I didn’t assume that nor say what you’re saying I did. You’re doing exactly what I just said to minimize what you’re interpreting as a personal attack. I said people who mount those cultural hills to fight upon them tend to calculate their values that way.
Fighting on social media is known to be pointless by most people. It is not the steady state of human nature. To keep doing it, and to do it passionately, the cause must be deemed important enough to consider throwing more shit into a pile of shit worthwhile within a limited lifespan, and that value calculus usually results in the moral framework I point out. It wasn’t even my main point; it was to counter the notion that these arguments pay any respect to civility or diplomacy (I mean, look even here).
Nobody worth listening to disagrees that those are extremely important issues within our societies. Some of us believe throwing bricks at each other in comments is counterproductive and don’t subscribe to partisan politics over real social issues. Calling someone’s views problematic, particularly when it’s a restating of their original point, is otherizing and is not a path to influencing people (roughly akin to “you’re on the wrong side” without explaining why).
Put it this way: one is either waging these cultural arguments to influence the viewpoint they find disagreeable or to remove that viewpoint from the discussion. There is no third option. If the approach is “that idea is problematic,” implicitly that tack supports concluding that the goal is removal, which undermines tackling those real social issues by driving the alternative opinion to darker corners where nobody is left to influence them in the direction you’re hoping.
What you’re saying doesn’t track. To folks who mount these cultural hills, racism, classism, and sexism are adjacent to murder in severity. There is no reason to be diplomatic with a person who has offered those ideas. Why would a diplomatic way of making that allegation be necessary?
The correct answer is that it’s a shibboleth to organize, and rally, like-minded people.
Not acceptable within that person’s value system and virtues, which they’re signaling by calling it problematic. It’s an appeal to an imaginary Problematic Idea Authority that maintains a list of what people aren’t allowed to believe. When the commentary you dislike isn’t an exact fit for something readily indictable on the list, find something close that is on the list (bonus points if it involves a controversial figure), reduce and compare what’s said to that, then proceed with shooting down the proxy opinion regardless of whether your read of what the person was saying is accurate. It doesn’t matter.
Read it again. That’s precisely what happened, followed by clicking the person’s profile to move on to fundamentally shaming the person rather than the problematic idea. That’s a standard playbook in 2021 and it is absolutely not at all about what was actually said. It’s a mating dance for those with similar belief structures and the person being disagreed with is a passenger; the response is only marginally addressing the speaker.
This community can’t get enough of that conflict because the microcosm of people it represents themselves cannot. So it does well here. Other people peacock it, and before you know it, it’s our defining culture. It’s how talking about culture without disparaging other cultures gets risky, because of the pattern matching mechanic against a black and white list with no acknowledgment of grays. “You talked about race, therefore you’re racist” is increasingly logical to folks, and once that chum is in the water whatever point you may have had no longer matters.
Fighting on social media is known to be pointless by most people. It is not the steady state of human nature. To keep doing it, and to do it passionately, the cause must be deemed important enough to consider throwing more shit into a pile of shit worthwhile within a limited lifespan, and that value calculus usually results in the moral framework I point out. It wasn’t even my main point; it was to counter the notion that these arguments pay any respect to civility or diplomacy (I mean, look even here).
Nobody worth listening to disagrees that those are extremely important issues within our societies. Some of us believe throwing bricks at each other in comments is counterproductive and don’t subscribe to partisan politics over real social issues. Calling someone’s views problematic, particularly when it’s a restating of their original point, is otherizing and is not a path to influencing people (roughly akin to “you’re on the wrong side” without explaining why).
Put it this way: one is either waging these cultural arguments to influence the viewpoint they find disagreeable or to remove that viewpoint from the discussion. There is no third option. If the approach is “that idea is problematic,” implicitly that tack supports concluding that the goal is removal, which undermines tackling those real social issues by driving the alternative opinion to darker corners where nobody is left to influence them in the direction you’re hoping.
Now look around in general and tell me I’m wrong.