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PaperclipPerfector  2d ago (text post)   9196 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 19, 2025

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Basically, I think there's a kind of motte-and-bailey inherent in political discourse that purports to be telos-based. Your argument draws its rhetorical force from its tautological conclusion. Reality is going to be reality whether we like it or not - the dictatorship of the universe is absolute - if you have a penis then you can't wish it away. But, by definition, nothing which humans can achieve, nothing we can physically implement, is ever going to be in defiance of "the dictatorship of the universe". Gender reassignment surgery doesn't break the laws of physics. If I have a penis I "have to be male" as a biological trait - in the logical sense of "have to" - but that has no bearing on whether I "have to" wear a suit and tie rather than a skirt, which I clearly can physically do.

When conservatives appeal to a telos they aren't saying that things are against the laws of physics. This isn't even close, I mean have you read the Bible at all? Humans do things that are sinful and bad all the time, so much so thta God sends a flood to basically wipe most of us out.

God gave humans freedom to act as He had, and we can choose to do evil things. That's religion 101, even outside of Abrahamic faiths. The point is that if you continue to miss the mark, you will eventually reap what you sow.

When conservatives appeal to a telos they aren't saying that things are against the laws of physics.

I'm not saying they do. I'm saying that, when arguing that the concept is intuitively correct, they appeal to the tautological inability to do impossible things - to actually rewrite physical reality - and then act like that should generalize to the full theological concept of telos. I think this is rhetorically disingenuous.

Appeal to the tautological impossibility hmm. Can you give me an example? I don’t see the point of appealing to something like that if you think it’s impossible anyway.

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