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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   26714 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 15, 2025

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Right-wing/MAGA ideology makes a mockery of objective fact. Reactionaries divide us with their culture wars. They try to force us to ignore the objective truths of systemic injustice and climate science.

Either you abhor and reject that which is objectionable, or you end up in recursively epistemic quicksand spew. It has to be possible to reject outright the false lies of the far-right.

If your entire post can be flipped to support the other side by just swapping a few key words, are you actually saying anything?

If your entire post can be flipped to support the other side by just swapping a few key words, are you actually saying anything?

You can flip anything that way, but its correspondence to reality may change. "I know you are but what am I" is an argument that should stay in the kindergartens.

You can flip anything that way,

No, you definitely can't. If your priors are true and your argument follows logically from its priors, then...

  1. any attempt to flip the logic OR priors without flipping the other will lead to the conclusion not following.
  2. any attempt to flip BOTH the logic and the priors will lead to either priors that can be demonstrated to be false using the same evidence posted in the original argument (you DID have evidence, right?) or will just lead to an identically true argument you just have to suck up and accept.

/u/Tiptoe 's argument could be easily flipped because the statements

X ideology makes a mockery of objective fact. X divide us with their identity politics.

Can be easily demonstrated to be true for nearly every identity-linked ideology and the original poster made no effort to demonstrate or argue that they are particulary true for their targeted group.

And while the conversion of,

They try to force us to ignore the objective truths of male and female biology.

into

They try to force us to ignore the objective truths of systemic injustice and climate science.

launders the assumption that the objective truth of A is equivalent to the objective truth of B, again-- the original poster made no effort to argue for the degree to which A should be regarded as important.

There is a difference between, say, responding to a post about Jan 6 with "What about the BLM riots?" (or vice versa) which is annoying whataboutism, and writing a post completely devoid of argument beyond "You suck."

Responding to the latter with "No, you" or "Nuh uh" is indeed juvenile, but there isn't really much else to respond with. The point is such posts should not be written because there is nothing to engage with.

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