The argument is that everyone is talking past each other and m the actual issue appears to be tediously boring semantics, rather than that any substantive attacks about the *actual* ideas Pinker is trying to champion.
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Replying to @Britonomist @Noahpinion and
First, has Pinker actually said this is how to think of how argument? Second, I’m not sure it’s “talking past each other” for people to respond assuming general use of a term. “Pinker omitted a bunch of enlightenment thought from his analysis” seems more an attack than a defense
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Replying to @p_bone @Britonomist and
It’s only talking past each other if one party isn’t deliberately introducing the ambiguity. That’s what is happening here. It is pointless to substantively critique ideas that are expressed so idiosyncratically as to be incomprehensible.
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Reginald Glenn ♨️ Retweeted Mark Koyama
They're not incomprehensible, his ideas are actually fairly straightforward and mundane - science, liberty, secularism good! What's happening here is a kind of left reactionary attempt to muddy the waters, summed up here:https://twitter.com/MarkKoyama/status/1003900282139373568 …
Reginald Glenn ♨️ added,
Mark Koyama @MarkKoyamaThe neglect of a well known example of the development of something akin to biological racism suggests something about the parochialism of the debate i.e. a fixation with Anglo racism in the Americas (as if it couldn't have emerged independently in another setting)Show this thread1 reply 0 retweets 1 like -
Replying to @Britonomist @0youngbs and
Right, so again, I think the the issue isn’t so much whether or not “secularism good” as a questioning of the approach of “let’s just ignore any bad stuff while talking about this” and then attacking folks who argue for like acknowledgement of complexity
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Replying to @p_bone @Britonomist and
I think Thomas Jefferson has some good ideas about liberty, but it seems relevant to consider that his household included a bunch of humans he enslaved because of their race, and (factually) pointing that out does not necessitate a total rejection of everything Jefferson thought
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But it just seems like a non sequitur - was his keeping of slaves something that contributed to the intellectual lineage of American liberalism? No. When discussing Newtonian physics should physicists explore in depth Newton's quaint views of menstrual blood? No point.
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Replying to @Britonomist @0youngbs and
You think that owning slaves is as far removed from liberalism as menstrual blood is from physics? That seems like a willfully bad analogy. At least go for the astrology belief man. But anyway, you don’t see a connection between slave ownership and, say, the Constitution?
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I'm not American or any kind of expert on the American legal system. But the point is that intellectual traditions and original thought are distinguished by *new* ideas that set them apart from the orthodoxy of the time. 1/n
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Replying to @Britonomist @p_bone and
So at least the (completely wrong, in my strong opinion) claim that racism was a *novel* intellectual offspring of the enlightenment doesn't fall into this trap. But merely pointing out that some thinkers still had orthodox beliefs certainly does.
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You clearly haven't read the article under debate. Please do so.
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I've read the article, as I said, it was damage control - ad hoc nuance added after the huge push back he received against his original inflammatory tweets.
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Replying to @Britonomist @HeerJeet and
Ad hoc? No. There is more nuance in the article than the tweets; that’s the nature of the medium. Your rigid distinction between pre-Enlightenment orthodoxy and the Enlightenment itself is not serving you well.
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End of conversation
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