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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   31012 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 15, 2023

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"Nuance" in this case is a trick. It's a way to map a yes-or-no, guilty or not-guilty question onto a spectrum such that "guilty" is all but one of the endpoints and "not guilty" is the excluded endpoint. Then demand no one take the endpoint positions because they're not nuanced. Then all the acceptable positions get to map back to "guilty".

That is, once you're talking about "nuance", you've decided Penny is guilty and you're only talking about his level of guilt.

No, when I say nuance I mean actual nuance, not what you are talking about.

I can think about this matter with actual nuance, and I am sure that several people I know in real life also can.

I can imagine more information coming in about what happened and, based on that information, deciding that Penny is not guilty of anything at all. That is, I have not ruled out deciding that Penny is guilty of nothing. Based on the information I have seen so far I think it is likely that he is at least slightly guilty in the sense of being guility of using too much force, but I can imagine more information changing my mind about that.

The position described by The_Nybbler accounts for your type of "actual nuance".

To put my spin on it, I think it's important to recognize ones own biases and contextualize ones own thinking process. That doesn't mean our views and opinions stop being relevant or valuable, as much as they ever were. In fact, recognizing what we think and how we likely came to think it changes very little.

But on the flipside, recognizing that our minds are, most of the time, just playing third rate magician parlor tricks does wonders to help oneself realize that we are in fact not bending the laws of physics and we can in fact not read minds. We knew the card drawn was going to be the ace of spades because every card in the deck was the ace of spades because we, at some point, through whatever process, chose that deck to perform with.

To put that in context, here's your deck:

I think here is the key: some witnesses report that Neely was throwing trash at people. If that was actually the case, then I think that it was reasonable for Penny or anyone else to attempt to restrain Neely. If Neely was just ranting and threw nothing, then I am not so sure. This is all aside from the other question of whether Penny's particular method of restraint was reasonable.

The parameters of your 'nuance' are not accidental. They are not tethered to some objective metric linked to the fabric of reality. They are chosen by you. Now why did you choose them? Do you think it is likely Neely was throwing trash at people? I don't.

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