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By that logic every country or organization or grouping of people in history is “comparable”.
by ryanwaggoner 8y ago
By that logic every country or organization or grouping of people in history is “comparable”.
- danharaj 8y agoYou might be surprised to learn that there are entire disciplines of scholarship dedicated to comparing countries, organizations, and groupings of people.
- ryanwaggoner 8y agoReally?? Wow! That doesn’t mean that they’re all “comparable” in any reasonable sense of the word.
- inetknght 8y agoWhat you find to be reasonable is not necessarily what others find to be reasonable. For a comparison: I find @danharaj's comment to be very reasonable.
- ryanwaggoner 8y agoProbably because they're agreeing with you and I'm disagreeing with you. Is a small tribe of Native Americans in the 1400s "comparable" to the European Union in 2018? Only in the sense that you can compare them, but then, you can compare anything, so literally anything is comparable in that sense, which robs the word of all meaning.
- danharaj 8y ago> Only in the sense that you can compare them, but then, you can compare anything, so literally anything is comparable in that sense, which robs the word of all meaning. I think there's quite a bit more in common between a 1400's tribe and the EU than say, the star Polaris and trends of Swedish Cubism in the years 1950-1980. The point here has always been that throwing up your hands and saying the original comparison is unreasonable is not a reasoned argument, it's flipping the table and walking off. The systems of social control in the United States and China are far more comparable than "anything to anything".