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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   31625 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 16, 2023

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Man, it sure is weird that I haven't seen Steve in three weeks. I mean we're all locked in a room together, it's not like there is anywhere he could have gone. And you sure look well fed." But I'm expected to hope that the secret cannibal will just admit they are a cannibal. I can't point out their obvious cannibalism. Even up to the point I wake up and my own arm is missing, I can't accuse them of anything lest I be accused of "lack of charity".

I think the point is, in the analogy you are locked in the room with 20,000 people on your side and 30,000 people on the other. When Steve vanishes and 20 of the other side look suspiciously fat and are wiping blood off their lips, then you can say that. But you don't get to tar the other 29,980 people in that group just because they are in the opposing group. For that you need evidence all of them ate Steve.

To push it back to the example you used "Blue tribers seem to think the world revolves around them, and if they can't eat absolutely every food item at a pot luck, nobody should." That is the equivalent of noticing some people in your opposing group are bossy picky eaters and extrapolating that to the Blue Tribe itself with no further evidence of that. Either you need evidence it applies to all of them OR restrict the critique to those who do the bad thing X themselves.

Note that mod feedback said your open was ok, where you said: "Maybe slightly, just because a lot of leftist I know are a bit neurotic and hypochondriac." because you restricted that to a sub set of leftists that you knew personally rather than all leftists. So a subset, informed by your observations.

I'm not a mod, but that is the difference that struck me.

But you don't get to tar the other 29,980 people in that group just because they are in the opposing group. For that you need evidence all of them ate Steve.

The other 29,979 are bleating about "charity", and the 1 that goes "Hey... maybe you are onto something" vanishes next.

Then you need to say that and possibly evidence it before you can extrapolate it to groups. That's the rule to try and keep this place somewhat palatable to everyone (as much as possible of course). But even then notice you are bringing in more nuance!

Some of the Blue Tribe think the world revolves around them and others within the Blue Tribe enable them because X Y and Z is a more nuanced take that enables discussion more than Blue Tribe X.

Again I'm not a mod, but if you think all Blue Tribe bad, then it's going to be tricky to exist in a space which explicitly wants both Blue and Red to talk to each other constructively and so limits how broadly you can generalize your outgroup to be bad without doing a lot of work to back it up.

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