[FRIAM] millenarianism

[Prof David West]

glen and steve,

Nick made me do it. He asked the question. And I made the mistake or pretty much answering him, not the group as a whole with my ** written ** response. As noted in my apology to Russ, the general tenor of the paragraphs reflected the mood/tone and the mindset of those at the Mother Temple immediately post election — and my bemusement by it — but a tone that continues to reverberate.

The nearly three years of my regular attendance at FRIAM, post-election, I made frequent attempts to do just as you suggest - tease apart the threads of belief among both pro and anti-Trump camps. When it comes to political discussion, neither heterogeneity nor nuance seems to have much value. (I think this might count as steelmanning in some sense.)

My rationale for the millennarian wrapper around my reply was not for comparison. It was a bad attempt to use the Nacerima technique to make "the familiar strange" in a way that allows people to become aware of that which they take for granted or to which they are usually blind - in the way that most people are unaware of the culture within which they are embedded.

I am merely inept, not evil.

Although ...

"basket of deplorables" "10 to 15 percent of Americans are not very good people" I know they are talking about me. :)

davew


On Sat, Jun 6, 2020, at 8:29 AM, uǝlƃ ☣ wrote:
> 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.
> 
> -- 
> ☣ uǝlƃ
> 
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