Home ›
Howdy, Stranger!
It looks like you're new here. If you want to get involved, click one of these buttons!
If you have an email ending in @hotmail.com, @live.com or @outlook.com (or any other Microsoft-related domain), please consider changing it to another email provider; Microsoft decided to instantly block the server's IP, so emails can't be sent to these addresses.
If you use an @yahoo.com email or any related Yahoo services, they have blocked us also due to "user complaints"
-UE
If you use an @yahoo.com email or any related Yahoo services, they have blocked us also due to "user complaints"
-UE
Comments
Either it was being around cigar smoke or near burning trash, but for several days I've had that thing where I smell cigar smoke for no reason.
Also I have a bag of burger buns brand Burger Porn.
Edit: Heavens, how did I fail spelling that badly.
Edit: Again.
I don't really like to talk (or write) about my writing, for vaguely superstitious reasons. I barely even write out what I'm planning, relying on good ole noggin (this frequently doesn't work out).
But over the past few years there are quite a number of projects I've began and abandoned for various reasons (I have a plethora of thoughts on writing death games), or ideas that I might return to at some vague point in the future, so maybe I'll start a thread for at least that.
The story I was writing now was a high school mystery series, mainly prompted by a desire to see something with low-stakes. Frequently, it became political, but not in a way referential to real life politics.
Funnily enough, whilst reading The Ashley's Lipstick Jungle, fully intending to turn the last part my own story into a circus driven by opposing ideologies, I realized nobody wanted to read that sort of thing. I mean, it was an insanely enlightening moment.
So I just wrote the characters as they were. Indeed, one of them has to come to terms with realizing that the people she opposes aren't as driven by a conspiratorial long-term strategy as she thinks.
I've always admired Fillmore!, so I tried to write to that effect. There was a student body election, which is an idea I've always wanted to write out too. A funny thing is the conglomeration of characters that ended up appearing in it. I think this is the first time that I'd reused concepts from other ideas in that effect.
It's called Detective Brody, and I'll probably start posting it on fictionpress in good time. I always wait until I finish a story before I start posting it, so I can focus on editing.
Meanwhile in Florida: invasive species of snail is helping to feed native endangered species of snail kite
(N.B. the invasive South American apple snails are having other deleterious impacts as well)
(that's why it was declared an invasive species in the first place)
Or I guess, life
Thanks!
I think a good precursor to polarization was the early nerd wars of the internet. Before [I would put a real hashtag here but that'd risk inflaming things that are barely relevant to the discussion], we had the shipping wars, the Big 3 anime wars, the CoD versus whatever was popular at the time, Pokemon vs Digimon, emo and scene kids versus... everyone else, subculture was the in thing unless making fun of subcul was the in thing. When nerds colonized the internet, they got into fights that defined their whole beings as people.
Then social media happened, and the average person joined.
[Disclaimer: I have no empirical evidence for any of this]
The main driving force of social media is twofold. One is the influencers, who comprise of people primarily on social media and other celebrities. These act as the draw for the average person, outside of the general convenience of social media.
The second force is the one that leads us here. It's the Pundit, the Author, the Professor or what have you. These are the nerds of politik, who turned politik from cool kids saying "Politics? I don't even vote" to "What do you mean you don't believe in [hashtag something something]?". These people are the nerds of the early internet, except with real life. They believe in what they believe vehemently, and unfortunately, they have a basis for it in reality (whereas nerds argued about pages and pixels).
People, unfortunately, had to buy into the "real" part of this, and pick their sides. Presto change-o, you have the twitterati influencing all our minds, even if you never go on twitter.
I think the decline in general nerd wars is part due to the vast access to content (more things to consume means less time to obsess) but also because most people intergrated upward into the political schisms.
[More bits with a lack of evidence!]
I'd say our fellows, the sort who grasped education by the hamstrings and beat it to death as children (...in a good way?), the sort that would ever gravitate to a site like TVT (which is basically the 1 2 3s of Literary Criticism, infused with a lot of postmodernism ie Focault), integrated upward into the left basically because it worked for us (and it does). The pre-twitterati left loved meritocracy, and we were good at meritocracy (though a significant number were bad at social things, I used to claim I was like this, but the truth was I was just a lazy idiot from ages 17-22).
Meanwhile, other less-articulate*1 men*2 tend to integrate upward into the right. So that's dedicated video gamers, those who obsess in specific ways, and those who understand abstract concepts better than social or literary ones.
*1 I'm not trying claim superiority, I'm stating a reality of people who post online in a way completely lacking in grammar or direction unironically
*2 I'm speaking about men here, because girls in general (Keyword: General) tend to be decent at the elucidation side of school, and almost all girl nerds are of that sort. This, I have to admit, is an extension of a belief I've based on the research done by Christina Hoff Sommers. So like, take it up with her, she's one of our many PHD overlords after all.
So, yeah, thoughts.
My take on "precursors to polarization" is that it's just good-ol'-fashioned human tribalism. Everything from small-scale group rivalries like school cliques to broader-scale dichotomies like sports/college rivalries, absurdly polarized political issues, and even wars have occurred/existed in the United States since well the internet was a thing. The "early nerd wars of the internet" were basically the internet equivalent of schoolyard squabbles, I'd say, and I think "early nerd wars" also predate the internet. Such rivalries, at basically all levels, are exploited for fun and profit (sometimes one or the other, sometimes both); the only thing that made "early nerd wars of the internet" an exception was that they were too diffuse/niche to be worth marketing over.
In other words, I doubt people were somehow more restrained about polarization back in, say, October 1859, compared to right now.
Then again -- since you've mentioned "western world" rather than "the United States" -- the lack of the internet back then may have meant that affairs within one country may have been less likely to spill over into other countries. However, there's still evidence that political/military conflicts "migrated" geographically -- e.g. the French Revolution influencing U.S. politics.
The lack of the internet back then may also have meant that information traveled more slowly, thus allowing more time for misunderstandings and malfeasance to ferment, but on the other hand it may also have meant that people had a slower, more patient mindset (their use of flower language noticeably outpaces ours). I don't know how to test either of these hypotheses. (Whether conflicts spread and/or died out more slowly before the advent of the internet, I don't know, I bet they do for rivalries promoted by marketing, but it may be too early to tell at this point for more substantial things like wars.)
Given the latest popcorn-worthy spat on MAL that you posted about, I don't think nerd wars have declined.
If there is anything that's declined it's because people got sick of fighting it or don't really feel that same passion for their side of choice anymore because they outgrew it (e.g. Pokémon vs. Digimon) or it became less relevant (e.g. subs vs. dubs, in the era of dual-audio releases).
May I ask you to elaborate on that last bit -- specifically, what about postmodernism has to do with TVT, and how Foucault is relevant?
I don't know if anyone's yet done broad-scale research on the relative frequency of, say, "obsessing in specific ways", and how that correlates to political leanings, but from what I can tell, this particular trait at least seems quite abundantly represented on both sides of this one-dimensional political divide.
Postmodernism is kind of the root of basis of examining a story in a metanarrative, rather than by it's own merits. It's different from classical literary analysis, which focuses on what the story presents and then tries to interpret it.
A good indicator of this was why individual structural analysis of individual stories on TVT was (and maybe continues to be?) lacking. Classical literary analysis can draw from a metanarrative, but it's usually something general like the human condition. Classical literary also takes the suspension of disbelief for granted.
Postmodernism draws, again, from discourses and narratives, both of which are bigger than the story. I mean, a trope is basically an agreed upon narrative that is transferred from story to story.
The Focault bit, mainly focusing on narratives on power and knowledge, and the obsession with how a story (knowledge) affects discourse (cultural power, that is to say, a story promotes a certain x-ism in some way for portraying X in a certain light, rather than in making overt statements of bias), is something I think I covered extensively in my other topic on TVT and We-know-better-ism.
Also, I think the giant misinterpretation (and deification) of the "deconstruction" (at the time) was a large symptom of this.
You might be right, towards the end I was drawing from my own experiences, which obviously may be lacking.
I mean, in a deathly serious sense, not really? It's kind of more that polarization has become a part of the low hum of life, whereas modern culture previously rejected that notion.
I don't think they're as intense as they used to be, but maybe that's because the internet itself has expanded so widely that sites like MAL have merely become a smaller bit in the whole.
I've noticed that a lot of British writers complain about this.
I actually worry quite a bit about smartphones. I mean, I've been addicted to my mobile phone since it was a brick, then a flip-phone (on which I proudly displayed my animu otaku bo-na-fi-des). Firefox's Save-to-Read later function on mobile basically destroyed any sense of self-control I had. I intermittently disable and re-enable YouTube on my phone, depending on how much self-control I have.
But, that wasn't the case with lots of people, who learned the art of waiting. Now, nobody waits silently for anything ever, we have smartphones to occupy our time all the time.
I mean, I only recently re-learned how to watch an entire episode of Masterchef Australia without getting distracted.
I used to be able to watch completely unsubbed anime (that I could barely understand), and though this may have to do with age, nowadays I can barely get through an episode of boring, but subbed, anime, without starting to doze off.
Linked article reference: https://www.mdpi.com/1999-4915/11/11/979
I don't exactly see the point "a corona virus previously identified in pangolins is more closely related to the novel coronavirus [affecting humans] than any [other] virus identified so far", but it does say in the abstract, which suggests that they might have covered 2019-nCoV somewhere in the article itself, which I haven't checked.
Furthermore, a pangolin virus being more similar to 2019-nCoV than any other virus doesn't necessarily mean that the 2019-nCoV is more similar to the pangolin virus than any other virus.
However, if the latter is true...then, move over, bat memes. (And move in, concern that people will start hating on the pangolin as a meme. Though, if this is what it takes for people to shine a bright light on the illegal wildlife trade, do please hate on the illegal wildlife trade instead.)
Perhaps modern culture in the United States is more polarized now than in some of the other decades since the 1940s, as is evidenced by how there used to be more Democrats regarded as conservative and Republicans regarded as liberal, but a caveat on this analysis is that the two party system underwent a realignment over this period of time, with Democrats formerly being the conservative party and Republicans formerly being the liberal party in varying extents since the 1860s.
More broadly, though, the post-WW2 period saw the US enjoying both some amount of political and economic dominance on the world stage (thanks simply to coming out of the war mostly unscathed), and my guess is that western Europe spent its time rebuilding things in general. But by this point we've gotten to the stage of considering "What's next after all this promising economic growth?", and it's turned out to be clear that the world's problems didn't solve themselves, but instead some new problems arose too (particularly environmental, but also otherwise), and the lack of economic hardship isn't something that we can take for granted even in so-called developed countries, and I wonder if part of this "polarization" has been caused and/or indirectly catalyzed by disagreements over exactly what different people think should come next.
Perhaps they're less intense relative to the internet as a whole, but I'd say they're just as intense as they used to be when taken at the same scale, particularly at the level of the participants.
-whispering to self- Anime is not real life. Anime is not real life. Anime is not real life...
To be fair, 90% of the bat meme people never intended to care about anything other than memes, let alone the illegal wildlife trade.
Ask any economist and it'll be a frantic snake-oil-salesman pitch about how he's read about this new model which will totally revolutionize growth and create even more growith than we've seen before ever.
Dealing with this sort of thing has basically become the modern nightmare.
But, obviously, mainly for the people most directly affected by economic hardship, rather than the people with cushy book deals armchairing about it from their very expensive armchairs.
However, the middle group, the one that must be in the end convinced to help those with economic hardship, should not be ignored. Most people want to help others (I hope) but if they feel their voices are being left out in order to benefit others, it's much easier for them to contextualize a pro (feeding empathy) or anti (feeding self interest, and this isn't to say that self-interest is inherently bad in any way) position that affects them directly.
I think like over a year ago I read an article about like, two people trying to decide on a single option for dinner, and that works out pretty okay. Now, get ten people in the room.
Eventually, those ten people will become two groups (or multiple groups, and you always have to account for some outliers) but they'll still be much less agreeable about what to have for dinner.
That may be true.
I'm only loosely versed in US political history, but, would it be true to say that the two parties used to orient themselves in respect to the issue of states rights vs. federal government rather than generic left-right?
Also. It certainly seems that it's some sort of effect of the ubiquitousness of social media, but how true this is is a different matter. Like, US radio pundits have been operating since the Eighties or early Nineties, the typical fundie redneck is probably not having better access to social media than those days, so on. There is the matter of nostalgia filter, too. Perhaps it was never better, but it's just a bit more obvious. Or even not more obvious, but we don't remember it was the same. Something like that.
Also x2, tangentially mentioned by 14w: the issue of clustering of beliefs and interests. (I'm calling it clustering, perhaps there already is some sociological term for it.) Like, here, if you met a (male) twentysomething long-haired metal fan, you could probably extrapolate he's studying computer science or some similar sort of engineering, reads fantasy fiction, and his political opinions tend to be somewhere between right-libertarian and alt-right. This kinda fascinates me, so if you've heard of any serious paper or article on this phenomenon I'd be very much interested in it. In my opinion this might be one of the reasons behind gamergate - if interest in videogames clusters with right-wing tendencies, then gamers were aroused a lot more by feminist criticism than they would if it clustered with left (which is already open to feminist interpretations).
Probably not saying anything particularly new here, but wanted to share it. (And probably will again once I forget I did so here.)
Also x3: I'd certainly read with interest a discussion on literary criticism and TVT.
Also x4: alas, so far I have not seen any pangolin memes.
Economists I've met -- or at least, the ones who I've talked to in contexts like classes at school -- don't have pretty answers lined up like that.
Then again I haven't watched them on TV where pretty answers are demanded of them.
what about the people who have youtube channels who dream about making it big from their secondhand armchairs but instead just keep telling people to like and subscribe while titling their videos with needlessly outrageous titles that blow controversies out of proportion in order to attract attention to themselvesTo be fair, I've *ahem* seen frequent live demonstrations of two people repeatedly failing to decide in any sensible way what option to have for dinner.
As for the ten-people example, my expectation would be that around five people will stop giving a crap about what to have for dinner, and maybe four of them (not exclusive with the first five) will have some opinions and make suggestions, and maybe two or three of them at most will end up doing all the arguing, if any.
Then, if you try to wrap this up, most people will express preferences if you ask them to vote for an option, but only those last two or three people will voice their disappointment with the outcome if it's not what they want.
This has existed as a point of contention since the very beginning, but not necessarily a prominent one. It often gets co-opted for other policy objectves -- for example, both conservatives and liberals will use states'-rights arguments to oppose federal laws they don't like, while they'll also support federal laws and ignore states'-rights arguments when they do like federal laws.
The two times it really became a huge issue, I think, were when the country was first founded and people disagreed on how it should be run, and then especially so in the several decades surrounding the U.S. Civil War, with the "states' rights" position basically equating first with "let us decide we want to have slavery" and later "let us decide that we can ignore pesky things like civil rights".
On average I think idea of "states' rights" is more closely associated with the conservative side than the liberal side, at least as of recently. The liberal side tends to be more pragmatic and nonideological with its occasional use of the term, while the conservative side is more likely to make hay of it by claiming that it stands for freedom and small government.
I'd bet that the "typical fundie redneck" is rather internet-savvy, even if only because of the sheer ubiquity of cell phones and wifi in the US.
I've not used the term "clustering" before (though it does seem like a nice term to describe it) -- but I've definitely noticed how political parties/alliances/coalitions tend to end up linking together multiple ideas that may seem fundamentally unrelated to each other. For example, there's not much conceptual reason for linking, say, support for the right to marry someone of the same sex with the intention to phase out single-use plastic shopping bags. But, thanks to the quirks of US politics, they are both labeled as "liberal".
'Zactly. Then add to that recreational shooting. This can be explained as part of a wider tendencies involving the political aspects of gun culture. And then further yet, add to that stuff like video games, which should by all means be of no consequence whatsoever. There might be better examples (like the metalhead engineering student ancap I brought up), but that's the best I can think of with my second-hand knowledge of American culture. And that last part is the most curious: one tries to explain it through a string of understandable occurences that seem anything but understandable when only taken at end point (like: video games - neo-Nazi versus video games - male-dominated internet - nerd culture - edginess - pretend-Nazi - genuine Nazi), but even so there remains a feeling there might be deeper, like psychological, preferences at work (like: hard science mixes well with tendency for strict logic, which mixes well with failing to see shades of gray, which mixes well with moral absolutism).
I mean I'm overselling what I'm describing here, but there's definitely a difference between how they communicate in certain contexts I guess.
The main issue is IRL you can't try to wrap it up without incurring the wrath of both sides simultaneously.
Yeah, I'd agree with that, but with the whole sanctuary cities thing (and the New York Human rights board) might be changing that.
There is a lot of stuff out there. I mean, before six months ago I barely knew what was out there and even now I only feel like I've scratched the surface. I think the main problem is that the "right" now is trying to disseminate it's information in a way separate from mainstream media (who, in all honesty, hasn't been kind to a Republican since I was a kid aside from Fox News, which basically exists to serve that audience in it's entirety), but then it's up to you as a reader to determine what things are just conservative (or libertarian) takes on a topic and what things are just insanity.
I mean, former Governor Mike Huckabee has his own TV show that people actually watch (I mean, it's on TBN, but still).
(Other fun fact about Mike Huckabee; he won the 2008 Iowa (R) caucus, a fact Joe Biden fans suddenly are in love with).
Clustering
I think this a really interesting topic. I mean, I've tried to link things but it's like... human beings are social animals, and they'll tend to share the opinion of those either closest to them or those who introduced them to a concept in the first place.
Like Bridgey Phetasy's (I feel weird being like "Fancy Focault" earlier and now I'm talking about a person who is essentially a YouTuber) talked about "Default Settings".
But I guess if I were to try, I'd continue on this thing where I say the liberal side is more empathetic in general, and is willing to put empathetic goals ahead of practicality. So if you care about people, you won't want to tell them what to do (short of really bad things I mean) if it makes them miserable. If you care about the planet, you won't want to have people use hydrocarbons once ever for what you see as minimal effort.
Whereas the conservative side is more concerned with an overall effect. I mean, marriage as an institution serves both the purpose of companionship and raising the next generation (it's not a straight couple's fault if they can't have kids, but a gay couple is just never having kids together via traditional means). Of course, nobody ever bothered arguing that really loudly.
I think the major arguments that were made in favor of gay marriage (before people realized holding children's suicides over everybody's heads worked way better) was the Sad Story:
(Writing this out I realized that the second part at least can be undone by having a decent will, but there were also stories of families contesting wills IIRC).
This plays into a liberal need to empathise with the immediate participants in said story. Conservatives played to religion way too much to come up with coherent counterarguments, which should have been tied to the social elemets, which is why gay marriage/relationships as an issue kind of toppled for them once it was legal.
(Actually this is not true, the Texas GOP* recently banned the local right-wing LGBT group from being an official Republican affiliate, so I guess some of them are still truckin' on despite all the help people want to give them).
*Texas Grand Old Party doesn't sound grammatically correct. Using this term ever since I learned what it means feels odd.
Moving on, if I were to wildly oversimplify, Gamergate was an attempt by games journalists to bring postmodernism/overall narrativism/the-story-is-a-message-ism to video games that went horribly, horribly wrong.
I feel weird about this, because I'd assume "hard science" and "moral absolutism" and think "No way."
But then you look at how absolutely insufferable New Atheism was for a while. Though that had a hard left/right divergence, which is odd in itself!
There are definite links that can be made, but the prevailing trend in sociology is postmodernism, mixed with blank slatism, and critical theory (all of these link to intersectionality, but that's an applicable theory to all of them rather than a main theory by itself). Trying to get "So it turns out groups of people who think in certain ways are that way for biological reasons" off the ground isn't going to happen, because* kuh-learly people think the way they do because their empty minds were filled with a specific narrative from birth, which they must free themselves of.
I think was what the whole 'resisting whiteness' thing was supposed to be until it devolved into outright (yet acceptable) racism. I mean, the name itself should have been a warning.
There's a lot of phenomenon to discuss here. Should we start a separate thread?
*To be clear what follows is sarcasm.
I'll be brief at this moment, only a few sentences on one point of your post:
Heh. Keep in mind, my perspective might be rather parochial. (Or whatever's the fancy word for backwater-ish.) Whatever the truth is, it's certainly a common enough view here that it's been brought up in journalism. I've also personally spent enough time in our little physicist community to joke that philosophy is what physicists end up in when they start thinking too much about their subject of choice. (Also theology. Do you remember Rottweiler back from TVT days? Assuming he's fine with math jokes, he'd fit right in with some of the guys I know.) Philosophy, of course, being in this context more of the oldie speculative sort rather than let-us-deconstruct-everything po-mo of these days.
Well my point was that the "both sides" who will actually raise a fuss about the choice of restaurant are actually a limited subset of the people who have opinions on the issue.
The "liberal" side isn't averse to using it as a legal tactic -- cf. also recent examples in Florida where environmentalists are siding with municipalities in championing a "home rule" doctrine while plastics companies and their affiliates are pushing the state legislature to pre-empt (i.e. legally prevent) bans on various plastic products, above the objections of cities that would benefit from such bans. But, like I said, it's a pragmatic use of federalism, rather than an ideologically-driven one.
(And IMO pragmatism is better than ideological nuttery anyway.)
I'm not sure how fair this assessment is. The opinion you've stated here is not atypical of a some Republican activists, while complaining that the mainstream media is too kind to Republicans and misdescribing Democrats is not atypical of some Democratic activists.
More saliently, though, while both sides can and sometimes do decry the "both sides" rules that govern reporting, the Republicans have of late been more interested in peddling alternative stories/interpretations/facts/etc. of everything, starting with alleging that there's some sort of major institutional bias against them among the elite (which is ironic since a darn lot of them are quite wealthy, including some prominent creators of conservative think-tanks, which tended to crop up in the first place because they were unhappy with the way society at large was going, and then took to labeling simply what was happening as the "liberal" version of things).
(N.B. just because two sides exist to every disagreement/argument doesn't mean that both sides are equally moral/truthful/accurate, nor equally popular, nor (for that matter) that they ought to become politicized at all.)
These might be somewhat true, but there are at least some issues where this comparison is turned on its head -- e.g. reproductive rights a.k.a. abortion rights, where the conservative side's position leans heavily on the idea of the sanctity of life, to the point of trotting out literal dead baby pictures, while the liberal side then responds with explaining that it's not about favoring abortion or pushing it on people who don't want it, but rather about providing the legal choice to people who do.
ehh
Well, if I were to wildly oversimplify, I'd just say that Gamergate was a giant mess, consisting of at least a few different ideas/conflicts.
I know you marked this as sarcasm, but I wanted to point out that sociological/political discussions on the internet tend to lose me when people start mocking straw versions of their opponents as if they were in-jokes that their audience gets. Perhaps the audience of people who do frequent such discussions does indeed get these in-jokes, but I find them horribly inscrutable very quickly, and basically a sign that the person I'm reading/listening to is too far down the rabbit hole.
IIRC it ends with "philosophers think they are as useful as technicians."
The version I remember ran "...physicists think they're God, God thinks Himself a mathematician." Also it ran from softer to harder sciences instead of degrees of practicality. (It's not a nitpick or whatnot, just that I knew another version of the joke.)
More on topic, I just recalled of a better example of this "clustering" of hard science and right-wing politics than some story from a shit-ass country at the end of the world. You guys remember that whole "Dark Enlightenment" circle of bloggers that grew out of that LessWrong craziness? It was like, take a group of people with a tendency for weird-ass logic and speculative thinking, tell them to use reason and rational argumentation to question common wisdoms, place them in an environment where they moderate themselves according on this basis foremostly, and suddenly some of them start questioning such common wisdoms as "racism is bad" and rationally reasoning that people are not equal.
I get that, but after a while human beings tend to drop the pragmatism in favour of believing in what works (see also, the Supreme Court and deification of Ruth Bader Ginsburg).
This is exactly what I think, but I also think this is vaguely immoral. Essentially, it's doing something to get your way despite what you believe. As I said before, this sort of logic won't fly with people who have like, morals, so they end up believing in the methods instead.
I disagree with you, but I don't want to make this a sticking point. There are more important things I want to discuss here.
Sincerely believing babies are dying before they are born (which, true or false, is an inflammatory position to be in) is different from taking the woman's right to choose so she can improve her life (which is the more empathetic position).
It's hard to make an analogy here.
I don't think I'm presenting a straw-man argument here. I think believing in cultivation theory or socialization theory is totally valid, and I can completely see why people believe in it (I mean, until early 2019, I accepted most of this stuff without question).
Despite my misgivings, I also see why people choose to view human behavior through postmodernism and critical theory and etc. However, the many many variations on these are currently the only acceptable positions to hold in pop-sociology (but especially anything that's called [Insert Group Here] Studies), which is what I think is silly.
RBG being an icon and somewhat of a meme has more to do with the extremely well-known and simple calculation regarding who's on what side of the ideological spectrum on the court, and then a few side things like her having a surprisingly rigorous workout regimen.
Maybe you're thinking of the term slightly differently than I am, because the term could just as well mean taking a hit to yourself your your principles in the short run to achieve an outcome you believe is moral. Consider this: supporting a candidate who is personally very immoral based the strategic calculation that that candidate will, when in office, vote to advance an agenda you believe to be morally correct. That's pragmatism.
With regards to the use of states' rights arguments for pragmatism, my point was that conservatives are more likely to incorporate that into their "what you believe" than liberals are, so for a liberal to use it it's more likely to be referencing stare decisis or some other legal doctrine, as opposed to presenting a personally-held belief. I don't see how this approach would be "doing something to get your way despite what you believe", as no beliefs or principles were violated anyway.
The position is only inflammatory when they try to beat people over the head with it; the position itself is also an empathy-based position, so by these arguments both positions are empathy-based.
What I'm failing to understand is how it's meaningful to speak of "acceptable position to hold in pop-sociology". Pop-sociology at present incorporates a wide variety of overly broad statements, half-truths, and other inaccuracies, yet often stated with the force of simplicity and iconicness that makes them sound more applicable than they are; the idea acceptability among them is meaningful is like saying "these memes are currently popular and thus present themselves as respectable ideas", which is a very silly position. (Perhaps such fads may popularize certain directions of thinking, yes, but that doesn't make them respectable ideas.)