It would be beautiful if we had some international means of communication, where every person could communicate with all people and we could examine a subject from all angles and come to an intelligent solution.
Oh, wait, we do have that. But, it’s not working, and that’s because most people aren’t very good at this public debate thing. Everybody’s determined to push their own point of view (which I see as pretty natural, and I’m guilty of it, too), and they’ll do so with straw men arguments, ad hominem attacks, and any other logical fallacy it’s convenient to use at any point in the discussion. Plus, there are spammers and trolls.
I suspected that we were dealing with one of those this afternoon, of the type called a ‘concern troll.’ You know, they act like they’re on your side, but they’re not. This one was all “I voted for Bernie in the primary but he’s just got too much baggage to run again” which is simply not true. They couldn’t hang any scandal on him in 2016, and there hasn’t been any since.
There was another thing she said that made me think she was a Clintonite and her whole “I voted for Bernie in the primaries” was a flat out lie. In response to somebody else’s comment, she referred to his ‘veiled sexism.’ I read back over his comment and I’ll be damned if I could see where he’d mentioned gender at all. So, I guess ‘veiled sexism’ means “I could hear it even if you never said it” and I’m not sure if that counts as a straw man argument or if it deserves a category all its own.
“Veiled Sexism”
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