it doesn’t matter how right you are, what matters is what gets people to change their minds.
Imagine talking to someone who says “Barack Hussein Obama” every time they talk about Obama. You’d recognize them as a crank and write them off. If you listen to anything they say, you’re immediately going to view it through a hostile lens.
That’s the type of reflexive dismissiveness we want to avoid. “IOF” reads like “Amerikan” reads; people who do not already agree with us will either think “oh I can ignore this” or read it just to look for places to disagree.
If you spend all of your rhetorical energies smoothing out ALL the sharp pointy bits of your arguments to pre-emtively appeal to somebody, you’re just doing the work of your opposition.
Everyone who does persuasion for a living (salespeople, marketers, lawyers, political writers, think tanks, etc.) puts tons of effort into carefully refining their approach. The details are enormously important, especially when you’re talking about communism and anti-inperialism in the imperial core, where a century of propaganda and hostility has primed most people to immediately dismiss those ideas.
You’re worried about watering down your point. Compare “Israeli soldiers are indiscriminately killing Palestinians” with “IOF terrorists are indiscriminately killing Palestinians.” The first one doesn’t water down the point at all, but you don’t sound like a crank and you don’t give people the opportunity to quibble over an academic question like how “terrorist” should be defined.
Imagine talking to someone who says “Barack Hussein Obama” every time they talk about Obama. You’d recognize them as a crank and write them off. If you listen to anything they say, you’re immediately going to view it through a hostile lens.
That’s the type of reflexive dismissiveness we want to avoid. “IOF” reads like “Amerikan” reads; people who do not already agree with us will either think “oh I can ignore this” or read it just to look for places to disagree.
At some point you’ve gotta make “your point.”
If you spend all of your rhetorical energies smoothing out ALL the sharp pointy bits of your arguments to pre-emtively appeal to somebody, you’re just doing the work of your opposition.
Everyone who does persuasion for a living (salespeople, marketers, lawyers, political writers, think tanks, etc.) puts tons of effort into carefully refining their approach. The details are enormously important, especially when you’re talking about communism and anti-inperialism in the imperial core, where a century of propaganda and hostility has primed most people to immediately dismiss those ideas.
You’re worried about watering down your point. Compare “Israeli soldiers are indiscriminately killing Palestinians” with “IOF terrorists are indiscriminately killing Palestinians.” The first one doesn’t water down the point at all, but you don’t sound like a crank and you don’t give people the opportunity to quibble over an academic question like how “terrorist” should be defined.
Sysnthesis yo… “Israeli Occupation Forces indiscriminately kill Palestinians.”