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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   29464 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 7, 2023

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I really appreciate how thorough and thoughtful this response is. I should have perhaps made it clearer that live debate has plenty of failure mode, particularly with how a conversation gets framed.

But if you reversed the cross examination, you would have seen an equal and opposite jam. These say nothing about who's epistemic position is inconsistent, because it only says that the conclusions of the one actor is inconsistent with the frame of the others... Which is not as interesting or 'gotcha' as it seems.

I don't think I understand this, what do you mean by "reverse" the cross-examination? I'm guessing you might mean an alternative scenario where Rufo asks Robinson about Jefferson's legacy but Robinson refuses to say anything positive about it? If that's how the discussion shakes out then yes I agree that would establish Robinson's position as inconsistent. It's perfectly possible for both of them to each hold inconsistent positions, showcasing that one person is using dodgy reasoning does not imply the other participant is innocent. [It's not relevant to your hypothetical, but in the interview Rufo does reverse the roles and asks multiple questions which to his credit Robinson readily answers.]

Re: Murphy

This seems inaccurate, and you use that to ground your entire critique.Without the full clip, what I see Murphy doing here is having a deontological opinion, but defending it inside a paradigm about effects and outcomes.

I agree with your analysis here based on the excerpt I picked out. I omitted a significant amount of prior discussion just because I wanted to be mindful of space, but I should have been more explicit. A commentator elsewhere made a similar point so I'll just repost part of my response:

The lead up to this particular exchange is relevant because Murphy was first arguing that sex work is bad because it's coercive, and it's by definition coercive because it involves someone having sex they wouldn't otherwise have were it not for the money offered. Destiny offers the obvious rejoinder that if you accept that premise, then ALL jobs are also "by definition coercive" as well. There's some anti-capitalists that actually agree with this premise but Murphy doesn't and so she finds herself having to add yet another qualifier to her argument, this time about how women are much more vulnerable during sex. Similarly, there are radical feminists that actually believe that ALL heterosexual sex is "by definition coercive" because it's penetrative and occurs within a patriarchal system where consent is impossible. Murphy has to be aware of these arguments, but as an unapologetic heterosexual woman, she doesn't want to concede that. At this point my impression is she quit because she ran out of pivots.

Re: Lance

Here, Pool allows Lance to draw out his own framework. The "mother's body, mother's choice" has no starting point in the pro-lifer's frame. And Lance walks into an open contradiction within his own set of justification. It's somewhat similar to Murphey, but you already admitted that Murphey here probably isn't arguing her actual epistemic foundation around prostitution. There's no appearnce that Lance isn't. Lance is just proving that his heuristic is undercooked.

I concede that "undercooked heuristic" is a possible explanation for what transpired but I'm not convinced because of how Lance's pivots were deployed. Reflexively his first objection was based on a straight forward "thou shall not intentionally kill a child" ethos, which I believe is revealing because it sheds some light on what Lance believes 'kill' and 'child' to mean. When he realizes how much he stumbled, he doesn't acknowledge that, he just pivots to another reason ("meth is illegal") that seems even more undercooked. Granted, the lack of an acknowledgement is not dispositive given the real-time nature of the discussion and how many people were ganging up on, but my impression of the exchange still falls along the lines of "oh damn, I admitted something I wasn't supposed to, now I have to think of another reason." My interpretation can indeed be characterized as a stretch, but it's also not set in stone and I would be interested to hear an alternative explanation from the man himself.

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