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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   37125 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 10, 2023

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Another instance where Team Liberal realizes it's a fair weather friend to Team Right and Team Left.

There are just not very many people for whom truth matters. Most just grope around for issue sets, decide what and who they don't and do like, and then go full sacking of intellectual integrity in order to promote or bash their particular feelz.

There are just not very many people for whom truth matters.

I wouldn't say truth doesn't matter to me, it's just that truth matters less than winning. It does me no good to smugly claim the right of truth from the sidelines after being thoroughly trounced by an underhanded enemy, as I watch them implement disastrous policy counter to all my intuitions and preferences.

Clinging to the righteousness of truth might be a comfort to you in such a situation, but not to me.

I don't see the connection. Whatever the truth is, when you're in a war, you're in a war. Perhaps stripping boxing gloves and picking up a bowie knife isn't a good tactic for the right — there may be social dynamics at play that allow the prog left to use slander but call for an asymmetric response from the right. However, there's nothing inconsistant between personal good faith truth-seeking and publicly using slander against opponents who are trying to destroy you. An anti-militarist can take up arms when the homeland is invaded. A person who seeks cooperate-cooperate can defect when playing against a defectbot.

Maybe caring for "truth" is just another way to justify one's feelz. Elevating "truth" or "freedom" as values of some higher order because their pursuit aligns more closely with one's personal preferences.

Even if it is a justification, seeking truth still has far more utility than any other option.

But those "personal preferences" for abstraction are more difficult to map on to any given object-level thing directly in front of you.

Are you making a kind of critical race theory notion that objectivity is actually just very much interested subjectivity?

"There's his opinion, her opinion and then there's the truth."

No no, the truth is just another opinion?

My point is mostly that it's easy to claim truth, but hard to prove, and easy to appear like you're just pretending to be truth-seeking out of self-interest, and even easier for others to convince themselves that that's what you're doing.

I.e., truth is an early casualty in culture war, and it quickly becomes very difficult to make out object-level facts when everyone cherry-picks their preferred factoids.

Nothing new.

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