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Notes -
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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