I encourage you to think about this the same way you told others to react to the people praising the murder of Charlie Kirk.
it's not a big deal. These people don't matter. Indeed, perhaps the people who worry you so are not even real. They are a figment of your imagination. Or maybe some curtailed rage bait. Who's in favor of this besides some random oppositional bubble you're in? Wouldn't you rather talk about something the other team did? Do you have statistics to prove who's more anti-Semitic? Have you weighed what's coming out of the other side on that front lately?
I imagine you would find it extremely frustrating to have people react in this way. So, can I ask: what makes this different? Why should I care what the crazy college kids are saying all of a sudden? I am asking you genuinely.
This may come off as a deflection, but the way I see it, this is a lot like those things, except these people were punished quite swiftly. So, why do we care, exactly? Everyone involved has been made an example of. What are you worried about?
there342
1mo ago
George Floyd's death was not a result of a political assassination. This is an important distinction. Nor was he really anyone anybody knew about. Heather Heyer might have had a better claim. But honestly, the best comparison is probably MLK as there are few instances to choose from. Would you hold a moment of silence for him?
I say that right or left wing, it's bad to associate the violent actions of a very few rare individuals as indicative of the whole group. Pretty consistent, nonpartisan, principled.
Yes, if you say that in vacuum it looks great. You are saying that as a way to deflect someone's sincere concerns about a very current issue. You should go to Palestine and tell someone in a bombed-out home about how awful "violence in general" is.
Is the only thing that matters the literal last event to happen? Silly. Especially because on the same day a dude radicalized by neonazis online shot three kids at Evergreen.
Show me where you see anyone celebrating this.
If someone was in the 60s claiming that violence never happened to black people at that time, they would be wrong whether they said it before or after the Kennedy assassination.
The point is that they would have to be very stupid to say this, because it is very obviously not going to play over well regardless of what an epic and brave truth it is. It is clearly inappropriate to most people, and would not endear the grieving nation to the plight of black people. If anything, it would be counter-productive. Kind of like this very ill-advised thing you're doing now. You are just dumping oil on yourself next to an open flame and blaming the fire for putting you in a precarious situation. I am telling you that it is not a good idea to be pouring oil on yourself.
Oh wow, this saddens me so much that a stranger on the internet disagrees.
You do not belong on this site. You are gleefully violating every principle of this space with snide comments like that.
Convenient how you ignore every single thing that separates this from the current situation. Did you see thousands of right-wingers openly celebrating those attacks? This murderer was not a brainrotted young man. He was a completely normal person as of a week ago. He was not a schizo with a crossed wire. He was simply someone who believed that the fascists are causing harm and we must fight them outside the bounds of a system they exploit, because what did you think revolution meant, a picnic?
"The past few years," really? Are you fucking serious? We're talking about something that happened days ago. Do you think having a big bad white supremacist rap sheet proves that the other side can never have any legitimate grievance on novel developments?
You should also consider this from a strategic perspective, if you have no interest in understanding others. I can understand why you're so desperate to deflect any attention away from something that could associate the good guy squad with a murderer. But every single word you type is only making it worse for yourself. All this comes off as is a desperate attempt to deny, deflect, and disarm, with your real motives nakedly bare. That you come handily equipped with a laundry list of not even remotely similar attacks is honestly really sad, and betrays your purposes.
And I don't know why you expect this to play out well. Oats_son certainly is not swayed by your argument. I'm not. I agree with everything he said below. Your words only make your side appear more obstinately certain that they can do no wrong by virtue of being on the right side of history. You make absolutely no effort to reach across the aisle and try to appreciate where we're coming from in saying this novel situation is worrisome. You only want to make it about the real bad guys. If you were doing this a month from now, this would be fair, but you are doing this in the immediate aftermath of a shocking, terrifying event, making every effort to reframe the conversation about how right wingers are bad. This will go over as well as if somebody tried to shut down any fears over Kennedy's assassination by bringing up all the black people unjustly killed by police, two days after it happened.
I do not know what you can possibly be thinking, but your arguments are only adding fuel to the fire. You are either a troll or being very, very foolish. Either way, I'd encourage you to stop raising the temperature, for the sake of your own side.
there342
1mo ago
The people whose fear you appeal to are generally not reasonable. Charlie Kirk did not want them dead. The fact that so many of them find satisfaction in his death is only proof of their absolute ignorance.
there342
1mo ago
But Kirk goes out of his way to be an ass here, to pander to low-class right-wing bigotry.
This sounds like any old way a tribalist would perceive any polite disagreement. I could just as easily say your comment is a long-winded effort at shaming people for being against murder.
there342
1mo ago
I will just be upfront and tell you that my concern is because the reasons people list that make Charlie Kirk murderable are reasons that could easily justify killing me all the same. This from a great deal of people I know. Charlie Kirk's rap sheet is seldom even about any tangible Harms, but just having bad takes. That is why people are celebrating. This isn't equivalent to wishing ill will on someone who was factually an illegal immigrant. In a moral human nature sense these can be equivocated I suppose, and I don't actually think him spending the rest of his life in a Venezuelan torture hole is a just outcome, but I do not think that is a fair comparison to my neighbors implicitly expressing that they would want my arteries perforated if they knew better.
Bluesky is, as we speak, dogpiling Gavin Newsom for saying political assassinations are bad. Yes it is an exaggeration to suggest that literally every single bskyist is like that, but it definitely seems like a prevailing sentiment to me. "All [place] is alight" is less of a declaration of universal characterization across all individuals, and more a general description of the room.
It is very strange how I must be on the backfoot arguing that radical violence-enjoyer leftists exist, year after year, when they completely color every corner of the internet that isn't a total right wing bubble. Especially today, when I can engage with literally any left-leaning website on its own terms and see tons of justifications of this attack, and a sickening glee for it. I am sure emotions run high now even for me, but does this tell you nothing? Do you think these people do not exist?
I agree that there are a lot of opportunistic right wing extremists using this as an excuse to appeal to normies, by the way. These accounts were only looking for a pretense to violence pill conservanormies. Sure. But their job is extremely easy when you can do what I did and immediately find tons of people cheering the attack. This is not a fringe element you have to go out of your way to find, you will instead be shouted at for not embracing violence enthusiastically enough all across the usual sites. Are you not seeing it? The temperature is not lowered by the fact that these right-wingers are, by a simple glance at the state of lefty internet spaces, apparently factually correct in their assessment that the prevailing leftist voice wants their audience dead.
there342
1mo ago
These people are real and I see those temperaments rising among people I personally know. Internet posters, even today, are generally real people. This is not a fringe minority opinion you have to go out of your way to find unless you live in a fully enclosed right-wing bubble.
there342
1mo ago
Further evidence that this is an actual phenomenon are examples like Cracker Barrel and Budd Light vs favored left-wing cancellations, where you see Republicans, right-wing extremists etc lashing out like babies vs "people are saying," unnamed groups (probably just ordinary decent human beings) leading the backlash
While that would probably be a better outcome (to those who value American interests (me)), I don't think it would work. It's too deeply entrenched. I really don't think there's any coming back from it when you look at issues like transgender beliefs. Do you think biologists are about to walk all their support of that back, in favor of what used to be (and, in my mind, still is) an unquestionably obvious conclusion? I don't think it could happen. There will be no surrender on that front of the culture war, especially when you consider the immense reputational damage they'd incur from changing their story like that. It doesn't even matter if it's left wing or whatever at that point, they'd look absolutely retarded to come out and say "Oh, we were wrong about not knowing what a woman is."
Maybe the issue is that, despite a subject mentality, they're absolutely unable to contend with the fact that they are bleeding reputation to people who matter and can exercise control over them. They see the looming threat of admitting failure, and they clearly understand the damage that could incur, but they don't realize that doubling down on what many people see as overwhelming stupidity is causing them to lose substantial trust day after day. All they need to do, they think, is preach endlessly to the choir, those who have already given heart and soul to expert worship and could not think to question them, blind to the irreplaceable losses that their endless march incurs.
They just don't get it. They don't realize that they have a reputational standard that needs to be maintained. You get the certs, you wave a paper, and the people obey. If that's what you're used to, why shouldn't you fight to keep it that way? But any ruler can take things too far. I think there was a perception of invulnerability, that it would not matter what peasants who doubt The Cause think; you just have to yell at them again and again, and reinforce the need to Trust The Science, and all sorts of other patronizing measures. The idea that the experts could be in error is unthinkable, even as Trump hits them in the face with a sledgehammer over and over again while giving them very easy outs. Any mistakes can be corrected, any challenge from the opposition can be waited out (as they are too valuable to be dispensed with, clearly), and anyone noticing their repeated failures can only cause harm by going above their stations to cast doubt on the methods of their betters, who need to remain unchallenged for the ultimate good of America (which they often seem to hate).
I don't want to sound like I am enforcing a consensus, but it is funny. The way you frame the recapture of academia feels to me like The One Ring. You can claim it for yourself, but it will either unmake you into just another dark lord, or it will make you an unwitting pawn of the Enemy himself. Only by destroying it, perhaps, can what's in motion be stopped - and that is the only challenge that has not entered their darkest dreams.
there342
2mo ago
The Science chose to align itself with wokeness, and it put itself in the crosshairs. How many people who knew better, within this scientific infrastructure, held their tongues when we were told covid would not spread if you were protesting for racial justice? How much serious rigor goes into racial justice narratives that justify a need for more black doctors, damn the merit? Science is subject to pressures that betray its very purpose, and there seems to be no interest in stopping these threats from within. Eventually, you're going to draw attention from an outside force, when the corrupting element becomes a driving force.
With that in mind, the fact of the matter is that anyone who's pro-America and pro-"Science" just doesn't seem to have much in the way of common goals these days. Science's first loyalty is to academia, not the country. And academia is dominated by a culture of rootless cosmopolitanism, which doesn't see any special value in any particular country (least of all America). I have extreme doubt as to The Science's commitment to America being a world leader in anything when they only ever kowtow to their humanities overlords in lieu of fact-finding - overlords who typically hold America in absolute contempt. There's obvious value in science and all, but if they wanted America's unconditional support, they should have been more willing to bat for America themselves when they had the chance.
there342
4mo ago
There’s possibly an element of Jewish thought in this reasoning + Singer’s. Because there’s an eagerness to heap up behavioral proscriptions, however numerous; there’s the love of rules and the eagerness to find extrapolations to the rules which defy normal intuition; there’s the arbitrary basis to begin morality; and there’s the obsession with trivia and edge cases over more substantive issues. That’s immaterial, but just interesting to note — it’s possible some of Matthew’s moral intuitions come from a different traditional framework.
This is called autism, not Jewishness. Autism can lead to people not having an innate understanding of why social rules work the way they do and trying to make sense of them in arcane ways that take them overly literally.
there342
4mo ago
Yeah - we are sending borderline-obsolete kit to Ukraine (because it is good enough to kill Russians) and replacing it with new stuff that is hopefully good enough to kill Chinese. Essentially none of the stuff being sent to Ukraine would be used in a mostly-naval war against China. As of now, some air defence equipment promised to Ukraine is being held back in case Israel needs it.
This is the point I always have to disagree on. Stuff like HIMARS would absolutely be useful in a Pacific war. Javelins aren't just for killing Russian tanks, they're useful even against insurgents because they are a standoff infantry weapon that can blow up fortifications and stuff - they were expensive, but useful in Iraq. And artillery shells being depleted is a real issue against China, the logistics here are sort of fungible, and spending a lot of resources resupplying Ukraine is going to demand we replace that (we have to be prepared to fight more than just China, a military's job isn't only to prepare for the most obvious threat), and the resources that go into replacing those assets, plus their losses, will eat up resources that could go into the Pacific. Sending shells to Ukraine is going to cut down on our available R&D. It's really not accurate to frame it as us giving them outdated old junk that would have fallen apart anyway, they got some pretty high-end stuff, and this commitment depleted important reserves of the conventional arsenal.
To be clear, putting a stop to Russia's antics is not bad foreign policy, but the part I find frustrating is that I don't think this should be America's responsibility to this extent. The EU constantly goes on about how strong and independent it is, so Ukraine shouldn't even be Trump's ship to sink. But it somehow falls upon America to disentangle a conflict we have little to do with, suddenly everyone is demanding us to be world police.
there342
4mo ago
I really wish he will win. And I really wish he succeeds in implementing his program, just so that USA will see first hand the results of those policies.
I thought this too at first, but let's be honest. It's really, really difficult to reason one's way into socialism, and that says all there is to say about the prospects of reasoning them out of it by adding one more stone to the mountain of its failures. We are not half a century from the collapse of the USSR and yet its example is not a factor in any of the socialist's consideration. Every failure can be decried as either not real communism or a result of treacherous interference from outside influences - we'll succeed if only we conquer those, too. I really don't think a bad example will teach anyone a lesson on this kind of thing. All they hear is "Free public transit" and they think "That sounds so cool!" without the slightest consideration of where the money comes from.
there342
4mo ago
I didn't read you as a socialist, I understood that you said you weren't a fan and all, but that was what I was getting at - Zohran seems like something you'd find more concerning than your comment seemed to indicate given your stated preferences
I just think that political solutions are pointless. We need what has always been the core of strong societies - a culture that promotes and encourages personal virtue. Without that, you have nothing.
I feel that, given your own stated preferences, a socialist upheaval should be among the worst case scenarios from your perspective. I get that you said you're not on board with it, but I feel like connecting the dots in what you've said would logically make a sweeping trend of socialism pretty alarming and less seemingly shrug-worthy.
The entire mission of this belief system seems to be dispensing with personal accountability at any cost, rewarding people for giving nothing, and deluding the masses into thinking they can get every possible thing for free. There is no interest in a platform like Zohran's in rewarding people for being virtuous, for working hard or providing things of value, only in redistributing to those who do less of either. Personal accountability is often a dirty term from this perspective, and this sort of belief system explicitly seeks to use political solutions to fix every possible issue, whether it's empowering schools over parents, giving us government-run grocery stores, or censoring for the good of the masses.
there342
6mo ago
I meant if the US was involved in a war of this nature, sorry that I wasn't clear. The US radically altered its aviation plans in response to Ukraine, canceling their planned scout helicopter (which didn't have a lot of the advantages the more expensive Comanche would have) because of how survivable modern helicopters look. A war with the kind of air defense Russia has would be really bloody for Army Aviation and the Comanche probably would have given them an edge they don't have currently, and it's a perfect example of a project that was canceled for the war on terror, in which Army aviation was pushed to the breaking point and had to devote everything they could to keeping the old stuff they had running.
there342
6mo ago
Border crossings have decreased a lot. People don't necessarily apply number crunching logic to these things. If a big scary fascist man says he's going to deport them and make a tiktok video ridiculing them, that's a more effective deterrent than his predecessor who didn't really object to their presence while enabling a chain of NGOs to coach everybody into making it in guaranteed for free. People react to visceral fears a lot more strongly than they get credit for, rational or not.
there342
6mo ago
Yup - projects like the Comanche are revealing, I think. I'm no expert, but I'd figure that such a weapon could have been a highly useful and survivable platform in a Ukraine scenario compared to a new generation of Apache with some new gizmos attached, but the Army needed to allocate resources to getting a ton of mine-resistant trucks, not a sci-fi stealth helicopter. And those trucks probably won't be that useful in a war full of missiles, drones, and artillery - hence those MRAPs just got sold to police departments. Huge waste to high-end acquisitions.
there342
7mo ago
The biggest mystery to me has always been why corpos bent the knee in the first place. An angry twitter mob consisting of people who will A) Forget about the story in a week no matter what you do and B) People who will cite this incident as proof of hate forever regardless of what you do, should not be reasoned with. But so many institutions were convinced that if they gave the sharks a few drops of blood, they'd be sated, and the institution spared. So they resorted to emboldening cancel warriors with insane stuff like a company firing employees of ten years because their kid said the n-word on the internet, or school principals expelling children because a one-sided video with no context made them seem guilty.
Why did it take so long for anyone to just try not listening to them?? The standard response was to only ever give the crazy people exactly what they want and hope it goes away.
there342
8mo ago
It was also an effort to recognize causes that weren't from direct combat. For instance, your wingman getting in an accident that kills him can be as traumatic of an event as seeing him get blown up by enemy fire, and both can be traumatic even if you didn't get blood and guts or debris all over you as you'd expect from a name like shell shock. Shell shock was named when they thought it was a literal physical reaction to the concussive force of artillery barrages, battle fatigue came about as the realization that it was psychological set in, and PTSD was a more generalized descriptor not exclusive to battle.
there342
8mo ago
Were it people who grudgingly showed up to because they had to because their masters made them on behalf of promises none of them were alive for, it would have been lesser, maybe even worse than if they had not at all.
Funnily enough, the movies' interpretation of events is basically that. They added a scene in Helm's Deep where elves show up and say, "Idk, we were allied thousands of years or so or something, so we'll stick around and help out ig." Basically, completely distorting Tolkien's intentions with what Alliances represented (to say nothing of the relevance of elves in the war by that point).
there342
8mo ago
You might be onto something, but I think it's less about dogs specifically and more the issue of human faces. I'm a furry autist and while absolutely not face-blind, there's something about the human face that is just a tad off-putting to me. Not to say I'm disgusted by it or anything, but recognizing a face as "a guy" always makes whatever it's attached to look a little bit worse in my mind. Just a little. Even when a character is clearly human, I always like them more when they have their face obscured by a helmet or something. But having a dog head instead works too.
Political discourse as small talk
People approach political discourse the same way people approach small talk. They don't really put a lot of higher order thought into it. And that tends to frustrate both them and the people trying to have a higher level discussion with them. Most people engaging in water-cooler discourse do not have any intention to operate on any deep, thoughtfully-developed principles, but on vibes. That's just how human beings are.
Notably, vibes are not always directionally wrong, and analytical thought is not necessarily correct (else I'd agree with CRT and inequality of opportunity - common sense carveouts justified by added complexity). But the point is, most people don't really apply themselves in unraveling political discourse.
What got me to think about it was this excellent post downthread.
Summary: when our hypothetical character Lauren says, "Oh, I had so much traffic on the way here. I hate it. Man, what are all these idiot drivers doing out there?" There's a couple ways you can respond to that. The general way you would do it is to just go, "Yeah, I hear you. Traffic, man." There is not any kind of intellectual discourse that's being had here. However, when you answer that way, you're basically signaling a level of empathy for that person as an individual, a willingness to hear them, even if you're not that interested in what they have to say.
The second thing you can do is kind of signal disinterest. Maybe you just do not want to hear it, so you give a single-syllable response.
The third way is that you can be autistic about it, and you can say: "Um, actually, you know, nobody likes traffic. Why is that even worth saying? You're part of traffic too, right? You know, you're adding to the problem." Or, you know, you can be the Redditor autist: "If everyone took public transit..."
People don't go into small talk expecting you to start arguing about the intellectual valence of traffic-related frustration.When I was a little 12 year old autistic kid, if I heard another kid complain about rain, I'd be like: "If there was no rain, everyone would die." And that was a mistranslation of my father's attempt at making me a less cynical individual, where his response to my complaints over rain would be to say: "Oh, you should appreciate the good side of things, because rain gives us plants and stuff."
You might technically be right, but that's really just not the kind of conversation that's supposed to be happening here. When people open that kind of small talk line of discussion, they're not asking for a debate full of intellectual rigor. They're just expressing a basic observation, maybe in this case minor frustration. And they want that to be appreciated. They want other people to understand their current emotional state and what's driving them to it and offer sympathy. They're not really looking for any kind of discourse.
When you answer politely, you're signaling a baseline empathy for Lauren, even if you don't actually care about what's being discussed at all, and she probably won't even care if you really are. But what the Laurens of this world do care about is that you care about their feelings. And that's what you're demonstrating when you show interest in small talk. Your true investment is the individual. So the theory goes, that small talk fulfills a basic social function, kind of greasing the wheels, reducing friction between individuals. And that can actually start as a jumping off point for a deeper conversation. They might be less willing to just assume you're "one of those people," regardless of who has what beliefs. People are more willing to assume good faith if you have demonstrated that sort of general niceness, and you can both get a better sense of the vibe before things get too hot.
Back to the main thesis: Small talk is how a lot of people discuss political talking points. When a left-leaning person at work brings up Kyle Rittenhouse, they're not looking for philosophical debate on the merits of self defense. They're not looking for a proper legal assessment to uncover whether he was acting in accordance with the law. They're mad that those people got a murderer off the hook, and they want their fellow coworkers to appreciate how upset they are over such a ridiculous ruling. Obviously, this has the feature, not a bug, of acting as a soft social enforcement mechanism. Being impolite to Lauren would be weird. How about LeftyLauren? To her, hearing your rigorous undertaking in response would come off exactly the same way as me being a smartass to my fellow students about how rain is actually really good. She will not be impressed, maybe bewildered or angry.
Why is LeftyLauren like this? Well, from what I saw with Kyle Rittenhouse but also politics in general, most people who felt inclined to yap about it didn't really feel inclined to look into it. And when people raise any talking points to object to their pithy slogans, they just want to say, "I guess it's legal to murder progressives now." Someone with that mentality is not really looking at the actual facts of the case or anything like that. They're just vibing, and they're making small talk about a minor frustration. That's not to say they don't actually care—quite the contrary, they do. They are genuinely upset when they say these types of things.
And that's a big part of what frustrates people in political debates, because some people will approach these discussions with the mentality of getting to the bottom of it, of digging into the facts, of assessing the truth, acting on moral principles. And other people who have possibly never really given their baseline principles as they relate to such an issue any consideration will be caught unblinking. They will see that person being the weirdo autist, like the redditor ranting about slavery after you said Happy 4th. "Bro, you're hashing the vibe!" These people are generally going to be on completely different wavelengths.
I remember when the Kyle Rittenhouse thing was going down, I was getting in arguments with people about it, and a lot of them sure seemed to have strong opinions on it while also refusing to even watch the video. And I was just completely dumbfounded. I asked: "How can you have an opinion on something like this if you're not even going to do your due diligence as a professional opinion-haver and look at the freaking video and see what actually happened with your own eyeballs?" But, while I definitely think I was right in a technical sense — and this, in no way, excuses their lack of rigor — I had absolutely no awareness that these people were venting and looking for validation. They were being Laurens about it, just hoping for somebody to say, "Man, yeah, it's crazy what you can get away with in America, bro!" And hearing me respond with emphatic, sincere disagreement came off as hostile. They had no interest in an actual discussion.
I, by no means, mean to imply that you are either in Camp Rigor or Camp Vibe at all times. It depends on the individual interest in the topic, I suppose. One person may be the most technically-rigorous autist in a discussion about gun control but an entirely vibes-driven normie on foreign policy. Perhaps vibes vs rigor pretexts is an explanation for Gell-Mann amnesia; consider if you had an astrophysicist rain on your parade by interjecting about how your super cool sci fi concept you brought up in an idle office conversation was just totally off-base. He would then go home and write a post about how dumb office talk is, and you'd write about how much of a dick he was to just not even try to have fun. You get the picture. You're vibing, he's not.
And I'm not going to just bash progressives here. I think I was probably in the vibe camp after the death of Charlie Kirk. I do not know if rigor was on my side - I like to think it was, overall, but it wasn't my primary operating principle. I vented my frustration privately to many progressive friends, was met with abject dismissal, and felt absolutely aghast about it. Then I came here and got "Facts don't care about your feelings" and other such expressions thrown in my face. Do you know how alarming that feels? It's very, very disconcerting to have your vibes spat upon that way, especially when they feel so normal, so unobjectionable. And that is probably not too different from how those poor normies felt about my confrontations over Rittenhouse.
But I do think this vibing is a valuable tool. Whining about traffic is as low-stakes as it gets. But this method of communication, this basic human tendency — I think its exploitation can be one of the ideal end states of propagandistic efforts. Uncritical small talk is, for reasons I discussed at length, kind of unassailable! You look like a lunatic for contesting it. This makes it the perfect tool for spreading an agenda, provided that it's normal enough that invoking doesn't make you weird. This is the perfect weapon for LeftyLauren to enforce norms, and to be honest, I have some doubt that it's intentional in all cases. I think this is a weapon that is often issued to clueless footsoldiers who probably don't even realize they're fighting a war.
I suspect this very detail was the reason "the personal is political" caught on, but I may be giving this too much credit. Either way, if someone says something flagrantly political, about, say, how awful it is that 10,000 unarmed Black men a year are killed by cops... I might be inclined to dispute that fact. But what am I gonna do about it, hash the vibe? All I'd accomplish is to rock the boat and look like a weirdo, at best, ignoring any disciplinary potential.
"What? You think getting rained on is fun?" and "You think it's okay to just shoot protestors?" come from the same fountain of normie autism-repellent. Neither of those are really accurate assessments of the contrary point of view, but you're never going to get an honest autist discussion from these two starting points. And from a propaganda spreading angle, that's actually really beneficial! It's not just about how you look to onlookers, either. You are as likely to convince Lauren to reconsider her vocal disapproval of some political happening, as you are to convince Lauren that her complaints about TRAFFIC are farcical, and that she should know better. It's completely orthogonal. At best, you're missing the point of her discussion.
And LeftyLauren can and will tune that exact same human mentality towards complaining about capitalism uncritically, which I bet is more likely to be a genuine expression of frustration than a deliberate attempt at manipulation. The intent doesn't matter though, either way, this has a profound normalizing effect, drawing people to a cause, making an idea more openly expressable, and forcing anybody who disagrees to adopt a socially weak standing. The Lauren making a flagrantly political argument in the first place will thus make an autist out of her weird political interloper.
You will be about as successful as my 12 year old autistic stuff harping about how rain is good, actually.
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