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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   33388 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 17, 2023

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It is unfortunate that so much of the debate is driven by bad actors, and not by reasonable people like (I assume) yourself who just want to live your lives and be left in peace. But the fact that even the reasonable people will generally refuse to even acknowledge the possibility of bad actors means that ...

I could have said this, word for word, re: Islam during my Internet Atheist years. And the fact that this epistemic rigor was not observed by the people I argued with really opened a lot of cracks in my old, blue-tribe worldview. (Charlie Hebdo and the reactions to it opened those cracks into fissures, and from there it's been rabbit holes all the way down.)

I don't really have a point here, but I found the historical resonance startling.

Interesting that Sam Harris is one of the people targeted by Contra in this video too for saying the activism has gotten a bit crazy when there're reasonable questions.

He's still showing cracks.

The primary one is noticing and rejecting the following general pattern: if we have a good thing G, and we add some stuff to G, we still get a good thing G that is just as good. It shows up in many contexts. Some examples:

  • The addition of "arts" to STEM, making "STEAM" (while liberal arts are fine in their own right, they're completely different to STEM);

  • The addition of arbitrary numbers of foreigners to a country, while expecting the host country's culture to remain completely unchanged;

  • The addition of experimental mRNA medicines under the label of "vaccine"; or

  • The addition of anything with vaguely-positive emotional valence to the label "democracy".

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