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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   37113 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 22, 2024

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I'm going to tap gattsuru's sign here. This is what they are under the mask; Outlaw83 is doing you the favor of taking it off. They want to crush you. They want you out of society, or at the very least on some ignorable margin. This is how society works... for them. There's no need for them to tolerate disagreement if they can simply boot out anyone who disagrees. Yes, it's a very illiberal attitude... but they're not liberals.

I think you mean faceh's sign!

And then it's not politics, it's basic decency, and if you can't understand that then you are the problem.

I apologize for this heat-post.

The problem there has always been that the line between 'politics' and 'decency' is itself a political question. Moreover, when there are conflicts between your sense of decency and my sense of decency, whose sense of basic decency should prevail?

There's a joke that goes around some of the circles I'm familiar with - "Your politics are politics. My politics are just basic human decency." In other words, the other side's politics get treated as politics, and so downgraded in importance, whereas my side's politics are so important - they're common sense, just being kind, etc. - that they must be maintained or enforced at all times.

At some point I think it's best to just skip over the meta-debate about which view is 'politics', which view is 'decency', etc., because that's ultimately just a semantic dispute, and focus instead on the actual conflict. People have different preferences when it comes to the unspoken rules of conduct in a given social space. How will we reconcile those preferences?

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