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So look my response here (the one I'm writing at the moment) is not intended as a petulant argument, but I feel a bit frustrated and I'm trusting you to interpret it in the spirit in which I mean it, and thanks in advance for taking the time.
First things first, I appreciate the ethos you're laying out here. As I understand it, this space functions based upon an axiom that anyone should be able to participate in good faith without having to suffer what amount to unnecessary indications of being unwelcome. If someone is of the opinion that entire classes of people are fundamentally incapable of participating in valid ways, that's a problem, because The Motte takes as axiomatic that people of all classes should be welcome to participate as they're able and those who disagree damage the capacity of the site to fulfill that function.
I think this is basically good and right. Not for reasons of niceness, but for reasons of epistemic humility, as you say. It's all too easy for any of us to be flatly wrong about something if for no other reason than because we've simply never encountered someone who could have corrected us if we'd bothered to discuss the matter with them. And, particularly when it comes to evaluating such matters as the one under discussion at the moment (to what degree long-divergent ancestral groups should be considered as belonging in the same class), it's intuitively very important that those of the ancestral groups in question have as much of a chance at participation as possible in order to maximize the chances of this happening.
So far, so good.
Arguendo that was my position (it wasn't; see below), how about "I think blacks are animals"? It's a useful test case because we get to the heart of whether the issue is with the opinion or the phrasing. Though FWIW, again, I think the term 'animals' here was a poor choice which generates vastly more heat than light, at least without defining it in detail and in ways that would probably trigger a lot of disagreement per se.
I just don't think I ran afoul of this, is the thing. If I say that I don't think eight year olds (and those who are mentally at that level regardless of their adult bodies) generally don't have the capacity to function as responsible adults, I doubt anyone would react with horror and disgust, and I also think the difference is entirely political. Similar opinions about women and, er, genetically-less-mentally-developed ancestral groups were nothing if not mainstream and considered prima facie obvious not too long ago and for most of human history.
Yeah, saying that is gonna upset some eight year olds, who are a lot less likely to participate precisely because they are juvenile and react accordingly. And I'll even allow that somewhere out there are a few who would make better citizens than many existing citizens. But it would be crazy to object to the observation on those grounds. And the "I think" in the claim is qualifier enough, in my opinion, or in the case of my OP, "I call it". Hedging my statements like that is a practice I picked up here, actually, for exactly the reason that signaling epistemic humility by doing so is useful for the tone of the space and even as a little reminder to myself. I've gotten lazy about it, so again, I concede that you had grounds for correcting me.
All good and well.
They can disagree with my premise, they can offer counter-evidence, they can ask me why I think that...
In short, they can behave exactly as I'd expect myself to behave. Or, if they can't, well?
Finally, and I realize this is likely to come off as splitting hairs but I wasn't talking about 'black people', and frankly I sincerely doubt that any of the people I was talking about would ever show up here in the first place for the same reason that eight year olds don't. (Perfectly-lovely and intelligent black people do show up here from time to time and I consider a couple of them friends and hang out in other spaces and even occasionally go to one for advice on medical issues.) I'm talking about comparatively-genetically-mentally-incapable people. In this particular case, heavy overlap with black, yes. But slavery is not a uniquely black issue and neither is being what amounts to a feral savage who will behave as such regardless of attempts at forcible civilization. In any event there's enough admixture at this point that blanket statements about SSH-descended inhabitants of the US are a lot less appropriate than they were two hundred years ago.
So -- I guess I just want to get the above off my chest. This isn't really an objection to anything you said in particular, I again acknowledge your correction, and (hopefully obviously) I don't intend any kind of gotcha argument. It's just a difficult situation. I'm glad to be in a place where we're at least trying to navigate such a thicket together in good faith.
Without trying to get bogged down in debating the specific claims you are (or aren't) making, I think the basic problem here is the way you expressed yourself, because yes, often it is about the wording. Because this place is explicitly tone policed and not content policed, tone is important. Consider the difference between "You're fat" and "I'm concerned about your health." Arguably they are communicating the same message, but one is being insulting without regard for how it's received, and the other is at least pretending to be offered with good intentions.
So with regards to saying "You're an animal," okay, I suppose a black person could, as you say, politely debate the proposition that they are an animal and not a human being, but I don't think anyone would deny that calling someone an animal is straightforwardly an insult. People here are expected to engage politely even with opinions they strongly disagree with and find offensive, but they are not expected to accept being told they're subhuman.
Granting that that wasn't exactly what you meant, if you want to discuss specific subsets of the population which happen to be majority black and argue that they are, essentially, subhuman, you can do that if you take the trouble to qualify your statement with behaviors you believe justify such a categorization, but you cannot just make a broad generalization about "blacks." Given that two mods read your original post as saying "Blacks are animals," it's fine if you want to walk that back a little, but hopefully you see why it matters what words you use.
FWIW I do -- I still call it husbandry, and mainly used the term 'animal husbandry' because people have no idea what the hell I mean by the former without gesturing at the latter. It's the same kind of husbandry men have for women, children, and domestic animals. My error was in recklessly implying that less-human hominids fit squarely into that last category when, as I say, I think they're somewhere in-between.
Obviously that is going to come off as insulting, though I think it's grounds for a really good conversation at some point if I can figure out how to present it appropriately.
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