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PaperclipPerfector  11mo ago (text post)   27236 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 11, 2023

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On one hand, yes it does seem important in the heat of the moment, even to me! Lives really are at stake, but at a societal level a few lives lost here or there are, while absolutely tragic, the sort of thing that, while we'll say we don't like bargaining with and deem priceless, in practice we'll gamble as if they don't really matter much to us. Witness, for example, fights over making streets safer for pedestrians, which many are happy to argue against (myself included sometimes) because it'll add a minute or two to a given car trip.

Certainly, but to get down to brass tacks how many dead people will it take before it is a catastrophe? One of the more fun bits of the community is that we can break this down into QALY and similar stats without people thinking we are moral monsters.

The Culture War also has no shortage of examples of catastrophizing on all it's extremes: witness that time that our current president told Black voters that milquetoast Republican Mitt Romney would "put [them] in chains," or how using undesired pronouns is akin to genocide, or how an admittedly-neglected immigration policy is a deliberate choice by certain figures to drive "demographic replacement." I'm not going to claim there isn't a kernel of truth to those claims, but finding common ground probably requires ceding that the bigger picture being painted is pretty biased.

And so does the Israeli-palestine conflict, exaggerated claims in the bailey do not mean that the motte is indefensible.

Of course, that position does embrace mistake theory, but I personally think we're still at a point where it's viable and nobody needs to be actively coordinating meanness.

Generalized firebombing is beyond the pale at the moment, but I'd not be against something more surgical against people actively engaging in ratfucking and other anti-social behavior.

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