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Culture War Roundup for the week of January 23, 2023

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i marked this comment "bad" on the volunjanny page so i guess i should reply.

"it is ok to punch someone who is x" is not dehumanization

yes it is. "it is righteous to practice violence against the outgroup" is the last realization of otherizing rhetoric.

  1. outgroup is bad

  2. we should do something about outgroup

  3. we should be violent to outgroup

to give the sharpest comparison, that phrase is syntactically identical with "it is righteous to kill jews."

no motte & baileying. as-spoken "it's okay to" is to be heard and understood as "it is righteous to"

it's not righteous for a woman to slap a lush, but also nobody gives a shit. almost all of europe believes it is not righteous to execute criminals because their framing of human rights extends even to mass-murderers. this is a deep subject of philosophy where i largely though not entirely agree with the europeans. i blame none for being uncomfortable with the state ending lives.

it is not righteous to practice indiscriminate violence against anyone. even nazis. this was the point of postwar trials: moral authority. righteousness. because they understood the indiscriminate violence practiced during the war was bad in and of itself. that statement goes against the trials.

that statement necessarily affirms certain premises; it is okay to dehumanize, it is okay to practice indiscriminate violence.

that statement says what the nazis did was only bad because of who they did it to.

to repeat and conclude: there is nothing you can say more dehumanizing.

There are several things wrong with your argument:

"it is righteous to practice violence against the outgroup" is the last realization of otherizing rhetoric.

  1. Even if the last step of otherizing is making the claim, "it is righteous to practice violence against the outgroup", it does not follow that every incident of making the claim is necessarily the last step in the process of othering.

  2. We are talking about dehumanization, yet you are making a claim about othering. They are not the same thing. See, eg, Genocide Watch's "Ten Stages of Genocide", which distinguishes clearly between othering (what they call "classification") and dehumanization.

to give the sharpest comparison, that phrase is syntactically identical with "it is righteous to kill jews."

Perhaps I was imprecise when I described the class of statements as, "it is ok to punch someone who is x." As my examples showed, I did not mean to define "x" as group membership, but rather as exhibiting a certain attribute, such as drunken loutishness, or a tendency to commit murder.

More importantly, you seem to believe that I said that it is righteous for a woman to slap a lush, or righteous to execute a murder, or righteous to practice indiscriminate violence against anyone. I said no such thing, nor do I believe any such thing. I merely said that doing so was a phenomenon different from dehumanization. I was making an analytical claim, not a normative claim.

i marked this comment "bad" on the volunjanny page

I >90% agree with your post, but I marked the one you're replying to as neutral because I didn't see evidence that @Gdanning was dishonest. My theory is "we want honestly-wrong people to come here, say honestly-wrong things, talk to people about them, and stop being wrong, so I don't want people to get in trouble for saying honestly-wrong things".