<img attachment="image_(2).jpg" align="right">I just saw another article about <a href="https://crookedtimber.org/2022/12/27/why-the-right-is-always-wrong-and-how-both-sidesists-help-to-ensure-this/" author="John Q" source="Crooked Timber">Why the right is always wrong … and how both-sidesists help to ensure this</a> arguing against saying that both sides are just as bad because we have to look at the policies. Fair enough, fair enough. <bq>Biden’s infrastructure package included provisions for multi-family housing to be erected in traditionally residential zone. These provisions were vigorously resisted by Republicans, following the lead of Donald Trump, who used racist scaremongering to mobilise opposition.</bq> I will wait here while we see whether any of that multi-family housing will ever be built. The Democrats are great at grand gestures---or failing to pass grand gestures---while doing absolutely nothing that harms their funding. If Democratic donors can figure out how to make big money off of multi-family housing projects, then they will appear; otherwise, they will not. It's that simple. <bq>Bothsidesists start from the meta-belief that a situation where half the population is systematically wrong is unthinkable.</bq> The author provides examples where Republicans only change their minds when the other side starts to believe it as well, but almost deliberately ignores examples where Democrats do the same, clinging to long-debunked ideas like "infection != vaccination" as far as protection is concerned. I don't think his line of argumentation about both-sidesers is right at all. I think that's straw-manning everyone who sees fundamental problems in Democrats as well as Republicans. It's ignoring the systemic deficits of your own team because <i>they're your team</i> and you can't conceive of a situation so hopeless that there <i>is no team to root for</i>. In which case, you would have to choose policies and goals and work toward building a new team to support them. The existing teams aren't going to reverse inequality, help the poor, get medical care for all, <i>be sane</i>. That's a scary world, so you denigrate anyone who's decided to live in it as a nutter who can't see how much better Democrats are than Republicans. Democrats tend to say friendlier things about poor people and working people that Republicans---although that's been changing lately, too. If you're on a team without your own goals, then you just float along with whatever goals your team happens to choose. Democrats used to be for the working class; now they're for elites. If you just stuck to your team, then you are now much better-aligned with coastal elites than with working-class people. Republicans have swept in to pick up those pieces, not because their policies will seriously help working-class people---trickle-down is still a myth---but because the Republicans are at least willing to <i>say they will</i>. The Democrats have stopped doing even that and have instead told the poor and homeless to <i>learn to code</i> and join the tech boom! That's what sticking with a team gets you. You end up being an idiot spouting idiocy that has nothing to do with what you once believed was good and right. You end up no longer believing in free speech because poor/dumb people keep getting convinced of things that you consider to be detrimental to the proper working of society. Coincidentally, the proper working of society seems to be funneling money upward to you and your friends while not demanding much of you personally. Detrimental is when it's revealed that you've been suppressing speech in order to prevent people from finding out that you're funneling that money. The "both-sidesism" isn't about espoused policy, it's about results. It's about the system they both work on. Both parties are funded by oligarchs. Both parties will only do stuff that benefits oligarchs first. That other people might benefit is a potentially nice side-effect---don't want them getting used to it, or God forbid, expecting it!---but not a necessity. The Democrats and Republicans are a classic good-cop/bad-cop combination, with the added twist that, for half of the country R's are good and D's are bad, while it's reversed for the other half.