Conversation

This will be an unpopular rant: If I could change one thing about this scene, it would be a slight downregulation of the radical scepticism that everyone expresses about everything. Ultimately I find this approach to the world exhausting and also corrosive.
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To maintain any kind of mutually intelligible discourse, we have to share some basic beliefs about observable reality. We have to agree that some minimal share of things we observe to happen actually are happening. If everything is an illusion or a lie we can’t know anything.
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EVERY. LAST. TOPIC. I discuss has 10% of commenters denying the thing I’m addressing even exists. Fauci doesn’t really have Corona bro, viruses don’t real bro, there was never a Wuhan lockdown bro. On and on, an eternal chorus about why nothing I talk about can ever be real.
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On the one hand, it’s true, that if you set your evidentiary standards very high, you can deny all manner of things. On the other hand tho, it becomes impossible to affirm anything without violating these heightened standards.
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You can’t maintain any substantive critical discourse ensconced in your blind Silo of Superclever Scepticism. You can’t affirm anything for sure about the world at all. Nobody who wants to run a small newsletter or even a moderately sized twitter account can do this.
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There are important parallels here to critical theory, which tried to reduce all of reality to discourse. A whole generation of scholars found this approach to be superclever, but ultimately it led to nothing but a bunch of inward-looking circular disingenuous unreadable garbage
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But the reality deniers would do well to read a little critical theory, maybe. Take Fauci’s vaccination status: I promise that this idiot really is *at least* quadruple vaxxed, but what the reality sceptics don’t realise, is that Fauci himself is an irrelevancy.
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Fauci the celebrity, the all-knowing virus wizard, the incarnation of science, is a media creation - and he is quadruple vaccinated *by definition*. Fauci’s personal vaccination status doesn’t matter at all. The media reports about Fauci’s love of the vaccines are everything.
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