[CorsiHockeyLeague]

Originally Posted by PepsiFree

I think, at this point, you can say that I'll never really understand your position. Whether it's because I'm just not smart enough, or your position doesn't actually make as much sense as you think it makes, is probably down to life experience.

I definitely don't think it's because you're not smart enough. I think if you really wanted to, you could at least take my views on board, even if you still thought they were wrong after accurate summary and careful consideration of them. That's usually my position with Rubecube, and you on some issues where I'm picking up what you're putting down. That being said, it's possible that something's just not coming across in text because I'm doing a bad job of explaining it, or it's not the right medium for communicating the idea. This is one of those things where I wish I could have the conversation in person (though that might sound like a nightmare from where you sit).

At a certain point, a view is not going to become "clear", nor is it fair to say it's being distorted by one side or the other. That suggests there is an interpretation that is correct, when nobody can really decide how another's life experience colours their view of things.

But there is an interpretation that's correct - you're either accurately representing what I think, or you aren't. In this case you weren't. As I said I think that was an honest error, but the lack of clarity for you doesn't mean that your representation was any less a distortion. I believe what I believe, there are no shades of gray involved unless I decide there are.

Originally Posted by Itse

Your condescending arrogance is getting really tiresome.

Thanks for your useful contribution to the discussion, wherein literally no one else was acting like an a-hole or calling people names. Hope that made you feel better about yourself. I gather you're projecting something here, but next time keep the insults to yourself.

Originally Posted by jammies

Yes, identity politics can lead to injustice and oppression, to the quelling of unpopular opinions and to backlash against a perceived revolutionary transfer of power. It's an imperfect tool for an imperfect world. That flawed tool, though, is preferable to a perfect tool for a perfect world, for we don't live in some Platonic plane of ideas inhabited by philosopher kings - we live on a ball of sh*t and mud surrounded by tribally evolved barely sentient animals. The appeal to logic only works, alas, with the logical.

Yeah, this is a fair rejoinder to the whole position from a pragmatic perspective... but people are in theory at least capable of logic and reason, and an honest effort at divorcing these things from bias. We can't discard our intuitions or ingrained biases, but we're also not helpless prisoners of them. I think people need to try as hard as they can to move beyond the limitations imposed on them by out simian imperfections and incomplete evolution.

There's a bit of cognitive dissonance going on here for me because I'm basically a moral skeptic at this point, having more or less lost my faith as an objectivist, and my entire theory here is based on group level pragmatism. So there's a decent chance that you're entirely right and I'm just way too idealistic and naive about human capacity for reason at the macro level. Which is depressing but not really implausible. Or maybe this is just how I feel after drinking for the past five hours... seriously, seven goals?