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I am split between love and hate for these kinds of phrases. I can appreciate the rhetoric and my favorite art form to consume is standup comedy which is basically all rhetoric. But funny and witty isn't the same thing as true or useful. Scott has a few good posts on this somewhere, but I can only remember where he makes the case that we haven't really been trying 'debate' and instead only been trying rhetoric: Guided By The Beauty Of Our Weapons.
I'd like to encourage people not to try and make more of these phrases, because most people horribly fail political touring tests. And instead of making gotcha phrases they instead make what I'd call a shitstorm of stupidity. The phrase betrays such an extreme ignorance that anyone confronted with it can only win by walking away and ignoring them (making the idiot even more confident).
Phrases such as
“Jet fuel can't melt steal beams”
“The Earth is flat, look out your window”
“If vaccines work, why do vaccinated people still get sick?”
“If we evolved from monkeys, why are there still monkeys?”
“If the Earth was spinning at 1,000 mph we’d all fly off.”
I think more earnest conversations would do a lot of good. I have asked a few palestine supporters how they think palenstine might treat the Jews if they were suddenly in charge. Only one was fucked up enough to say something like "exactly as they deserve". Most of them got thoughtful looks and realized ... ya there might just be another genocide going the other direction. Which turns the situation into the old joke:
In the case of Israel we have already accepted there is going to be genocide, now how bad do you want it to be? And to whom should it be committed against?
I could write a long reply, but to keep it short:
I dont want to use my tax money to make sure jews are the ones who dominate Palestinians and not the other way around.
From a humanitarian perspective, I would prefer if they find some workable 2-state solution. There are plenty of Palestinians in the West Bank who live with constant harassment from IDF and settlers, and they mostly try to live their lives the best they can. I think that shows some promise towards peaceful coexistence being possible. Muslims and Christians also coexist in the West Bank much better than with Israeli settlers.
But again, even if it is not possible, I dont particularly get riled up over possible future bloodshed among Israelis
I am against American funding or intervention in the middle east. But I think that position is rarest among people willing to express an opinion about the conflict, and it's also probably the most common opinion among people who are quiet about it. I've had very little success in converting interventionists of either stripe into non-interventionists.
You get to have that political opinion today because America got very good at shale oil and became an energy powerhouse.
Non-intervention in the ME was not a possible political position pre-2010 unless you were also willing to accept a lower quality of life in the US. Back then we needed to keep the oil flowing.
Today the biggest benefit to America playing geopolitical games in the ME is Jared Kushner getting a PE fund.
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I don't think you're quite understanding the point @FtttG is making here. It's not merely gotchas and catchphrases, it's gotchas which are specifically unanswerable to people with contradictory or controversial viewpoints that they don't want to expose, forcing them into a catch-22 in which they cannot answer your question.
If you say “The Earth is flat, look out your window”, the round Earther can explain math to show how curved surfaces apear approximately flat when zoomed in far enough, or about GPS, satellites, orbital mechanics, and/or just ships disappearing over the horizon. They are not afraid of answering, because everyone around them will smile and nod approvingly. Even if the answer is complicated and simpler minds might make fun of them for having such a complicated answer to such a simple question/observation, there is an answer.
If you say "It's okay to be white", the correct response is "yeah, and?" The more sane leftist will then proceed to go on about how everyone already knows it's okay to be white so your statement is stupid and pointless but black lives matter is an important statement because police blah blah prison statistics etc.
But the radical leftist does not believe it's okay to be white. They can't/won't say "yeah, and?", they will become angry and try to cancel and censor you and expose themselves for anti-white racists.
The gotchas being promoted here ARE guided by the beauty of our weapons, because they're the specific type designed to exploit contradictions, lies, and cognitive dissonance. They're taking logical and truth based arguments like "you can't simultaneously promote peace, harmony, and anti-racism, while also being an anti-white bigot" and condensing them down into a more memeable form that has more visceral impact when made properly. We already have logical arguments, but some people don't care to listen. It'd be useful if we had plenty of logical arguments AND asymmetrical memes that have broad appeal and can only be used against illogical people.
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