Or possibly because of, and I quote here, “not covering the protests in the local media”?
Yes
Go to the chalkboard and write down “I WILL NOT CONFUSE THE OBJECT LEVEL FOR THE META LEVEL” 100 times. :mad:
Firstly, “protest” and “attack” are two different things. Secondly, I’m in the media. I have a fairly good idea of what’s going on in my local area and it doesn’t involve people attacking mosques, which is an excellent state of affairs I hope continues indefinitely.
I don’t know what that means, and don’t really care enough to find out, but I’m pretty sure that your argument is exactly the same as: “they laughed at Galileo, so you shouldn’t laugh at Bozo the clown.”
Please let me know if my example didn’t appropriately capture the META PURPLE OBJECT LEVEL.
There were 63 mosque attacks in the US this year (up 50% from last year). The US has 3.8 million square miles. Therefore, most people in the US didn’t have any local mosque attacks either.
They still happened. Guess ignoring them didn’t work.
Object level: A question about a specific, practical issue like “Can Neo-Nazis hold a rally here?”
Meta level: A question about what general principles you should apply to all object-level claims, like “How do we decide who gets permission to hold a rally?”
(Courtesy of /r/Slatestarcodex)
I need to stop expecting people to know what I talk about when I pull shit off LessWrong. I probably should have figured that out by reading LessWrong. Bit of a failure on my part.
Obviously there are relevant differences between gay pride parades and neo-nazi rallies. Trust me, I get that. Object level: one is generally good, one is almost always bad. However, both may very well involve actions that people would not want to immediately be associated with. If I’m the CEO of a large corporation, there’s still nothing wrong with me going out with rainbow glitter body paint in a thong and a dildo hat at a gay pride parade, but maybe I’d prefer I not universally be thought of as Jimmy McDildohat.
So what’s your meta-level? (Or in this case, SteveG1’s meta-level.) What’s the general principle we should follow here? If you can’t help your political beliefs becoming broad public knowledge, why should it be any different for anyone else? Is there any reasonable way I should be able to say, “Please don’t spread those pictures of me at the gay pride parade around, I prefer that not to be the first thing people see when they google my name”? Or those pictures from the furry convention? Or from StripperCon?
Punch a nazi is all well and good, but what is the general principle behind it? “Punching nazis is good” is not a general principle.
The general principle is that if you hate what one person stands for hard enough then it’s morally justifiable to enact violence against that person.
Problem with that is that people hate each other for all sort of reasons, so that general principle is anathema to civil society.
It’s kind of funny when I reminisced back in time to things I’ve seen in this board, after 9/11 the debates about the war on Afghanistan, the prevailing leftist view was that a heavy handed policy against a Muslim country would be counterproductive in the fight against terrorism, it would harden the fanatics and radicalize moderates.
Fast forward to today the idea being floated is that if you hit those other people hard enough they’ll just crawl back under a rock and stay there.
I’m sure this time it will work and not like, totally backfire or something. :rolleyes:
That’s not the question.
Works for me.
And then the Nazis say, “Well our principle is, punch non-nazis”. And then things go downhill.
I think the general principle is “let’s stop violent Nazis from murdering innocent people.” But your version is much easier to argue against, so I can see why you picked it.
I believe my comment was META BIRD LEVEL ORANGE, which a layman might call a joke.
And you’ll have to excuse me if it’s a little hard to tell who is and who is not joking about the correct course of action and/or the correct general principle being “punch a nazi” at this point, because of the number of people around these parts who believe either or both!
For the second time, I said “protests”, not “attacks”. And also for the umpteenth fucking time on these boards: I. Don’t. Live. In. America.
I don’t remember saying that you did.
My apologies, I didn’t realize that when you said “I have a fairly good idea of what’s going on in my local area and it doesn’t involve people attacking mosques” you weren’t talking about people in your local area attacking mosques.
That’s uncomfortably specific. A good GENERAL principle would be “let’s stop ALL violent people from murdering innocent people.”
FYI, anti-Muslim activity in Australia is increasing according to news reports I found. Maybe you should ignore the bigots harder?
Eh, who has the energy.
Perhaps Spain should purge itself of all the symbols of the ideology that inspired the terrorism of yesterday. Whatever ideology was behind that might get one thread.