this post was submitted on 19 May 2025
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There are exceptions to every rule. Killing someone is bad. Killing someone about to detonate a bomb and destroy a city is heroic.
As a general rule, if someone tells me I said something racist, I’d want to know what it was and how it was perceived as racist to avoid making that mistake again. Have you ever tried to do that with an overt racist? Immediate defensive anger peacocking.
yes absolutely. few things are binary. it's like people claiming pro-palestine protestors are antisemitic, or trying to take the valid examples of exceptions as an excuse for unrelated bigotry. it adds a lot of noise and makes it hard to navigate,, so a lot of people running on low-dimensional heuristic maps of the situation will lash out and cause legitimate grievance between other people who can or can't contextualize what happened and why. those who can't repeat the cycle, and socialize it.
why russia has such an easy time causing division and self-segregating behaviour. also why anti-intellectualism and self-serving behaviour is bad. we are too hackable in contextually 'noisy' environments, and bad actors love using that to their advantage.
it takes a lot of energy and time to understand how many blindspots we have within our oversimplified prediction of the world, and diverse environments and experiences, both physical and cyberphysical, and how that leads other people to be making different assumptions about what the world actually looks like. this includes our projections and expectations of others, battling our innate predictive modelling and biases/blindspots.
the issue is when an audience is running on those heuristics and making important choices that affect people. being overconfident in your over-binary predictions can cause these damages that cycle a self fulfilling spiral of legitimate grievance. again, an easy fire to stoke.
I agree. Nothing about human nature is truly binary. The universe is on a spectrum.