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PaperclipPerfector  2mo ago (text post)   37693 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 8, 2024

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This viewpoint is basically your version of the social-justice activist's "police is racist for arresting a Black shoplifter", is it not? It doesn't matter that the arrested person was a shoplifter and police's core function includes arresting shoplifters, but only that they were black; it doesn't matter that the hoaxed person was a purveyor of bad epistemics and a rationalist blogger's core function includes obstructing purveyors of bad epistemics, but only that she was conservative.

There is a view that it is proper to enact violence upon and confine criminals and doing so doesn't make you qualitatively the same as those who would do so against any political opponent. It's not too much of a stretch to draw the same distinction regarding sneer celebrities and similar antisocial elements of the epistemic domain, and say that they ought to be humiliated, alienated and discredited regardless of political colour.

This viewpoint is basically your version of the social-justice activist's "police is racist for arresting a Black shoplifter", is it not?

No, and I don't understand how you can make that comparison.

It's: arresting shoplifters does not justify an elaborate sting operation, and an arrest made by a SWAT team. By the way, the sting operation involved a "free samples" sign left next to the shoplifted items, which may or may not have been obviously fake enough for a normal person to tell apart from a legitimate one.

Feel free to use the "well, technically they did shoplift" defense just don't whine about the townsfolk suddenly becoming rather uncooperative with officer Leroy Jenkins, who led the operation.

I can't find a good way to respond to your objection because it is not clear to me what part of the comparison you think fails. Just to be clear, you do understand that I think that LoTT's normal conduct of nutpicking the outgroup is the bad thing, rather than just the circumstance that LoTT reposted a hoax, right? I doubt any of our right-wing members think that the left-wing version of that behaviour (which is basically sneerclub and rationalwiki) is good; to assert that it's good when your tribe does it is just the same sort of trite who/whom that otherwise takes the form of "black people shoplifting is just".

I can't find a good way to respond to your objection because it is not clear to me what part of the comparison you think fails.

It's the part where you're implying people agree with you on the nature and the level of badness of the transgression, and only object to the reaction for tribal affiliation reasons, rather than because they think the reaction is completely disproportionate to the alleged crime.

Just to be clear, you do understand that I think that LoTT's normal conduct of nutpicking the outgroup is the bad thing, rather than just the circumstance that LoTT reposted a hoax, right?

The problem here is that the very structure of hoax, and all the commentary around it, did not attack that part of LoTT's conduct. The hoax could only criticize her lack of vetting of her source material.

I doubt any of our right-wing members think that the left-wing version of that behaviour (which is basically sneerclub and rationalwiki) is good;

They all have a function in a balanced ecosystem, and are all completely fine, as long as they aren't taken to excess.

To assert that it's good when your tribe does it is just the same sort of trite who/whom that otherwise takes the form of "black people shoplifting is just".

Check your premises before forming your conclusions, I guess.

Alright, admittedly, I'm 2 fingers of whiskey into my night, but I cannot follow you at all.

The only way I can pattern match your claim, is to involve entrapment. Because Tracing didn't merely catch LOTT spreading a hoax, he invented a hoax, and specifically messaged her evidence he fabricated. And I'd be totally against hypothetical police, I don't know, somehow entrapping Black people into shoplifting. Maybe they put up a sign saying "Free Watches" without the store managers knowledge or permission. I don't know, the whole comparison made little enough sense to me in the first place.

The shoplifting in the metaphor is not posting hoaxes, but doing what LoTT does normally - "nutpicking" and sneering at the outgroup based on the most outrageous examples of its members. This is entrapment in the sense that those porch thief bait packages people like posting about on YouTube are - the reason the porch thieves are bad is not that they took the bait, but that they took non-bait packages before. The bait package is just a tool to catch them.

If that's what the shoplifting means in the metaphor, then we could just catch the criminal shoplifting because they do it all the time, and setting up a sting operation instead of observing actual shoplifting brings no benefit at all.

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