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Culture War Roundup for the week of January 15, 2024

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I've ridden a lot of subways and never seen a schizophrenic attack anyone, so I'm going to be reluctant to agree that I have some Ivory-tower blindspot in my own knowledge of the subject. Be loud and annoying and smelly, sure, but that's not the same thing, especially when we're talking about justifications for killing them.

I would agree that I have a blindspot to some type of worldview where that is a default assumption about how the world works, where there's a belief that deadly attacks on subways happen all the time and it's a huge failing that the government hasn't stopped them and every citizen needs to be armed and ready to deploy deadly force against them at all times. Or whatever your actually position here is, for being the only concrete example you give you really don't spend much time outlining it.

But I really do believe that worldview is just factually wrong, my personal experiences and those of other people I know who ride the subway seem to confirm it, I'm not aware of any stats that contradict it and if they were shockingly strong I would sort of expect to know it.

Which brings us back to the point that it seems like you're making two different claims here, 1. that liberals are blind to the ways that non-liberals view and think about the world, in ways that lead to communication breakdowns and strife, and 2. that liberals are blind to portions of empirical reality that they can't/won't acknowledge.

1 is trivially true, and I would say fully bi-directional; it's just a description of what the culture war is, more or less, or even just what tribalism is more generally.

2 requires actual examples to back it up, and I don't buy it from the only one you give.

Schizophrenic attacks are just the worst part of a class of associated antisocial behaviors. Along with X number of actual attacks go X * *Y numbers of pools of urine on the subway, X * Z incidents of verbal harassment, etc. which are on a continuum of "how bad can people behave" that has schizophrenic attacks as one of its endpoints.

Sure, but we were talking about extrajudicial killings here.

I agree that those other things exist, but so do liberals. I and they have lots of proposals to fix those things, which conservatives have variously opposed for decades or centuries. That's not a blind spot, at most it's policy disagreement.

Hlynka was using a specific discussion he had with a specific person about a specific killing to say that liberals have a blind spot about why a private citizen might need to kill someone on the subway and why that's justified and heroic. I don't see a connection between that and public urination, unless you can explain it more clearly.

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