Facts are what Parents/Teachers "teach" us;
Personal experiences bridge moral and political divides better than facts
121–130 of 175 posts
Re: Personal experiences bridge moral and political divides better than facts
#122Earlier quoted context omitted.
Narcissism. "I've read many books and governmental reports..." is (presumably) a fact. It's a fact about the person saying it and not about the issue. It's a way to claim "I know what I'm talking about" without evidence. Unfortunately in today's world, you can be well read in any subject and still end up on either side based on what you've read.
> It's a fact about the person saying it Which ironically enough, seems to be the definition itself of "personal experience". Notice also how there is emotion thrown in: "it made me feel strongly about". How is this supposed to be an argument?
> How is this supposed to be an argument?
I agree, if heard that kind of argument then I would think it was ridiculous and narcissistic.
My personal experience is that people often argue in this way, and if I’m being honest if I don’t catch myself than I too am tempted to argue this way.
I think there’s a few factors going on, foremost perhaps an aspect of normal human psychology is that when humans process information and from that information come to a observation or conclusion, we tend to remember the conclusion we came to and not the process of coming to that conclusion. Also, I know that I personally (and also everyone else too I believe) think about myself quite a bit more than anyone else. It’s easy to live in my head and forget that not everyone knows what think I know.
So tldr - forgetting stuff and being selfish
Re: Personal experiences bridge moral and political divides better than facts
#123Earlier quoted context omitted.
That’s not much of a point. It’s really just you being on the demonstrably wrong side of actual facts, but acting like your extreme and indefensible take deserves equal validity or ontological status as a “right” belief, but it completely and unequivocally doesn’t. You wouldn’t be saying this stuff to BLM supporters, only an echo chamber filled with your non-fact-based alternate world. There’s a complete difference o…
It's only demonstrably wrong if you're going to insist on the very literal "almost none of the BLM protests involved violence" and ignore that that statement, in isolation, is rather misleading. Sure, most of the protests were peaceful. But when they weren't, it was was very bad. I was living in Downtown Chicago during the two major BLM protests that went violent last year. From my window, I saw people shooting out w…
Nobody is gaslighting anyone. By your own account, the perpetrators of the looting, property damage, etc., were not part of the BLM protests, but clearly differentiated groups adding violence to something non-violent.
I live in NYC and in my neighborhood we also had windows boarded up after days of looting, cars smashed in the street, fires and more. Literally none of it was related to the BLM movement.
Similarly with Portland where many friends and coworkers live, the violence there was literally brought about by Trump and his false allocation of Homeland Security agents to “protect” federal landmarks, yet they abducted people off the street with no due process.
I’m certain looting happened, destruction happened, violence happened. It happened literally around the corner from my apartment.
That absolutely does not give anyone any entitlement to indulge racist or fascist biases to blame that violence on BLM or associate it with somehow representing the purpose of BLM, etc.
Re: Personal experiences bridge moral and political divides better than facts
#124Earlier quoted context omitted.
I hope you understand how unreasonable you sound to me. You're telling me that what I both saw and experienced, with verified fact and video evidence, isn't real . Your conviction that you know more about me and my life, than me, and your insistence on how invalid it is, makes you sound, frankly, like some sort of political zealot. I tend not to waste my time convincing other people of things to this degree. I will s…
What you are saying is simply not ok. If your take away of your experience led you to believe BLM is responsible for significant violence, that is a manifestation of problems with you and your beliefs, not an accurate fact-based conclusion drawn from a legitimate interpretation of the BLM movement or any experience of BLM protests. You saying that I sound unreasonable by not letting your shit slide doesn’t change any…
I'm confused... it's verifiable fact... insurance claims from the riots are between $1-2 billion in damages... dozens of people died and between just a few cities thousands of police were injured, who knows how many protestors and bystanders... support for the movement dropped rapidly once things escalated... these are the facts. How can you look at this, and when someone says they witnessed just a small piece of it, say they're "irredeemably far from fact based reality" and you just can't let it "slide". Consider at least, that your extreme position harms your movement. What is your exact criticism of my opposition? Or at the very least, to what I witnessed?
Re: Personal experiences bridge moral and political divides better than facts
#125A personal experience is a fact. It is a fact we can be pretty sure of, and we know the context of that fact. Obviously, once we extrapolate from that experienced fact, it becomes bias. A fact that is not a personal experience is difficult to trust. Even if I trust the source of that fact, I am often not sure if I understand the fact properly. Anyone who has ever tried to understand a math theorem might relate. It is…
Eyewitness testimony is a personal experience that's been well proven to be poorly correlated with others' personal experience of the same event. You may be redefining "fact".
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Re: Personal experiences bridge moral and political divides better than facts
#126It's interesting to me that this delineates between facts and personal experience as if personal experience doesn't occupy the same space as facts. Perhaps a more useful way to think about people's relation to truth is one of proximity. For a given individual, their personal experience is entirely factual, and because it is also most proximate to them, it is weighted the most highly. Intuitively, I think we understan…
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Re: Personal experiences bridge moral and political divides better than facts
#127Earlier quoted context omitted.
Don't forget the media lied throughout that time too; let us not forget the craziness of satanic ritual abuse, or the lies that led to the vietnam war, etc... The media and the government routinely mislead the public, look at in 2019 the intentional confusion of blackmarket thc vapes and tobacco vaping. Or more recently, the use of human trafficking. To claim there was sometime in the past where the news was good and…
There's a notable difference between: 1) a media outlet that repeats government lies about why we are fighting a war (or how it is going) 2) a media outlet that ignorantly repeats mistruths that are present in the (sub)culture 3) a media outlet that makes up its own lies We used to mostly have a mixture of 1 & 2, but we now have to contend with (3) as well.
In the early 2000s I went to “the south” for the first time, and on the news there was a story about a suspicious hanging of a black man ruled suicide, but his hands were tied behind his back and was dating the sheriff’s white daughter.
Found out a decade later that story never happened, and it was a big enough deal for it to be in the list of urban legends and a controversy of how the news decided to report it at the time.
We have been dealing with (3) for a very long time. We dont even know what’s polluted our minds as truth.
Reality almost never matches with your worst fears, reality is typically different and strange. You should be very skeptical if it matched your worst fears no matter what the source.
Re: Personal experiences bridge moral and political divides better than facts
#128A personal experience is a fact. It is a fact we can be pretty sure of, and we know the context of that fact. Obviously, once we extrapolate from that experienced fact, it becomes bias. A fact that is not a personal experience is difficult to trust. Even if I trust the source of that fact, I am often not sure if I understand the fact properly. Anyone who has ever tried to understand a math theorem might relate. It is…
Eyewitness testimony is a personal experience that's been well proven to be poorly correlated with others' personal experience of the same event. You may be redefining "fact".
I am not redefining fact, but you are trying to reinterpret a personal experience as something it isn't. A personal experience is not an objective accurate fact about the world. There is no such thing. It can only ever be a bias. Just as an example can usually not be the proof of a theorem, just an indication that the theorem might be true.
Re: Personal experiences bridge moral and political divides better than facts
#129Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's only demonstrably wrong if you're going to insist on the very literal "almost none of the BLM protests involved violence" and ignore that that statement, in isolation, is rather misleading. Sure, most of the protests were peaceful. But when they weren't, it was was very bad. I was living in Downtown Chicago during the two major BLM protests that went violent last year. From my window, I saw people shooting out w…
Nobody is gaslighting anyone. By your own account, the perpetrators of the looting, property damage, etc., were not part of the BLM protests, but clearly differentiated groups adding violence to something non-violent. I live in NYC and in my neighborhood we also had windows boarded up after days of looting, cars smashed in the street, fires and more. Literally none of it was related to the BLM movement. Similarly wit…
You assert that the groups responsible for the rioting were clearly differentiated from the BLM protests, but I don't see how one can differentiate them without making a no-true-Scotsman argument that the rioting somehow goes against the principles of the movement and they can be distinguished on that basis. At the time, some people were claiming that the rioting was the work of alt-right agents provocateurs, but that doesn't seem to have panned out. (Cf. the assertions that the Capitol rioters were antifa agents provocateurs.)
It's also not a good argument given there were loud voices claiming to speak for BLM that were justifying the rioting and looting. Reparations, smashing the racist capitalist system, etc. Maybe they don't represent the movement as a whole, but if so, the movement had lost its voice to extremists by that point.
An example of this kind of thing, posted by a friend who took part in BLM protests, in response to a status update I made: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EnCI4_9W4AAAxDf.jpg
Bad actors doing embarrassing or destructive things is a real problem for ad-hoc decentralized movements. And that's why I'm careful to not hold the acts of individuals against a movement unless said acts are the whole point of the movement. But at the same time, "Black Lives Matter riots of 2020" is the most accurate label for the events in question that I can think of.
Re: Personal experiences bridge moral and political divides better than facts
#130Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think the aspect that spans between your comment and the one you replied to is this: Why should “personal experiences” be a different category than “facts?” (even taking for granted the extra step you mentioned, where it is the use of these experiences within a discussion, not the absolute existence of the experience, at play). For example, suppose I know you and you are honest and trustworthy, so if you verbally t…
>false realities Or just other people's realities. You mention BLM riots, which affected me a great deal; tens of millions in damages to my city, destruction of local landmarks, one of the teachers in my local school district was arrested for assaulting a state politician for recording them burning a police car, and to top it off, they smashed the pharmacy where I get my wife's medicine, so she had to go without for…
>This was my experience so when people tell me they were "peaceful protests" or the news says "statistically, they were 99.99999999% peaceful" but I look at what I saw with my own eyes, and also what was on TV in other cities... I can't be convinced that they weren't violent, destructive, and plainly, evil, no matter how much other people tell me what to think.
Your point is well taken. I live in a large city. The area where I live, while mixed, is majority minority. My own experience was quite different. No one assaulted teachers from my local school. I saw no businesses burned. I don't know anyone who was directly impacted by the months of daily BLM protests.
Those are my experiences. Why are you telling me what I should believe?
I mirrored my experiences against yours to point out that your anecdotal experience is not the whole of the story. Nor is mine.
Now for some facts that neither you nor I actually experienced:
Where I live there were a few instances of violence against police (and in every single case, nearly all the folks involved were both white and from out of town).
There were also numerous instances of police instigating violence against peaceful protestors.
There were a few instances of looting, and the police and local government addressed them quickly and harshly, as just about everyone, including the protestors (many of whom were captured on video chasing would-be looters away) was horrified and angered by such actions.
There were (and are) violent miscreants who should be prosecuted to the full extent of the law. However, those folks were a tiny group compared to those who peacefully protested.
When you hear folks say the protests were "mostly" peaceful, they are empirically correct. Something like 20,000,000 people around the US peacefully protested against police violence.
At most, a few thousand people committed acts of violence and vandalism. Let's say there were even 10,000 (a high number, I suspect) folks who committed violent/destructive acts alongside the peaceful protests.
If that's correct, 99.95% of people protested peacefully and 0.05% of folks were violent/destructive.
I'm not sure how that could be construed as anything other than "mostly peaceful". in fact, I'd characterize it as "overwhelmingly peaceful".
I'm most certainly not telling you what to think or believe. Just presenting my own experiences and a few facts.
Don't take my word for it. I'm just some random asshole on the Internet.
The facts speak for themselves.