Lets talk about this post by scott. I can’t be the only one who thought it was weird. Like 2 big subjects (*) are not mentioned at all.
Like one of these subjects is such a big thing in American politics right now (at least from my filter bubble, considering people already got killed taking action against it) how can you not talk about that subject in a post like this.
And because it is boring and a gotcha, I’m not going to talk about the circular part of the argument. The, lets take a stance against calling people liars which makes people calling other liars the real liars. (E: also didn’t mention that this whole post was started because somebody said ‘hey perhaps we all are biassed towards think AGI is just around the corner and people are lying to us’. It is good scott addressed the central point of that argument there /s )
*: After thinking about the post, I realized that one of the big subjects, I thought was missing, is mentioned in the opening statement, but the bad word is taboo’d and not mentioned in the whole post. And suddenly the first section makes a lot more sense, who has a long discussion about the term abuse? And because I’m obnoxious, im also going to taboo both terms I thought were missing and only talk about them vaguely, so you can figure them out.
Am I the only one who had this experience reading this? Is this just very bad timing on scotts part and nobody in his social circle is talking about it?
E: btw, the title of the post is just a reference to faulty towers btw, I realize I shouldn’t drop 40 year old pop culture references anymore.
Why do I feel like he’s talking about his own thoughts on trump here? But what if you had some way to look at all the “lies” together, like each lie could update your belief that someone is a liar. If only something like that existed 🤷🏻♂️
the premise here is pretty clear: abusing language bad, abusing people ok.
i mean, the us court system describes biased employmemt decisions a pretext all the time. the supreme court just did it a few weeks ago in a differentsituation. pretext is just a nice word for lie but maybe synonyms make him happy?
love the “I’m cheating by shifting from abuse to abusers” acknowledgement in section 1, followed up by constantly shifting from lie to liar.
Scott acknowledges that “bad actors” are a thing, but apparently can only conceive of bad faith being used against people with sincerely-held beliefs, no mention of the use of “sincerely-held beliefs” as a guise for derailing discussion, JAQ’ing off, and/or shielding fascist talking points from criticism by trying to move the question of whether we should treat people equally into the realm of the subjective. That sort of bad faith, hiding-your-power-level bullshit is absolutely a form of lying, it saturated the CW thread before it became The Motte and abandoned most of that pretense, and the fact that Scott doesn’t acknowledge any of that further insists to me that Scott himself is engaging to some degree in bad faith himself.
The idea of which I really take no joy in. I prefer to think he’s just naïve, but he makes giving him the benefit of the doubt so difficult, mostly because of the time I spent engaging with his fan club, which drove home just how insidious this bad faith stuff can be, the exact kind of bad faith he pointedly ignores.
But, if he’s really just too dumb to see that stuff, then that’s also reason enough to discount anything he has to say on the matter. Which kind of gets to the consequentialist crux of it all: it doesn’t matter whether you’re lying or stupid, if you’re furthering the goals of white nationalism then it’s a good thing when people tell you to shut the fuck up.
This is basically an invitation to lie to Scott’s face as much as possible. I can’t possibly imagine anyone in his comments section doing that, though. Especially not those with academic careers.
I actually assumed this was a retread of the “If you use the word [racist] to describe anyone other than a literal KKK member, you’re Crying Wolf!” stuff, but you might be right.
Honestly, there’s so much winking subtext in his posts these days I never can be bothered trying to work out what he’s actually trying to say.
I’d like to nominate this for Scott’s stupidest sentence.
“so you see, calling donald trump a liar isn’t technically correct, because you can’t prove he doesn’t genuinely believe what he’s saying, and therefore if you say he’s lying you expand the definition of the term to the point where it’s useless. we have to extend our enemies the benefit of the doubt, unless they’re feminists of course”
This is a familiar argument. Scott’s instincts are telling him that conservatives are right and progressives are wrong, and he’s trying to find some pseudo-rational justification for that impulse. This business of definitions is convenient because nobody actually knows where the line is. Obviously if you called everything a lie the word would cease to have meaning, and if you called nothing a lie you wouldn’t be able to identify liars. The truth lies somewhere in the middle, and being deliberately vague about it allows Scott to always assert that the people he doesn’t like are using the word too broadly and the people he likes are doing it just right.
The underlying psychology here is the whole thing where you agree with 90% of Republican beliefs but live in a part of California where it’s culturally impossible for you to acknowledge to yourself that you actually are just a Christian conservative in all but name. I really wish these people would find Jesus, it would make all the bullshit a lot easier to cut through.
My read is there is a smuck they are trying to convince to support miri and they are getting themselves tied up in knots about whether it is unethical to spam them to “save the world”.
Is one of the taboo’d words “fascism?” Maybe “racism?” Otherwise I have no idea. *****
Make up your mind. Are they getting stricter or are they getting broader?
God, the inanity of this logic. I realize he is basing that statement on this assumption:
Which is a rather… structuralist?… way of thinking, but it’s that perfect combination of short, quippy, and wrong that makes it so easy for him to repeat. Let’s look at some other ridiculous pronouncements we could make using that construction:
This whole thing sounds like a really low-key attempt to counter the (correct) idea that “structural racism is a thing, actually, and basically all white people are racist to some degree.” In other words: “If everyone is racist, then nobody is!”
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