Daily Archive

One of the argumentative dodges that ideologues like to employ is something I’ve termed the ‘complexity dodge’. Now to clear many arguments and many issue are complex and nuanced and do require careful examination and sometimes expert knowledge to fully grasp in their entirety. Legitimate expert guidance and knowledge must not be dismissed when it comes to understanding and discussing issues that affect society.

However, certain contentious topics in society have intentionally had their definitional clarity muddied and obscured to prevent people from clearly understanding what the terms mean and how they are being used in social contexts. For instance the intentional blurring of boundaries around the word “woman” has created situations like this:

When a Supreme Court Justice hedges on correctly defining a woman as an adult human female we can know for certain that something weird is going on ‘under the hood’, so to speak.

The meaning of the word “woman” has been intentionally made fuzzy and unclear. The rival notion rather than ‘adult human female’ is ‘anyone who identifies as a woman’ which is clearly a circular definition because the definition when provided does not tell us what a woman actually is. If we cannot clearly define the terms in an argument it becomes very difficult to understand arguments and to parse the logic of people using the terms in question.

Witness:

This is the kind of bullshite that goes on in Gotham when people have intentionally muddied the waters in the ideological pursuit of their goals.  This exchange is from a thread about a Canadian Nurse being put on trial for adhering to basic human biological facts.  It’s crazy making.

So, appreciate complexity and nuance but be aware that both of these attributes can be weaponized to make arguing much more difficult and onerous than it needs to be.