The value in just calling them bad is making the point clearer when the degrees of bad are not germane to the point being made.
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If your goal is to simply assign guilt then no it doesn’t matter. That is my whole point. Assigning guilt is both intellectually easy and not very valuable. If your goal is to rehabilitate the murderer it might be useful to differentiate a sniper from a close up throat cutter.
As for Rogan and Maher, I agree they are both “bad” in the broadest sense of the world as in holders of insane right wing ideas. That holds little interest. I want to understand the difference in their badness.
Also, we are having a perfectly interesting and cordial discussion. No idea why you feel that need to toss an off handed insult in.
It was a very brief derail. Guilty as charged. Peoples frustration had nothing to do with that though. Nobody even mentioned a derail until you did. Pocketchads was angry because he thought I was saying Maher is good.
I was just using the existing topic to pivot to a different point. This is something that happens hundreds of times a day here. Perhaps I should have been clearer in that aim.
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I feel like “I’d like to talk about Bill Maher, especially the times when he gets criticized unfairly” is a better thread title. The framework of lumping vs. splitting isn’t going to give you any answers about specific cases.
We can completely drop Maher for all I care. He is just a jumping off point for the larger issue which effects nearly all recent political discourse.
Hypothetical person agrees with you on every single political issue on earth but also believes gay people choose to be gay and shouldn’t be allowed to be married? Is this person good or bad?
I’m just not convinced that you think Maher is even bad. Says some bad things, sure, but I don’t get the impression that you think he is a net negative.
The basic point is that some people believe that Maher is bad enough that a true progressive should be resistant to effectively endorsing him by going on his show. That is independent of whatever nuance there is between Maher and Rogan.
If you meant for this to be a jumping off point for a larger discussion of lumping vs splitting, you did a piss-poor job of it.
Hypothetical person agrees with you on every single political issue on earth but also believes black people should be enslaved? Is this person good or bad?
Exactly my point.
You want to believe I think Maher is great because it feeds into your preconceived idea. No matter what I say you bring it back to all that matters is we label Maher bad. After that there is nothing left to discuss.
In that case, I’m mostly skeptical about these kinds of conceptual frameworks offering much insight. Obviously, some people are going to be very close together and it’s appropriate to lump them together. Then some people are going to be too far a part and it’s obviously not appropriate to lump them together. So now you’d be off to find demarcation conditions for when it’s appropriate to lump and when it’s not. If you ever find those conditions (good luck), you will not have solved that much really, as you will just end up with two categories of people, and you’ll then be lumping and not lumping according to those. Meanwhile the substantive issues are just what are the bad beliefs, what are the bright-line disqualifying beliefs in contemporary political discourse, etc…
You don’t seem to distinguish between “bad enough to not want to go on his show” and “BAD!”. Lots of people have said the former, I don’t think anyone has said the latter as (as you keep saying) it’s a pretty damn silly judgement. I think most people’s position is that the former does not imply the latter, and it’s misrepresenting them to say it does.
Except is does matter. How we categorize the world has direct influence on how we operate within it.
There is difference between “all trump voters are awful people who should be ignored” and “some trump voters are likely low information people voting out of party affiliation alone”. The former would mean there is no value in outreach to this group and the latter would suggest there might be value.
To head off the trump voter derail this is just an example.
Another example.
One could say all people who use racist language are awful people. This would mean the grandma who uses an old and racist terms of liquorice candy is the same as David Duke. The former is changeable. The latter is not. This is obviously a silly example meant to show the extremes to frame the debate.
My preconceived idea is that you have a higher regard for Maher than pretty much anyone else on this forum, probably because he said some things about religion that you value and I don’t. Or are my notions still preconceived if it’s based on actual posts?
Let’s look at what zikzak said:
You agreed on c. You didn’t say anything about agreeing on the first two points, so it’s reasonable to guess that maybe those aspects of Maher aren’t a problem for you.
Kind of feels like you’re just lumping everyone who disagrees with you into one category.
I don’t give a flying fuck about Maher. I don’t know how else to say it. This isn’t about him. Holy fuck if you are not interested in the topic then move on.
I’ve moved on to taking the idea that “it’s worth our time to more closely examine why people think what they think” and applying it to you.
Congrats you insulted me a second time. You can move on now having accomplished your goal itt.
Where’s the insult on that?
Here is a couple interesting, if somewhat tangential papers.
First one is called
LUMPERS AND SPLITTERS
THE PUBLIC OPINION INFORMATION THAT POLITICIANS COLLECT AND USE
http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.474.3283&rep=rep1&type=pdf
Here is a more theoretical one.
It makes this broad point.
As the following seven papers demonstrate, the process of lumping and splitting underlies the way we use money (Zelizer), create a safe (Simp- son) as well as a fair (Purcell) world, sculpt our professional (Nippert-Eng) and sexual (Brekhus) identity, and narrate complex biological processes such as pregnancy (Isaacson) and menstruation (Foster). Furthermore, these papers all reveal the unmistakablycognitive foundations of social life
You’re not exactly conflating things but I thought you were going to go from an insight about “lumping” and “splitting” in the epistemology of science to why [redacted] isn’t as “bad” as [redacted]. I’m suggesting that the direct route is to start with what you think constitutes a “bad” person; I don’t know how a theory of lumping and splitting is going to help explain that. And for what it’s worth, I tend to find labels to be inefficient if not outright misleading and counterproductive in many a discourse, so we may share similar intuitions.
Like is there anybody saying there is no difference between the groups of people in your examples? Many would agree that there are salient differences between old-timey racist grandmas and David Duke, and that these salient differences may very well justify different reactions to them. Some may say there are noteworthy differences, but that there are enough pertinent similarities to justify certain collective judgments against them, but that just returns to the issue of what constitutes being a ‘bad’ person.