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The March of Dimes Syndrome

city-journal.org

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Re: The March of Dimes Syndrome

#121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That entire paragraph is mostly a strawman, or, if you're feeling charitable, coming from an extremely surface-level awareness of the actual issues they're talking about.

"Anything I don't agree with is a strawman"

Not at all, but I would absolutely argue pretty much all instances of "List of single-sentence heavily polarised and editorialised talking points" are. You're not looking to engage in a good-faith discussion by throwing out a pile of points and hoping nobody puts in the effort to actually engage with every single one - look at the sibling thread to my comment and the disproportionate amount of effort it takes to respond without just being pulled aside to debate the minutiae of specific events.

Of course, that is all assuming they actually have some level of familiarity with what the topic being discussed and the talking points they are using. They could simply be uninformed, but trying to engage in rhetoric before learning more at that point doesn't seem like it would be in good faith either way.

(That is not to say that one should never respond to an argument that takes way more rigor than throwing it out there took, but it's definitely not "should always" either :p.)

Re: The March of Dimes Syndrome

#122
post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At the end of the day the person coming to a public accommodation for a service or good doesn’t and shouldn’t need to know anything about the religion of the owner. Why should they? What does that have to do with me buying a muffler from their store or a bouquet of flowers? Living in a world where we have to follow all the weird -isms of each individual proprietor (including, yes, racism) would be a social nightmare…

You must be replying in the wrong place. I didn't say anything about buying mufflers or flowers, or "all the weird -isms of each individual proprietor". I'm not talking about broad principles and generalities here. The cake thing was weird. I wouldn't expect to get a very good cake by pressing the issue. I should think it much more likely I'd get some haphazardly-assembled, bare-minimum, passive-aggressive excuse for…

No, I’m not replying in the wrong place and i cited the portion of your comment I was responding to.

I think your idea that a proprietor reducing the quality of the product because they disagree with someone’s private life is literally the problem in a nutshell, you have just said that we need to just tacitly tolerate discrimination in public accommodations. The quality of the cake should simply have nothing to do with the implicit characteristics of the customer at all.

Furthermore, you’re suggesting that since they will just discriminate anyway in lower-key ways if we ban overt topline discrimination, that we should just legalize overt topline discrimination and let it happen. That’s wrong/bad too.

Like you’re just suggesting open discrimination should be legal because we can’t stop 100% of it. That’s a fucking shitty take/shitty belief system you hold.

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