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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   32975 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.

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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