In College and Hiding from Scary Ideas(nytimes.com) |
In College and Hiding from Scary Ideas(nytimes.com) |
I pretty glad I got out of the mainstream tech industry when I had the chance.
Edit: And yes please reaffirm what cowards you are by down-voting instead of replying.
Edit: And yes please reaffirm what cowards you are
by down-voting instead of replying.
This is a pretty bad opinion piece using scare quotes,
personal attacks and anecdotal commentary.
It's disappointing to see this up-voted since people
here aren't interested in a debate, but just to
affirming there own views on the subject.
I pretty glad I got out of the mainstream tech industry when I had the chance.
Do you want to refute my claim or do you don't think quality of the article is important?
"And this part"
I don't sympathize with people that actively constructs an environment where they will meet the least resistance. It's one thing if opinion pieces of different views on this subject was posted regularly, but they aren't. Quite the opposite.
"the vindictiveness and prejudice"
Maybe the biggest reason I left the mainstream tech industry is because of the judgement you meet when expressing an opinion that is seen as even remotely devaluing tech.
I'm having a much better time traveling and running my own business than being overworked, arguing about some library on a mailing list while trying to get some hobby project functional for production. Maybe that is prejudice, but it also how a lot of the tech industry works.
"are downvoting the prejudice and spite you demonstrate"
Or maybe it's just far easier.
"Hope your day gets better"
My day is going fine. My interaction here is very much conscious and not because I had a bad day.
Regardless, here is my on-topic opinion. Colleges are one of the few places in society where you can experiment with different ideas. If those ideas always have to be holistic in regards to the schools well-being or in-line with that the NY times thinks they will very easy be limited. Wildly disagreeing is a good thing, including disagreeing with what, how, when and where you can disagree. Say you weren't able to try to censor something, then few people would see the importance of free speech.
If there's anyone who should be criticized, to the extent they are guilty, it's not those who express their opinions, but the schools themselves. They are the "referees".
The article of course on purpose disregards the fact that these kind of groups, regardless if you agree with them or not, often have very well-thought out arguments, stories and reasons behind their actions.
Refute what claim? That you think it's a "bad piece"? That's an opinion, and you're entitled to it. There's nothing to refute.
Those who upvoted it probably have a different view or they don't think the quality of the article matters as long as they agree with it.
You can find almost every opinion possible on the Internet. They have no value unless there's an argument behind them. I'm not going to write an essay for deaf ears, but I did express my opinion with initial argumentation. So don't act like I didn't and there's nothing to refute.
Edit: I guess everyone is entitled to their opinion as long as it's grey at the bottom of the page. Talk about tolerance.
I am totally in support of educating people to speak sensitively in the sense of it meaning not to speak flippantly or hurtfully about charged subjects - for instance, I will still object to jokes about prison rape - but for it to progress to the point of avoiding provocative subjects entirely, that just seems like anti-progress and willful ignorance.
I've been in recovery from realizing and recognizing the effects of my trauma for almost 4 years now. You talking about rape does not bring me back into the mental state it once did. But I don't know how I got here, besides through time (and sheer determination to be the best I can be, and not let my past haunt me). But that said, if you reminded me of my abuser, I don't think I could control my reaction so much. And hyper anxiety / reactive shutdown is not something that is easy to remove oneself from.
I think your attitude is very intelligent, but I think you need to add a little more empathetic wiggle room for things you may not understand entirely.
I might roll my eyes at the phrase "trigger warning" sometimes but on the other hand I recognize that the whole reason why this concept exists is because there are forms of abuse and violence that have been pervasive in our society all along, they've just been swept under the rug, their victims intimidated, silenced and shut out of the public discourse. It's not a reason to censor the media, but it also wouldn't kill us to have a little sensitivity when discussing these topics.
You may be right that victims of trauma are not entirely understood. Even so, you seem to be suggesting that society _should_ "avoid provocative subjects entirely" and "pursue ignorance", as the parent puts it, to avoid upsetting victims of trauma. In the end, is that a strategy that will actually help any of us?
Then I applaud you, as that is a vital skill, rarely understood. So much miscommunication happens because content is easier to follow than intent, yet understanding intent is what really lets you get to know someone.
Suppose you and I are close friends. We've known each other for years. We understand each others' intents pretty well. Last year I totally forgot your birthday - and you didn't get mad, because you know I was busy with a family emergency and my intent wasn't to make you feel like crap. Similarly, sometimes you make extremely tasteless jokes: jokes about murder or maybe even racial issues. I laugh at them because I have a similar sense of humor and I understand your intent very well: I know you're a caring human being and they're just jokes, for crying out loud.
And that's how friendships are supposed to work. We understand each other and don't get bothered over the small stuff.
But how well does that work with people that don't know each other well? A heck of a lot less well. You can't possibly know everybody's intents. The guy on the bus? The guy handing out leaflets? The loudmouth in your university lecture hall?
I used to joke about a lot of things that I don't joke about any more, at least in public. In my mind when I made those jokes, I was actually parodying the kinds of people who earnestly believed really shitty things. But to people that didn't know me well, I was at times indistinguishable from the actual bad guys. I felt I had a choice: be more selective with my humor, or hide behind the old "but my intentions were good!!!!!" excuse.
This forced me to rethink my communication skills and try to change my approach of conversing. I've found that people who understand those concepts can use them to their advantage and benefit immensely in all sorts of settings.
That said, I would never demand that all critical discussion of Christianity be banned.
And even so, if the point had been to halt discussion, there would be no such thing as "trigger warning" because the only reason to warn anyone is so that the discussion can still go forward, and people who feel the need can excuse themselves. How often we should promote discussion in which people feel the need to excuse themselves, however, is worth consideration.
When I see this quote in the article, “I was feeling bombarded by a lot of viewpoints that really go against my dearly and closely held beliefs,” I wince a bit too.
Offending and triggering are not the same thing. And although people within that political sphere are sometimes guilty of using the terms interchangeably, those who criticize that political sphere are often guilty of treating the entire thing as ridiculous. When in so many circumstances it's really not. I mean, you wouldn't dismiss the needs of a solider who had trouble around loud noises.
We just all need to be really careful about distinguishing between offensiveness (a matter of opinion) and triggering (a matter of involuntary mental state).
It sucks being sucked into your own black hole and I do not believe trauma victims walk into their own black holes willingly. It's a state of mind and it can be learned to be dealt with, but it requires strength.
There are lots of people who live assuming they are in control of every thought and reaction they have. Sometimes this is a rationalization to prove to themselves that they will always have control: it is meant as an affirmation because they fear losing control.
But it denies the experiences, intuitions, and most importantly - the emotional, hormonal, and physically chemical responses of others. We are human. But we are animals too, and as animals we are subject to some 'laws' of our own physicality. People are supposed to learn coping strategies to deal with stress and negative emotions. But trauma victims rarely learn these strategies, and instead learn to pick up on tiny red flags and measure people intuitively on a scale of abuse potential (which is typically heavily biased by correlative relationships).
Do you want to live in a world where everyone is perpetually judged as enemy/non-enemy, but you are constantly told by culture that your intuitions are ridiculous and irrational? Because as a trauma victim, the conditioned response based on experience tells you different even if you are a very smart trauma victim (in which you know that it's based on an outlier from which you can not judge the entire populace). Still, it can be hard to override the physical response to this mechanism - such as hypertension and other indicators of adrenaline release.
It quickly becomes a race to the bottom to see what is the crassest idea you can successfully firewall by accusing its opponents of oppression.
Ironically, this concept meant to bring to the fore the lived experiences of individual people (not an invalid goal when discussing social science topics) is most commonly used to suppress and silence - wait for it - the lived experiences of others.
These kids are coddled since they are born to make sure they are "safe" and ferried endlessly from one constructive activity to another so they don't take any risk. Of course it will also be that they need "safe spaces" in college (basically extended high school) whenever they hear something tangentially against their worldview.
The assertion that a discussion of "rape culture" can be "too distressing" such as to require a trauma room is absolutely ridiculous. A part of it, I'm sure, is that the administrator needs to justify her unnecessary employment by creating work.
What farce.
This is a great essay on the increasingly anti-controversy left: http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/04/22/right-is-the-new-left/
Edit to add: So the progression of political trends isn't linear. Liberals push for the next new idea and conservatives want to hang on to (or revive) some other value, but (hopefully) neither is going to endlessly push their agenda today until it's some authoritarian mockery of itself.
I think it's telling that while political and ideological fashions fall in and out of favor, actual policies tend to progress towards effectiveness.
I see a lot of evidence on the right but not much on the left. E.g. The people saying they support gays but are against gay marriage are the same ones helping African governments pass laws enacting the death penalty for homosexuality. But I don't really see any evidence that, say, what the folks lobbying for high speed trains really want is to put Christians to death or whatever.
Relevant smbc: http://smbc-comics.com/index.php?id=2164
Similarly to being raised in a cult, the internet gives people the ability to spend most of their time in a community that reinforces their world view while forcing out any dissenting view points.
Subcultures on the internet tend to trend towards the more and more extreme as anybody expressing an opposing view can be quickly and easily downvoted / banned.
Is it any wonder that now all the young adults entering university raised in this manner now behave this way?
Maybe not such a new phenomenon?
That is something you would expect to find in a young childs room. Is that really the state they are at?
And also, what is wrong with a real puppy?
I personally don't, but I do find rooms for adults filled with play-doh, comfort blankets and rabid third wave feminists a bit threatening.
Why do you demonize video technology so?
I'm not American and I don't know much about feminism, so for me it's hard to tell the proportions with which these ideas come from US culture vs feminism (there are accounts of UK based initiatives, but there is heavy cross pollination between the US and UK student worlds).
As for why he's asking the question - because activist intersectional feminism appears to be leading the trend towards these safe spaces, I guess? It was the focus of the article ("rape culture" as a concept is, as far as I can tell, a feminist one), although it segued into the racism/Islamophobia at the end.
It's gotten to the point where the analogue would be to label oneself a 'stalinist libertarian' (because not all stalinists are like that) or other similar nonsense.
[1] = http://www.vice.com/en_uk/read/bret-easton-ellis-interview [2] = http://www.vanityfair.fr/culture/livre/articles/generation-w...
The Church of Scientology had to create itself some safe spaces in order that its practitioners could feel comfortable learning new things in spite of the rampant counter-opinions on the subject of the mind, body and soul.
Does the idea that colleges and other social institutions need a safe space, away from all the 'counter-opinions' offend you? Maybe you should stop reading right now.
Unless daily protected from doing so, every safe space eventually becomes a prison. No institution is safe from authoritarian behaviour - even those who fight repression/oppression/suppression. In fact, it is a daily struggle to prevent these very human elements from impacting society - because fundamentally there is a desire in all of us, every single one of us - enlightened or otherwise - to repress those we do not agree with, suppress those we despise for whatever reason, and hate those for whom we cannot find anything to love about.
Typically people also have a home which should be a safe space for whatever they want to do/be, and also of course their mind, in which they are free to think whatever they wish.
People involved in "safe spaces" or passing out fliers against "rape culture" (not rape, that's a crime and a different subject), generally, on average, after college, don't enjoy happy long term rewarding relationships, successful careers nor make a lot money nor contributions to the world.
When I was in college in the early 90's I flirted briefly with the emerging "PC" movement, (many of the principals which I support in theory). I quickly distanced myself when I perceived the pervasive underlying negativity and unhappiness.
[1] http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/12/01/chris-rock-colleges...
The only thing troubling here is the medicalization of the emotions experienced during an intellectual debate.
Why, then, isn't the "safe space" (in this case) anywhere that isn't the lecture hall holding the specific debate?
"I never came across anyone in whom the moral sense was dominant who was not heartless, cruel, vindictive, log-stupid, and entirely lacking in the smallest sense of humanity. Moral people, as they are termed, are simple beasts."
Amusing that the NYT's fusty policy for censoring profanity pokes its nose into THIS quote, of all things.
Assuming that the original was "balls", it was perhaps done in ironic self-awareness, considering that the original expression would be disapproved of by feminists because it links a male-associated feature with courage, seen to be a positive character trait.
It's probably not so much the "trauma rooms" that are the problem, as it is using them as reason to censor the "traumatic discussions".
It'd be nice if there were more mechanisms in place to both teach and encourage actual reasoned discussion aka dialectic. There's too much debate out there, too much ethos and pathos crowding out logos.
And what I fear is that they'll shape whatever environments that will allow it because everyone else has kowtowed to their feelings, and if you don't let them have their way, you'll become the toxic old guard who enables the victimizers-- quite a step away from "big, fat meanie head".
In a business environment, after making their way into a managerial role, it may mean over-promoting people who agree with them and reassigning those who don't. It might be some form of constant ostracism, like not getting invited along with everyone else to drinks after work, having negative rumors circulated about what a secret creep you are ("I heard they tried to pick up someone who was drunk." "I'd believe it, they don't think rape is real." "What a shitlord.", or not being put on jobs you're best at. And if you aren't having work that could make you look better withheld, you might have your career slowly poisoned by having things put in your file that indicate you're not a good candidate for promotion, which is all for the best, since you could be a closet oppressor who undoes a lifetime of progressive equality.
That's a bit hyperbolic, but those are all things that I've witnessed individually in varying degrees over the years, with different labels. It can be incredibly difficult to hold people to task for their actions, especially if they're not forthright in what they're doing and you're in the minority.
Perhaps it help to solve this problem if we included one more warning about life early on: "Safety is not guaranteed."
Keep in mind that 99% of the "trigger warning" generation is just following along with what is presented to them in university as unassailable orthodoxy. When they get to the workplace and are presented with another, altogether different, unassailable orthodoxy (STFU and fit in with company culture), they fall in line pretty quickly.
The adults didn't keep score. Whether they knew the score or not depended on whether they cared about sports or not.
The kids kept score. At the end of the game, every last kid knew the score, who won, who kicked the most goals, had the most saves, etc.
Likewise with "every kid gets a ribbon." The kids know the score. They know if it's one of those ribbons that every kid gets, or a ribbon that's actually a prize for something.
From my own experience, I tend to agree with this passage from the article:
""" Shield them from unfamiliar ideas, and they’ll never learn the discipline of seeing the world as other people see it. They’ll be unprepared for the social and intellectual headwinds that will hit them as soon as they step off the campuses whose climates they have so carefully controlled. What will they do when they hear opinions they’ve learned to shrink from? If they want to change the world, how will they learn to persuade people to join them? """
Here's my theory: college students are well-meaning, overzealous, and inexperienced. Therefore they make bad bad decisions, and even good decisions they make are often framed or communicated poorly. Like all adults, only moreso.
FTA: "Still, it’s disconcerting to see students clamor for a kind of intrusive supervision that would have outraged students a few generations ago. But those were hardier souls."
Is there anything more tired and myopic than "kids these days?" But the Hacker News commentariat, a bastion of reason and rationality, has correctly identified these students' actions of civilization's imminent destruction by "rabid third wave feminists."
- in America you can sue someone for almost anything
- universities in the US made students pay so much for their educations, that basically they got fucked up because students now ask to be the boss since Universities would be at a loss without them, so they must comply to their every demand
On the contrary, in Europe, teachers are "the boss" and students come to them to learn, so there is a respect for the institution and the teaching, and people learn to manage their every whim
Nowadays it seems to mean something more along the lines of "you said something at least tangentially related to race that I didn't quite agree with".
'If you disagree with me, you hate America' became 'if you disagree with me you hate women'.
They do want to use the force of law to prevent businesses from discriminating among their customers, though, which is an important distinction.
Hate black people? Sure, put up a klan poster, but you've still gotta serve 'em a drink.
Disclaimer - I love teasing both ultra conservatives, ultra religious, and radical feminists to blood ... I do not discriminate against any group - if you are fanatic, you deserve to be mocked and provoked.
Well now I'm quite curious. Care to make a throwaway account and voice one?
But the rise in "recommendation engines" (Facebook, Tumblr, etc) and even "news aggregators" (yes, the irony) may indeed impart the provincial-ising effect you mentioned. As people are automatically fed information that they have been measured to prefer, they end up grossly overestimating how widely-held their views really are.
I think you're painting too broad a brush. The problem isn't that the majority of college students think this way, it's that the majority don't care much either way and a vocal minority works hard to institute punishments for anyone who opposes them.
This has always been my thinking around the more unusual subcultures closely tied to the Internet such as vores etc.
Prior to the net, if your fetish was being eaten by a dragon, chances are it was yours and yours alone within your accessible social circles. Espousing it openly would lead (rightly or wrongly, I make no judgement, each to his own) to social ridicule at best, ostracism at worst. But with the internet, you can now find like-minded groups who will tell you that your interest in being eaten by dragons is entirely normal. People who join those communities to disagree will usually be banned or removed somehow.
I've chosen an extreme example, but you'll find similar in other online subcultures - in my opinion, the smaller, the more likely the group-think.
Learning to gauge intent is easy enough to summarise... 1. Listen to the words, then take your time to consider why they were said. 2. Give people the benefit of the doubt to start. It's not always accurate, but it'll lead you the right intention most of the time.
One further point, when people misjudge you, it can be easy to adjust your behaviour so you validate their opinion, don't do that. It's easy to say, but I promise you'll be better off if you're comfortable with your own intentions, regardless of how they've been interpreted. A little extra patience can sometimes let people catch on, but otherwise no need to dwell on it.
I got better. Some people are still in the process of getting better. I am asking for empathy and compassion for those people, if you have the capacity to recognize that they may need it. Otherwise, just do your best to be a decent human being.
Sort of off topic, but what's interesting is that this sounds a lot like indicators of borderline personality disorder.
At any rate though, these sorts of articles basically ascribe a narrative to an entire generation, which isn't really fair. Those sorts of impulses are easily grown out of for most people, and people who are diagnosed borderline come from all generations. I think the current thinking is that borderline has both nature and nurture components - some from environment, some genetic.
I respond to intelligence with intelligence and to stupidity with stupidity.
That is on me.
I can't control my first reaction, the feelings of panic, being trapped and so on. I can however choose what I do once I feel those things.
If I try to push responsibility for my safety onto others, or hold others accountable for MY psychological reactions is to insist that they participate in my treatment. It seems to be that if I need to draft my entire community in my treatment I may be going about it in the wrong way.
Taxes get more complicated every year. I have a whole extra set of documents and fines to deal with because no health insurance is punished now, for example. Surely more effective would be least overhead to do taxes possible and least burden on the poor people without insurance.
The goal of many politicians is to increase pork barrel spending in their state, so it isn't like they are even trying to be effective for many policies, just to try to wrest the most money and support from the others. So if you mean most effective at making deals with businesses, maybe you are correct.
It also doesn't help that some of the overloading of "feminism" is from its detractors.
I feel like we're approaching some sort of new, self-imposed dark age.
What's the statistical rate at which incitements to moral panic turn out to have been correct?
I'm curious what this alleged political process actually looks like -- are people writing checks to re-elect Robert Mugabe? -- and the extent to which "people saying they support gays [etc]" here in America actually are participate in that sort of process. When I hear those words, I think of some of the people behind SB 296 in Utah, the antidiscrimination legislation which has received praise from both the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and the American Civil Liberties Union.
Also, way to go easy on the left. "High speed trains" is the worst you could do? Ha! You could at least apply the "help African governments" standard and start digging through their support of various leftist / Marxist regimes for convenient atrocities, I'm sure there's something :P
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/james-peron/whos-helping-finan...
> Also, way to go easy on the left.
I mean if you actually read DailyKos or whatever it's clear that a lot of the people there are batshit crazy. But as far as I can tell it's one level of crazy, I'm sure there are exceptions but for the vast majority of people I don't think it goes 10 levels deep. Whereas on the right it seems to be the rule that when people are fighting against the public option for healthcare what really want is to genocide minorities, rather than the exception.
Whereas when people on the left have historically supported genocidal regimes, as far as I can tell it's been because they (perhaps naively) did so unknowingly rather than because supporting genocide was their intended outcome.
I think you've been reading too much Daily Kos if you think it's an exceptional right-winger who doesn't want to genocide minorities.
(a) Miscellaneous fundamentalist elements of the Christian right who clearly don't support gays have been doing miscellaneous agitation through their missionary arms; African churches have been lobbied (in the passive voice) "to drop ties with mainstream Christian groups." I'm not sure who these shadowy figures are, but it sounds like they're not mainstream.
(b) Everyone is helping support the death penalty for gay people because the Obama administration gave the Museveni regime cash and military aid.
This situation seems problematic. However, notably absent is commentary about people who "say they support gays but are against gay marriage" lending any form of material support through their actions. Is it possible you have conflated several of your political enemies? It's an easy mistake to make, we pretty much all do it from time to time...
I don't think comparing crazy blog commentators is a fair standard for either side. I'm going to come up with something I think is a bit more fair: compare the intellectual component of each side.
* Left intellectuals (ie: writers at the Guardian, Jacobin, etc.): tendency towards hero-villain thinking in domestic policy/class struggle, a tendency to apologize for violent regimes that purported to be engaged in class struggle. Occasional cultural silliness, and fairly commonly prone to apologia for anything a perceived "underdog" does whatsoever. Otherwise, generally quite cogent and able to come up with extensive critiques of the status quo and platforms of action.
* Right intellectuals (ie: the National Interest, The Economist): tendency towards hero-villain thinking in foreign policy, leading to support for violent regimes purporting to "keep the damn dirty Leftists out". Large amounts of cultural silliness, especially prone to believing that hierarchies of authority just are morality, especially prone to tribalism and a bizarre fixation on people's recreational proclivities, especially sexual ones. Often cogent, but not actually consistent in platforms and critiques: usually more focused on rationalizing the existence and actions of some power-hierarchy to which the intellectual is loyal than with establishing any universal moral principle at all (other than hierarchy itself).
It's pretty damn clear which side I'm on, but I also can't think of any facts I've neglected at the moment. Worldwide, the separation between Left and Right seems to really be about principles versus hierarchy.
Who, in my opinion, are simply trying to recover from the political damage cause by the California prop 8 fiasco.
And how is it that we've got the most hegemonically capitalist system the world has ever seen, with self-professed right-wing nationalists or cultural conservatives running most of the planet's governments, and I hear that what we really need to worry about is college students being dirty hippies? After all, college students have always been dirty hippies, and the world has yet to die of it -- unlike, say, global warming.
Tempest in a teapot </crotchety>!
But seriously, I don't agree with the choice to label our recent history a "leftward" movement. I would call it a gradual, and thus far successful evolution. It often includes progressive ideas spreading through society, but as the author correctly points out, many progressive ideas are never accepted (see eugenics).
I think the best way to explain it is to say that while the "conservative" side of our culture tends to favor stagnation, the "liberal" side of our culture tends to favor unchecked growth. On the one hand, it would be very unfortunate if our society stagnated for centuries like some have, but on the other hand unchecked growth is what cancer does, and that's not healthy either.
As a matter of fact, in the '60s and '70s they were trying to blow things up, burn things, and kill people.
> I have had problems with people thinking I'm arguing or
> attacking their ideas, when I am only looking for a
> debate and a more thorough view of their ideas and
> line of thinking.
Consider that people in oppressed groups (women, victims of sexual assault, ethnic minorities) have had their legitimacy questioned and denied throughout most if not all of history.
And then along comes you, the noble truth-seeker. Probing and questioning their views. Looking for logical holes. What wonderful subjects these people make for your rhetorical sparring!
The reality is that your intentions are good but from their perspective, chances are that you sound pretty much the same as the last few millenia of people that have shouted them down and questioned their legitimacy. Give them room to express their views, even if you think they're wrong, because this is something they are often denied the right to do.
The solution is simple but not easy. Make sure you're listening and reading a hell of a lot more than you're speaking and writing.
I 100% believe your intentions are good, by the way. Just understand that intent is not magic.
Everyone should have a platform to safely express their opinions, but if their opinions are incorrect then they should be challenged and debated. Statements shouldn't be protected from scrutiny just because they are being uttered by a woman or a minority.
First, I like the distinction between dialectic and debate. It's possible to learn more about someone's point of view through asking interested questions and (together) exploring where their beliefs lead, without necessarily challenging them in a debate sense. Debate often means scoring points using non-logical rhetoric. Dialectic is more the spirit of being on the same team, exploring a point together, and I don't see it as less efficient in any sense.
Second, normative conclusions (as most opinions are) are a combination of moral axioms and a bunch of logical syllogisms. I think an opinion can be judged "incorrect" in two ways. First, they are reasoning badly from their premises (valid but unsound). That can be fun to explore in a dialectic sense to see if the logical framework can be tightened up or if the conclusion can be modified. But the other common way an opinion can be "incorrect" is if it soundly, logically flows from moral axioms (values) that you simply disagree with. And those sorts of axioms aren't correct or incorrect by definition. This is usually the appropriate time to agree to disagree, or respect where the other person is coming from.
But either way, this all requires having a certain level of empathy or respect for your counterpart's point of view and intent.
Precisely this. Granting special exemption from the normal process of discourse and debate is infantilizing. Treating someone as your equal and expecting that they are capable of defending their ideas is not wrong, particularly when they share their ideas in the public sphere.
> if their opinions are incorrect
When we're in the realm of issues like racial inequality, gender relations, etc - I'd be really cautious about deeming anybody "incorrect."
These are issues that have challenged humankind as long as we've been on this Earth, and we haven't exactly worked out any ironclad solutions yet.
In any case, this lead to micro conflicts I wasn't aware of and so poor relationships.
Your solution is spot-on. I had such difficulty following through, that I literary tied up a piece of red string on my left wrist to remind me of conflicts and my unmindfulness. Nowadays the Internet is my battleground for heated debate :)
That said, it definitely bugs me when someone comes to be "looking for a debate", so that may be why people have reacted negatively. I can generally tell when someone's genuinely concerned with an issue, and when someone wants to provoke me into a debate. I prefer not to spend much time with people who do the latter.
However, I recognize that we may be understanding the term "debate" differently here. To me, the emphasis in a debate is on the debating prowess of the participants. Whereas in a discussion, the emphasis is on the issue to be solved. You may well be referring to what I think of as a discussion.
Often this is done by playing devils advocate or by playing dumb and getting the other people to really explain their viewpoint. I do this too when I either don't properly understand what is being presented and I want to encourage others to flesh it out and explain it in a way that I get it, or if I see the ideas as being too vague or risky and I want to make sure all of the pros and cons have been properly considered. Often I will then concede, because the idea really was a good one, but sometimes I dig in if I feel like it isn't being resolved.
I'd say I go looking for a discussion in these cases, but its not up to me to judge - only other people can tell you if I do it tactfully or not. I'll make an effort not to be too confrontational.
I mean you could just watch Fox news or whatever and see what they say they want in their own words. It's largely not social liberals who are supporting the war on drugs, war in the middle east, privatized healthcare/water/education, climate change denial, etc.
My understanding is that they are actually quite mainstream:
http://www.npr.org/templates/transcript/transcript.php?story...
E.g. they include several prominent senators and congressman. I'll admit that I don't know for a fact that the exact same people have said they support gay people, but I still think my comment is valid because that's basically the right-wing party line and these are folks at the very top of the Republican party.
Again I'm not saying that if the left had a monopoly on politics that they wouldn't do a terrible job, only that I think they have less of a propensity to say they want X when really what they want is Y.
E.g. when they say they want to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 80% because that's what climatologists say is necessary to prevent runaway climate change, I don't get the feeling that what they really want is to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 100%.