[FRIAM] millenarianism

[Steve Smith]

Glen -

Your ability to demonstrate the "steelmanning" skill continues to
inspire me.  I don't know if I am constitutionally capable of focusing
down on a single topic well enough to even begin to demonstrate it
myself.   I have been "fuming" over Dave's *written* response to Nick's
last minute challenge (on vFriAM) and wanting to challenge *HIM* to
steelman this for us.   I think you sketched it out for him here.   Dave
may well be as handicapped in this mode as I seem to be, but I would
value it if he could try.  Dave?

Since vFriam degenerated to just 4 Brady Bunch characters (you, Nick,
Guerin, myself), nobody else observed the _role-playing_ that you and
Stephen both adopted so adroitly, calling up an alternative personality,
or homunculous or channeling of each of your own
cartoon-but-steelmannish characterization of a (naive?) Trump
Supporter.  Even better, I felt, was the way Nick very good-naturedly
all but pleaded to your alternate characters to let "Stephen and Glen
come back!  I don't even know who I am without you" (bad paraphrase,
worthy of correction by Nick if he feels misquoted).   I just observed,
winding up my whole body to throw myself between "Danny and ???" and
Nick if things got violent.   It was a fascinating moment.

- Steve

> Agreed. To be fair, though, just as Dave announced he had to leave the meeting, he was asked to quickly state why he thought the accusations against Trump supporters was a mischaracterization. He called out the anti-Trump crowd for over-generalizing those who voted for Trump and briefly described a few reasons a *heterogeneous* collection of people might have different reasons for doing so (conservative court appointments, tough talk to China, etc. -- arguably legitimate things some of us might want in a President). This post of his was, therefore, a legitimate response to that request, coming up with a narrative circumscribing the faulty thinking of the anti-Trump crowd.
>
> However, in so doing, he attempts to right one wrong with another wrong. His post rightly calls out the over-generalizing fallacy of the anti-Trump by then over-generalizing (or outright false narrative cartooning) them. My tack would have been to demonstrate the diversity of the not-pro-but-not-anti Trump tolerators first. *Then* maybe dive into why the anti-Trump crowd exhibits such flawed thinking. And FWIW, I agree with his gist that the anti-Trump crowd is, at least a bit, eschatological. But I think lots of us, regardless of political bent, are eschatological. We see it in the Singularians, the bioethicists re: DIY Bio, ecologists, climatologists, Steve Guerins re: societal phase transitions >8^D, etc.
>
> The story could easily be rounded out with a demonstration that the anti-Trump crowd is also diverse. Not all of us are eschatological. Some of us are simply embarrassed by him. I'll take an Evil Genius over a bumbling moron any day of the week. And my reasons for purposefully over-generalizing my characterization of the Trump tolerators as morons or cult members is a (likely misguided) attempt to shame or guilt them into thinking a little harder about who they vote for. It's got nothing to do with "millenarianism".
>
> On 6/5/20 11:16 PM, Russ Abbott wrote:
>> Presumably, davew doesn't believe that the preceding characterizes the way any living human being thinks. So why pretend that it does other than to insult people? And why does he want to insult people? We don't need any more of that. We are already fully supplied with insults from the insulter-in-chief. Let's not make things worse.