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PaperclipPerfector  6mo ago (text post)   35552 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 16, 2025

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Main query: Are the blackbagging tactics of ICE a necessary evil, a dangerous overstep, or some nuanced in-between?

Main answer: None of the above. The ICE tactics you describe are not blackbagging by standards that would have been applied outside of Trump.

Ending query: Assuming (for the sake of this question) that the end goal of this administration is to establish a type of authoritarianism where people are kidnapped and disappeared because of vocal opposition to the regime, what should be the response by the opposition that would want to prevent that?

Touching grass and recognizing that if you have to assume for the sake of argument that the outgroup is uber-boo, then you are admitting that the outgroup is not, in fact, uber-boo.

If the outgroup was uber-boo, you would not need to assume the conclusion for the sake of the argument, nor would you need to change standards to invoke pejoratives. Instead, there are years of precedent in of people not being disappeared for vocal opposition to the regime.

Conversely, acting on a false consensus that the outgroup is uber-boo, and then taking actions that merit a corresponding response in even a non-boo context, will instead be viewed as confirmation bias that the outgroup is uber-boo. Thus self-justifying more actions that do warrant detention from even non-boo actors.

These detentions, in turn, would be prevented by not perpetuating false perceptions that the outgroup is uber-boo meriting detention-worthy opposition.

I can tell by the lack of responses that this comment didn't really resonate with anyone else either.

Is this just "Nothing ever happens, stop overreacting" in more words?

I can tell by the lack of responses that this comment didn't really resonate with anyone else either.

Looks at OP vote count of -10 at time of writing.

Looks at response vote count of +29 at same time.

Raises eyebrow

It's been awhile since I last saw someone try and pull a 'no one agrees with you' bandwagon fallacy from a nearly 40 vote deficit and from negative resonance.

Is this just "Nothing ever happens, stop overreacting" in more words?

No, it is 'words have meanings, and making false accusations don't make them true.'

False accusations can, however, push people towards motivated reasoning sillyness where they confuse the justified response to their sillyness as tyranny.

Putting everything else aside, flexing your upvote count on someone is profoundly cringe

Especially as this site has a pretty strong ideological bias, and like literally every website with voting, voting is 100% indicative of in-group/out-group agreement/disagreement and is largely unrelated to comment quality

I agree, which is why I didn't raise the issue or make an argument based off it. Eliot did, and did so as part of a wave of next-day response posts to dismiss objectors. The 'I can tell your post didn't resonate with anyone else' only works as a dismissal if a lack of 'resonance' is indicative of quality.

I am quite happy to agree that voting is tangential to quality. I also agree with you that it is 100% indicative of agreement/disagreement. An exceptionally high degree of agreement is the evidence of 'resonance' that makes eliot's attempted engagement flex, well, eyebrow worthy.

After all, if there's one thing more cringe than a dude-bro conspicuously flexing how they can pick up heavy weights, it is someone trying to do the same with light weights. It is all of the same arrogance, but none of the capacity.

"Nothing ever happens" is a completely valid sentiment, more valid than all the proclamations of all the academic experts combined, in fact. Also, people don't chime in with "I agree" comments over here. People only responds in agreement, when a comment is exceedingly insightful, otherwise they tend to respond with disagreements, which you can observe in this very instance.

I agree

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