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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 1st, 2023

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  • Okay so, this is a rhetoric problem.

    This phrase here:

    I disagree with the premise, the Holocaust was unique.

    You lost the crowd immediately. The thrust of Walz’ position is that people should be more aware of the ubiquity of genocidal thinking, and in your first sentence, you put yourself in opposition to him.

    Even though you agree with Walz later in spirit, the immediate impression is that you’re downplaying other genocides by over-fixating on the shock and horror of this one in particular, and it takes you way too long to clear up your position.

    If you had phrased this as “added context” or “an additional fun fact” or “some ways in which the holocaust was unique,” it becomes much harder to disagree with you. Your audience isn’t primed immediately to be angry, and you beget much more charitability, at least from those who aren’t insane.




  • Mm, yeah, that’s possible, too. I think I just considered that to be a turn a phrase.

    This is almost off-topic, but I’ve always found it kind of funny that people ask questions like these in AITA when they could get an answer if they just thought about it for 5 minutes. Like, “Wow, my wife really hates this. And, it either was or was not my fault, so… hm.”





  • True, but I often feel like people use Poe’s law as an excuse not to engage mentally. It’s really uncharitable, actually.

    Like, I can hold the view “is sincere” and “is sarcastic” in my mind simultaneously until something confirms or denies one.

    And it’s not like it matters that much. If he’s sincere, I’ll say "wow, that’s crazy, " and if he’s not, I’ll say “wow, that would be crazy.”

    [e] Just to clarify, I see now he’s a Fox news contrib. So, he’s paid to be nuts.







  • And how ads on TV are sometimes so much louder than the show they’re cut between. And the glitches! Sometimes, you have to completely power cycle your phone to fix something simple. And how Facebook’s curated, algorithmic feed sends people down extremist pipelines, fueling things like public shootings and the January 2021 Capital riots. And how the continued atomization of society into smaller and smaller pieces (e.g. suburbia) has made people lonelier than they ever have been. And how the displacement of work onto capable machines never seems to yield benefits onto the people whose work is being displaced, only their bosses.

    I guess if all you remember are Letterman’s fumbling grandpa jokes about what the Internet is, gosh dang, even useful for, I could see why you’d think nobody’s criticisms are real.