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 Originally Posted by MadMojoMonkey
It is dehumanizing to devalue a person's opinion based on other people's opinions (even if the other people have similar opinions on similar topics).
FWIW, I meant to say conservativist. I meant nothing political by what I said, so if that's what got your diaper bound, then I'm sorry for the mixup.
Also FWIW, I did include the qualifier "tend to." It maybe woulda been slightly better to say "There's a strong tendency among conservatists ... ", but I don't know and it doesn't seem important enough to dwell.
I don't really wish to qualify it any more than that because I really do mean to make a massive, general statement in this case. There is an extremely prevalent approach to a wide range of conversations where simply pointing out one downside to a new technology/solution/policy is enough to convince a large segment of people that the world would be better off without it, and this effect kills so much discussion on the spot.
This article makes a value statement on the effect of Google on our intelligence,[1] and it seems pretty fucking silly for any value assessment to be made without considering an entire half of the equation (ie: the good). It annoys me that this article (and many arguments of its kind) would convince anyone, and I'm lumping anyone that it might convince into the group of conservatists--this due to the fact that they're all too easily convinced of the badness of some new thing.
[1]Or at least its title purports that; if they changed the title to, "Our Relationship with Technology is Maybe Not Quite As Positive As We Might Think," then we likely wouldn't be having this conversation, due in no small part to the fact that no one would care to read it.
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