this post was submitted on 30 Aug 2023
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Hold up, assigning traits to a government made up by people (a group of people) is weird, but assigning traits to a different group of people isn't? I don't really disagree, but you can't agree with the comment above you and agree with your comment also.
of course i can; if i couldn't, i wouldn't, but i did it, which is proof that i can do it
You can't while being a reasonable, logically consistent person. You can if you argue in bad faith, which I expect but usually people don't take pride in that.
Did he assign a trait to liberals? Because if not, there's no inconsistency.
Then a follow up question: is there a difference between 'liberals' as a group (i.e. not liberalism) and a government (i.e. an institution)? If so, there may be no inconsistency.
What I mean is, when people talk about governments it's often as a non-human legal person, which can act, omit, sue, and be sued, but which does not have the full range of human traits, like insincerity. Whereas a group that does not have legal personality and only describes a collection of humans, albeit in the abstract, like 'liberals', can demonstrate a fuller range of human traits.
Then, as an experiment, switch the terms and see if it has the same ring to it:
Does this anthropomorphise 'governments' in the same way as attributing human emotions to them?
I don't necessarily have answers to these questions but it seems that you can't be calling someone out for bad faith unless you can strongly argue yes, no, yes, to the above questions.
i admire the willingness to spell it out lol but that other guy has big reddit debatebro energy and i don't think it can go anywhere
It's often the way. Hopefully someone else reading will see the flaw in forever calling an alternative viewpoint 'bad faith' because it's presented with humour.
Let's see...
It sure seems like it. Liberals treat politics as a reality TV show seems to be a trait described.
Sure, there is a difference. They're both institutions though. They can both be assigned traits in perfectly valid reasonable ways.
I can strongly answer that "anthropomorphising" things made of anthropomorphic beings is perfectly reasonable. Giving traits to a building can be silly, but sometimes still useful literarily. Using human characteristics to describe humans is totally normal, useful, and reasonable.