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.
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.