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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   32971 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 13, 2023

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that firing white people to bring in a minority is still racism, but still believes in critical race theory and think that Jonathan Haidt and John McWhorter are idiots that are worth mocking immediately.

I think that this is a mostly empty category at this point.

What are some diplomatic skills I can develop to argue in such a way that a) I do not put myself in a position where I get easily accused (with onlookers being persuaded of those accusations), b) attention of onlookers remains on the bailey (not motte, the accusations), c) I politely reveal the idiocy of the positions of my woke interlocutors?

You have to hide your arguments with the language style and concerns of the woke, absolutely never show any type of anger, show complete apparent sincerity and good-will, and never actually admit to holding some positions like being pro-gun or anti-abortion, but merely say that you have some close family members (or friends) who hold those positions, and that after talking with them you didn't think their arguments were as stupid as you expected (you were not convinced by them, of course, but merely impressed by the arguments). Couch everything in a desire to simply make the woke's arguments better by seeing how they stand up to scrutiny. At the end of every exchange where you "try to make the woke arguments better", you have to end up saying that the woke are right, and just hope that the spectators see that the arguments against are really much better than those for the woke, even if you appeared to concede to wokeness in the end.

Another argumentative weapon is to have the "how do we convince conservatives?" frame, where you show people the anti-woke arguments in an attempt to see how the woke POV would address them, for the purpose of convincing conservatives. Couch everything in compassion, conservatives are people too, despite their "horrible viewpoints", and we should aim to rebuke their arguments. The goal is not to be explicitly anti-woke, but just to expose people to anti-woke arguments which they've never seen.

All that said... arguing about politics in public under your real name is almost never worth it.

I don’t think that any environment so woke as to require such measures would let that slide the way you think. They would detect the whiff of mistake theory, and punish it as defection.

I've had some success with this on university discord servers, there are people on there who appear less woke than I appear, but I seem to get more people interacting with me, and therefore I get more woke people hanging themselves with the rope I give them. I think that any forum with real names requires this sort of caution if we're gonna talk politics, anything less than this might carry an unacceptable chance of a bad outcome.

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