I suspect you think you're rebutting me but you're doing more the opposite. Of course people with functioning minds examine issues and individuals separately. But as I keep saying, logic is a retrofit and it is a minority retrofit.
Adlai Stevenson on needing a majority.
But a point I keep coming back to is the sneer at any and all genera…
I suspect you think you're rebutting me but you're doing more the opposite. Of course people with functioning minds examine issues and individuals separately. But as I keep saying, logic is a retrofit and it is a minority retrofit.
Adlai Stevenson on needing a majority.
But a point I keep coming back to is the sneer at any and all generalizations. Smart people are alert to their exceptions; not all gay men offer money to teenage boys (most don't), not all black kids roam in gangs (most don't). I'd say generalization in those cases is bona fide bigotry.
But. Judiciously and unprejudiciously applied, generalization is the most powerful tool we have for making sense of the world. Look at taxonomy. It bears live young that are initially helpless, it feeds them with a nutritious fluid generated in its own body, it has fur. No oppression or presumption in guessing it's a mammal. Then there are the marsupials and monotremes that don't quite fit the generalization. That doesn't mean we should stop gathering mammals into a category.
Same with people. Taking your first example, the gay culture encouraged immaturity and ready capitulation to impulse and didn't have the maturing power of needing to get it together to raise children. That was nothing intrinsic to being gay and a lot of gays managed to grow up anyway. But the culture promoted it, one reason AIDS swept through it like a fire in a dead cornfield and a high wind.
Back to my first, political attitudes very much tend to come in syndromes. I'd call myself pretty far left, and more authoritarian every year as I see what a lousy job we're doing with our precious freedoms, but there are elements of the "leftist syndrome" that are completely unacceptable to me.
AND there is the fact that most people are conformist af and live their lives trying to act like the television tells them they're supposed to. Watch how eagerly people pick up dumb new words and phrases (reach out, share) or succumb to peer pressures and start smoking.
I think we share in disdain for political syndromes. There are places where generalizations are more highly useful than others and I do not discount them out of hand. I just try to not give them more weight than they deserve.
I suspect you think you're rebutting me but you're doing more the opposite. Of course people with functioning minds examine issues and individuals separately. But as I keep saying, logic is a retrofit and it is a minority retrofit.
Adlai Stevenson on needing a majority.
But a point I keep coming back to is the sneer at any and all generalizations. Smart people are alert to their exceptions; not all gay men offer money to teenage boys (most don't), not all black kids roam in gangs (most don't). I'd say generalization in those cases is bona fide bigotry.
But. Judiciously and unprejudiciously applied, generalization is the most powerful tool we have for making sense of the world. Look at taxonomy. It bears live young that are initially helpless, it feeds them with a nutritious fluid generated in its own body, it has fur. No oppression or presumption in guessing it's a mammal. Then there are the marsupials and monotremes that don't quite fit the generalization. That doesn't mean we should stop gathering mammals into a category.
Same with people. Taking your first example, the gay culture encouraged immaturity and ready capitulation to impulse and didn't have the maturing power of needing to get it together to raise children. That was nothing intrinsic to being gay and a lot of gays managed to grow up anyway. But the culture promoted it, one reason AIDS swept through it like a fire in a dead cornfield and a high wind.
Back to my first, political attitudes very much tend to come in syndromes. I'd call myself pretty far left, and more authoritarian every year as I see what a lousy job we're doing with our precious freedoms, but there are elements of the "leftist syndrome" that are completely unacceptable to me.
AND there is the fact that most people are conformist af and live their lives trying to act like the television tells them they're supposed to. Watch how eagerly people pick up dumb new words and phrases (reach out, share) or succumb to peer pressures and start smoking.
I think we share in disdain for political syndromes. There are places where generalizations are more highly useful than others and I do not discount them out of hand. I just try to not give them more weight than they deserve.