If you can radically change your political views like Fetterman has, based solely on a personal experience and not logical argument, then you never had a rational basis for your new views.
Even if everything Fetterman said was true, it’s still damning.
Also, he was elected based on the views he professed at the time of the election. Even if he personally changes, he still owes it to his constituents to act like the person who they thought they elected. It’s like he doesn’t even understand the most basic principles of representative democracy.
He understands American democracy. PA voted for Trump, so they would probably be more likely to elect a conservative senator next time around as well.
He might think that, but it’s not always the case that people vote all one way or all the other. They’ll often go out of their way to vote for the other side if somebody has a lot of personality.
This, North Carolina typically votes Democrat for Governor and Republican for President. Can’t understand why even as a resident of the state. A lot of people realize the Democrats are holding back the wolves at the door, but they think the leader of the pack is somehow the one exception.
you never had a rational basis for your new views
Nobody bases their political views rationally. I promise you, the foundations of your values are based on stuff you believe, but cannot demonstrate.
Statements like: “society should help the vulnerable”, or “society should enable the strong” cannot be validated or rejected based on formal logic. Logical valuations like true and false are incoherent when talking about how things ought to be.
What? Of course you can base your political views on rationality. For example, climate change is literally an existential threat to life on this planet, so the rational thing to do would be to support policies that preserve the biosphere and therefore dramatically reduce carbon emissions. This is rooted in the core biological desire to reproduce and care for your offspring. Similar arguments can be made for all basic human and animal needs, like food, shelter, etc.
If your point is that everything is contrived and therefore irrational, then that precludes this entire conversation to the point of uselessness.
Nobody bases their political views rationally. I promise you, the foundations of your values are based on stuff you believe, but cannot demonstrate.
Some people are pretty strict utilitarians. So, they wouldn’t say that “society should help the vulnerable” or “society should enable the strong”, but that society should try to maximize utility, which is also often called “happiness”, but it shouldn’t be confused as being exactly the same as the layman’s term of “happiness”.
I am not a strict utilitarian, but utilitarianism can be a useful tool, and it absolutely can be used to rationally examine your example statements. The only part of it that is a belief is that it’s better to maximize utility, and then the question of quantifying utility, but there is much more logic in that than you seem to think exists in a system of values.
read zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance and you’ll realize that no one has a “rational” basis for their views. it’s always ultimately based on feelings no matter how you disguise it with facts and logic
I don’t need to read that book in particular to know what you’re saying is basically true. However, it’s a misleading truth because it’s actually a huge scale, and not a binary yes/no as you’ve presented it.
You have people on one end who devote their lives to truth, like philosophers and scientists. Yes, their deepest underlying reasons are emotional, but they still generate truth. And then you have people all the way on the other side of the scale, who seemingly have no grasp on reality as presented, and rely solely on emotion, similar to an animal.
But when you turn a scale like that into a binary option, that’s the misleading part. Just because everybody’s basic motivation is emotional doesn’t mean that everybody is equally irrational.
Wow, what is up with all these people getting elected Dem and then switching. Where are all the Gopers switching to dem? smh.
People who are actually Dem don’t like playing dirty. The nature of believing in things like equality and justice and so forth tends to mean you believe in telling the truth and doing things on the up & up. Pretending you’re something you’re not is anthetical to one’s upbringing. “Ends Justify Means” isn’t usually a belief held by those on the left.
Whereas, if you’re a sociopathic grifting opportunistic dipshit, you’ll exploit this to nefarious ends.
People with truly noble aims are always playing catch up to people with ignoble aims, because the former operates under a set of rules, and the latter does not.
I think that’s why chaotic good tends to be held above lawful good. Lawful good sits by and does everything by the book, resulting in a constant game of catch-up. Chaotic good puts a cap in a ceo’s ass and makes the others paranoid.
Much easier to grift off FUD than hope, and for many that income stream and power are near impossible to walk away from. If they tell themselves a lie enough they begin to believe it almost as much as their base does, and it’s easy to get caught up in and go down the rabbit hole and end up outside of reality.
It’s also easier to rationalize being the victim of “them” than it is coming to terms with being out of touch.
My grandfather was a Democrat all his life until he got dementia then he hard shifted to Trump. I know its all jokes but I would be so much less than surprised if it was true.
“I did not mean that Conservatives are generally stupid; I meant, that stupid persons are generally Conservative” – John Stuart Mill
Fucking liar. He’s a born into a wealthy living and has been a jerk all along, just look at his own people where he live and ask them… They will say the same thing almost forecer.
It was the national media that glorified him into a character he never was.
He just wore a character that he’s not and fooled the national media and democratic party, but in his town he’s a jerk since … Ever.
