Clinton and Sander’s values and ideas via their websites

As one of the only people apparently still undecided between Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders, I finally sat down and took a look at their campaign websites to do a comparison. I realize of course that they don’t write their own content for the websites, so details of their views may not entirely be reflected accurately, but as president, they will have advisers and cabinets and more, so I think there is value in seeing the kinds of staff they surround themselves with.

Overall, they present themselves in fairly similar ways, with basically the same issues listed and often discussing and proposing the same or similar things with almost the same language. Their staff clearly are adding and modifying content in response to what the other is saying, sometimes even implicitly referencing what the other said. It does seem to go both ways.

I didn’t read every section/issue, but I read the same ~1/2 of each candidate’s platform, covering issues like racism, women’s rights, income inequality/economy, foreign policy, LGBT rights, the environment, and a few others. Each topic they discuss starts with showing off their awareness of the background of an issue and then listing what they want to do as president, often followed by or including their history on the issue, particularly for Clinton. I didn’t analyze in fine detail their ideas, but here are the overall broader differences I saw (focusing on their proposals/”As president I will...”).

1) Sander seems to spent part of each issue relating it back to the economy. These things are all interconnected, which is good of him to acknowledge, but interconnectedness isn’t the same as root cause or primary cause. I’m not sure if this is what he’s implying by focusing so much on this. Clinton indicates awareness of some interconnectedness as well by also repeating her points in multiple, relevant sections.

2) Clinton talks about transgender rights both in the LGBT section and in the racism section (attempt at intersectional thinking, or just an accident?), and includes both issues of police violence and having accurate gender on official documents. Sanders only specifically mentions transgender people briefly (though does mention gender identity together with sexuality) and only focuses on police violence. Neither mention access to healthcare.

3) Sanders only talks about women’s issues in regards in reproductive topics (abortion and childcare) and income inequality, with a brief mention of domestic violence (with the implication that it’s mostly in the past?). Clinton addresses these as well as sexual violence and international women’s issues.

4) Clinton says she will “appoint Supreme Court justices who value the right to vote over the right of billionaires to buy elections“ while Sanders says he will “Only appoint Supreme Court justices who will make it a priority to overturn Citizens United.“ While these sound like near-identical statements, Sander’s makes me question if he understands how the Supreme Court works (or of he thinks his supporters don’t). The justices can’t just decide to overturn a past decision, and if a case related to it come before them, they have to decide based on the merits of that particular case - their values matter in how they interpret it, but I think legally they can’t actually say/decide ahead of time how they will rule on any particular topic because the specifics of what comes up can vary and they have to at least be willing to hear out the argument. Clinton proposes a constitutional amendment to overturn Citizen’s United, while Sanders proposes nothing else.

4) The biggest difference, the one place where I saw broad differences between them: While Clinton doesn’t seem to be pushing for the US to be fighting more wars, she does indicate a very dominant stance to international relationships, maintaining the image of the US as the leader of the world. Sanders is very diplomacy-focused and seems less “us vs them”.

Again, I didn’t compare all of their positions, and I’m not here analyzing in depth how their plans would work, but beyond what I listed here, they seem mostly in agreement on the issues I looked at. I think a big factor is their history. In my understanding, Sanders has been very consistent in his positions and has refused to “play the game” of corporate support, but perhaps this can read as an all-or-nothing ideological-purity stance, while Clinton has a history of both progressively...progressing...on issues while taking things in steps or through compromise, changing the “game” from the inside, which can seem/be too small or unhelpful or outright harmful.

Stages of feminism

Disclaimer: This isn’t a historical overview, but a process that I think people go through when thinking about gender relations and how we, in the present (in the US at least), interpret and relate to past gender relations. And by “men” and “women” here, I don’t mean all men or women or that feminism is the same as the voice of all women and no men, or that all men and women are straight, or that all people are only men or women. Here, I use “men” and “women” as simplified way to refer to the common, dominant, social narrative and “voice” of groups of men or women in a culture or sub-culture, which can in practice include both men and women who take those particular voices and narratives as their own.

Somewhere in our history, men created the idea that they are horrible rape-monsters. They didn’t see it in that negative light of course - no one believes they’re the bad guy - but they did create it. “Men can’t help themselves,” “men have needs that women have to meet,” “men can’t stop themselves once they start,” “men deserve wives who meet all their needs and will cheat if they don’t get that.” People still teach their children these things today. These kinds of claims may seem to put men in a bad light, as they are little more than excuses for why men don’t respect women’s boundaries, but this isn’t about reputation. Not respecting women’s boundaries, believing and accepting these claims, in practice gives men social power over women, it allows those who believe it to tolerate all kinds of boundary violations and make all kinds of unfair demands and expectations of women. This isn’t just about sex. Even men who say “no, that’s too far, I wouldn’t treat women like that” are still given more leeway in this system to expect too much, to treat women unfairly or disrespectfully when the bar for what’s “too far” to tolerate is that high. People in a system that skewed are going to have a hard time seeing what fairness and respect really looks like, even if they mean well.

So men created the idea that they are horrible rape-monsters, and that benefited them, but eventually people noticed that’s what was created. Women realize this set-up hurts them, realize that they’ve accepted men’s terribleness without defining it as terrible only because they’ve been conditioned by society to not challenge it, to see it as normal. And so they conclude “men may be terrible - even the well-intentioned “nice” ones expect unfair things of me - but we still need to interact, so here are my boundaries, here is what you need to do for me to make up the difference.” And thus we get attitudes like those expressed in songs like “Dear Future Husband,” where Megan Trainor does stereotypical 1950s housewife things that no one really enjoys being expected to do, like cleaning the floor, while laying out how she defines being “treated right” in return for what’s assumed/implied she’ll be doing to treat this future husband “right.” Men who recognize some level of fairness with women often accept this setup in our modern-day impression of “chivalry,” where men believe, perhaps subconsciously, that they “owe” women for what they get from them. Thus they put women on pedestals, claim to protect women, buy women nice things and perform symbolic “polite” gestures like holding doors in exchange for relationships and sex, and get angry or frustrated when things like buying dinner doesn’t lead to sex. They paid their portion of this social arraignment, so they feel cheated and used when the woman doesn’t “pay” their portion. Others see it less in terms of fairness and more in terms of a game that they must win to be a successful representative of their gender.

This should be an obviously unhealthy setup for relationship functioning, and even at its best, women are still expected to sacrifice certain personal boundaries and life choices if they want respect (however it’s defined). And it is obvious, if that particular song’s hatred coming from both feminists and anti-feminists is any indication. Yet this is where many people stop (some having also started here, never moving on). It’s also at this point where the narrative starts to split along gender lines.

Women start to recognize that not only have they been accepting men’s terribleness because they’ve been conditioned to see it as acceptable, but men are conditioned to be terrible. Men’s terribleness is not an inherent state; with everyone just accepting it as “the way it is” and denying the claims in stage one are even truly terrible, men have been afforded the social freedom for their worst tendencies flourish, even if they didn’t mean to indulge that. It’s a freedom women haven’t been allowed, although can come out in stage two as they try to define their own boundaries and needs for the first time. Many men also agree that “no, we are not terrible, just taught terrible ideas about what to expect as and how to be a man.” This is the way to healthy relationships and more equal perceptions of each other, and this, not stage two, is the realm of modern-day feminism. We as individuals may not be at fault for the system’s existence, but we are responsible for seeing it for what it is and not perpetuating it.

Meanwhile, many other male voices also claim “we are not terrible rape monsters,” but not because they refute stage one. Rather, they just don’t see stage one or it’s bleed-over into men’s roles and behaviors in stage two, don’t see it as still having an impact despite those claims and attitudes still existing, or worse, are still in stage one themselves, believing those claims are not terrible at all. They only see stage two, where women attempt to assert their boundaries and needs. Thus, without seeing or understanding what it’s a reaction to, women’s demands for “more” seem unreasonable, and women are at fault for inventing the idea that men are terrible, rather than responsible for recognizing the terribleness that was already there, hidden. These male voices see the moment of revelation of terribleness as the origin of that terribleness itself. They see feminism as tipping the balance attempted in stage two.

And so without seeing the progression of these stages, they can’t see or understand how social norms make unfairness invisible to those who benefit; they can’t see their own social power, instead assuming they don’t have any because they no longer have all of it. By thinking about these issues starting only at stage two, they only see the attempts to balance things, particularly stage two’s poor-but-still-better-than-nothing attempts, as “taking away” from men. And since they individually don’t have all the freedom to behave however they want, since they see everyone as already sacrificing something to interact with the other gender, then it seems to them that things between genders as a whole must be equal. They don’t recognize that there are gradations on the scale of sacrifice, social power, and perceptions of what “respect” means.

So here we are now, with people saying, either implicitly and uncritically or explicitly and knowingly, that stage one was this mythical time of equality, or that there was something in between stage one and two, maybe the early stages of two, where that equality happened, and that everything since then has been “women demanding too much, emasculating and denying men’s true selves.” That stage one’s attitudes were somehow completely erased when people decided that no, men can’t actually have absolutely everything, and so now there’s no more to actually think about here. But there is more to think about, more to understand. And I hope this explains the psychological-history of the motivations of how many feminists got to where we are.

Sometimes the world seems hopeless

I get depressed about the state of the world. Not just the balance of terrible to good things in the world, which may or may not be getting better, but it’s source…us, our instincts, behaviors, brain-functionings that lead to that good or bad. I’m afraid we can’t really change. Our tribalism, fear and distrust of others, desire for cultural power, our general unawareness of our limited ability to perceive or even be aware of the larger experiences of the many, many cultures and people and how that unknowingly leads to seeing our own world and our experience as default or more valuable, our initial instinctive response of anger when our views are challenged, our hurt and fear from even needed change that holds us back, our inability to see and respond to long-term consequences as real risks, our misunderstandings of others’ minds and even our own personal psychology.

These things are all instinctual, but overcoming them, managing them, living with them, controlling them, requires a level of self-awareness that itself may have inborn limits within each individual. We can expand our understandings through education, expand our experiences interacting with others, we can learn to be more self aware and reflective of our own feelings and actions…but enough to matter? Enough of a scale to shift the population far enough from all the harm we do, have done for our entire existence? What if some us are just simply better or worse at doing this self-reflective growth than others? What if the average across the population is not really all that good at any of this, even if they want to be?

I believe most people mean well. I believe most people want to do “good” and thus change is not entirely impossible. I don’t discount too many people as entirely unreachable and uncaring. But changing the world rest on people’s ability for personal growth and awareness of others. We can’t impose that change on others, can’t make them aware if they don’t know how to look, and so we have to rely on them to figure it out, trust that they can do it. We can help people along, if they’re willing, put our representation in front of them, protest in ways they can’t just ignore, try to change laws and policies…but people, ourselves included, still have to be aware of our own limited perspective to understand what we’re seeing. We have to be aware of our own blind spots, our own tribalism, our own desire for power, our own limited perspective, our own instinctive and unanalyzed responses. Or else we’ll just keep creating new oppressions, new harmful social norms, new exclusionary cultures blind to how we’re marginalizing new “others”.

And I no longer think most people are capable of that level of self awareness and self critique.

Activists for one social issue, completely clueless that they are behaving towards another group or issue exactly as they criticize their own ideological opponents for, people pushing for social change but then demanding the same level of unquestioning ideological purity and rigidity as the thing they’re fighting against, dismissing all criticism as oppression or bias as if there is only ever one correct interpretation or strategy with no room for discussion, the expectation that people can and should accept an opinion without acknowledging the intellectual and personal emotional struggle it takes to really understand and live that view, that simply being told is the same as thinking about it, that shame and emotional coercion are acceptable ways to change people’s minds and not simply a form of power-based/top-down social control (or worse yet, that this type of power-based social control is acceptable as long as the “right” side wields it), the implication that caring about people’s feelings is a zero-sum-game where caring about the “unapproved” group’s feelings means you must not care about the “approved” group’s or just don’t even understand the issues in question.

These are the interpersonal behaviors that lead to so much harm in the world, so much uneven balances of power, so much oppression, marginalization, and just general unintentional ignorance-based hurt. And I realize now everyone does these things: right side, wrong side, other’s sides…my side. My side may have better ideas, may even have a better understanding of the root of so many social problems, may be a little better at listening, ended up living around a higher diversity of views that they could incorporate into their own understanding…but we can’t experience everything and we can’t simply rely on experiences to passively inform us of everything we need to know to understand and accept others; we still need to analyze ourselves, and deep down, we’re still a collection of people spanning the same terrible range of self awareness, following the same basic instincts as everyone else. And that’s what I find depressing about the state of the world.

Do Christians and Muslims worship the same God?

I don't really care to debate theology, but I thought this was an interesting question when I realized the answer actually depends on whether or not you believe either religion, and it's opposite who I usually hear each answer from.

Assuming we agree that the two religions share a common origin, then if you don't believe in the Christian or Muslim god (and let's include Judaism too), then you can look at the history and development of the stories and, like with evolution and speciation, determine if/where the descriptions of God diverged enough to consider them unique, separate characters.

However, if you believe in one of the religions in question, then it seems that if you recognize the common origin and shared stories (and don't believe the potentially polytheistic origins of early Judaism), then the most reasonable conclusion is that all those other religions believe in the same god as you, but misunderstand/interpret him differently.

So, short answer, if you believe in this god, then yes, Christianity, Islam, and Judaism all worship the same god, but if you don't believe in this god, then potentially no, the stories may have diverged enough to consider them different figures.