You're viewing a single thread.
"Reading comprehension" is starting to become a buzzword like "cognitive dissonance." It is harrowing how often I've seen reading comprehension criticized by people who clearly missed the point themselves. God help you if you venture into Linux communities, there's some kind of shared brain fog that completely deprives them of the ability to "get" anything that involves context clues.
Right wingers tend to go into the following cycle
1 - get a talking point or rhetorical strategy from Fox News or Alex Jones or whatever
2 - use it en masse against democrats in online debates
3 - democrats and other thinking people call out the disingenuous nature of whatever it is, by using the appropriate term for a fallacy (ie straw man), or creating a new term (like JAQing off), or using a historical quote.
4 - right wingers are too stupid to understand, but they think if they just copy and paste it with different nouns and throw it back against liberals then they have a "gotcha"
Example: remember a year or two ago when this quote from Jean-Paul Sartre started going around regarding fascism?
Never believe that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The anti-Semites have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert. If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past.
So after a while of this, you started seeing Qultists posting stuff like this
Never believe that woke liberals are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The woke liberals have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert. If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past.
Makes no goddamn sense but they didn't understand the first quote anyway.
I see it as a kind of cargo cult. They see big words like "strawman" or "cognitive dissonance" and think that they hold the power to winning arguments so they use them themselves with no regard gor context.
Any angle that can be used to criticise or defend something will get used by both people who don't understand it but are trying to use it in good faith, people who do understand it but misunderstand the situation and misapply it, and people who may or may not understand the thing or situation but use it in bad faith.
I hate the word "subjective" now. It absolutely does not mean what most people think it means. And it certainly doesn't mean that there's no such thing as objective quality/effectiveness, nor that there's no such thing as good taste.
It's in opposition to what is objective, I don't understand how someone could think if one exists the other can't...
But I also don't understand why people were eating Tide pods so...
- You can't define something with "it's the opposite of something [that you also haven't defined properly]"
- It's still not what most people think it is, but
- I really don't want to be forced to open up this can of worms right now. I don't have the mental energy
If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past.