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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   34499 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 6, 2023

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IS MY CLASH WITH THEMOTTE POSTERS PURELY VALUE BASED

Let's assume that your poorly-developed, unsourced arguments are all 100% true. They're not, and throwing music and novels in there is almost absurd enough to suggest parody, but I don't want to deal with your Gish gallop, so I'm going to use my imagination.

Why should I care? If, as you seem to think, [redacted] are unfeeling automata who may neither comprehend art nor build genuine rapport...I'm not seeing the problem. Explain to me why the existence of such people is a bad thing. From: @netstack

17 upvotes!

Now, the fascinating thing about this post is it takes my position far further than I could ever imagine doing so and then confronts me with a person who claims it would be irrelevant if this extreme position were fully true. That "unfeeling automata" might, if representing a substantial portion of your elite, convert your somewhat free country into a nightmare where you never saw an unmasked face again, seems not to bother him in the slightest.

Now I'd be tempted to ignore this as a one-off but then there's this response to my comment on foot-binding.

"...Furthermore, similar laundry lists of objectionable practices would be possible to assemble concerning any race of people or, indeed, of the human race. Even assuming the Chinese are every bit as bad as you say, that doesn't make them special.** Even assuming the [redacted] are every bit as bad as you say**, that doesn't make them special." - naraburns

Now this is fascinating to me, because while I can intuitively understand the conditions leading to things like genocide, or more to the point physical child abuse, footbinding falls within the entirely alien moral universe world to me. Given the choice between an otherwise loving family who bound my feet, and an otherwise violent one that didn't I cannot possibly imagine choosing the latter. I'm pretty sure this isn't just my gender speaking for another gender, and I'm more than willing to entertain what might be considered misogynistic thinking. Yet @DaseIndustries hits me with this.

"...Read some interviews of surviving women from traditional families who have had that done to them, see what they think of it."

Now, I don't doubt that someone of Dase's intellectual caliber understands why the testimony of a person, victimized irreperably by loved ones, in a cultural context where this was normal; might be less than reliable. So I'm left, once again with the feeling that our underlying basic instincts must just be different in some way. How would we go about figuring out whether this is the case?

  • -28

We don't need to figure anything out, it's clearly not just values because this post is bothersome to me on its face because it has very little context, is continuing an argument but also ignoring the argument to deflect disagreements as ad hoc or something, I'm not even sure because you're making vague insinuations here that I also can't parse even after realizing who you are and what it is you're talking about.

We don't live inside your brain and the way this was posted doesn't make that apparent. So, yes, clearly there are problems beyond just disagreeing with your values. But does this matter? Even understanding this post I'm left wondering what you're even trying to do here. Are you posting this because you want the answer? Because I'm sure you can strike a nerve and get more agitated responses than usual depending on the topic but there's clearly something more than that and it's not even the previous posts that made it clear but it's this post. Whatever drove you to make this post and to keep it so vague as if we all know about you and your arguments is probably partly the reason why people are reacting harsher than you think they should to you.

So, maybe think about why this post exists, why it needed to be made so long after those arguments have basically died, why you didn't link to any of the quotes or preface with what it is you were arguing about. And I know it's not fair because sometimes your personal overton window bugbear will bug other people immensely more than their's would you but if you want to get people to react less aggressive or dismissive toward you the first step is to be conscientious in general and avoid examples of how people phrase things as consensus building or culture warring, even if you disagree the examples you'd get from a search might just help you understand what to avoid when framing your position or just, in general, constructing something that someone else is going to read. Like I said before, we're not in your brain and we don't have your brain. But don't treat us like we're stupid even if we are.

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