The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:
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Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.
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Updates to let us know how you are doing. This provides valuable feedback on past advice / encouragement and will hopefully make people feel a little more motivated to follow through. If you want to be reminded to post your update, see the post titled 'update reminders', below.
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Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.
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Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
"If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe"
You and the described leftist have too great of an inferential distance. Explicitly laying out your arguments will be interpreted as nonsense because your arguments rely on certain presuppositions that rely on other presuppositions (recurse indefinitely). Presuppositions that he lacks or run counter to his.
You need to build up all of them one by one, and this means long iterated conversations over a long period of time. There is no easy way. There are easy ways to "win" the argument. But there are no easy ways to actually convince someone of your views.
Above is a very ideal situation. Most of the time, I have figured it's not worth my time, because you don't only need to teach a {modal politically/philosophically misguided person} the presuppositions, but also statistics, logic, history, etc. (Being "educated" doesn't absolve them of this shortcoming)
This is not to mean you can't associate with people you disagree with, just that you avoid talking about certain topics, focus on whats common instead of different.
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