Interesting. I guess it’s about cultural conditioning. Growing up in Scandinavia the “both sides” and subjectivist approach was more common for leftists. Especially the “your terrorist is my freedom fighter”. In contrast rightists and liberals usually insisted on exactly this two-plus-two-is-four rhetoric. As analyzing American discourse from the outside I’m still not sure if the right wingers of my Nordic childhood was right anyway, or if American leftism has regressed horrendously
If we were talking about the normal version where one perspective does see 4 sides and the other 3, then I'd agree. But right wingers often completely ignore science and facts for what they feel is right - despite loudly claiming the opposite. They're simply wrong about any number of things, from economics to gender studies to climate change, but they insist on their positions because of how they feel on a fundamental level - that all the common-sense folks around them think this way, their preacher thinks this way, and they don't trust anyone they haven't personally encountered long enough to understand. Time and time again, science has disproven explicitly conservative viewpoints, from race biology to Social Darwinism to climate change and so on. But they double down because to change their perspectives risks alienating their peers, or even worse, possibly damning them to Hell.
That's why I said what I did. Liberals are a pain in the ass and generally incapable of accomplishing much of value, but at least they typically welcome new data that may contradict a previously-held position.
Is there a way to see this as four? I’m assuming so but legitimately can’t see anything other than three. Is that the joke and I’m overthinking‽ ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
my favorite thing is when a comic has a very clear message but it's also written at the top what it's about and whay i should take from the message is further explained below.
Do you not see four? Your really missing out. I think some guys even started worshiping it. We even started selling a book about four. Once you see it, you can join out super cool club and four based economy.
I think the joke is that there's indeed unequivocally just three, and that one of them still says four despite that fact, contradicting the readers expectations who normally for this format expects the middle thing to be something that changes with perspective (eg. 6 vs 9)
I guess it’s all a matter of cultural conditioning but growing up in Scandinavia this kind of rhetoric was always associated with right-wingers and other liberals whereas “both sides” was more common for progressives and leftists. The most common I saw was the one-persons-terrorist-is-another-persons-freedom-fighter.
It's always been complicated, Chomsky famously got criticized around the world for opposing censorship of different perspectives. Censorship has always come from collectivist ideologies though.
What? The first ordinal you start counting at doesn't change the total count, and alternatively the last item would be indexed at 2 if you used 0-based indexing.
Sure it’s a matter of perspective, but only so far because reality will constraint that the number of “items on the ground” are either three or four. One of these people is closer to what’s real.