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naraburns  nihil supernum  3yr ago (text post)   37938 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 6, 2023

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I don't see you addressing popocatepetl's material point. The British were not slaves. They did not decide to free them due to the slaves' coercion, threats and censorship of anti-slave ideas. They argued and one day they agreed to free them. This very important issue of 'who are people' was settled by arguing. Ergo, less arguing, less freed slaves.

You're losing me with your analogy, what does (what I assume is ) a chomskyist take on US anticommunist misdeeds have to do with this. Yeah the british imposed abolition by force in a dirty imperialist way, and you and I believe that is a great thing.

To get back to them, who said it needed to threaten them and destabilize their society? A good deed doesn't count unless it leaves you destitute and maimed? It did cost them a lot of money and effort. Please reconcile that with your view that only the use of raw power by the people whose personhood is denied results in change. You want censorship? But at the time, the notables and 'good people' in their society were probably much more likely to want to ban pro-slave views.

I'll just quote Scott:

Logical debate has one advantage over narrative, rhetoric, and violence: it’s an asymmetric weapon. That is, it’s a weapon which is stronger in the hands of the good guys than in the hands of the bad guys. In ideal conditions (which may or may not ever happen in real life) – the kind of conditions where everyone is charitable and intelligent and wise – the good guys will be able to present stronger evidence, cite more experts, and invoke more compelling moral principles. The whole point of logic is that, when done right, it can only prove things that are true.

Violence is a symmetric weapon; the bad guys’ punches hit just as hard as the good guys’ do. It’s true that hopefully the good guys will be more popular than the bad guys, and so able to gather more soldiers. But this doesn’t mean violence itself is asymmetric – the good guys will only be more popular than the bad guys insofar as their ideas have previously spread through some means other than violence. Right now antifascists outnumber fascists and so could probably beat them in a fight, but antifascists didn’t come to outnumber fascists by winning some kind of primordial fistfight between the two sides. They came to outnumber fascists because people rejected fascism on the merits.

I don't know why you want to jettison our beautiful weapons for some ugly ones.

I guess it’s a matter of scale I my opinion. I find the the political personhood of ~50% of the population to be more compelling and important then the material disposition of the great great great failsons of European warlords. I suspect this is a belief shared by a vast majority of people who even spare the old nobility a thought.

Your continuing to define the issue at hand as "personhood of 50% of the population" is compelling to you but not to others past, present, and future who consider the rights in question social constructions. Those progeny of Charlemagne likewise defined their cause in grandiose terms, which we now dismiss.

99% of humans ever alive would find your and my values completely disgusting.

I should continue to restate my point lest it get lost in the weeds. Culture wars are serious. Everyone is always fighting for their fucking life. If you feel there's something uniquely monstrous about the anti-feminist position opposed to you, it's because you have until this point been sheltered from the high stakes of other culture wars in history.

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