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PaperclipPerfector  3d ago (text post)   15243 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 25, 2025

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For everyone else, the police statement, local skepticism, and sociological context should nudge your priors at least a little.

I think that sums up my stance, and is, in fact, what I actually said. I am not leaning uncritically on the police report, I consider it significant, but I have taken pains to explain the local sociocultural milieu.

Just like trusting a random dude on social media, trusting official sources is just outsourcing your critical thinking to people that have repeatedly proven themselves unworthy of that trust.

Also lol at the idea distrusting the authorities is the modern equivalent of a witch hunt. Was it Matthew Hopkins Witchfinder Footsoldier? Who ran the Spanish inquisition again?

The fuck? Scott has a point about "bounded distrust". Governments, and their official mouthpieces are neither infinitely trustworthy nor untrustworthy. You can throw just about anything Pyongyang says into the trash, other nations command more credibility. Britain is not North Korea.

If firefighters ask you to evacuate your building because of a gas leak, don't tell me you're going to go lighting matches to see for yourself, because you don't trust a damn thing The Man tells you.

What is that I imagine hearing you say? I'm strawmanning you? Then I'd invite you to reconsider attempting to brand me as someone slavishly dependent on the "official" take.

I don't consider that strawmanning, I consider it a misunderstanding of my position. It does illustrate my point though. I would not light matches to see for myself, no, because a fire-fighter telling me there is a gas leak in my building is an immediate authority dealing with an ongoing situation. A police department's press office is a completely different animal, they are engaged in narrative control after the fact. Conflating the two and suggesting they require the same level of compliance... I don't have a brand, I have a label maker and OCD.

Anyway my point is that Pyongyang or London, lumping official statements in with facts and logic is downright insidious. As for 'nudging your priors at least a little' if that is indeed all you meant and it wasn't an ironic 'OBVIOUSLY this is the correct take' line, then you should think about how you write everything else in your post, especially the faux wistful "Of course, if you prefer your axes in the hands of twelve-year-olds fighting imaginary Bulgarian sex pests, I suppose nothing I write will convince you otherwise." that follows it. That is not the language of the thoughtful truth seeker, it is the language of the partisan drawing battle lines.

You began with your preferred narrative - "little ned girls harassed a dude who didn't deserve it" - and then assembled your evidence to support it, deploying the official statement as a key soldier in your army. That is the same thing the telegram denizens do. The exact same thing. You are outsourcing your critical thinking to people who don't deserve it.

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