Putting political labels on people is a vital step in the divide & rule strategy: keep the people hating each other while the power elite pull the strings.
Exactly. So much politics is done by swearword association; "elite", "marxist", "fascist", "corporate", etc. Just stick the label on some non-specified group of bad people.
A data point for the orthogonality of politics and intelligence.
If one is holding to the belief that a certain political stance means people are somehow deficient, it just shows that one is vulnerable to propaganda which dehumanizes and blames a group.
Don't hate the person. Call out the stupid.
Actually, don't hate. It makes you stupid. (Again, this is orthogonal to politics!)
You know, I think the danger in partisan labels is that we are labeling ourselves. When that happens, we shut down big pieces of our brains and morality.
But that's ok, because those other people did it in days gone by. Such hypocrites, they. What I do today is just a response, and I'm better than them.
It's extremely convenient when the major labels that you use to demonize your political opponents cannot apply to you, even when you do the exact same behavior, based on definitions that your side made up. Extremely convenient.
Except a lot of those individuals will happily brand you to pigeon hole all your views with a dislikable group, so at this point I think branding them back is fair game.
I think sometimes we are a little too eager to attach labels to people. There are a couple of problems with labels:
1. A label is a heuristic. It's a quick way of getting an approximate picture of a person. If somebody introduces you to Rick as "a former Republican senator from South Dakota" your mind is already filling in lots of blanks about Rick with categories like "male", "senator", "Republican" and "South Dakotan". Our mind gives us a head-start in knowing about Rick. The problem comes when we don't allow ourselves to revise this rough-draft picture of Rick. Perhaps we think all Republicans are like X, so Rick is like X. Therefore, we don't bother looking for information about whether Rick is like X, because we already know. Labels can get in the way of actually knowing somebody.
2. A label often carries the implicit assumption that the aspects of the person in question are immutable. In other words, people don't change. It's different to say someone is a "psychopath" instead of "going through a psychopathic phase".
"In other words, psychopathy is being recognized as a more or less a different type of human."
This quote really bothered me. This completely dehumanizes "psychopaths." They are officially "the other". http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Other
Totally. Those labels are instant mind-killers and in my book they are tools of the Dark Arts. When someone calls you a "socialist" or "neoliberal" or whatever, they imply you believe everything some ideology has to say, so they can go ahead, point any random weak point (every political ideology has some) and call you a moron.
This is so totally dumb behaviour, that I can't even begin to describe it. What's equally dumb is assuming that if you agree with some group on one thing, then you should also agree on everything else.
Basically - for me, giving yourself a political label is a sign of subpar thinking. Giving others political labels is disingenuous.
Racist, sexist, anti-Semitist, terrorist, socialist, liberal, etc. are what I like to call "duct-tape labels". You stick that label onto people's faces to instantly silence them. Or rather, they'll keep talking but you refuse to listen. So the tape is actually applied to your own ears.
In the long term, excessive use of duct-tape labels works against you. Because they keep talking to the public anyway, while you've cut yourself off from the only thing that can give you a clue about what's going on in their heads.
Iterated prisoner's dilemma games [1] give us a good idea of how "liberals" (in the author's rather academic usage, not the popular usage) should deal with people who harbor other kinds of ideas: whoever tries to stop the discussion first, loses. You keep civil and engage their ideas publicly as long as they're still talking and not shooting.
Only when they do something other than talking that causes harm, you retaliate in kind. Violence (arrest and imprisonment) for violence (murder and other violent crimes), and political action (protest and civil disobedience) for political action (unjust legislation). But if all they're doing is speaking, the only way you can retaliate is with more speech.
If they're doing plain ol' demagoguery, well, isn't that despicable? You counter with better demagoguery. Thinking you have a better product is no excuse for poor marketing, and this applies to the marketplace of ideas as well. If you try to silence your competitors first, there goes your moral high ground -- the only high ground you might ever have had.
You can throw labels around as much as you like. My opinion is still my opinion. Call me stupid, anti-*, dumb, whatever you like. Sticks and stones you know. This way of labeling people with a different opinion is another thing I consider very very dangerous. But apparently, if it is done by left leaning people, it is always a good thing tm.
You publish it so that the people that believe it - and are currently very angry - can enjoy the confirmation of their bias and roll around in it to great pleasure.
A quick example of this in action. A friend of mine is irrationally partisan when it comes to being a Democrat. The party can do no wrong; all wrongs are ignored, without exception. Hillary Clinton was her unicorn politician that was to change everything bad about the world, she cried for weeks about the election loss. Then she moved on to attacking any of her friends she suspected of supporting Trump. When that wasn't enough to sate the anger and hurt, she moved on to demanding proof of loyalty - proof that you didn't support Trump and did support Hillary (Bernie Sanders and Jill Stein supporters were also evil).
She loves any documentary or media she can get her hands on about lesser educated / poor white people in America (she is a white person, and grew up in poor Appalachia). She loves to make fun of them; these are people she hates. It confirms her existing bias and makes everything feel better by reinforcing what she believes about politics generally and the 2016 election specifically. It gives her a villain group to blame any negative situation on (identity politics practically requires groups to designate as evil or bad, to properly establish the framework).
I agree. I think people have figured that it's easier to get your way if you portray the "other" side so far away that there is no way to even talk to them (other than yelling). Marking people as "socialist", "racist" or "transphobic" marks them as irredeemably bad
"I never considered a difference of opinion in politics, in religion, in philosophy, as cause for withdrawing from a friend. " - Thomas Jefferson
Unfortunately, the Us vs. THEM mentality seems to be propagating more and more these days. "Divide and Conquer" isn't just a military strategy. It's a highly successful way
for keeping a population from moving forward in many ways. I live in the DC metro area and have seen a "Democrats need not apply" sign up in a store front. I think it was meant to be humorous, but it's still fairly screwed up.
"Disliking or hating something conditions you to (1) ignore virtues in the disliked, (2) dislike people, products, and actions associated with the disliked, and (3) distort other facts to facilitate hatred.
Startups should focus on their customers, not their competition—whom they may dislike."
-This is #3 on VentureHacks cheat sheet of point from "The Psychology of Entrepreneurial Misjudgment"
And if you adopt a moral framework that emphasizes those common ideas in defining the category of “bad people” (or perhaps “deplorables”) then you’ve got a powerful justification for elites to dominate ordinary people.
It’s an inversion. We used to hate GOP voters for working on Wall Street and at McKinsey and laying off workers, while bombing Afghanistan and Iraq. But now the target is the traditional views of nationality, sexuality, etc., that GOP voters have in common with those laid of workers and Iraqis and Afghans.
You see this a lot these days (though I suppose it's just more visible now). Another example is people selling political t-shirts (many offensive or obnoxious) to both sides of a partisan divide.
There are plenty of people who select their political affiliation to match their lack of respect for their fellow human being. There are also plenty of people who are led to such lack of respect via their political affiliation.
There are narcissistic and sadistic people everywhere, but to pretend the prevalence is evenly distributed, or that the expressions of their narcissism or sadism are identical, is to ignore the actual state of the world in favor of philosophy and thought experiment.
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