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They're not even hiding it (lemmy.zip)

submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

48 comments fedilink hide all child comments

I know a lot of us don’t read the news, so here’s a meme. The Republican Speaker of the House has begun an impeachment inquiry on U.S. President Biden.

Context: https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2023/09/12/why-biden-impeachment-inquiry/

https://www.reuters.com/world/us/top-us-house-republican-mccarthy-calls-biden-impeachment-inquiry-2023-09-12/

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[–] [email protected] 83 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Do not think they do not recognize their own hypocrisy. It is a demonstration of power: "See, I can get away with it. Because I am in power."

[–] [email protected] 70 points 1 year ago (3 children)

This. To anyone who thinks this is the Republicans being hypocritical: They know. They do not care. They are lying to your face. Pointing out the hypocrisy does literally nothing because they. Do. Not. Care.

[–] [email protected] 46 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Ugh. It's time to post this Sartre quote again. I hate that it's still relevant:

“Never believe that [they] are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. [They] have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert. If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past.”

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago (2 children)

How does one deal with people that act like this?

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Call them out on a lie that undermines either a core part of their case or that damages their credibility in the eyes of anyone else listening.

Your goal isn't really to convince them to stop doing anything but to completely destroy their credibility, which takes away their ability to use rhetoric to get what they want.

Addressing their motives works too.

You have to be very, very hard-nosed about it and be willing to wield that banhammer on sight, or, in the real world, be willing to exercise power to drive them away, but if you can or if you can convince someone else in the audience with that kind of power to do so, you'll usually be straight.

I do this shit all the time with dickheads here on Lemmy. You'd be surprised how effective calling them out on a lie is.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

But hasn't this been done... all the time? Like with Trump?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Not the obvious ones. You need to reveal the lies that reveal their true intentions for it is uncovering their true intentions they do everything possible to avoid.

Like with the Trump Chumps, their end goal is genocide of anyone different than them but they know no one has actual hard evidence this is what they're trying to orchestrate. If anyone could trip them up in debate and trick them into admitting such, or uncover actual evidence and reveal it to the public, it would probably be enough of a driving force to convince the left to shake off the provocateurs and shills holding them back and to finally fight back with fists and bullets, even if only to collectively save themselves.

Granted, the people I do this to are kind of different than the Trump cult, many are on the left, so YMMV in terms of results, but I know from experience it does work.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

You don’t

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

I find the last sentence of that quote particularly interesting. Any example of this tactic recently?

[–] [email protected] 18 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Agreed, it's never been about ideological consistency or evidence-based governance. It's about, "hurting the right people," to appeal to the masses, and plutocracy to appeal to their donors.

Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit:
There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.
There is nothing more or else to it, and there never has been, in any place or time.
For millennia, conservatism had no name, because no other model of polity had ever been proposed. “The king can do no wrong.” In practice, this immunity was always extended to the king’s friends, however fungible a group they might have been. Today, we still have the king’s friends even where there is no king (dictator, etc.). Another way to look at this is that the king is a faction, rather than an individual.
-Frank Wilhoit

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

I mean, they do care. It's a fundamental part of how fascism works, so they can't leave hypocrisy out.