Yeah I understand this that was the point I was making. It's really challenging to hold onto that initial empathy when you're being harangued by people who don't want to repay it.
Honestly, for me it sort of breaks the immersion. All I can think of when I see this character, is that an openly trans person in the late 1800s in Scotland would have been completely ostracized from society. In those days, it would've been treated the same as a mental illness.
It would have been treated as mental illness in 2015.
Because their opinions are completely incoherent and not grounded in anything true or real, as that "ethicist" you quote ably demonstrates. If you believe there is some line that demarcates where you stop accepting objective truths and reality (e.g. in "the sciences") then the reality is that you can put that line anywhere you want "if it feels true."
There's a difference between having self-defined ethics (as opposed to prescriptive or dogmatic beliefs) and believing that ethics are meaningless/non-existent. Most secular humanists believe in the idea that there is an objective right and wrong, they just think it's something we have to figure out with our minds, rather than by reading 2000 year old forgeries cobbled together from other forgeries.
This is the opposite of what the quote says, which is that postmodernists tend to embrace areas where objective truth can be agreed upon, like science. It's the more abstract and philosophical areas where they recognize that objectivity is harder and there's room to disagree, since we're all just doing our best to grasp these concepts rationally. And Thacker argues that, given that wiggle room, people will rationalize to themselves things that make them feel good.
Funny note here: people that say "I feel" instead of "I think" have a tendency to dismiss objective metrics or empirical results going with their "gut feeling", even if that contradicts the data. Typical "it's just your opinion" stance.
I feel you are correct.
Dictatorships/totalitarian, fascist/commie governments, etc, approve of such a society.
I don't really see this "recognition that objectivity is harder and there's room to disagree re: abstract and philosophical areas" attitude in many people who are "secular humanists". And Im technically one of them. In fact this is my major issue with super left spaces currently - I see statistics being overused and manipulated to try to bend science to someone's philosophical or abstract belief so they can claim it's scientific often. To me, who has been an atheist my entire life, a lot of the spaces feel full of people who behave effectively identical to the Christian's when I was younger except with a different set of morals/dogma.
Oh no not The Girlfriend Review... Again
This is well thought out coz I was thinking the same thing. The more you get attacked over something the more likely you are to dig your heels in if the attacks are personal.
Remember when Harry Potter was banned for witchcraft by hardcore christians? It's like the same shit all over again lol
I'm not a HP fan so I don't know about any other dumbassery related to the book, but if there's one good thing about social media is that it proved what all of us believed, but couldn't prove before the internet….. the world has shitloads more dumbasses than imagined.
It's also worth mentioning that the outrage over JK Rowling almost exclusively takes place in the Anglosphere, whereas the popularity of the books and the franchise reach far beyond that.
Even more funny is that they helped give the game more exposure to people probably only knew about it and checked it out because of this ridiculous boycott call out.
Some people are already divorced from reality, so alternative realities became their own reality.
