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Good explanation. My original point was that the attempt to reduce to absurdity fails because it's not simply being something or holding some opinion that causes others to be in implicit support of it. Implicit support consists in being present when an immoral or unethical action takes place, and not stopping it when you have the opportunity to do so. Indeed, it doesn't even require one group to be in the majority, although fear of going against a larger group is often what causes people to stay silent.



I get your point, but I don't think it's entirely relevant to my original post because the comment I was replying to was making statements about the truth of descriptive claims rather than, say, standing by while group X oppresses group Y. Of course these are intertwined and hard to separate in some cases; you can find plenty of examples where descriptive claims have been used to justify horrible atrocities, and being agnostic towards the claims Nazis made about Jews would not garner my sympathies, but I hope you can understand the distinction I'm drawing. I don't even feel comfortable saying that the scared or indifferent onlooker would be supporting group X (though if they pay taxes to group X I'd say they are supporting the oppression whether or not they speak up, in a financial sense), but I do understand your reasoning in that context and don't particularly care to split hairs over the definition of "support" (it doesn't affect my opinions of standing by and doing nothing in the face of oppression, I'm just a pedantic motherfucker).




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