> I'd prefer to sidestep the leadership issue since it's going to bring up a million and one questions that are going to get philosophical.
That's fair--I think all I'd like to agree on here is that it's not useful to pretend that parties aren't majority wealthy when you weight for actual power rather than simply counting people.
One subtlety in my initial statement that I didn't really explain was that it's not necessary to be wealthy in order to believe that your family will be wealthy in the future.
> Romney was pro-choice, until he wanted to be president. Biden was against federal funding for abortions, until he wanted to be president. It's unlikely their personal views ever changed, but a politician's job is to get elected - and so what a politician says or advocates and what a politician believes don't necessarily have all that much in common.
This points to another issue, which is that "liberal" and "conservative" are really problematic groupings of ideas. Abortion has nothing to do with climate change, but it's usually impossible to vote on one without taking a stance on the other.
> On the predictions issue, I fully agree with you. And I find it disappointing that debates on this topic in general tend to avoid this actual core issue - should we trust the current predictions, or not? And like you mention there are varying degrees there. So the real question is should society's trust of climatologists' trust of themselves be high enough to justify large scale change, or not?
I don't know if I would say I "trust" climatologists, but I believe that they are presenting the best information we have, and I believe that we should always operate on the best information we have, rather than simply doing what's profitable.
> Instead debates are people just straw manning one another to no end, which results in both sides thinking the other is full of idiots. No progress is made, divisions are deepened, and further amicable discussion becomes ever more unlikely, all this in turn means any sort of lasting change becomes ever less likely.
To be clear, I don't think that (most) conservatives are stupid or malicious, and I think that too often liberals have done liberal ideologies a great disservice by making that assumption.
That's fair--I think all I'd like to agree on here is that it's not useful to pretend that parties aren't majority wealthy when you weight for actual power rather than simply counting people.
One subtlety in my initial statement that I didn't really explain was that it's not necessary to be wealthy in order to believe that your family will be wealthy in the future.
> Romney was pro-choice, until he wanted to be president. Biden was against federal funding for abortions, until he wanted to be president. It's unlikely their personal views ever changed, but a politician's job is to get elected - and so what a politician says or advocates and what a politician believes don't necessarily have all that much in common.
This points to another issue, which is that "liberal" and "conservative" are really problematic groupings of ideas. Abortion has nothing to do with climate change, but it's usually impossible to vote on one without taking a stance on the other.
> On the predictions issue, I fully agree with you. And I find it disappointing that debates on this topic in general tend to avoid this actual core issue - should we trust the current predictions, or not? And like you mention there are varying degrees there. So the real question is should society's trust of climatologists' trust of themselves be high enough to justify large scale change, or not?
I don't know if I would say I "trust" climatologists, but I believe that they are presenting the best information we have, and I believe that we should always operate on the best information we have, rather than simply doing what's profitable.
> Instead debates are people just straw manning one another to no end, which results in both sides thinking the other is full of idiots. No progress is made, divisions are deepened, and further amicable discussion becomes ever more unlikely, all this in turn means any sort of lasting change becomes ever less likely.
To be clear, I don't think that (most) conservatives are stupid or malicious, and I think that too often liberals have done liberal ideologies a great disservice by making that assumption.