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by knuththetruth 2961 days ago
He tosses in a couple of asides about how if you were on the receiving end of this atrocious idea, you might not like it so much, but your characterization is far too generous for something radically awful that he’s floating as a “thought experiment.”

And of course it’s not just a “thought experiment,” it’s something that right-wingers are doing across the country to aggregately awful and racist results (go look up the track record of Betsy DeVos’ charter school empire). It’s the same kind of dubious “just asking questions” nonsense these guys pull all the time.

1 comments

> but your characterization is far too generous for something radically awful that he’s floating as a “thought experiment.”

He's floating it as a thought experiment to bring up the question of whether a tactic like this, for whatever goal, should be considered good or bad, given that it relies on secrecy. His thoughts are that government should get out of education. He's not actually saying he thinks peopls should go about it this way, he's raising the question of should we be okay with a tactic like this? The extremity of the argument is to make you think critically about it.

The entire conversation is couched in this context. I'm not sure why you refuse to consider it in this one exchange.

> And of course it’s not just a “thought experiment,”...

So you think the person that's calling it out as possibly something people should be wary of or at least examine very closely because of all the possible unintended consequences (which is a point they both spend quite some time elaborating on) is the person that should be viewed negatively? It's not just that something was said, it's how it was said, why it was said, and the larger context. To me it feels like you're missing that.

I’m not missing anything. He says specifically that he’s “often wondered” about this specific idea, goes into detail about how, if it were to happen, it should be enacted by the wealthy in secret to prevent any opposition, and proceeds to reveal himself favorable to a whole host of other fundamentally anti-democratic ideas (as well as not really push back against Holiday doing more of the same).

Yes, these kind of people are exactly the kind of people one should be wary of.