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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   27425 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 28, 2025

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As the highly official representative for "this place", I conclusively answer your questions with

  • No.
  • Possibly to some extent, but in between implications lost in hostile interpretation and and the high probability that the defintions are doctored specifically to serve the argument here, I'd say not enough to allow for an actual yes. The strictly correct answer seems to be "Yes if you want to, else no.".
  • 120% word games. I mean, your entire setup here is...weird.

Here's a suggestion: If you want to know what people here think on individualism and meritocracy, then just plain open a discussion about individualism and/or meritocracy. If instead you try to play semantic games with highly controversial public figures in order to attempt getting a blanket statement describing the ideological degeneracy of "most posters" here...I dunno, seems crooked.

But I don't care much about American politics, so I'm probably not the target demographic.

In summary, I just wished you had started a more open-ended discussion instead of laying out bait, no matter how openly you did that.

Part of the problem with just opening a discussion on "individualism and meritocracy" is that these are very fuzzy and connotationally charged words. It's therefore best to talk about specific examples as much as possible---this was just a relevant one that's somewhat timely. Any specific example is going to have a billion imperfections and distractions, but I really think it's still better to be concrete. If your quibble is that I picked a bad example, maybe you have a better one in mind?

I also think there's an huge difference between saying "most posters here are ideologically degenerate" in some absolute sense and saying "I have the impression that most posters here have values that are incompatible with my own for these reasons, am I right or wrong about this?".

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