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There are few things that exhaust and discourage me more than reductionists shouting past each other.
the only thing I can think of that's worse is the guy who stands on the sidelines, refuses to take a position and shits on everyone as though he's contributing to the discussion.
I stand only with every other layer of abstract sideline-shitting
I stopped trying to contribute to battles between reductionists many years ago, since they're not coincidentally also binarists, so each just takes the fact that I'm not 100% in agreement with them to mean that I'm on the falsely dichotomous other side.
That's an awful lot of why they're so exhausting and discouraging - because I know from bitter experience that there's absolutely nothing I can do about it. I'm constantly tempted to respond - just, if nothing else, to for instance point out that something as enormously complex as the US Civil War cannot possibly rightly be said to have been about one specific thing - but I've learned that that can't possibly accomplish anything.
Should I then have just kept my mouth shut? Probably, in much the same way as I'd likely just keep walking if I saw two drunks brawling in an alley.
But I didn't, and so be it.
And who knows? Maybe somebody somewhere will read this and think, "You know... it really is kind of dumb to reduce a complex issue to just one single idea, then get into shouting matches with people who have reduced it to some other single idea."
Or not. And again, so be it.
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