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They exist as a useful abstraction over the interests and actions of many individuals; i. e. they exist on the Map, but not in the Territory.
Again, only as an abstraction.
Sort of. In terms of who gets listed in the 'factors leading to' paragraph in the history texts, it is reasonable to list $GROUP did $THING. In terms of who ought to suffer Consequences, one has a duty to make finer distinctions; e. g., it is not appropriate to blame or ostracise an individual liberal for the murder of Mr Kirk if the liberal in question did not, after said murder, continue to call for violence against 'Nazis' without being clear which right-wing figures do and, more importantly, do not fall under that label.
And yet, our society has been built on a sharply limited willingness to make such finer distinctions, in both war and peace, for the entirety of its existence and right down to the present day. I observe that such fine distinctions have been remarkably rare when it seemed desirable to coordinate consequences against my tribe for its perceived misdeeds. We've had affirmative action for generations. We've had hate-crime laws for generations. We've firebombed cities in wartime, we've bombed weddings in the present day. Justice has been apportioned in collective terms for generations, and routinely still is.
It appears to me that most liberals fail that test, but leave that aside. Why should I even bother to disagree with this statement, as opposed to simply selectively quoting it verbatim when the shoe is on the other foot? I readily agree that it will be highly inappropriate to discuss any concept of Red Tribe's collective responsibility for the hypothetical future murder or abuse of Blue Tribers. I readily agree that the correct response to such attempts is a retreat into a fog of abstractions. In the meantime, it's very important that we take Online Radicalism and Stochastic Terrorism very seriously, and provide accountability to those who foment hate and extremism, so long as all definitions used in this process are mine and mine alone. If that seems like a bad system to you (and it should), you probably should have won the fight against Blue's attempts at full-spectrum social dominance. But neither you nor others won that fight; to the limited extent it was won, it was won by people like me, who burned most of our principles to make it happen. If on the other hand you considered their push for full-spectrum social dominance distasteful and gauche but ultimately acceptable, it seems to me that the correct response is to invite you to consider my tribe's pursuit of dominance in a similar manner.
...Or to speak more plainly, it's not even that you're wrong, it's just that you are incapable of drawing these distinctions fairly, much less enforcing them on society as a whole. Your principles may or may not be wrong, but they are certainly irrelevant because they have never and will never be implemented in the real world. What is, is.
Society has been built on a lot of things for the entirety of its existence and right down to the then-present day, until people started to realise that it was wrong.
The Industrial Revolution greatly facilitated this process, which is why I consider degrowthism/primitivism/anticivilisationism to be unwise on the level of tickling a sleeping dragon.
I do not like the wokists' excesses either; that's why I came here!
Because many (of at least the central examples of) hate crimes have two parts: the direct victimisation of one or a few individuals (e. g. a Black person beaten after registering to vote), and the threat to thousands or millions of others (other Black people deciding whether they ought to register to vote).
Which, if you are referring to Dresden and Tokyo, I do not condone. (If we hadn't done so, we could've added charges for Coventry to the Nuremberg Trials.)
When Columbus sailed the ocean blue, communication faster than a horse or sailing ship had never been implemented in the real world.
Freeing women from the drudgery of hand-washing clothes had never been implemented in the real world.
Eradicating an infectious disease had never been implemented in the real world.
In other words,
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