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Well, this is where I tend to walk away (though I am trying not to do that here, even though I also find these conversations very frustrating and circular, but when I give up in exasperation, you later come back and accuse me of ducking the argument, so). I just reread all those posts of mine you linked to. I can see how you might disagree with some of the things I said. I can see how I might have worded some things better, or might even walk back a line or two if I were re-editing myself now. I cannot see where you get (what I perceive to be) an accusation that I am lying or arguing in bad faith or ignoring your counteraguments. For the most part, I stand by what I said and have not changed my opinions. You think invoking concentration camps and literal Civil War is hyperbolic or something? Fine, duly noted, I will take that into account when trying to get my point across (to you) in a way I hope will be received in the way I intended, but I used those examples for a reason (and often because other people invoked them first!)
I also admit at this point I am honestly not sure whether you think my problem with FCfromSSC's position is that I disagree with his conclusions or that I dislike what he is forecasting. In fact I do disagree with a lot of what he has said (regarding how oppressed Red Tribers are), and of course I dislike the idea that we might fracture into a bloody civil war. But those are not the same issue!
It seems to me like we often come to a point where I don't really disagree with most of your specific examples ("Yes, that's bad" ... "Yes, I agree, that's bad too") but then you still rail at me because I don't agree that all those bad things mean Blue Tribe is already where nybbler says it is, stomping on your face forever. I am not sure you believe that, but clearly you believe the situation is worse than I do. Or perhaps unlike me, you don't see this as a historical pendulum, but some sort of irreversible state change. That's fine, we can disagree about the severity of the problem. Is that your problem, that I just don't agree with you about the severity of the problem? Or are you convinced that I'm lying about how bad I actually think it is, or lying about whether I actually think it's a bad thing for the Red Tribe to be oppressed? If the actual problem is that you just think I'm wrong and too stupid to see how obviously correct you are, well, you are only going to continue to be frustrated (and frustrating me) with this pettiness.
Because none of these things would break from the standards you demand, now!
Time, after time, after time, after time, you propose horribles or parades of horribles of things that are Worse that are your evidence that conservatives need sit down and take it, not just in response to civil war rhetoric but even to matters as simple as turnabout being fair play.
And then I provide examples that those parades of horribles are happening, or being attempted, or in rare cases have been room temperature for a decade or been applied to me personally. In some cases, you explicitly say that "mostly, it's not happening" and a "gish gallop", even after I provide explicit evidence, without even the slightest effort to point to a single one that I'm actually wrong on. Other times, you just ipse dixit, or simply duck out because my claims "doesn't impress", none of the examples I bring were persuasive enough for you to even bother responding to.
And now it turns out it doesn't matter! It wouldn't change the conversation even if conservatives were being literally marched into concentration camps -- which, to be extremely explicit so you don't deflect down that rabbit hole again, I'm not claiming is the current state. If A(3) or A(4) are what we're trying to talk about, we've had concentration camps before! Why the hell were you asking me about shit like voicing conservative opinions in public or struggle sessions? You, in this thread, brought up "(Or even, say, the level of a fringe political or religious minority in previous eras in US history.)" as what you were arguing against, and by definition even if I could have demonstrated this to your requirements, it'd still not have been novel at all!
Well, okay, maybe the conversation topic just drifted in the last handful of posts. You've said our real disagreement was about whether the severity and novelty of the
gish gallopsexamples I provided weren't serious enough to justify defection. That's something we could discuss seriously, and I spent a thousand words doing it: why evaluations of novelty are vulnerable to giving you whatever answer you came in wanting, and why defection is both necessary and laudable before the more extreme degrees of marginalization and exclusion from the public sphere hit.Did your response here engage with any of that, either? You literally can't see how you're ignoring my counterarguments or arguing in bad faith, with all that?
This is very frustrating.
I reread those links and do not see where I am arguing that "turnabout is fair play so conservatives need to sit down and take it." Evidently that is your interpretation of what I said, but it is certainly not what I intended to say.
To underline this point: that is not, in fact, what I believe. I am literally not sure what you think I do believe.
If conservatives were being literally marched into concentration camps it would absolutely change the conversation, and I would say "Goddamn, gattsuru, you were right and I was wrong!" How are you concluding from anything I wrote that I would be unmoved by conservatives being marched into concentration camps?
Yes, fine, this is the only part I can make sense of. You have a lot of specific examples of oppression-of-Red-Tribe which you think are compelling examples of a dystopian slide and I do not. We could debate the specifics of each one of those examples (I'd rather not, because it probably wouldn't lead to much in the way of agreement, but again, not gonna be accused of ducking arguments, I just hate having to go through a list of 20 bullet points and starting a subthread about each and every one of them), but I would summarize it as "I still think the evidence does not say we are as far along down the slippery slope as you think we are" - do you think that is a fair summary, or not? Is it that there are specific examples whose litigation you are unsatisfied about/you think I dodged, or that you think I should have been convinced by the volume of your examples and I am not?
No, no I literally can't. When I say maybe I'm just too dim to understand you, I am not being entirely ironic. I mean, I do not think I am dim, but sometimes I read and reread your arguments (specifically, your indictments of me) and I cannot tell whether there is a hidden code I'm not deciphering or you're just trolling me. To me, a lot of your accusations seem to be made in bad faith. (You seriously think I'd say "nbd" if conservatives were being literally herded into concentration camps, really? You think I haven't taken you seriously or engaged with what you're saying, even though here I am in yet another interminable thread that's just going to leave both of us pissed off again because I cannot help trying to futilely convince people that I'm trying to be fair-minded?) It doesn't help that we told you once to lay off the big collection of "links to every argument you've ever made" every time you argue with someone, because it's antagonistic and obnoxious, and to this day you claim that we told you you "aren't allowed to refute people with evidence." That is not what we told you, and that sort of thing makes me squint whenever you accuse me or someone else of arguing in bad faith.
[I'm answering this a little out of order, as I think the more critical stuff was wedge into the center.]
I am neither describing concentration camps as a current or plausible near-future problem, to be very explicit. If they happen, I will be wrong, too. Beyond that:
... where do you put concentration camps on a scale of novelty? They literally happened, more than once, as particularly shameful periods in American history. One memorable and significant set in living memory. They certainly weren't anywhere near what you'd have to dive to the Literal Civil War, to use the term I applied for A(4).
Novel means new. Not mean worse, or a different color, or upside down: it means different from what has come before.
I'm not sure where this confusion is coming from, but looking for something that has already happened in the United States and been meaningful is precisely what A(3) and A(4) are trying to exclude, where A(1) is about whether the specific examples I've presented being true, and A(2) is the Chinese Cardiology option.
Ok, that's not A at all, which was about whether "Things I'm citing are "specious arguments, half-truths, misrepresentations, and outright lies". It sounds more like something along one of B ("The things I'm citing real and meaningful, but not justification for retaliation"), or C ("These things real, and meaningful, and justification for retaliation, but not cause for escalation").
Is that closer? Or is there something on "meaningful" that you're trying to dig into?
... I don't think this helps expand the problem. You've said countless times that our situation -- if not "greater free speech than has existed in almost any period of history " -- at least not bad enough to do some greater action over, beyond complain or persuade, and even for complaining you have little patience for people thinking they're oppressed.
That does not explain if the examples I bring up "mostly isn't happening", or if they're happening but they can't justify any retaliation, or if they're happening but can't justify any escalation. I did the whole Wittgenstein format question, trying to break this down, and instead I'm asking a second time.
Even this exact quote doesn't deliminate between whether you disagree with my evidence, or with my assessment of the tactical or strategic or moral sphere. And it's infuriating, because you keep bringing examples of specific acts as if they mattered, and it's really not clear that any but the most extreme, unlikely, and irrecoverable ones do. And I can't even tell if that's because there's something you don't like about the examples I bring of those specific acts, or because they don't matter to the extent they did happen.
See above. I'm not going to, and can't, and don't want to, demand anything, but I can't see this being productive without at least trying to:
Pick one-to-three claims that I presented as a present-day encroachment of conservative civil rights and freedoms, and argue that it did not happen or mostly did not happen (in the sense it never occurred to start with, rather than in the sense it was overturned or punished in some form by the state).
Give as low-severity an example of a thing as you can think of, that would justify retaliation, which you believe has not happened, which if I can show has happened would persuade you retaliation on that matter were acceptable.
Give an example of a thing progressives have done, which is acceptable for conservatives to retaliate on, but not to escalate, and what that escalation would look like.
[edit: Yes, these do leave remaining options unavailable: you could, for example, disagree out of a general moral principle toward deescalation, with an exception for the absolute last-second of some extreme and irrevocable all-consuming abuse by a fascist government; or need some sort of statistically-validated incidence rate for discrimination or civil rights violation; or perhaps some certain classes of injury set aside for special pleading. There are some interesting conversations to be had under each aegis. Two or three years ago, I would even be interested in having that conversation with you. But you've made bets about things that don't make sense in any of those frameworks. If they're your real objection, state it and we'll at least have closure, but I'm not getting into those debates with you given the communication problems we've already had.]
The actual words I wrote were that "your evidence that conservatives need sit down and take it..." "in response to" "...matters as simple as turnabout being fair play."
"My heart does not bleed much when "liability" is being kicked off of Twitter" is literally the comment I linked to in those words you (mis)quoted, as was "I'm on your side if you want to push back against the anti-free speech, authoritarian ideology that is increasingly popular on the left. I am not on your side if that "push back" is defection and civil war." This was in response to a series of conversations not about civil war, or succession, or street warfare, or Minecraft LARP, but about some stupid speech restrictions (in Hungary!) or (a strawman of) "surely, we must burn THIS book?".
If you want a direct one: "I don't like cancel culture, at all, but the ironic thing is that most of the "solutions" I see proposed, other than "persuade people not to do that," would require that the government just change the rules to allow censorship that is more to the other side's liking."
There are good arguments against making that particular choice! But instead of an argument against such an action, you simply jump to acting as though people were plotting "defection and civil war" rather than fairly trite regulations.
Now, this was before it was demonstrably proven that Twitter's moderation schema was often government employees naming individual posters to take down; it was merely blindingly obvious that these groups were at least reacting to government threats. Now, I don't particularly agree with FCFromSSC's position on free speech, and I at least try to be (if not always successfully) a true believer in free speech.
But come on. You're "on [my] side if you want to push back", somewhere... so long as that's limited to complaining about it, or trying to persuade people who don't care or actively want to punish conservative positions. Absolutely your prerogative to hold that position; I'd like to hold it as well. But instead of arguing why it is morally or pragmatically correct, instead you leap to people not being sent to a gulag.
Who was talking about gulags, when FCFromSSC in your exact quote was comparing a thousand-dollar fine against the social cost of his online identity being attached to his real one? Doesn't matter, it's the new standard!
((I mean, you do touch on the turnabout is fair play when progressives do it gimmick, with literally "you guys started it" sometimes, but it's rare enough that I try not to focus on it, and it wasn't among my links above.))
And also asked me not to joust with old posts and ZorbaTHut said "I'm kinda not okay with digging through people's Reddit history using search tools to catch them in contradictions."
Fine. It's your shop, it's your rules. It's just this one class of evidence, and only when antagonistic, and it's only evidence of past claims, why would that matter?
(Apropos of nothing, did you know Darwin's back? Maybe he'll engage more seriously these days.)
I'll be more specific about what I'm not allowed to dig for in the future.
I find this bizzare. If you're having a conversation with someone across dozens of threads and months, how is it anything but helpful to cross-check what they were saying in the past with what they're saying now? If someone's being slippery or careless with their arguments, how else can you demonstrate that?
Reading the context, it looks like the report claimed "selective quoting/misrepresentation of another users post history to try to argue some kind of dishonesty or inconsistency, apparently motivated simply by not liking what that user had to say". So maybe they'd only moderate for doing that in a dishonest way? But I mean, you can just moderate for "misrepresentation" and "motivated by not liking" directly (except, well, you have to distinguish disliking for bad personal reasons and disliking because it's incorrect).
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I've been away a few days, so forgive me if I do not dive into each of your responses (sigh) as thoroughly as you would like.
I suppose. (I am pretty sure I have never accused you of lying.)
I don't think everyone on "your side" is plotting defection and civil war. I think very few are, actually. I never claimed everyone who feels they are being oppressed is an accelerationist or a would-be secessionist.
I don't think I leaped to that. I think there are many degrees between "complaining" and "being sent to gulags" and I don't know why you are accusing me of presenting only such stark choices.
Find a way to do it without being antagonistic, and the other conditions are not a problem.
Yes, I've noticed.
For the record, my personal feeling is that your "you are not oppressed" comment is one of my favorite replies I've ever received here. I disagreed strongly with your position then, and continue to do so now, but that isn't the point: you grasped the fundamental nature of the argument and responded directly and concretely. Honest, thoughtful disagreement is something I treasure because it sharpens my own thinking, and that post is one of the better disagreements I've had here. I try not to bring it up, and I don't usually get involved when others bring it up because I realize you don't enjoy rehashing it, but I smile whenever I re-read the exchange. It seems to me that if your argument there was correct, then it was deeply necessary; if it was wrong, well, we each are often wrong, and the way you would be wrong is one of the better wrongs one can be.
There's a deeper discussion available, but maybe I'll get to it in a top-level comment. Merry Christmas and a happy new year to you, sir.
Merry Christmas. For what it's worth, I hope you are wrong, but I am not closed to the possibility that I am. That you hold the views you do while being fundamentally decent is one of the reasons I feel so strongly - the idea that you and I will inevitably wind up on opposite sides of a civil war is pretty horrific to me. There are other people here who like to fedpost, play Internet Tough Guy, and trot out their edgiest takes, and are really only here to inject venom into the discussion and express their hate for their outgroup, and they would be no loss to anyone, any community, or any civilization. Perhaps some of what @gattsuru objects to is my contempt for those people bleeding through in my responses elsewhere. But it is not a general contempt for "your tribe." I have friends, I know many good people (as our favorite Orange Man says), on both sides. It... bothers me, that what I hear from both sides is increasingly "How can you possibly associate with them?"
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I understand (and hope!) that everyone's got better things to do with their holiday season.
Do you know why I've been linking to the wikipedia page for gish gallop? Or why I keep using variations on the phrase "mostly isn't happening"?
I'm not sure you have accused me of lying! I'm trying to dig at whether you're accusing me of "specious arguments, half-truths, misrepresentations, and outright lies", or what subcombination thereof. Maybe we're both just really confused about what 'metaphorically' going against the wall in the context of firings and speech restrictions might be!
But it's kinda hard to tell, since we never seem to get to the actual claims.
And I've not accused of that, nor particularly care whether you do or not.
You literally responded to:
with
What space are you trying to subdivide that's below a few thousand dollars in fines and the results of FCFromSSC's name being attached to his real identity on twitter, that anyone should care about? Leave alone the obnoxious questions like whether FCFromSSC ever said anything comparable to "imminent danger of being sent to a gulag" (even in his historical post on Russian terror!), he's the very central case of the sort of person you're disagreeing with. What are these many degrees that we're supposed to be shimming into place?
EDIT: and to be clear, that's not a "oh no, you've used hyperbole, the banned superweapon". What the hell is any serious response supposed to be? You clearly don't find anyone's examples persuasive, even when going down the list of things that you supply, so what are you asking for?
What, exactly, are you trying to persuade me of?
That conservatives, as a political class, are now an oppressed group in the US? Oppressed in the sense that all the apparatus of the state is working against them, they are systematically deprived of their rights, and that they are institutionally (as our woke friends say) oppressed?
That FCfromSSC cannot share his candid opinions on Twitter without fear of losing his job is, I agree, a kind of oppression, but it's not exclusive to conservatives. What I am not convinced of is that this is state-level or institutional oppression, that we are on a slippery slope towards anti-Red totalitarianism. Your legal examples, of disparate applications of the law against, for example, conservatives using guns for self-defense, or engaged in protests, vs. when liberals protest or use guns, I am very suspicious of as illustrative examples. I certainly believe individual legislators and DAs are biased in how they apply the law, but I am unconvinced (though I could be convinced) that this is a system-level phenomenon, or that if I had access to your legal search tools and the willingness to spend the time, that I could not construct a competing narrative of, say, white oppression against black people, or liberals being oppressed wherever conservatives control the local government.
My confusion, in our exchanges, stems from the fact that you seem to be accusing me of... something. Lying. Stupidity. Willful obliviousness. Sticking my fingers in my ears and saying "lalalala." I'm not sure. But I, in turn, am not sure what you think I think, only that you think I'm wrong and you're still pissed at me for that "You are not oppressed" post.
For this specific thread, and speaking in the specific context of higher education:
I can provide the various examples and practices and links if you want, but you haven't actually asked, and I'm not in the mood to do a big effortpost if it's not even a point of meaningful disagreement or if you're just going to shrug and say some variant of 'sucks to be them' or 'well, not literally every one got instantly shut down, so progressive groups must not have the capacity everywhere even if it happens repeatedly'.
More generally, I think -- to be charitable! -- you are either underestimating the effort or effect of progressive efforts to remove as much administrative power and all four of the boxes of liberty from conservative hands, or to remove the real-world impact of any use of these systems when not possible, and to the extent that these efforts have used government power or threat of government power to apply themselves merely because they don't have direct civil or criminal statutes.
Not every part of this has a direct impact today (although that's not always the case: the pronounced effort to shut down public speech does hit a lot of randos and normies, two-in-five workers deal with DEI, colleges are increasingly requiring pledges to as part of certificates or degrees most jobs now require, HR yadayah; again, I'm not doing a deep dive if this isn't the point of disagreement). Whether intentionally or not, whether the goal or not, these efforts are bad not because "laws I don't like sometimes get passed" -- in no few cases, I personally like the policy goals -- but because they drastically reduce if not outright crush disagreements in a wide variety of spaces. Worse, numerous people in the progressive movement have been quite willing to throw under the bus very people they claim to be acting for, in order to push these efforts.
I mean, I'm open to being persuaded in turn. I'd like the alternate position to be correct, where I'm just being paranoid and this stuff is all the totally-normal everyday behavior every political alignment just has to deal with, absolutely normal and absolutely possible to handle with normal persuasion. I would like an answer to increasing efforts by progressives to censor their opponents to have some possible response rather than merely to ask them not to do it, and :surprised pikachu: when that just results in it happening harder.
So I guess one answer is that I'm trying to persuade you to try and persuade me.
I am accusing you of calling my posts a "gish-gallop", and then never engaging with a single claim that you think was not a reasonable example. I'm accusing you of requesting "specific examples" and not having much to say when multiple overt examples are demonstrated. I'm accusing you of strawmanning aggressively, even and especially when responding to people who bring moderate takes.
But I can deal with all of these problems, if there's something to have as a conversation, here. Is there?
I think you often weakman my arguments like this.
I agree with this.
I'd be more equivocal about agreeing with this. There are certainly a lot of liberal institutions dedicated to deplatforming conservatives, but I don't think they have as much power as you seem to, nor do I think it's a grand Soros-like conspiracy aided and abetted by President Biden and whoever else you think is part of this "enemy action." This reminds me a bit of the radical feminists' construction of The Patriarchy. Do I agree with them that society has a patriarchal bent that often gives women the shitty end of the stick, and that there are some very dedicated misogynists who'd like to make society even more capital-P Patriarchal? Yes. Do I actually believe in a Patriarchy, acting in any kind of concerted or directed way, according to any group's design? Or that society is actually ordered as a capital-P Patriarchy? No.
And to be uncharitable? Never mind, I probably don't want to know.
Seriously, yes, it is possible that I am underestimating this. I have said that the last couple of years have pushed me - slightly - closer to your way of thinking. But I still think you, and especially FCfromSSC, the_nybbler, et al, are catastrophizing, and also suffering from presentism.
I honestly do not know. What was Scott's post about seeing evidence of ancient Atlantean highways at the bottom of the ocean, and how if you are dedicated to finding a pattern, you will find it? That is sort of what I think you are doing, and which I perhaps inelegantly referred to as a gish-gallop. You have a hundred examples of "conservatives being oppressed" you can link to on demand, and I probably don't disagree with most of those, individually, being bad. I don't "engage" with them because any one, by itself, I am probably not claiming didn't happen or wasn't an abuse of power or an example of leftist censoriousness. What I am disputing is that they add up to what you claim they do. As I said above, if I had your skills and dedication, don't you think I could drag up an equally long list of "evidence" that The Patriarchy exists, or that white supremacy is the single greatest threat to POC in society, or that trans people are the most oppressed demographic in history?
I realize that this is not an entirely satisfactory answer ("I could rebut you if I cared enough to spend the time on it") but I hope it explains why I can nod along to almost all of your examples and still not be convinced by your core argument. What would convince me of your core argument? I am not sure, but probably some sort of tipping point, some sort of event (or series of events) beyond the pale of normal politics and culture war. I understand you and FCfromSSC think those events have already occurred (e.g., the Floyd riots, Kenosha). Maybe if you lay out why you think we have already reached a tipping point, why you think there is no possibility of the pendulum swinging the other way, or even moderating, I'll be persuaded, but not by examples 1 through 50 of Wokes Gone Wild.
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I've quoted the following passage repeatedly, and argued that I find it directly relevant to the current situation in America.
The above might be where the "Gulags" point comes from; I disagree with that usage, since I think the point generalizes well beyond literal gulags, but if this is the source, the interpretation seems at least somewhat understandable.
Reading this particular quote at a young age was a notably formative experience for me, and I think the idea it expresses is directly and immediately relevant to the current political situation in America, and to most places generally.
The lesson I draw from it isn't "camps are a legitimate threat"; I learn that lesson from the last two hundred years of human history. Rather, the lesson is that if you want to fight tyranny, the correct time to fight is when you see the tyranny coming, not when it has already arrived. This generalizes to all sorts of tyranny and oppression, not merely camps.
The other end of it, though, is that there's no objective definition of "oppression". Obviously camps and gas chambers and mass graves qualify, but does being forced to wear an armband count? Does krystalnacht? Or take it from the other end: does mandatory schooling and income taxes count? One could claim that Jim Crow didn't involve camps or gas chambers, so it wasn't oppressive. One can claim that taxation is theft and public schools are slave camps, so we each have a moral imperative to burn society down. Obviously, both allowing actual tyranny and destroying the peace over the normal friction of society must be avoided, and equally obviously, there's no objective way to tell which is which. it all comes down to a judgement call, based on limited information, with severe consequences resulting from a bad call and possibly even from a good one.
It seems to me that this discussion, the whole tangled network of conversations going back years now, is about how to make that judgement call. I've found the discussion deeply fascinating, and find considerable satisfaction in revisiting the previous points made in light of new evidence over the years. It saddens me when this conversation grows acrimonious, and it saddens me more when things I've written are the cause of that.
To me, the nature of the disagreement seems obvious. The tribes have different values, so they assess wrongs and the redress required for those wrongs differently. That variance means there's a fundamental disconnect in the moral calculus required to maintain peace and prosperity. Each tribe is willing to accept things the other tribe considers abhorrent or unjust, and each tribe is willing to condemn things the other tribe considers necessary. The examples are too numerous to require enumeration: COVID policy, Trump, insurrection, BLM riots, MeToo, Trans acceptance, gay rights, abortion, gun control, the entire culture war, in short: None of these problems are unresolvable if your society enjoys homogenous values, none of them are resolvable if it does not. In the same way that small vibrations can wear away steel, even small disagreements auger out our social structures and conflict resolution mechanisms.
On the other hand, society does have some forces pushing for reconciliation and togetherness. As I understand it, @Amadan's position is that the former forces are outweighed by the latter, where mine is that the latter are outweighed by the former. My question to you would be, why expect this to be a disagreement that can be resolved by evidence? Predictions seem more useful, and this seems to be a good time for them.
Yeah, I've been trying to avoid highlighting Joe Huffman's Jews in the Attic Test, since it's a little Godwinny in its name, and I have to keep emphasizing I don't think concentration camps are a near-term concern, but there's a reason he was highlighting it for LGBT causes in the late-90s and early-00s, and it wasn't because he believed that they'd be thrown into ovens anytime soon. Some of the (unfortunately, no-longer online) debates related to some of those matters were pretty persuasive to me even as someone who was skeptical of his redline around biometrics back then.
Part of my goal is to narrow down whether that is the point of disagreement. The one you hypothesize is not an unreasonable guess as a higher-level hinge, but it's hard to match with continued emphasis on disagreement about what's happening now.
Someone could also just reject this philosophy of preemptive resistance entirely, either out of moral disagreement, or by believing that any tactical benefits would be overwhelmed by the negative publicity. Those possibilities are part of why I keep highlighting the "Obviously if I'm wrong, you'll never be able to collect, but anyway" post. One of the solutions for your dilemma of distinguishing between acceptable levels of oppression is simply to set a threshold at so high a bar you never expect to see it in real life: it's possible to completely agree on the ground facts and expected social forces, and still fall here. That's why I tried and failed the Wittgenstein knockoff.
But even movement of forces is the disagreement, these estimations on these forces and their effects are observations of the world. There's nothing magical about predictions, and I dunno how useful they'll be, without an agreement on what we'd need to expect. Someone should be -- if not as persuaded -- still reconsider their positions when they find something unexpected in history or present-day news.
More deeply, I've highlighted some predictions I've made in the past, including where I thought I was wrong. And there's not been much engagement with that, or with either when they were first posted, either; I can't tell whether that's because those specific claims wouldn't matter even if true, or because no small-scale examples could be, or because anything without statistics is Chinese Cardiology.
Or see: "(hypothetical, hypothetical, vaguely related anecdote)".
((And then there's the problem of who and how you evaluate predictions. This would have been really prescient in January 2021, but it wasn't like we had a spat of politically-motivated homicides between Sept 2020 and Jan 2021; in mid-2022 one could claim it was just the racial nationalists modulo things like that cop city snafu; in a year I'm... not optimistic that it will be so easily debatable. Do the church arsons count? Do they have to be in the United States?))
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