of human society and are mentally ill and straights shouldn't have to treat them with the same ordinary respect they would treat anyone else, that sort of thing, they are baseless, they are the inner ramblings of an insecure white straight male with no positive qualities to his personality. These fictions are there to make him feel good about himself in some effortless way, he makes himself feel better by denigrating people different from himself. There is no *fact* to these thoughts. In these situations where some almost arbitrary characteristic isolates huge groups of people, where millions of people are blocked from contributing to or receiving from society to the highest mutually beneficial level on *fictional* grounds, this is *baseless* discrimination, the enemy of liberty.
REAL discrimination is telling the difference between a poisonous toadstool and an edible mushroom, a true christian from a faux XXXtian. There's a REAL difference between the two. I'm sure you'd agree. This kind of discrimination is not baseless and is necessary to make the way you deal with the world efficient enough to live safely and courteously and all sorts of other things, we "discriminate" between all sorts of ordinary things all the time, forks and knives, shit and shaving foam, discrimination itself isn't "wrong", it's baseless, meaningless discrimination that's destructive. And it's baseless, meaningless discrimination that riddles the Right. The Left, having been the target of this discrimination has in some cases simply reacted without analyzing the problem and shot straight back with a whole load of baseless discrimination of their own devising, (which often has been quite correctly diagnosed by posters on this board).
BUT.
It's not discrimination to criticize someone for making a DECISION that you think is WRONG. That's a totally different ball game of fish. The discrimination HAS a base in that case. If you just get rid of discrimination in politics you might as well say prosecuting the Third Reich as war criminals was wrong because it's discrimination against Nazis.
This is not to say that the base of the discrimination might not be wrong, but it HAS a base, and that's what should be discussed, not the simple act of discrimination itself.
There's a difference between discrimination based on retrievable fact and internally generated discrimination based on fiction. One is about dealing with the outside world and, when done properly, works, the other is about maintaining a comforting self image, and NEVER works, unless you take the original goal of the exercise to be keeping the generator of the fiction happy and comfortable in his suburban, white, straight maleness, in which case baseless discrimination works just fine (as any politician worth his salt will tell you, I'm sure. I have no doubt that they use that white straight male fear for anything they can get it to do).
No-one decides to be be gay or black or female, and most of the cultural values associated with these groups are just so much hot air generated by people who've never met any anyway. THAT's why "discrimination" on the grounds that one is black, latino, a Muslim, female, etc don't make any sense and shouldn't be part of the political dialog. Even if there WERE any noticeable trends among gays to prefer a society without marriage (there aren't) or any evidence that women aren't as good as men at taking on positions of power and responsibility (there isn't) that's no reason to chuck the whole grouped out of the equation, all that does is block off from society the proportions of those groups who DON'T fit into the trend FOR NO GOOD REASON. It's INEFFICIENT, apart from anything else (a LARGE number of anything else's here, really).
Voting Republican, thinking that Iraq should be nuked to show that "we're there to help them", thinking that all Muslims should be deported, these are opinions and decisions, and it is THE BUSINESS OF POLITICS to discriminate on the grounds of decisions and opinions. These things are chosen and the chooser must bear responsibility for the choice. It has *nothing* to do with persecution. They'd know, these whiners on the right about being persecuted, if they genuinely WERE being baselessly persecuted, they'd certainly know about it. It's not really the same thing as having your opinions ridiculed or questioned. It's more to do with being locked up without trial, blocked from employment regardless of your ability to do the job or simply outlawed because of some aspect of your being that has no real impact on anyone else and that you can't change. THAT's persecution.
I've rambled a bit.
Of course there are decent republicans. There are also thoroughly evil ones. Would you like us all to preface every accusation with "But not you nice republicans, you're okay"? I'm not being facetious, it may be genuinely useful, the thing is, it gives the thoroughly evil ones a bolthole to retreat into by pretending to be one of the decent republicans (sound familiar?).
Evil can masquerade as good by playing by the rules...
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