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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   32853 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 5, 2026

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Pointing out that "What's so bad about tyranny?" is coming from someone who will benefit from tyranny is not bulverism.

Except that isn’t what the other poster did. The poster said we are so worried about tyranny that we don’t worry about anarchy enough and anarchy is worse than tyranny.

That is not what you ascribed to the other poster.

This reminds me of Peterson’s complaint that we have a lot of antibodies for when the right goes too far but none for when the left goes too far.

This reminds me of Peterson’s complaint that we have a lot of antibodies for when the right goes too far but none for when the left goes too far.

Why does he discount the rather obvious examples of Pinochet and Franco, for example? Genuine question, as I'm not familiar with his work in detail.

Pinochet was pretty objectively good for the lower class in Chile though, so this critique, in in context, makes no sense. If you were complaining about the fates of egghead professors, then perhaps it makes more sense.

OP's point was specifically about scenarios where the Left goes too far, which is arguably what happened under Allende's rule. My critique regarding this is thus that "we" do have at least one example of an antidote.

But Amadan's retort is we can't look at who benefits from tyranny (allegedly the wealthy entitled people) and ignore those who it oppresses (the poor). But that assertion is just untrue.

Fair point but Spanish and not Anglo world.

Interestingly people like Pinochet don’t command near the cultural respect as say Fidel despite Pinochet leaving Chile a lot better off compared to Fidel in Cuba.

Right. Seemed a non-sequitur to go from that post to "guess you're cool with police tyranny." To steelman Amadan, that is exactly what you'd do if you're intelligent about politics and sensitive to the implications of its arguments. To strawman, it's a hysterically paranoid progressive reflex.

I like that Peterson point. I sometimes feel my niche or role in the conversational eco-system is to provide antibodies for the left, as the right is already vigilantly watched (in this sense, being correct in absolute sense is less important than providing some balance). I think Matt Taibbi made a similar point about why he's journalistically more fixated on areas of rule not under Republican control.

Pointing out that "What's so bad about tyranny?" is coming from someone who will benefit from tyranny is not bulverism.

Looks like a textbook case to me. Wikipedia:

The Bulverist presumes that a speaker's argument is false or invalid and then explains why the speaker made that argument (even if said argument is actually correct) by attacking the speaker or the speaker's motive

Bulverism is only bulverism if it side-steps the speaker's argument entirely. Arguing that the speaker's motives caused them to make a reasoning error at a particular step in the chain is not bulverism. As I understood it, @2rafa argued that "so-called 'tyranny' short of North Korea isn't worthy of the name, because in practice it's very easy for ordinary people to live with unless they actively go out of their way to antagonize the regime"; and @Amadan retorted "no, in fact you are over-generalizing from the experience of a privileged few; living under USSR-style tyranny is very disruptive to actual ordinary people's everyday lives even if they keep their heads down, it's only the upper-middle-class who might get by alright if they're apolitical enough".

Bulverism is only bulverism if it side-steps the speaker's argument entirely. Arguing that the speaker's motives caused them to make a reasoning error at a particular step in the chain is not bulverism. As I understood it, @2rafa argued that "so-called 'tyranny' short of North Korea isn't worthy of the name, because in practice it's very easy for ordinary people to live with unless they actively go out of their way to antagonize the regime"; and @Amadan retorted "no, in fact you are over-generalizing from the experience of a privileged few; living under USSR-style tyranny is very disruptive to actual ordinary people's everyday lives even if they keep their heads down, it's only the upper-middle-class who might get by alright if they're apolitical enough".

Would you mind taking the post I was responding to and quoting the part which is NOT an attack on the previous poster's motivations? TIA.

I will grant you that this post, taken out of context, was very easy to interpret as straight bulverism. It's Amadan's original, longer reply to 2rafa which I believe can be more charitably interpreted as a more valid argument.

I will grant you that this post, taken out of context, was very easy to interpret as straight bulverism. It's Amadan's original, longer reply to 2rafa which I believe can be more charitably interpreted as a more valid argument.

I'm not sure I understand. Are you able to (1) take the post I was responding to; and (2) quote the part which is NOT an attack on the previous poster's motivations?

I am not, but I don't feel I have a duty to do so, because the post you were responding to is not the one I was defending in the first place. If you want more than that, take it up with Amadan.

I am not, but I don't feel I have a duty to do so, because the post you were responding to is not the one I was defending in the first place.

I clicked on your links and your point doesn't make much sense, but as far as I can tell, the most charitable interpretation is that you were attacking a strawman.

All fair points. I don’t discount the risk of tyranny - North Korea scares me, too. But I also think a lot of our understanding of life being awful in eg the Soviet Union or Maoist China (an understanding that is generally accurate, I think) is because of the terrible ideological choices and economic system that led directly to famine, starvation, poverty, lack of material goods and squalor. Even the extreme violence of the Cultural Revolution - which was bottom-up, not top-down the way that totalitarian state-performed violence is - was part of this.

In fact, the kind of people who were really likely to be persecuted by the KGB were largely what passed for the Soviet upper and upper middle class, people “like me” if you want to take that line of argument, who worked in state administration, running large enterprises, academia, media and so on. Most average working class people had very different problems.

This is true; but then one might argue that the ability to pursue terrible ideologically-driven policies absolutely unconstrained is a key danger of tyranny, not something else that various tyrannies happened to do by coincidence.

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