Controversial topics are hard to talk about. What makes the process even more difficult is when one side, for whatever reason, decides that disagreeing with their position is equivalent to you *hating* their position.
The disagreement=hate confab is almost an exclusive feature of attempting to dialogue with someone on the Left of the political spectrum. I hesitate to use the Left/Right distinction though because the terms are not describing the political reality we now inhabit. Perhaps authoritarian vs anti-authoritarian might be a better way to describe positions these days.
Authoritarians whether on the Left or the Right seem to have a built in predisposition to thinking that their choice is the moral choice and that somehow by questioning their assertions you are questioning their morality or ethics.
It really isn’t that, at least not a first. One must grapple with the argument the person makes not the morality or ethics the person in question happens to hold.
An easy example is a person stating the fact that women, exclusively, are adult human females. The simple action of stating a fact can lead to accusations of hatred, discrimination, and even bigotry.
How does that even work? My hypothesis is that when you encounter the disagreement=hate trope the person that you are dealing with isn’t willing to put the thought or effort in to make a reasonable counter-argument. It is much easier to simply dismiss statements and thoughts that do not comport with what you hold to be true than do the work to properly refute them (also the statement in question may be closest to the truth and thus more accurate than your worldview).
Another issue is that your interlocutor may rate highly on the authoritarian scale. Woke ideologies like transgender ideology are totalizing, for them to reach their final stage *everyone* has to believe in the ideology. The utopian magic can’t happen until everyone is ideologically congruent thus wrong-thinkers must be converted or removed from the equation. If you are speaking against gender ideology -for the converted it simply must be “hate” – because the ideologue is convinced that their position is not only factually correct, but morally and ethically correct as well. Thus, the problem lies in you, not them as they have deep insight into the question, that gives them access to the “truth” and speaking against this “truth” must be hateful in nature.
It isn’t.
Being able to interrogate and critique ideas is part of the bedrock of a free society. We need to be able to objectively look at what people say and determine for ourselves the value of their arguments. Doing this now in society can be challenging precisely because questioning the orthodoxy is often misconstrued as “hatred”, thus speech and debate must be kept in check to stop the “hate” if one is to follow the reasoning from those who seek to limit speech in our society.
Limiting speech is such a completely terrible idea and we should really pause and consider the nature of so called progressive movements that advocate for the censure of speech in society.
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April 8, 2024 at 11:33 am
Brian Dundas
Don’t disagree with this, except:
As to the Alabama, Christian Fundamentalist position you advocate on this blog, the research has already spoken (though it will refine over time). Who knows, maybe sensitive and loving treatments will change, either way. Right now, that’s where the science is.
You betray the essay above when you go in and on about leftist dogmatic conspiracies controlling what are right now the prevailing scientific/medical views!
There are scientists who said smoking doesn’t kill, and those who say climate change is a leftist/Jewish hoax. Your dissenting scientists as well as the right wing deplorables you site to trumpet them, are in that group.
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April 8, 2024 at 11:48 am
The Arbourist
@Brian
Do you see what you are doing? “The Christian Fundamentalist…” – Which argument is that? Can you just address the argument? I don’t even know what you are referring to.
I assume this is in reference to GAC? The evidence, here in North America, is being patently ignored. The medical establishments of England, Sweden, Norway, Finland, and France – basically anywhere they conduct a comprehensive systemic review of the evidence – concludes that the efficacy of GAC as practiced here in North America is LOW at best. This isn’t a left versus right issue this is a issue of our professional medical associations willfully ignoring the evidence based medical practices and instead adhering to ideology that is intrinsically unscientific and unsound.
My next topic on argumentative rhetorical strategies is going to be Guilt By Association ploy as demonstrated here. Refuted simply as: “Hitler drank water, how could you possible like or do something that Hitler did? It is another way of deflecting and ignoring what the argument is saying.
I’m not sure you meant to employ this dodge, but it certainly seems like it. Medical experts are not infallible – lobotomies were the approved treatment for a shockingly long period of time before we knew better. The case of GAC is in a very similar situation and will is in the process of being abandoned as more medical professional return to evidence based medicine as opposed to woke transgender ideology.
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April 9, 2024 at 8:49 am
Conversational Gambits that are Annoying – Guilt By Association | Dead Wild Roses
[…] gambits and habits that are annoying, funnily enough, happened in the first Gambits post I made. Go check out the comment section as I will be pulling my example for this post directly from the text of a […]
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