• zqps@sh.itjust.works
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    1 day ago

    The community’s use isn’t the correct point of reference. It is also naturally biased, because the community seeks to avoid association with these people.

    It’s not crazy or outlandish to label Harris or Dawkins as skeptics in the common use of the term. It’s core to their branding whether you like it or not. That’s what matters when you talk to people outside the community, not the insular definition you treat as objective fact.

    I don’t even see a point in litigating this, other than the one I mentioned already. It was clear from context what they were talking about.

    • FauxPseudo @lemmy.world
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      1 day ago

      The community has explicitly rejected the people you named because they aren’t in keeping with positions the community holds. If the community says they don’t want these people in the group but you insist on saying they are part of the group then you are making a bad faith argument.

      Communities get to decide who is an isn’t part of the community. You specifically mentioned trans issues. Two of the pods I named had trans hosts. Dawkins had his AHA award pulled because of trans comments. Skeptics aren’t being the people you said they were. You can either change your mind or stick to your beliefs despite the evidence.

      https://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/richard-dawkins-trans-humanist-aha-b1835017.html

      • zqps@sh.itjust.works
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        3 hours ago

        You’re completely missing the point. This isn’t about a community no matter how much you’d prefer otherwise. This was a conversation in a public forum.

        The word “sceptic” has a generally understood meaning regardless of how the community feels about it, because the general public isn’t paying attention to what the community wants.

        You can either change your mind or stick to your beliefs despite the evidence.

        How kind of you. Word of advice, don’t resort to statements like this. It’s transparent ego stroking that makes you sound like a self-centered asshole and doesn’t help your argument in any way.

        • FauxPseudo @lemmy.world
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          2 hours ago

          “This isn’t about a community no matter how much you’d prefer otherwise.”

          Except that it was/is about the community/movement/group collectively known as skeptics. Go back the the beginning of the conversation. I mentioned materials and the reply came back about how it was all transphobic misogynist stuff. Well there is nothing inherently transphobic or misogynist about the application of epistemology, logic and spotting logical fallacies so the complaint must have been about the people. Then the conversation explicitly mentioned people by name as represe representatives of the community. So no matter how much you try to say it wasn’t about the community it was.

          “This was a conversation in a public forum. The word “sceptic” has a generally understood meaning.”

          There are lots of “generally understood” groups that go by existing words that aren’t understood at all by the general population. To many people atheists are Satan worshipers, trans people are bathroom predators, and geologists are part of a massive cover-up about the truth of young earth creationism. But we know that these “generally understood” meanings are completely false. In a dictionary a word can have more than one meaning and context matters.