feotakahari

Person 1: When people call something “tradition,” it’s usually newer than what people call “modernity.”

Person 2: I don’t get it. Are you saying the word “tradition” is newer than the word “modernity”?

People 3 through 1 gazillion: *Point and laugh at Person 2*

Person 2: I still don’t get it. Would someone please explain the post instead of insulting me?

People 3 through 1 gazillion: *Still laughing*

You’re all jerks.

I should respond to more political strategy with “I don’t know that, and neither do you.” Like that person who said the Democrats would win more elections if they called transphobes “weird.” I argued with that on linguistic grounds—if transphobes are this common, they’re the normies—but thinking about it on strategic grounds, I have no way to tell whether calling transphobes “weird” would help or not. And you don’t know that either, unless you’ve been doing opinion surveys. You’re just stating something that feels to you like it should be right, and things that feel right may or may not be right.

You can argue about what’s a good vs. bad way to meme about the Gadsden flag on the Internet. But it sounds like the people who’re deciding American presidential elections these days don’t have much overlap with the people who will ever look at your Gadsden flag meme. I’m not sure any decision you make about your Gadsden flag meme will be relevant in a practical sense.

“If the Internet Archive was selling heroin, you’d want to stop them.” Okay, but the Internet Archive isn’t selling heroin.

“If a woman consented for a man to rip her jaw off, you wouldn’t let him do that.” Okay, but I’m not aware of anyone consenting to have their jaw ripped off. “

If a runaway six-year-old wanted to live in a crack den instead of their old home, you’d still force them to go home.” I can imagine this one, but only if the home is so horrible the crack den is an improvement.

Racists love to say they’re employing “pattern recognition.” It’s a phrase they regularly come back to in order to say you’re stupid for not being racist. But they can’t recognize when the pattern fails, even when they’re directly discussing the pattern failing. E.g. a couple times now I’ve seen a pro-gay racist use discrimination against gay people as an excuse to say some group are “savages” or whatnot, without any acknowledgement that the same group they hate includes the gay people they’re supposedly defending.

I never want to hear the word “Christmas” in an online argument again.

Actually, I never want to hear the word “Christmas” again.

Commenters on Retraction Watch are surprisingly prone to making arguments already addressed in the article.

( You're about to view content that the journal owner has advised should be viewed with discretion. )

I haven’t consciously thought about this before, but apparently I think there’s no safe way to be sloppy about your values. Like that one person who posted about how in an ideal society, poor people would be able to be wasteful. They didn’t really mean that, because what they actually meant was “it sucks to be this fucking poor.” But if something like that is spreading around, my emotional reaction is to assume there must be value in arguing with it, if not for the OP, then for other people who didn’t think about it.

And that’s how I ended up arguing with someone whose intent was to communicate “disabled people have the right to live.” I still don’t feel like I made a mistake there. I feel like the framing can be abused, even if the OP didn’t mean it to be abused, and I feel like recognizing the problems protects you when other people use similar arguments to take advantage of you. But it’s relevant whether or not I’m accomplishing anything besides pissing people off.

Today in “we’re going to equivocate between treating someone well and treating someone exactly as shitty as we think they deserve”: people who treat men exactly as shitty as they think men deserve, who are now complaining about men who want to be treated “even nicer.”

A parallel:

There are people who support Land Back. There are also people who don’t actually want to give land back, but seem to think the Land Back people are saying the same thing as them.

There are people who say there are no thought crimes. There are also people who say there are no thought crimes except for this one thought that’s evil to have, but seem to think the people who said “no thought crimes” agree with them and just forgot to mention the evil thought.

A mental trap: asserting that human-created meaning exists outside of humans. For instance, wavelengths of light exist, but humans are the ones who categorize some wavelengths as “yellow.” If you talk about yellow as an objective property and philosophize about the true nature of yellow, you’re overprivileging the human perspective.

Also a mental trap: thinking that someone is asserting human-created meaning when they’re not. Someone talks about the wavelengths of light that are commonly considered “yellow,” and you get mad and lecture them about how yellow isn’t real. They weren’t trying to assert yellow as real; they were just trying to talk about the properties of light in a concise and easy to understand way.

Both mental traps constantly snap shut when people talk about sex chromosomes.

Communist blogger: anarchists don’t have any good ideas for how to get insulin to people who need it.

Anarchist blogger who thinks he’s making a counterargument: communists don’t have any good ideas for how to get insulin to people who need it.

My synthesis: neither of you know shit about distributing insulin.

There was an interesting take I saw today that was phrased meaner than I normally reblog. Paraphrasing: “Every time I talk about how much a Democrat sucks, Americans show up to tell me I need to vote for him because the Republican is worse. I don’t live in the U.S., so I’m not saying anything about voting! Just let me talk about how much his policies suck for my country!”

I continue to have zero interest in arguments of the form “people who have the same disability but different opinions accuse each other of being bigoted against people with disabilities.” Are the stutterers* who say Biden doesn’t just have a stutter bigoted against stutterers? Are the stutterers who say he does just have a stutter bigoted against stutterers? Who gives a fuck?

* IDK the PC term, but it had better not be “people of stuttering.”

There’s this thing people do sometimes where they talk about the conventions of fanfiction as if they’re checkmarks of quality. This is used as a lead-in to argue that non-fanfic writers don’t know fanfic conventions, and fanfic writers don’t know non-fanfic conventions, so therefore both are equal and you can’t say non-fanfic writers are “better.”

I detest this argument, because by that logic, any writer who doesn’t check the conventional boxes for their genre is worse than one who does! Your checkmarking fanfic about half the cast hooking up isn’t automatically better than my fanfic about half the cast breaking up. (It’s probably better, but not because of the checkmarks.)

The more I think about it, the more frustrated I am with that person who told me I didn’t understand systematic racism and gave me a list of books to read. I know what systemic racism is! I don’t know what you think is an appropriate response to systemic racism, and you got mad at me for not following your chain of thought! I wasn’t looking for a book about the general subject matter, I was looking for what you, an individual who presumably doesn’t think in lockstep with the book, thought about the specific situation you were talking about!

Something that’s happened more than once: a non-white Jew says white Jews treat them like shit. The replies accuse the nonwhite Jew of saying Jews deserved the Holocaust. The nonwhite Jew didn’t say anything about the Holocaust, but that doesn’t seem to matter.

People arguing over whether they can drag the Democratic Party to the left. Some arguing that previous attempts haven’t dragged the party to the left. I’m disappointed that no one seems to be replying to this. “Here’s why our current attempt to drag the party to the left is different from previous attempts.” Or even “here’s why you’re underestimating how much of an impact our previous attempts had.” Don’t just restate the initial point!

For the sake of honesty, “transmisandry doesn’t exist” should be followed by “so I’m creating it.”

A comparison: when someone argues that it’s an exaggeration to say that women who accuse men of rape have their reputations destroyed. The inevitable followup is to attempt to destroy women’s reputations.

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