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PaperclipPerfector  9mo ago (text post)   18980 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 29, 2024

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as per any slander, it's a bunch of lies and mischaracterization built around a true seed of a real event

Thanks for pointing out the seed. Now, the actual claim being made:

I was radicalized by interacting with the kind of progressive who calls people racist for not believing Jussie Smollet and then refuses to acknowledge the case ever again once it becomes apparent that they've made a booboo.

Nowhere there or anywhere else do I call anyone racist for doubting the claim, or call anyone on the board racist. In fact, in the thread you link I have a later post explicitly saying it would be stupid to call anyone racist for those reasons, and I was asking for the people who were calling people racist in an analogized incident about a highschool debate to stop calling people racist using that type of logic.

And we have had this discussion with me talking about my mistake of getting drawn in and believing there must be some truth to the story several times on the old subreddit (mostly that I didn't think cops would fail to correct misstatements about gross physical evidence of injury, updated on that now). The idea that I haven't is, again, just a meme spread by some people who seem really devoted to cultivating ad hominems instead of addressing my actual arguments, for whatever reason.

So, like I said: the core of a true event, but then the parts that are actually the most damning accusations are just lies.

Standard tactics which I would expect people around here to recognize by now, but no, not when the target is chosen properly.

Nowhere there or anywhere else do I call anyone racist for doubting the claim, or call anyone on the board racist.

Hm...

And, yeah, this is white fragility. In a week when two white kids lost a highschool debate for quoting Ben Shapiro, and also a week where a black homosexual was severely beaten with a rope tied around his neck while the attackers yelled homophobic and racist slurs and yelled 'MAGA Country', which one did we spend 3x as many comments talking about? When some people can't walk down the street without fear of violence, why is this tiny incident apparently so much more worthy of our notice and concern?

While earlier:

But I'll say this, for those who aren't aware: part of the standard progressives critique of classical liberalism - ie 'lets be blind to differences' - is that, in practice, it always ends up favoring those already in power and reinforcing existing power structures, and that when there are 'accidental' deviations from the maxim of blindness, they always coincidentally seem to involve hurting minorities and those without structural power. See What was Liberalism, especially section 2 starting around 3:30.

So while it's off the mark to directly call this sort of classic liberalism 'racist', the steelman accusation is that it has a tendency to favor the continuation of racist structures if such things just happen to already exist. And the corollary is that any public intellectual who talks about these issues should be aware of this tendency because this is a pretty basic and old critique. And the corollary to that is that the people who stridently ignore this problem and pretend it doesn't exist, are probably doing so for motivated reasons... which is where we come to the accusations of racism and the relevance of pointing out the demographics of the speaker.

You not saying it, just implying it favors the continuation of structures that do it... well, if you want @somedude to issue a mea culpa and say "the kind of progressive who calls people racist makes two-faced and not-especially-subtle insinuations people are racist", hope you enjoy that. I'm sure they'll love the opportunity to say it twice. But it's a pretty weak defense.

And we have had this discussion with me talking about my mistake of getting drawn in and believing there must be some truth to the story several times on the old subreddit (mostly that I didn't think cops would fail to correct misstatements about gross physical evidence of injury, updated on that now).

That's closer (perhaps I missed the 'several'), though it rather failed to engage with your original position.

You not saying it, just implying it favors the continuation of structures that do it...

Literally what are you talking about, the second post is referring to a highschool debate, nothing about that comment invokes the Smollet case or anyone on the board or anything related to the claim against me here. I would accuse you of taking me out of context to try to trick people, except I think you're competent to do a better job if that's what you were trying to do and wouldn't link to the source, so I'm honestly baffled.

Once again: the accusation was 'calls people racist for not believing Jussie Smollet'. Not, 'says that the steelman position that some highschool students were grasping at is that classical liberalism is not well-suited to dismantle existing historical elements of structural racism'.

I believe you can tell the difference.

I would accuse you of taking me out of context to try to trick people,

But you'd look ridiculous when he's giving the links to the conversations in question, so anyone can check the context for themselves.

...yeah, literally the next thing I said in that sentence you are quoting one section of.

Which is incredibly funny.

Good job if that was an intentional joke, I guess.

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