Quote:
Originally Posted by Reincarnate
If you cannot be bothered to address the points offered to you with intellectual honesty, then there is no point in furthering any discussion or debate with you.
You could try addressing the point I made to you before trying to place the onus on me for answering to stargroup's points. I'm a separate dude making a separate point to you. If you can't address the point, then I'll just leave the thread.
|
Quote:
Originally Posted by Reincarnate
Zaevod: What kind of food do you like?
Me: I like Japanese food.
Zaevod: NO. WRONG. YOU LIKE THE SUBSET OF JAPANESE FOOD THAT YOU HAVE HAPPENED TO ENJOY, YOU CANNOT SAY THAT ABOUT ALL JAPANESE FOOD. IT IS ILLOGICAL TO SAY THAT YOU LIKE JAPANESE FOOD.
|
To be honest, I admit that I was at least partially wrong for saying earlier that you can't ever generalize based on personal experience. But, still:
Assuming that this analogy works, then it's okay for one to say that they hate blacks/gays/jews/whatever because the ones they met, or at least some of them, were assholes.
My problem with this analogy is that, even though you technically
can generalize if you have evidence from personal experience that the majority of people from a certain group are bad,
this is usually not an accurate reflection of reality. A lot of these hateful generalizations are not based on honest assessments but on confirmation bias or even anecdotal data that reflects only a minimal subset of the group. I believe that this is the case for misanthropy and many other forms of hatred, because a lot of the justifications people often use only apply to a very small minority.
It's perfectly okay to generalize if the issue you have with a group is shown to be a defining, essential aspect of that group. In a lot of cases, this is simply not what happens.
However, it could still happen that ALL members you meet from a certain group are evil assholes (again, unless this is a defining aspect of a group. For example: religious fanatics), but I'd say you have to be somewhat isolated from the rest of the world for that to occur.
So, maybe the solution for this would be for people to at least attempt to know the group in question as well as they can before making a generalization.