Comment by bell-cot
4 months ago
Is he really trying to move those goalposts? Or is he just voicing the most-common way for humans to process such events?
I'm thinking that 99% of people would feel horrible and/or morally responsible if they lent an axe to their neighbor Mr. Seemed-Nice, which he then used to kill his wife. Vs. far less so, if their neighbor bought his fatal ax from Amazon or Walmart.
This is exactly what I was trying to point out. You've made some reasonable points here, but that doesn't offer any evidence for the hyperbolic statement that Israel is pure and undiluted evil. Israel could be a bad place without that statement being true.
This might seem like a silly distinction to some but what I find depressing about modern culture wars is how "we disagree on these points" seems to morph into "you and everything you represent is terrible". Nuance matters.
You seem a bit over-focused on the literal truth value of that "Israel is pure and undiluted..." statement.
Vs. 99% of educated and rational people recognize that as a bombastic/emotive statement. Arguing its truth value is like kitchen-testing whether a cookie recipe turns out worse if you replace "2C sugar, 1/2t salt" with "2C salt, 1/2t sugar".
And sadly, such bombastic/emotive mis-statements are far, far older than our modern culture wars.
It’s very possible that things were always this way, you’re right. My own perception is that politics has become more divisive and less respectful in my own lifetime, and I happen to think that social media makes this worse, but that’s admittedly just an opinion.
To the emotional statement: I think I’d get a reaction if rather than saying “I don’t think Go is a good language” I said something like “Go is objectively the worst programming language ever devised”. I get your point but if you feel emotional about something then say so - IMO the parent comment did much more than that.
>You seem a bit over-focused on the literal truth value of that "Israel is pure and undiluted..." statement.
>Vs. 99% of educated and rational people recognize that as a bombastic/emotive statement.
That's a cope. Words have meanings, and being able to make and walk back on misleading/false statements with "I was being bombastic/emotive and it wasn't meant to be taken literally" absolutely poisons any sort of attempt rational discourse. "Israel committed war crimes" becomes not a statement about whether Israel broke international laws but whether you support Israel or not, "fake news" becomes not a statement about whether the news story was conjured from thin air but whether you like the story, etc.
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