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PaperclipPerfector  3d ago (text post)   13177 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 14, 2026

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This speech is more wide-reaching, but I wouldn’t call it anti-Semitic, because he explicitly says he is not criticizing Jews or Israelis but the genocide itself (implicitly its undertakers, who don’t include every Jew or Israeli citizen).

"I'm explicitly not criticizing X group, just the bad ones" is... not generally a great defense, even though it may be very common.

Is it a defense seen typically on the left? ACAB, etc.

I remember it being taken apart in the classic Radicalizing the Romanceless post:

It was wrong of me to say I hate poor minorities. I meant I hate Poor Minorities! Poor Minorities is a category I made up that includes only poor minorities who complain about poverty or racism.

No, wait! I can be even more charitable! A poor minority is only a Poor Minority if their compaints about poverty and racism come from a sense of entitlement. Which I get to decide after listening to them for two seconds. And If they don’t realize that they’re doing something wrong, then they’re automatically a Poor Minority.

I dedicate my blog to explaining how Poor Minorities, when they’re complaining about their difficulties with poverty or asking why some people like Paris Hilton seem to have it so easy, really just want to steal your company’s money and probably sexually molest their co-workers. And I’m not being unfair at all! Right? Because of my new definition! I know everyone I’m talking to can hear those Capital Letters. And there’s no chance whatsoever anyone will accidentally misclassify any particular poor minority as a Poor Minority. That’s crazy talk! I’m sure the “make fun of Poor Minorities” community will be diligently self-policing against that sort of thing. Because if anyone is known for their rigorous application of epistemic charity, it is the make-fun-of-Poor-Minorities community!

I’m not even sure I can dignify this with the term “motte-and-bailey fallacy”. It is a tiny Playmobil motte on a bailey the size of Russia.

Yes. It's the argument they're making when they deny that the dogged insistence on using the term "toxic masculinity" in specific and their steadfast refusal to even entertain alternative terminology isn't an attempt to marry the concept of masculinity to being inherently toxic, but that they are only criticising the toxic aspects of masculinity.

You know, like how if you turned on the car radio and it started playing One Direction, and my response was "ugh, I hate shitty pop music" you'd naturally assume that I ordinarily love pop music and I'm only singling out specific bands in particular, and definitely not talking about the genre as a whole.

'Not all men', wasn't from the left and was the response to some of the 'toxic masculinity' nonsense.

I don't recall the parsing of toxic vs non-toxic aspects of masculinity.

I don't think your example works? I like pop music, but I hate shitty pop music. I guess if I only ever say 'shitty' and 'pop music' together that would be strange, not sure that's the case with masculinity and the left though depends who you are referring to.

It works fine. The normal English reading of that line is that "shitty" refers to the category of "pop music", rather than creating a subclass.

I've heard this language pattern being called "a cat coupling". Or in more academic terms, a modifier being plausibly both a restrictive and a non-restrictive one.

Thinking about it more, I feel like there's some cultural effect in play, something like the adjective ordering OSASCOMP rule. Just cold opening with "I hate shitty pop music" sounds like a complaint about the category of pop music. The version that refers to a subclass is something that would be said as a clarification in an ongoing discussion. "Don't you hate pop music?" "I hate shitty pop music. This song is great."

No, it's ambiguous and how you'd interpret it would depend on the speaker and context. It could be said by someone who absolutely loves pop music. A true opera lover might well hate shitty opera more than anyone.

I think in the latter case you would italicize the "shitty". Your reading only works if that one word is particularly stressed.

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