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.
3 comments
November 2, 2022 at 7:08 am
silverapplequeen
“It’s crazy making”. That’s what abusers do. Having been in more than one abusive relationship.
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November 2, 2022 at 9:19 am
tildeb
To add injury to insult, in Canada it is now a punishable offense to speak the truth because Bill C-16 insanely inserted ‘gender expression ‘ and ‘gender identity’ into a protected legal class from ‘discrimination’. What could possibly go wrong?
So reality is suddenly discriminatory. Anyone who is willing to respect it over reality-denying gender expression (in whatever extreme and idiotic way ‘it’ is demonstrated) and reality denying gender identity (in whatever extreme and idiotic claim is made that includes it) is now not just a bigot by definition but committing a criminal offense, namely, a ‘hate’ crime. Such a criminal unwilling to go along with this lie also pays a social price in that he or she is now A Very Terrible Person Who Should Lose Their Job and Be Silent. That’s what ‘freedom of expression’ now means in Canada. That’s what’s on trial in BC.
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November 2, 2022 at 4:17 pm
Cynthia Wolff
There is an underlying *deliberate* pattern in the narrative(s) of A LOT of U.S. politics now, to try to obfuscate racial problems (here) by conflating them with the red-herring of sexuality. The selection of someone such as Justice Jackson is, I think, a tool of the (ironically?: White as well as never-changing, turbo-imperial/consumer capitalist) Establishment meant to continue this goal.
Other countries really do. not. know. how soooo much of the corruption in America *IS ALWAYS* tied-to a multitude of issues BIGGER than what the sidebar media circus of the moment is selling people. “Trans” is a coordinated pinkwashing campaign of nothing but Wall St. Pharma quack eugenics and every B.S. misogynist pig hellbent on the U.S. Arms industry wanting to pretend the World is stuck in 1950. *THAT* is the reason this sickening culture war of rape and abuse has almost like the same. identical. script. playing out everywhere it sprang up: U.S./CAN./U.K./GER./AU. I’ve always felt it was clearly a retaliation against #MeToo and, a retrograde attack on the political/professional/and economic mobility of women as well as (actual marginalized) racial minority communities: so, that, an effective Left doesn’t ever get its act together to revolt against the entire criminally-feudal system at this point.
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