I was recently talking to someone about israel/gaza in the context of the new iran war. I couldn’t help but notice we were coming to much the same conclusions, but through totally different lines of thought. To summarize, like most lefties, he opposes israel for “what they’re doing to the locals” i.e. from the perspective of “anti-colonialism”. On the other hand, I oppose israel for what they’re doing to do us in the West.
What is your reaction to a situation like this? And more broadly speaking, what do you think about this notion of coming to the same conclusion as someone else, while following wildly different trains of thought? Try and convince them that their entire perception of the world is upside down? Take it as a win, in an “enemy of my enemy” kind of way? Can they be trusted to ever come to the “correct” conclusion again if their rationale is “wrong”? Or is the line of thought more important than the conclusion? If not in general, can it ever be?
I suppose this post is basically just turning that giancarlo esposito (“you dislike X because Y, I dislike X because Z, we are not the same.”) meme into a text post lmao, but I think there’s actually some kind of important discussion to be had, related to this idea
Liberals can occasionally say something correct while still being fundamentally wrong. That's inevitable.
If you have let's say, a guy who died of a disease he caught drinking from the river. An civilized man will reason that the water source isn't safe, and either avoid or purify it.
The primitives will say that it's because you made the water spirits upset and you need to avoid the water until the shamans can make it happy again.
The latter group of people are still wrong, even if they too avoid drinking from a tainted river. In this case, you're not going to fix their stupidity so I just nod and play along and chalk it up to something new to laugh about with my wife on the car ride home.
Well put - im sure you can tell by the post this was barely a half-formed thought lol.
Even if in this case they come to the “correct” conclusion, with faulty reasoning they’re still “wrong”, and thus couldn’t be trusted to come to the correct conclusion ever again and should therefore never be allowed into a position of authority over water resources.
I suppose the dividing line is something like “does this really matter?” - if I disagree with someone’s reasoning for, idk, liking a movie, that doesn’t really matter because their opinion can’t really have an effect on me. If their opinion decides where the village digs the new well, then shit, we might have a problem lol
Of course it matters.
Which set of reasoning do you want to live under? That should matter very much.
It absolutely matters. Liberals values are about "protecting minorities" which is a sick way to run a society.
In math you can make a mistake in a complex calculation and still come to the right answer just by pure chance.