12-14-2020, 01:37 PM
(12-14-2020, 04:33 AM)Bob Butler 54 Wrote:(12-14-2020, 03:22 AM)Eric the Green Wrote: Classic has everything exactly wrong, and shows zero ability to learn from us. Frankly I wonder now whether he is a robot, or just insane. In any case I think he is not worth having a dialogue with any longer. I haven't blocked him yet, but I am considering it for myself.
I also think it is pointless to argue with Einzige, and see him as much the same as Classic. And the same applies to CH86
Thing is, the people you listed above are hardly alone. If you remember our fundamentalist, can you see convincing him that every word of the Bible is not literally true, and you must accept the whole Book rather than the old parts which specify who to hate? Can you see yourself freeing Xenakis from tribal thinking?
At least I recognize that I have a terrible flaw as a person, and that flaw is not of my choosing. That completely destroys me as an authority on almost anything. I need to give a citation.
Quote:People will cling to their worldview and values. Unless they have a strong scientific worldview and values, they will disregard even direct observation in order to preserve their worldview and values. I’m not arguing that conversations with people with strange worldviews is apt to be futile. It is. They just have different ways to determine Truth. Even if you quote the parts of the Bible inconsistent with homophobia, even if you acknowledge tribal thought is still dominant among minor powers, even if you acknowledge that cavalier culture has it’s strengths that have contributed much to America, people will remain committed to the Bible, tribal thinking, socialism, cavalier culture, astrology or even CH86’s odd obsession with boomers, no matter what is said.
Rigidity of thought goes with Asperger's syndrome. But this said, "strange" and "inflexible" need not be antitheses. Sometimes it is the strange idea that is right.
I may not have been particularly homophobic for the time, but I made "gay jokes" that I would never tell now. The only one that I am willing to relate is "I knew that Rock Hudson was a fine actor... but I had no idea how much he was acting!". Once I was threatened with gay-bashing I recognized that the problem isn't that I fail to exude overt heterosexuality but instead that people are so hostile to real and imagined homosexuals that nobody is safe. I may be a sissy, but I am basically a lesbian in a male body... which is as straight as one can get. Men -- yuck! By standing fully for LGBT rights I believed that I was making the world much safer. I am vindicated.
I like to believe that I am good at deconstructing faulty arguments -- so long as I did not make them. All ideas have consequences.
Quote:(It is hard using the obsession with boomers constructively. That is admittedly an odd one. But it is typical in its way. In dealing with CH86, you can’t seem to get away from all boomers being what they are not, and their being the cause of all problems. How can that perspective be used constructively?)
I am a Boomer, and I know the difference between elites who lord it over the rest of us and those over whom we get lorded. If one is a subordinate on the job, especially as jobs become less a matter of labor and skill and more of bureaucratic toadying, humility becomes a necessary characteristic of survivors.
Quote:My trick is in embracing the odd way of thought, being able to use its strengths, finding its limits, and building a worldview which incorporates them all. Changing how a person thinks who believes he has found the One and Only Shortcut to Truth? That seems to be beyond my pay grade. It takes a major event, a total failure of the worldview and values, to convince someone to hide or change the way he finds Truth. A S&H crisis, among other things, contains an event which presents such a total failure of values to a bunch of people at once. If a culture is a collection of people with similar worldview and values, it takes such a drastic event to change the culture.
It is hard to give up the alleged shortcut to truth even if it is wrong. If one develops an unwieldy system for explaining everything, whether the Bible as literal and uncontestable truth (scientific method be damned -- Believe it or burn in Hell!) or Marxism, which has a large official literature that one cannot contest even for technological or experiential obsolescence, then seeking any other source is like giving up everything that one has, whether professional qualifications or possessions, for a chance to start over at the bare bottom of life. Few people can do that without feeling robbed.
People change their ways when they hit bottom and have no choice... imprisonment, for example. Or having to choose between drinking or drugs on the one side and participating in the American Good Life.
Quote:So far this crisis we have the bug pricking the idea that one need not solve problems. We have the Black Lives Matter protests fighting the idea that racism is satisfactory and inevitable. We have the economy failing again, which ought to but has not yet convinced people that Voodoo economics ought to be seriously rethought. Global Warming? Pardon if I doubt there is enough shock to go around, that the culture can fully accept everything it needs to? We may have to wait on the next generation of prophets. It is, after all, their future that we are stealing.
But people will go on trying to see their personal truth as The Truth.
Truth needs no qualification for validity.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.
