Been noticing that (neo)liberals, not even just fascists/conservatives, dont know what words mean. Its becoming harder and harder to talk to people when they dont know how words even work. Twice this week people have stumbled into conversations I’m having and either havent read the conversation or just only a response and fucked their way into refuting their own point.
Its driving me up a wall to have some one say “The west is liberalism personified. Its the best thing ever” for me to respond “that doesnt make any sense, how would you even justify that? what about the world wars, imperialism, slavery, 400 years of liberal history of primitive accumulation and exploitation” and then for another dipshit to come in and say “you seem to be conflating the west and liberalism commiecuck.”
What. What the fuck did you just say. That was the basis of the entire conversation. This person isnt responding to the OP, refuting the OP, and even follows the OP and likes their posts. Are these people radioactive? Is interacting with these people and dunking on them just a memetic hazard at this point?
I dont see how someone or anyone can operate on a daily basis while being unable to parse something like that. It makes me feel like these people are just bot accounts, operating purely on hallucinations post to post. And this was just one of two this week, I’ve had a few others but the brain seepage seems to be accelerating out of control.
tl;dr America is cooked when even the smug “brain geniuses” cant seem to function.
Yeah, I meet a lot of people who have no idea how an actual argument is structured or how to identify and address someone’s underlying point.
One example that comes to mind from my own life is an argument with someone about “frivolous” science funding. I made the argument that it’s hard to argue that a scientific project is frivolous when science is so often advanced by researchers finding something they weren’t even looking for. I gave the example of Pavlov, who was just looking for ways to collect more dog saliva and accidentally discovered classical conditioning. But he fixated on my choice of example, simply said “Pavlov was an animal abuser” and completely ignored the actual point I was trying to make. Like, I don’t even disagree with him about Pavlov, but my argument had nothing to do with whether Pavlov was a good person.
I run into this problem a lot too. It seems like regardless of how people phrase things oftentimes they just mean, “thing is bad” or “thing causes bad things” so they will assume that you are going to say whatever your best example of, “thing is good.” Science funds assholes isnt a good counter argument in that situation. If you just kept things super simple and said something like “penicillin comes from bread mold.” They might have responded more positively.
Im on the spectrum so I’m always parsing through the ways in which other’s logic is different from mine.
People seem to use words as gestures rather than building blocks and its super frustrating for me.
My favorite example of this is the alchemist who accidentally discovered elemental phosphorous by repeatedly boiling his own piss
Exactly how saying the word “Uyghur” is just China=bad in actual content. Most libs know nothing about Xinjiang, nothing about Uyghurs, and rarely even spell it in am acceptable way. Propaganda often works to just have some phrase mean bad and be repeatable
I got into this argument with my uncle a few years back when he was complaining about “frivolous studies on worms when we can just use common sense.” This guy has a degree from a private university and was in the Air Force doing nerd (and ghoul) shit.
I tried explaining using a similar argument you used. Science is a gradual process where we try to eliminate/reduce bias to advance our knowledge. You can’t do fuck all going off your gut because you end up with non-falsifiable results nobody can replicate. Yeah, it’s tedious to have a ten year study on the mating habits of worms in New Hampshire vs. worms in Nebraska. But it’s necessary in order to find answers and eliminate wrong ones.
And again, like you say, so much of science is accidental. Penicillin, insulin, and x-rays were all stumbled upon by chance when their creators were working on something else. Then there’s the “common sense” catastrophes like phrenology, creationism, or that time those guys thought they discovered cold fusion.
There is nothing common or sensible about common sense.
Common Sense isnt.
Many such cases
I think another key issue is that most people view situations and events from a insular self and so their own sense of feeling toward an event is more valued than what a statement on a event means within a specific context. i.e. that America has troops that have committed horrible war crimes gets seen by so many as “your specific friend/child in the military is a grapist/murderer and should be put on death row” because having loyalty to something outweighs any actual realistic context when someone is emotionally invested. Similarly there’s the “vote blue no matter who” liberal rhetoric that gets proven false when progressives step up to bat but god forbid you point this out to a liberal as it’s seen as wanting to support Nazis (never mind that dems are Nazi enablers/their own flavor of fascist).
Are we really doing the “grapist” thing here?
The other term gets filtered out and sadly Trevor Moor forever planted it in my brain. Honestly wondering though if there’s a similar shorthand term that could be used that isn’t juvenile.
i believe terms regarding SA are terms to avoid without a CW and shouldnt be used without good reason; while I dont always agree with this stuff I did actually edit my post before submission for two different instances of mental health language that there was discussion about. I did actually like doing that, felt neat. Although there are a few terms I do want to use that get autofiltered (degen). As long as we avoid “unalived” that shit is weird.
We should add “unalived” to the slur filter
Is that true? What a weird and cool example.