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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   29720 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 12, 2022

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Most of the time the facts behind racism claims don't bear out, like when asked to estimate the amount of unarmed black men they will wildly overestimate.

You're missing the point because you're too focused on waging the culture war and winning object level arguments about how bad the outgroup is. All of those things could be true and still orthogonal to the point I'm making.

What if owning the libs is, in itself, a moral good? What if you see these people leading us down the path of speech authoritarianism, transing of children, diversity quotas, quality of life selfdestruction in the name of the climate gods, cultural suicide, race to the bottom globalist economics and paedophilia apologia, and simply think that stopping or impeding them is the single greatest good you can do in the world right now?

Yes! Much closer.

You're missing the point because you're too focused on waging the culture war and winning object level arguments about how bad the outgroup is. All of those things could be true and still orthogonal to the point I'm making.

I don't think they're orthogonal at all. If your animating principles are derived from lies and misinformation, they're not worthy of respect. If verifiable reality contradicts your beliefs, your beliefs are simply wrong. If you don't even know the underlying statistical reality beneath your own beliefs, I have trouble calling your beliefs sincere. If you felt that strongly about it, wouldn't you know the truth? But it seems not.

I really, really don't care if the crazy guy in the street genuinely, truly, sincerely believes that the Blue Men who live in the TV will murder his daughter if he doesn't provide them a blood sacrifice, if the fact is that he's waving a knife at passers-by. However real it is to him doesn't matter at all.

If your animating principles are derived from lies and misinformation, they're not worthy of respect. If verifiable reality contradicts your beliefs, your beliefs are simply wrong. If you don't even know the underlying statistical reality beneath your own beliefs, I have trouble calling your beliefs sincere. If you felt that strongly about it, wouldn't you know the truth?

This line of reasoning can be found on any number of /r/politics posts about the conservative talking points you gave in your earlier post in this thread. "My ideological opponents are lying / tricked by misinformation" isn't exactly an uncommon belief in the Culture War. And we frequently have discussions in this thread arguing over the object level truths of most, if not all, of the claims you list.

But there's still a difference between claiming the moral high ground and being wrong and just straight-up claiming the moral low ground, which, uh, isn't a phrase because it's not something that people usually (ever?) do. I think @Chrisprattalpharaptr is observing the Elon Musk appears to be doing the latter and wants to know what is going on (or what he's missing?) and how this fits into the stories the right tells itself about free speech and their ideology in general.

You appear to have proposed the principle that the left's ideas are harmful and reducing their spread as much as possible is good to reduce the harm they can cause. Which seems like a coherent principle to me even if we disagree on the object level facts.

People here tend to be overly literal, so you get arguments of "well, they're not lying".

There's some equivalent of "reckless disregard for the truth" that should apply. Someone who doesn't check facts, doesn't understand when purported facts look suspicious, and engages in motivated reasoning such that he doesn't look closely at facts that seem to support him, is sincere. He's not lying. But morally, willful blindness is pretty close to lying.

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