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PaperclipPerfector  5mo ago (text post)   26567 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 3, 2024

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I think the thing is that these people do mostly share some distorted version of my values in the way that the Nazis don't. The Nazis tried to exterminate a people that they thought were vermin while invading their neighbors in a war of aggression.

I think we should exterminate vermin, and you probably do too. So Nazis do share a distorted version of our values. Of course, we don't think humans qualify as vermin, and Nazis do think that, but that's what makes it distorted--it's still a version.

This feels like quite a stretch. Maybe it's just the time I've spent among the progressives in my life but I know the type of people who, through blinding empathy, advocate for things like the WPATH guidelines.

There are certainly leftists who resent, hate and advocate for violence against people that I can see as analogous to nazis, as there are rightest for whom the comparison would be taken as high praise. So I don't think I'm just incapable of comparing modern people to nazis.

Rather than thinking of the consequences would you rather live with empathetic but misguided people or slightly more correct, with their own wrongness, people who advocate for and are willing to partake in violence against their out group?

Consequentialism in a moralish society has this quirk where straightforwardly evil people can't get public support and thus can't do much harm and thus rank low on consequential harm measures. While moral empathetic people can get lots of support and thus can cause lots of, inadvertent, harm and thus can score high on harm measures. This is a dynamic to look out for and we should always be critical and careful with those we entrust with great power. But it seems a horrible mistake to conclude that the moral empathetic people are as bad as the straightforwardly evil people on these grounds. It really matters that if we entrusted other groups with the power that the progressives are entrusted with that things would be much worse and they should get some reasonable credit for that. Not absolution, not a free pass, but they're not nazis.

What are you talking about? You seemed to have missed the part "of course, we don't think humans qualify as vermin".

You and Nazis both think you should exterminate vermin. You don't think humans are vermin and Nazis do. So the Nazis have a distorted version of the same values as you.

I understand "can humans be vermin" sounds like it could be on the 'IS' side of the Is/ought distinction but I think it's actually on the 'ought' side. I don't think "is there such a thing as an internal gender experience such that it can be out of alignment with a person's sex" is on the is side. I believe this because I think there is some amount of proof that could sway me into believing that gender as an innate felt experience is real while there is no proof that would cause me to believe that some humans are vermin.

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