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PaperclipPerfector  10mo ago (text post)   26352 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 8, 2024

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One of the common failure modes of liberalism is to assume that being good means being nice when the truth is that sometimes the best and most compassionate thing you can do for someone is to tell them "Get your fucking shit together dude"

This calls to mind "The only Theodore Dalrymple article anyone reads", as Scott Alexander described it. It starts:

Not long ago I asked a patient of mine how he would describe his own character. He paused for a moment, as if savoring a delicious morsel.

"I take people as they come," he replied in due course. "I'm very nonjudgmental."

As his two roommates had recently decamped, stealing his prize possessions and leaving him with ruinous debts to pay, his neutrality toward human character seemed not generous but stupid, a kind of prophylactic against learning from experience. Yet nonjudgmentalism has become so universally accepted as the highest, indeed the only, virtue that he spoke of his own character as if pinning a medal for exceptional merit on his own chest.

Thanks for sharing. It's depressing to read about his patients. Surely, after twenty years of beatings and still not escaping, you and your broken brain chemistry actually enjoy it?

I also didn't see the author suggest that his patients are nonjudgmental because they know they themselves are deeply flawed, which means it's far safer to proclaim oneself above judgment in either direction. The accomplished and strong woman doesn't find herself in the same situation in part because she doesn't live in a glass house and so can readily cast stones.

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