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by Karunamon 3368 days ago
>Your what matters. And it matters to other people. It's inescapably political because you live in a polity and your decisions impact other people.

By the same standard, then, I can safely write off BlackLivesMatter as a group whose members are inherently racist, and in some cases engage in literal terrorism (definition: violence applied for political goals) with the sanction of the larger group?

Why or why not?

You are your impact on other people and every impact on everyone else is inescapably, inextricably, definitionally "political".

Except most of these definitions of yours, that are entirely yours as far as I can see, don't have anything to do with the actual definition of the word political. To wit:

relating to the government or the public affairs of a country.

Where's the connection to government and public affairs and Star Trek? You did make that connection, and I'm curious to see how you go about defending it, especially since you called out this division of political vs not as a rhetorical device used to avoid defending things.

On that same note, humans "draw lines to segment off topics" because that is literally the only way human reason about things. Your definition of politics implies that I can't watch a Goddamned fictional series about spaceships without a bunch of other ill-defined ideological baggage attached to it. I don't see the practical or metaphorical usefulness of this definition, and up to this point, you have not demonstrated it.

1 comments

> By the same standard

They were describing a situation of 99% bad people where you write off the 1%. You seem to be describing the inverse. That's not the same standard.

Is there some source for these percentages or are the numbers generated purely from a sense of "I like this group" vs "I don't like that group"?
Those numbers are not my opinion on anything in particular. It's a loose representation of how they were describing the groups. eropple said one in a few thousand were innocent, while Karunamon was describing a minority of the group as racist/terrorist.

There's a big difference between "almost all of this group is terrible, you are enabling them and should be painted with the same brush" and "a tiny fraction of this group is terrible, you are enabling them and should be painted with the same brush".

It's a fully general statement, not about particular groups.

Fair enough. I would definitely agree that there's a difference depending on what portion of the group has the behaviour in question. Thanks for clarifying.
Not at all. But I'm afraid that's not a great conversation to have here.