I started following politics in about 2015. Before that I was kind of a “they’re all jerks anyway” moderate who didn’t really support either side. I voted for Kerry, Obama in 2008, didn’t vote in 2012.
What made me start paying attention was that I noticed the left starting to use a new tactic, and use it everywhere: they would call people racists.
Don’t get me wrong, this is still going on, and it’s still effective, although not as effective as it was. If you call someone a racist, they have to stop whatever they’re doing and prove that they’re not, because a racist is pretty much the worst thing you can be. So if you just throw that accusation out toward everyone indiscriminately, they spend all their time proving they’re not racists and you spend all your time making your actual points.
It’s a pretty good tactic.
Really though it’s the tactic of a few years ago. It’s still used, to great effect, but it’s proven and boring now. The new tactic is conspiracy theories.
Everyone thinks that people who believe the earth is flat are loons. And they are! The earth is not flat. This is readily apparent to anyone, just like it’s readily apparent that vaccines (in general I mean) work and that elected officials are actually humans and not lizards in masks.
What’s less apparent is that the only way to prevent tens of millions of young healthy people from dying is to force them to wear thin pieces of linen over their mouths, or that every vote cast in Pennsylvania was by a legitimate registered voter who really wanted to see Biden win, or that shutting down small businesses is regrettably forced by public health concerns and not motivated by political ideals.
But if you equate these two things… If you make people afraid to even think something in the latter group by associating it with ideas of the former group (with the implicit threat of social consequences that goes along with that)… Then you don’t even need to engage with those ideas. They’re debunked! And anyone who still says “hey, waitaminute, Biden looks like maybe he did take bribes from Russia,” well they’re just crazy people ranting about falling off the edge of the planet. Ignore them, or point and laugh.
Your opposition spends all their time establishing the basic legitimacy of what they’re saying, before even starting to prove the correctness, while you’re off doing whatever you want to do.
It’s the new tactic. And they’ve been planning it for a while, laying the groundwork: remember how there seemed to be a lot more making-fun-of-antivaxxers than normal, a few years ago? That was prep for this.
We’ve gone from “the right wing is wrong” to “the right wing is evil” to “the right wing is crazy.“
6 replies on “Racism and the shape of the Earth”
Name calling is an infantile tactic, but it works. This says a lot about both sides. When I was a child, I learned quickly that the best way to avoid name calling getting worse was to laugh and pretend not to care. It always worked.
Well, as a nurse who actually doesn’t think that vaccines are nearly as universally great as they claim, I’ve dealt with a lot of this over the years.
You will just get stuck in the weeds if you spend all of your time arguing with them about whether it’s okay to have a certain viewpoint. All you can do is stick with those things that you know are true. If someone wants to call you names, there’s nothing you can do to stop them.
The thing to do with baseless accusations is to dismiss them out of hand. It’s not your job to prove you’re not racist, it’s their job to prove you are. When accused of something that’s not true, a simple “You’re wrong about that” is the most you need to respond, if you respond at all instead of just chuckling dismissively or merely ignoring it.
If we’re going to turn away from these bastards as Bill describes, let it start with utter disregard for their attempts to induce guilt in us. We’re not the ones doing anything wrong. Act like it.
I’m not so sure Bill has the right idea but I haven’t really thought that through yet. My general thinking is something along the lines of, your job in a debate isn’t to convince the person opposing you that he’s wrong, it’s to convince the audience that he’s wrong.
The Left’s common tactic of dismissing anything they don’t want to believe by labeling it as a conspiracy theory is something that really bugs me – for many reasons.
Conspiracies most certainly exist. Every time two or more people create an organized plan to achieve some goal, that is a conspiracy. Buy my product, join my organization, support my cause. The point is, conspiracies exist.
People often say they don’t believe in conspiracy theories because they don’t think people can keep a secret. Ok. It’s a conspiracy “theory” as long as there is no evidence of it. But once there is evidence, say, hundreds of sworn affidavits, it’s not a conspiracy theory anymore. It’s a conspiracy!
Meanwhile, these same people who say they don’t believe in conspiracy theories were willing to believe the Trump/Russia hoax for four damn years without any evidence whatsoever, even after spending tens of millions of dollars trying to find evidence.
Yet, when it was an incontrovertible fact that Hillary illegally used a private server for official government work, accepted hundreds of millions of dollars from foreign actors, illegally kept, distributed and destroyed classified information, these same people dismiss these undeniable facts as conspiracy theories.
So the reality is that these people will believe something that there is no evidence for, but will disbelieve what there is incontrovertible evidence for. They ONLY believe in conspiracy theories and refuse to believe in facts. It makes me sick!
Interesting! I’ll keep my eye out for that. I think you’re right.
I’ll let my fellows know. Hopefully we can wise up more quickly than we did for the racism accusation if we make ourselves aware of it. The biggest hurdle will be reminding our side that we’re not crazy/conspiracy theorists by pointing at the hard data… I wonder if we can flip this tactic on them somehow? Call them conspiracy theorists for believing Trump colluded with Russia or something?