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I quite literally thought the opposite. I think the whole thing was mealy-mouthed apologia and nitpicking, culminating in a "well, I guess you could just be mean, but you better tell me how you're going to be mean" as though that dissuades someone that was OK with being mean in the first place. Yes, I want the cops to pick up the deranged bum from the park, forcibly drug him, and if they keep having to do this, permanently incarcerate him. Ideally, this would all be done with more care and consideration than the inpatient mental facilities of yore, but honestly, I care a lot more about the ability of a mom to take her kid to the park without dealing with deranged bums than I do about what happens to the bum.
Scott really has a profound and obvious sensitivity to interpersonal "mean-ness." This comes across most egregiously in his writing about how public schools are, I guess, these awful no-fun dungeons of mental torment.
I couldn't exactly ever figure out why, from his writing alone, he had such a hard time.
Then I saw a picture of him and some sort of deeply buried physiogonomy module in me caused me to audibly yell, "NERD!" It made me think the Simpsons were on to something in that Nerd pheromones episode.
Scott had a hard adolescence. Cool. The point is to get over it. I've written before on the Motte about making a conscious decision to Chad-It-Up when I got to college. It worked. And, my life improved.
While everyone will always have personal biases derived from past personal experience, it's hard for me to give the benefit of the doubt to anyone who is aware of that bias but then pretends it doesn't impact their "rational ability."
Eh, I think he's just extremely agreeable. I actually like that about him. I appreciate that he likes to advocate for people he thinks are being unfairly stamped on. He seems to honestly have the attitude that a lot of the wokesters pretend to have, where taking the side of the underdog is just important to him. He gets some stuff wrong, but I like his earnestness. I think you have to take the rationalists for what they are not for all the high-minded stuff about revolutionizing epistemology.
He's an earnest liberal making an earnest liberal argument about homelessness. We don't have to dig on his physiogonomy to understand what he's saying or make counterarguments.
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