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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   33485 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 19, 2023

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I'm no authority, but I think at least a part of the progressive project is to encourage language that's less exclusionary. The idea here is that by having neutral-valence terms to describe each other without resorting to the kind of implicit judgment a term like "normal" contains. There's an implied acceptance or tolerance when labeling something normal that I think most humans probably have some psychological need for. Certainly, it's at least preferable to being sorted into a category that's implicitly abnormal, and thus much more likely to be subject to ignorance, misunderstanding, and prejudice.

I'm no authority, but I think at least a part of the progressive project is to encourage language that's less exclusionary. The idea here is that by having neutral-valence terms to describe each other without resorting to the kind of implicit judgment a term like "normal" contains.

"Racist", "Sexist", "Homophobe", etc, are all exclusionary by any reasonable definition. If Progressives just want neutral-valience language to describe each other without resorting to implicit judgement, why is their language packed to the gills with terms that implicitly judge others?

Again, I'm not an authority on progressive thought, but my best guess is that their argument would be that it's unfair to judge others on what they consider inalienable characteristics like gender identity, race, sex, etc. but that beliefs and behaviors are relatively more choosable and thus fair game.

Why don't you go ahead and claim jailing people for kidnapping is hypocritical?

The point is that Progressives are not interested in a neutral viewpoint in the abstract, but only as a tool to undermine moral views they disagree with. They do not treat their own moral views with similar skepticism or "objectivity". Hence, the appeal to neutral viewpoint is not itself neutral. It is an isolated demand for rigor, and should be discussed with that reality in mind.

The rules require that you respond to what was actually said before arguing something else. In particular, this means that putting words into people's mouths is not really allowed, even when you frame that move as a question. This is low effort, don't do this.

Those terms are meta-exclusionary. They only exclude people who try to exclude others. This is reminiscent of Popper's intolerance of intolerance.

I expect you can come up with new examples that are not meta in this way, but of course, offhand, I cannot.

They only exclude people who try to exclude others.

I'm largely repeating the response below, but I believe the actual causality is reversed: the people who use these terms take people they want to exclude and then deem those people as excluding others. Similar to the whole thing about Popper, which is that, by and large, the people who most loudly proclaim the principle are ones who take people they already don't want to tolerate and deem those people as being intolerant, in an effort to justify their pre-existing intolerance.

Should we then be intolerant of the intolerance of the intolerant...?

Those terms are meta-exclusionary. They only exclude people who try to exclude others.

No they don't. Someone can be a "racist" for having the wrong skin tone and singing along to the wrong song, or refusing to give up a rented CityBike. Moreover, as is increasingly popular on the left, there's a categorical denial that anyone who isn't white can be "racist" at all - thus "racist" itself is a term being used to exclude others.

Similarly with "sexist" and "homophobe." The most common use-case is attacking someone who holds disfavored object-level beliefs regarding, e.g., sexual morality or family formation.

You might be right in practice. I suppose this is the bailey, Esparanza's use is the motte.

Someone can be a "racist" for having the wrong skin tone and singing along to the wrong song, or refusing to give up a rented CityBike.

Actually, the outrage was worse than this. The argument of Twitter activists wasn't that she was refusing to give up her CitiBike. It's that she was trying to somehow steal the bike that the other black men had rented and was using her status/privilege(?) as a white woman to cry crocodile tears, and thus trying to get someone to call the police, and therefore the police arriving would commit racist police brutality on them, and therefore her resisting in that manner means that she was committing literal violence on them, despite there being more black men than her who were all individually physically stronger than her. And of course, therefore, it's appropriate that she be canceled and fired from her job as a nurse.

At least, that was the argument as I understood it. It's all completely incorrect, of course, and I do not endorse it in the slightest.

"White"? "Bourgeoise"?

"Pedophile" is exclusionary and judgmental. Generally speaking, would you argue that Progressives are okay with judging and excluding pedophiles, or would you argue that they object to doing so?

If I say that homosexual acts are a sin, how is that more exclusionary and judgmental than a gay person saying that my moral assessment of homosexuality is bigoted and homophobic?

Also, you (or the progressives you're referring to) are misusing the paradox of tolerance. It applies to people who respond to argument with personal violence.

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