Unfortunately modern activists and politicians want to make it seem like no reasonable person could disagree with them. This makes it impossible to engage in a dialogue and bridge a gap.
I can see your point, but you have yet to support it with a valid example. I would not argue with you if you had valid examples.
I never said half or halfway. I said the best answer often lies between opposing positions. You are continually changing the subject and creating strawman arguments which do not reflect what I'm actually saying.
The example of someone wanting your things does not have enough background about the circumstances to fully explore. In the context of taxes, there could be a middle ground. In the context of a lawsuit, there very often is a middle ground. In the context of a robbery, the situation does not reflect two arguments in a venue that promotes discussion and it involves someone breaking the law and widely established societal structure, so it doesn't meet the elements of a philosophical discussion.
Your second to last sentence is a slippery slope fallacy unless you can support it with data.
Your last sentence illustrates my original premise - western thinking tends to pick one side or the other rather than meaningfully evaluate thwboptions that lie between the opposing positions.
I grew up in high school with abstinence-only sex ed, rare access to birth control and a bunch of rumors about "pulling out" and period sex preventing pregnancy. No condom lessons at all, just scare videos on STIs. A number of teen pregnancies happened in that school, though I only knew the ones carrying to term.
I am not sure what they has to do with Safe, Legal and Rare.
This motto that was the foundation of the Pro-Choice movement has nothing to do with abstinence-only sex ed.
One of the things that has been losing support and making the issue more polarizing is the fact that many in the Pro-Choice movement have moved to a Pro-Abortion movement wanting to celebrate abortion, and to use abortion as a primary means of birth control instead of a rare occurrence when other methods failed or were not an options.
Also the raise in support for 2nd and 3rd trimester abortions has not helped the Pro-Choice movement, the public when surveyed have an almost (something like 80%) distaste for 3rd trimester and only a slightly more favorable view of 2nd trimester abortions. While they are medically rare, extremely rare, politics is about optics and perception, the Pro-Choice movement is not winning any hearts and minds by supporting those.
//For the record I am very much in the "Safe, Legal and Rare" camp, I oppose celebrating abortion or making it something that should be viewed as a primarily birth control method, I also define life as starting "when the fetus could medically survive outside the womb with normal feeding and care" at which point only medically necessarily abortions should be legal as decided by a medical professional
My wife had to abort due to an etopic pregnancy. Nothing to due about it, would have killed them both. Still bothers us.
My daughter was supposed to be a twin, the other didn’t make it. That really hurts.
I can understand arguments about first few weeks.
People that support giving birth to the baby then killing it. Well, they are the worst sort of killer imaginable.
The "rare" part. Due to bad sex ed and hurdles to get birth control, there were a lot of teen pregnancies. It's not Clinton's fault, it was bad state policy.
In general, though, it's been seen as a core responsibility for activists and politicians to channel their constituents' passions towards productive ends. There've always been a lot of toxic people in the world - that doesn't have to lead to toxic politics.
But perhaps it's the other way around? That the voters are led to believe there are extremes? And only extremes? Most reasonable people understand few things in the world are truly binary.
But when everything is framed as red v blue, what choice is there? That paradigm is topped with confirmation bias, media hyperbole and social media misinformation.
I have a diverse group of friends and colleagues. No one I know wants this.
Is it though? Most people are more politically center and the extremes of the political spectrum keep trying to pull politicians towards the extremes. When that failed to work, they started pulling out the "you're either with us or against us" card forcing people to pick sides or be ostracized if they risked being nuanced.
Politics and media have become extreme because they are dying "industries." The internet has (pardon me) disrupted both of them. Severely. They crank up the hyperbole in order to try to justify the need for their existence. That cycle can't go on forever. In fact we see the results weekly. For example, politicians aren't moving the needle so more and more people resort to protesting (and yes, rioting).
I'm not an advocate of violence. But it's easy to see the level of frustration and disgust wasn't being addressed.
I started agreeing with you when you said politicians were failing people.
I disagree sharply about the riots, though. I think bad actors use things like social media (and even traditional media) to whip people into a frenzy. That's where the violence comes from, and it is rooted in politics more than a reaction to it.
We should come to some agreement and maybe give some people 3/5ths of their rights, as has been done prior. That should solve these "extreme" positions with some much needed compromise.
