Comments by "SsjC" (@ssjcosty) on "Dilbert creator Scott Adams melts down in racist rant, Elon Musk defends him" video.

  1. I think this simplified view is quite problematic. Sometimes there are valid reasons to have negative feelings about a group, especially when it comes to politics and religion. Pointing out systemic issues and evils that some religions and sects promote, and harmful actions done by their adherents in the name of their religion, can be insulting to the followers of those religions and others who feel offended on their behalf. And you'll notice that the more fundamentalist some sects are, the more they get offended by the modern world, by the existence of LGBTQ people, by sex education, by the existence of apostates and non-believers, by people seen as blasphemers etc. I personally have negative feelings about conservatives and religious fundamentalists and Christian nationalists. Should I really fear saying things that they may find insulting?
    3
  2. That poll is apparently highly questionable anyway. But I just want to say that when constructed well, to minimize statistical biases, polls can be highly reliable and accurate and can involve surprisingly low numbers of people (e.g. in the thousands or depending on the scope even hundreds). There are ways to calculate the accuracy (and the margin of error) with regards to the size of of the sampling population, and there are some thresholds after which the accuracy gained by adding more individuals to the sample becomes statistically insignificant. In any case, the polls published by Pew Research Center tend to be quite reliable, with robust methodologies behind them.
    1
  3.  @tiffanywyatt5137  ​I guess...? I mean, I judge groups for some of the reasons mentioned above. Some of the groups I'm thinking of are even classified as "hate groups" in the USA, while others are literally terrorist organisations, so I'm not sure why there would be a problem with having negative feelings about them. And in regards to political groups, I believe it is quite alright to have positive or negative feelings about them without being bigoted, is it not? My other point was that a lot of specific criticism of systemic problems in some religions (e.g. Westboro Baptist Church, Jehova's Witnesses, The Church of Latter Day Saints, Catholic Church) are considered offensive even if they are well grounded, and even when they aren't meant to discriminate actual followers of those religions. E.g. accusations of child abuse in the Catholic church offended a lot of Catholics who claimed these were just nefarious forces trying to attack and undermine their faith, or worse, they took it as a personal attack on themselves rather than a valid criticism of the Church institution. So I don't believe it's reasonable to give blanket recommendations that people should just refrain from expressing opinions if they can offend people's sensibilities and biases.
    1
  4.  @tiffanywyatt5137  Absolutely not. You should be biased against those who actually commit crimes, not against a whole group arbitrarily defined by some biological characteristic. According to the FBI 2019 Uniform Crime Report, African-Americans accounted for 55.9% of all homicide offenders in 2019, with whites 41.1%, and "Other" 3%. Be aware that this is only a percentage of the total who commit violent crimes, which overall are a tiny percent of the population. Consider that the violent crime rate in the USA is about 366.7 per 100k inhabitants, meaning about 0.36% of the population — according to the FBI Uniform Crime Reporting 2019. Now according to the USA Census Bureau, for 2022, Black Americans represented 13.6% of the total population of 333,287,557 people. I'll spare you the calculations, but considering the percentages mentioned above, it means that of all the black people in the USA, only 0.002% of them are violent criminals. Would you seriously discriminate against a group on the basis that 0.002% of them are criminals? It's unjustifiable to the extreme. Now contrast this with what I said in my previous comments. Specific religious organisations and political groups promote specific values that are harmful, discriminatory and even racist, and I am against them doing that. Sometimes, expressing negative opinions of their practices leads to followers of those organisations to claim they are offended. Should I care about their offense? I believe I shouldn't. I also believe the same people should be far more offended at the bad shit done by those organisations than by people uncovering said issues.
    1
  5.  @tiffanywyatt5137  How so?
    1