A taxonomy of projected ideas
From Paul Krugman's blog:
One thing Chait doesn’t mention, though, is that the willingness of right-wingers to believe this particular myth has a lot to do with projection. On the right, people are for smaller government as a matter of principle - smaller government for its own sake. And so they naturally imagine that their opponents must be their mirror image, wanting bigger government as a goal in itself.
But it’s not true. I don’t know any progressives who gloat over increases in the federal payroll or the government share of GDP. Progressives have things they want the government to do - like guaranteeing health care. Size per se doesn’t matter. But people on the right apparently can’t get that.
I wonder whether or not it would be helpful for online conversations to start a kind of taxonomy of bad use of others' ideas -- The Mirror Fallacy being a big one (since I believe X, my opponent must believe the inverse of X). I'm thinking about it a bit having just been to my first academic conference -- a total clusterfuck of a conference put on by the Popular Culture Association. Lots of poor thought on display, in part because the nature of the conference is quite democratic (there were probably hundreds of papers being shared), and not a lot of it all that instructive -- basic "here is this theoretical framework I've read about, now let's see how much pop culture I can cram into it" stuff mostly. (The When Given A Square Peg for Your Round Hole Turn That Motherfucker Into a Circle Fallacy.)
One thing Chait doesn’t mention, though, is that the willingness of right-wingers to believe this particular myth has a lot to do with projection. On the right, people are for smaller government as a matter of principle - smaller government for its own sake. And so they naturally imagine that their opponents must be their mirror image, wanting bigger government as a goal in itself.
But it’s not true. I don’t know any progressives who gloat over increases in the federal payroll or the government share of GDP. Progressives have things they want the government to do - like guaranteeing health care. Size per se doesn’t matter. But people on the right apparently can’t get that.
I wonder whether or not it would be helpful for online conversations to start a kind of taxonomy of bad use of others' ideas -- The Mirror Fallacy being a big one (since I believe X, my opponent must believe the inverse of X). I'm thinking about it a bit having just been to my first academic conference -- a total clusterfuck of a conference put on by the Popular Culture Association. Lots of poor thought on display, in part because the nature of the conference is quite democratic (there were probably hundreds of papers being shared), and not a lot of it all that instructive -- basic "here is this theoretical framework I've read about, now let's see how much pop culture I can cram into it" stuff mostly. (The When Given A Square Peg for Your Round Hole Turn That Motherfucker Into a Circle Fallacy.)