If you're right and you aren't willing to actually communicate why, or worse, if you're right and you don't even understand why, you might as well be wrong.
If you're going to argue with people on the internet, and I know you are, either go full irony or actually take time to work out an argument that you know is going to be persuasive, none of this halvsies shit.
I was on the edge of becoming a leftist for like six months. That's literally how long it took for me to even be exposed to the idea that capitalism is bad for inherent and structural reasons, and not because of all the really obvious shit that liberals also disagree with but think can be reformed away.
The entire appeal of the right is that it's an easy, bullshit explanation that requires no work and preys on deeply engrained societal prejudices.
Our job is just harder, requires more effort, and will more frequently fail.
Harder to teach someone calculus than to tell them a wizard did it.
“I’m not racist but why do black people commit so much crime in comparison to other races?”
Part of the trick is figuring out who's in that borderline group (where they are potentially open to a real answer) and who's just trolling. It's probably best to assume the former, at least at first, because (a) you don't want to lose those borderline people and (b) unless you're in the ass-end of the internet, there are usually more people lurking and reading the exchange than there are people actively taking part in it.
Some people just have to pull themselves out of their liberal holes.
You can give people a ladder, but you can't make them climb it.
Everyone is different.
More important than developing a super strong argument (which is basically just a gotya) is starting someone down the path towards the disavowal of hegemony needed to radicalize, which is the state you need to be in before you can accept a leftist orientation.
I knew most of the shit I know now when I was liberal. I needed permission to follow my gut and reject all the easy status quo counterarguments. I needed permission to see it from a different angle.
Just hearing someone say Capitalism was the problem over and over again helped me a lot. And inaction on climate is what sealed it.
But everyone is going to have a different trigger. Getting an intuitive sense of what that is, and pressing that button, is way better for the vast majority of people, who need a demonstration of how this shit affects their real life.
Just hearing someone say Capitalism was the problem over and over again helped me a lot. And inaction on climate is what sealed it.
These were also big for me. It was similarly helpful to read about ways things could be done better, or have been done better. It's easy to convince yourself that even if capitalism sucks it's still the best system there is -- that's capitalist realism for you.
The example I chose is a pretty generous one, with arguments that are pretty close to being correct. The bad arguments problem goes a lot farther into arguments that are a lot worse.
There are instances where people say things that are definitely not helping anyone, no matter their inclination.
To my benefit it's hard to pull sources when you're supposed to be working
You don't even need sources, just the right arguments.
If you're supposed to be working and you don't have time for that, just go irony mode. I have nothing against low effort shitposts.
Low effort shit posts are my go to for reddit now for the most part, if I want to make a cogent argument I'll just publish the damn thing
Another example: people who are arguing that ACAB will correctly point out that police brutality rates are unacceptably high even with underreporting, correctly point out that police are a historically racist institution, then leave it at that.
All of that evidence is correct, but it does nothing to refute a "bad apples" reformist worldview. Unless you include the real, core police abolitionist arguments-- the ones that show the concept is utterly rotten with no regard for implementation-- you're never going to convert a liberal.
Or failing to mention that the first police were escaped slave catchers.
Being a depressed leftist with little skill or experience in debates/arguments is hell. Do we have anything organized here or on the discord that helps train people to make better arguments?
If that's something you're legitimately really interested in then it would be nice, but also you aren't obligated to argue with people online. It's not really that helpful anyway.
Real life it helps though. I'm a bit of a debatelord Shapiro leftist and despite a lack of knowledge sometimes i've converted quite a few people through conversations and arguments in front of others.
It’s not really that helpful anyway.
It's not always helpful, but it can be. We need at least tens of millions more people on our side to get anything big done, and even if the material conditions are right to push people towards our side, they still need someone to light the way.
What's helpful is:
- Getting a good leftist message out there where a lot of people will see it (or where you almost never see a leftist message)
- Providing a good leftist rebuttal to chud talking points
- Finding someone who appears to be genuinely curious and giving them some leftist content to consider
- Identifying/challenging pro-capitalist propaganda
- Engaging with fellow leftists to figure out your own beliefs and figure out the best way to communicate them
What's not helpful is:
- Getting into arguments no one will ever read
- Posting weak shit that won't convince anyone
- Losing sight of the fact that most people who use social media never engage with it; they just read
- Spending too much time in friendly spaces and not enough time getting the message out where it's not already accepted
- Wasting time on chuds who will endlessly debate you in bad faith and never come around
Propaganda works, folks, and we're either doing it or standing by while it's done to us.
Yeah but it's not so helpful that you should still do it if it has negative consequences in your life
More so for real life, since political discussion is so often unavoidable with friends or family members. I've got a brother-in-law whom I believe is genuinely well-meaning and is always receptive to what I have to say, has offered to watch any political videos I send him. Problem is he's in that centrist mindset that you've always gotta listen to conservatives/"both sides" or else you're a bad, close minded person. He's got a couple black friends — he sent one of them a video he found recently from a black conservative listing reasons why Trump isn't racist, and got mildly upset when they refused to watch the whole thing. Not to mention he's also worked in various levels of marketing for most of his adult life, and is friends with a guy who became a millionaire off of it, so the belief in capitalism might be strongly rooted. Still, I think he's got a chance.
I'd just love to get it into his head that conservatives so often act and argue in bad faith, and that it's okay to disregard them sometimes at the very least.
Why don't you just lead the way, hot shot? Give me some of those persuasive arguments in descending order of their power of leftist seduction.
If you're arguing against capitalism and you don't mention at least
(A) the problems that persist even with the most ideal, sanitized, socdem form of capitalism
(B) the impossibility of meaningful reform against the threat of wealthy interests
The best you can do is make a reformist think we need to reform even harder.
All good internet dorks have heard of the paperclip maximizer problem: an artificial intelligence that pursues a seemingly benign end to such an extreme that it kills the planet.
We've already invented one of those. It's called capitalism. Capitalism is destroying the planet to give us slightly bigger TVs, and it will perpetuate itself until we turn it off.
either go full irony or actually take time to work out an argument that you know is going to be persuasive
You have the thesis, you have the antithesis, but you LACK THE SYNTHESIS.
If you don't have the synthesis you can't have a higher order. How can you have the higher order if you don't have the synthesis?
oh no, other people aren't putting in the effort to sift trough information and organize it on my behalf.
it must be their fault for even trying, not mine for being a lazy ignorant liberal who probably isn't worth their scarce time and attention in the first place. </sarcasm>This reminds me of one of the earliest debates I had on the internet; it was about 9/11 and the Pentagon.
Basically I took on the "Devil's advocate" position that a missile, rather than a plane, hit the Pentagon.
I held that position for days until I got so totally bored and frustrated with the useless opposing arguments, that I ended up making the argument against it myself.
And then I insulted basically everyone that tried arguing against me before, because I was an asshole.Anyway, the existing evidence that was out there (video footage, analysis of debris, crash simulations, etc) was so conclusive and easy to find that I never took online debates seriously again;
in the sense that: if my opposition makes terrible arguments they could still be right, and it is my own responsibility to figure things out.I hate bad arguments as much as anyone, but this is just a fact of life. Almost all good ideas are badly argued on internet forums.
If you want better arguments then it is your own responsibility to seek out books, evidence, insightful individuals, and more critical discourse.The people who can make good arguments are rarely going to spend much of their time on those who are not putting in the effort themselves.
There are more efficient ways to spend our efforts than arguing online with random individuals.
For example, helping more prominent commentators hone their arguments, those will be heard by thousands of people, instead of debating on tiny internet forums.
Or debate with people where we already have more agreements, so we can get into the details, and really hone our positions and argumentative skills.My approach to arguing online is to pick my battles; choose threads with many viewers, only engage if you can decisively win, focus on a specific point not broad arguments, ensure everyone leaves with new information, and get people into the mode of "thinking together" rather than defensively.
To do this effectively you need to know more, you need to be able to pull from many sources and jump on opportunities instead of having pet arguments; you need to be adaptable.(edit: I know some leftists prefer to be aggressive/dismissive, instead of arguing much of anything, but I've honestly never seen that be effective; although the best approach obviously depends on context)
In fact, being adaptable is the greatest force; if you can just convince people that they are arguing with someone that is beyond their capacity, that goes a very long way.
And it is not possible to do that by walking well trodden ground. (the risk, obviously, is that you can over extend yourself; as I often do in more friendly debates...)The reality is that nobody holds specific altogether falsifiable positions; we have systems of thought, and changing them is 'death by a thousand cuts' not single conclusive arguments.
For example, see this summary of Imre Lakatos on the development of science, or listen to personal accounts of religious deconversion, such as the one by Prplfox.It might feel like there are one or two things that finally changed your position, but you've probably just forgotten all the other things that had to change first.
All humans have consistency bias; we systematically misremember our past opinions as resembling those we currently hold.Also, it took six months, but you got there; so mission accomplished. Yours is not a cautionary tale.
oh no, other people aren’t putting in the effort to sift trough information and organize it on my behalf. it must be their fault for even trying, not mine for being a lazy ignorant liberal who probably isn’t worth their scarce time and attention in the first place.
This reads like "educate yourself" and is fundamentally going to hurt socialists. We can not blame other people who do not understand socialism for not seeking out that information for themselves. We must take that information to them and in a format that works. Yes, it is tiresome, but it is necessary.
ehehe, you kinda proved the point I had just edited in.
I will change the the </s> to </sarcasm> for clarity.
Didn't even read past the paragraph to get to the /s before responding! I probably sprung on it a bit quickly.
Using bad arguments is a bad idea, it doesn't matter if you personally don't like that it's that way lmao
With people like you bad arguments are almost as good as good ones; because you clearly don't know how to read.
lmao couple days ago there was a pro china posts about the uighurs and they posted a whole fucking google doc about it but they didnt want to go into detail about the currewnt situation nor did they try to refute any western propaganda
Multiple people gave you specifically greater detail, and there were multiple comments in that thread that provided condensed versions of the key points.
