cross-posted from: https://midwest.social/post/7076150
this post was submitted on 02 Jan 2024
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It doesn't matter that the argument is good. Conservative propaganda is completely stupid, but it convinces the right people. It is those people who are less educated that you need to convince. And no rational, educated argument will convince better in 10s than a shitty catch phrase.
Its really strange to me that you would advocate the idea that we should parrot bad points to propagandize our perspective. I don't mean this as insult, I just find that a really alien way to look at the world...
As a counterpoint to some of what I understand your stance to be, in my experience those kinds of hollow arguments tend to only appeal to people who already generally agree with them. To my mind, that makes them much more effective at polarizing perspectives than actually informing anyone's perspective in a meaningful way. They ensure that people who have been consuming intellectually bankrupt reinforcements of whatever they already believed are even more incapable of meaningfully engaging with people they don't see eye to eye with, when that opportunity arises
I understand that the popular, cathartic, take is that we should just hate the bad people who think the wrong thing and that talking with them is a pointless waste of time, but in my experience the only thing that ever seems to change individual perspectives is compassion and sincerity, perhaps especially when not entirely deserved. And I also find that dismissing the intellect or emotional capacity of anyone I disagree with as a means to justify hating them and what I've decided they represent is a really toxic way to engage with the world. And by that I mean toxic to myself- I think its toxic to others too, but frankly writing off half of my country folk as stupid wastes of oxygen we'd all be better without feels poisonous to my own emotional wellbeing.
Do with that what you will 🤷
Edit: some wording.
I don't even necessarily disagree with your point that convincing people who are only going to engage superficially is politically important at scale, and that those people may at times be more swayed by hollow talking points than well reasoned arguments, its just very foreign to how I'm used to relating to the world I guess
Ok, to elaborate a bit, first, your argument is only aimed at people on your side already, as I said.
But more importantly, secondly, the point made is not completely wrong. Sure, it is only a correlation that's pointed, and the left should try to help the conservative voters instead of blaming them. But as a matter of fact, conservative policies do empoverish people. Which means the argument has some truth condensed in an inaccurate catch phrase that can actually hit its audience.
I guess we went to the same conclusion on this.
I'm starting to believe these days that the leftists are prone to argue and disagree about technicalities and details, and it can be counterproductive to the information war that's happening.
It is definitely more inherently difficult to build than to destroy, i.e. to move forward rather than back.
Moreover, most of the time when conservatives seem to argue on the internet, truth is not even a minority portion of their goals. Thus, liberals aim to argue in order to become correct - bantering back and forth the details until the most proper course of action can be decided upon that takes into account all of the facts - whereas conservatives argue in order to be effective, at "winning" the goals already given to them by an authority figure, who they presume to know more than they personally about all subjects (maybe God Himself even, via their chosen shepherd here in Earth, in spite of literally everything God has ever said in the Bible previously, such as the workers deserving their wages, taking care of widows and orphans, and other social justice matters).
So yeah, arguing "facts" with someone who has already decided their position in advance and is not listening to new ones coming in, is indeed a huge waste of time, most often. Sadly, I don't know what would not be a waste of time, in terms of convincing conservatives about any factual matter. In the analogy above, until those coal miners saw for themselves that they were being evicted from their homes and could not purchase groceries with all the non-existent money that was promised to be flooding in as "clean coal" was to make its great comeback, I am not certain that they could be convinced by any means? In fact, I bet many were not convinced even after they became homeless - surely it was just their bad luck that they could not wait for the clean coal revolution, or you know what, I bet it was those damned dirty Democrats who did it, somehow!? (despite not being in charge of pretty much anything for multiple years straight) "Lock her up!", no matter what she may or may not have done, bc it's a convenient scapegoat.
And it's not even that they are brainless, it's more that they do not choose to engage their brains in these matters, preferring instead to defer to authority, whenever their brain comes to a different conclusion. So what is that precisely... laziness, perhaps? Or just flat gullibility. In any case, most definitely an easy target to aim to exploit, by oh let's say some nation that would like very much to switch the USA from a foe to a friend to its goals, or at least neutralize it.
The founders warned us about all of this btw, saying that it would lead directly to the death of the at-the-time still fledgling democracy. We chose not to listen, and we've been coasting along ever since, likely protected more by the large oceans than anything else, back when that was a more daunting technological hurdle to have to cross.