Politics Discussion Thread (Heated Arguing Warning)

[Bobchillingworth]

What ISIS is doing is abhorrent by the cultural standards of the vast majority of Muslim/Middle Eastern people.
Should all white people/Christians be judged on the actions of Westboro baptist church, or the Spanish Inquisition, or Anders Behring Breivik? Maybe we should judge everyone who voted Leave by the actions of Thomas Mair?

Heh. I think Darrel's point is that different cultures aren't completely alien from each other, and it's entirely reasonable for people from one culture to make judgements on others. Like, the ancient Aztec culture has been essentially dead for centuries now, but we can still say that their use of mass human sacrifice and enslavement of their neighbors was pretty fucked up. It was bad even if Europeans during the same time period engaged in comparably rotten behavior.

[Bobchillingworth]

Apologies for triple-posting, but I do have to apologize to Gavagai for assuming he was a Putin supporter. Given that I believe both he and Trump have (informally) endorsed each other, it seemed a natural conclusion.

[darrelljs]

What ISIS is doing is abhorrent by the cultural standards of the vast majority of Muslim/Middle Eastern people.
Should all white people/Christians be judged on the actions of Westboro baptist church, or the Spanish Inquisition, or Anders Behring Breivik? Maybe we should judge everyone who voted Leave by the actions of Thomas Mair?

Westboro baptist church never ruled 90,000 km^2 of territory, but point taken.

So let's go with my neck of the woods, the American south in the early 19th century. Still not willing to judge?

Darrell

[darrelljs]

Heh. I think Darrel's point is that different cultures aren't completely alien from each other, and it's entirely reasonable for people from one culture to make judgements on others. Like, the ancient Aztec culture has been essentially dead for centuries now, but we can still say that their use of mass human sacrifice and enslavement of their neighbors was pretty fucked up. It was bad even if Europeans during the same time period engaged in comparably rotten behavior.

.

Darrell

[Mr. Cairo]

What ISIS is doing is abhorrent by the cultural standards of the vast majority of Muslim/Middle Eastern people.
Should all white people/Christians be judged on the actions of Westboro baptist church, or the Spanish Inquisition, or Anders Behring Breivik? Maybe we should judge everyone who voted Leave by the actions of Thomas Mair?

Heh. I think Darrel's point is that different cultures aren't completely alien from each other, and it's entirely reasonable for people from one culture to make judgements on others. Like, the ancient Aztec culture has been essentially dead for centuries now, but we can still say that their use of mass human sacrifice and enslavement of their neighbors was pretty fucked up. It was bad even if Europeans during the same time period engaged in comparably rotten behavior.

I know, but it annoys me when people just scream "ISIS" every time someone says "maybe we shouldn't be so quick to judge other people". Humans are in fact capable of understanding nuance, although it seems that the majority have forgotten that for some reason.

[greenline]

A friend of mine is doing a research and systematization of Harry Potter fanfiction.

slow days at work huh?

[ReallyEvilMuffin]

A friend of mine is doing a research and systematization of Harry Potter fanfiction.

slow days at work huh?

Has he checked out hpmor? I would actually say it is better than the real deal.

[SevenSpirits]

Bob, you're really avoiding addressing Gavagai's point directly.

Suppose that, over the next few years, we amass a huge amount of scientific evidence that people of Korean heritage tend to have genes that make them worse at math. Do we:

a) Pretend that the evidence doesn't exist.
b) Accept the evidence, and start treating people with Korean genes as inferiors.
c) Accept the evidence, but treat them just the same anyway.

You are claiming that both b and c are "racist", so I'm guessing you would choose a. Gavagai says that c isn't racist, and says, why are we not just agreeing to c as a general rule so that we never even have to care about whether we can statistically predict people's talents based on their ancestry.

To which I believe you are replying that c won't work for two reasons:
1) There are a lot of jerks in existence who aren't going to treat people the same anyway.
2) People tend towards fulfilling society's expectations of them. So part of having a level playing field is having equal societal expectations for everyone, even if that's throwing some information away.

and so a is the best answer.

Meanwhile I think Gavagai is saying that a is a scary answer from a practical perspective because, by denying that there is even a problem to solve at all, it fails to solve the underlying problem of people treating their perceived inferiors poorly. And that since it's relying on society believing that predicting people's talents by the visible expression of their genes is impossible, evidence to the contrary (which we may possibly unearth in the future) could be really damaging to the whole system.

I think your approach is more practical and Gavagai's more idealistic.

[picklepikkl]

HPMOR is a very different sort of story than Harry Potter. It is better in certain ways and worse in others. I certainly enjoyed it greatly, but Harry Potter is children's literature transitioning to YA, and HPMOR is a philosophically-didactic fanwork.

[ReallyEvilMuffin]

HPMOR is a very different sort of story than Harry Potter. It is better in certain ways and worse in others. I certainly enjoyed it greatly, but Harry Potter is children's literature transitioning to YA, and HPMOR is a philosophically-didactic fanwork.

I really liked the battles, and the ingenious ways they applied scientific principles to the magic. It made me laugh quite a lot.