Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by chalst 1711 days ago
Your insertion of the word "critical" is making a strawman out of the assertion you replied to.
1 comments

Full quote:

> Also, dissent is being amplified with software, which itself is not conscious. Being more conscious of your points will help matters. Not being more conscious of your points will help accelerate the madness.

The parent is clearly accusing me of not being conscious of my opinions, and this person doesn't know me so this is an assertion (s)he can not principally make. So how do you interpret what he/she refers to with conscious if it is not ideologically driven by critical social justice (CSJ)?

My impression is that this person is an adherent of CSJ. In general adherents to CSJ tend to drop essential qualifiers, so that they can use the Motte-and-Bailey [1] rhetorical trick of arguing a more radical position (Bailey) and then when challenged defend a more moderate position(Motte).

The CSJ adherents liberal individual Motte is not compatible with their group-based Bailey, it is purely a lie to provide cover until resistance has abated, and in general accusing someone of not being conscious simply because they agree with you is completely 100% unacceptable behavior. Especially if your viewpoints could have been spewed by a bot programmed to believe in CSJ. ;)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motte-and-bailey_fallacy#:~:te...

I am not going to explain your error to you if you have a track record of not admitting problems in your argumentation when they are pointed out to you.

Seriously, you wrote the above just after I wrote the following:

> To be clear, the problem kordlessagain is referring to is that if you make the effort to make explicit what the X and Y are, the response will rarely include the slightest explicit acknowledgement of any incoherence.

> Generally, if a fallacy is found in one's arguments and one values intellectual honesty, the best response is to apologise for the error first and only then attempt to restart the argument. If you don't do this, but try to act as if there was no error, you do avoid loss of face in the eyes of the unthinking that comes from admitting error, but you lose the respect of readers who understood the error and saw the evasion.

> It is a sad fact that today most people have little awareness of this risk of losing respect in heated arguments, let alone place high importance to it.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28785685

The way to show I am in error with you (or the parent) agreeing with the radical Bailey of critical social justice, such as the DEI initiatives true position in its Bailey, would be to say "I do not believe that people are defined by group identity" and "I think redistributing resources and position based upon group identity is wrong". Neither of you have done that.

Do you (or the parent) believe that "people are not defined by group identity" and that "redistributing resources and position based upon group identity is wrong"?

A way to show that I am in error about the whistleblower proposing Critical Social Justice activism would be to show that the links I provided showing the whistleblower calling for censoring "hate speech", her call for a ministry of truth, her association with CSJ, and the suspicious political ties of her whistleblowing being wrong. These are not moderate positions.

Are you aware that your posts in the last few days strike other people as hypocritical?

You draw attention to what you regard as logical errors in the arguments of others, but you do not observe the formalities that norms of logical argument require when problems are pointed out with your arguments.

If you do not accept the requirement that your own arguments be coherent, then the more that you learn about logic, the less rational you will become.

I asked you a simple question about your position, since you claimed I was in error about it. This is not a complex logical argument:

Do you believe or not believe that "people are not defined by group identity" and that "redistributing resources and position based upon group identity is wrong"?

If you do not want to answer that is fine, but treating people differently based upon unchosen identities is not “making sure everyone is treated equally”.

I'm inclined to think that people do not have a consistent group identity, and I strongly believe there is more to what we are than our social relations. Nonetheless, social motivations are very powerful, and I respect some people who have attempted to understand selfhood from a sociological point of view. So with respect to your first question, I don't believe it, but I don't insist that my way of looking at the matter is right.

With respect to the second, I think far too little effort is made to resolve the lasting wounds of historical injustices, but I don't think that the attempt to tackle these wounds primarily through redistribution is politically wise. In fact, the attempt to tacle something like the aftermath of slavery in this way is certain to create massive political counterreation and is quite likely to result in new injustices.

Do you understand what the problem is with your approach to argument that I have criticised you for repeatedly?