What I notice when I discuss with liberals - with normal liberals, not with the SJW-batshit-Tumblr kind - is that they keep insisting on dictating the form in which the debate shall take place.
We are literally living in a time where form beats content. I was recently debating one about how a massacre in Donezk wasn't reported on and was immediately dismissed because I used the word "trigger" before. I explained in length how I'm not alt-right and all that but eventually realized: Why I'm even justifying myself? With what right do they dictate the talking points? They simply put you in the dilemma of either justifying yourself or smugly dismissing you if you don't. You dance to their pipe.
Besides that, it's utterly terrifying how the choice of words beats the actual content. Liberals have created a style of discourse in which everybody who holds alternative standpoints is immediately corned because he abandoned the established narrative form.
Easton Miller
I TOLD YOU ABOUT LANGUAGE GAMES BRAH
Henry Anderson
pretty much this
Ryder Nelson
...
Leo Morales
The big W was right about everything post Tractatus. Fite me
David Perry
These words function as a code through which you signify your adherence to the dominant ideology. Failure to do so will cause you to be regarded as an outsider, which is virtually synonymous with outcast.
Alexander Jackson
This is reddit/mainstream socialism as well, they first scan your post to make sure you didn't post any "reactionary" material and base the entire reply on that. I used to have 'retard' in my name on an old forum, I had to drop it because the only left responses I got were about ableism and hate.
Joseph Turner
I don't even know how in such a materialist ideology like Socialism words can labeled "reactionary". It's not like words are some magic hex that twist your brain once you utter them no matter what you actually meant.
Nathaniel Rivera
They won the culture war and got a near-monopoly on American public debate, so they're used to just soapbox, seeing as their opinions are echoed by all of their peers. All rhetoric, no dialectic.
Dylan Harris
I'm not American, but I see the same phenomenon in Europe as well just with different terms.
Ethan Thomas
I think it's a huge problem when you want to adress the working class without using Marxist jargon and you basically say the same thing but everybody thinks you are a Nazi now.
So either we re-label working class or alternative jargon as left-wing again, or we have to justify us for hours for our choice of words of talk Marxist academic language that nobody is familiar with.
David Gutierrez
chomsky can not comprehend the world as other than conspiracy, which is probably why he is so well known. in every society that ever existed, debate has been very lively within a small spectrum, you don't have societies made up of secular humanists and nahuatls who commit human sacrifice, this limitation is intrinsic to ideology and it's apparatus, not a conspiracy from The Man
Asher Myers
Yet however people like Marx and Engels redefined the jargon and broke through the limited debate culture in the 19th century.
If Marx tried the same today he would be dismissed because people would just get riled up about his generalizations about economic class and declared hate speech.
Kevin Perez
You saying Porky doesn't go out of his way to block opinions outside the spectrum? Surely you have seen all the dirty tricks the media pulled against Trump, even tho he himself is a porky.
Thomas Evans
marx and engels were the pinnacle of 19th century debate culture, and it was for exactly that reason that they broke through, they brought the 19th centuries language game, with it's generalizations, measurements, mechanical systems and instrumental view of humans to a final conclusion
if marx tried the same today, he would do it differently. in the same sense that books written by liberals today read nothing like locke
he does, i wanted to start a debate about the question if children or nobles make the best human sacrifice, they all thought i was mad, it's biopolitics i tell you
Easton Hughes
This isn't a purely liberal thing, it's a psychological thing and professional debaters are taught to dictate the narrative of the debate for good reason. It's much easier to attack a point than defend a broad position, and much easier of course to discuss the topic and specific point you want to address than whatever your opponent actually wants to discuss. I suggest you learn how to deflect back and quickly dismiss their axioms for your own.
Kayden Cox
But that feels dirty. Basically what they do is comparing everything to Hitler and I don't wanna be the one fullfilling Godwins Law in a debate. I could have be like "dude, you support Nazis or what? Azov Batallion in Ukraine is Nazi, I demand of you to justify yourself now" if it wasn't so fucking low.
Luke Robinson
Debate culture is bourgeois, and, indeed, the problem: that the quality of a performance or a performer determines truth is plainly fucking delusional. The legitimacy of needs is not dependent upon adherence to Platonic Forms. Some games are meant to come to particular results. Debate is the liberal's war reenactment: not intended to converge but to conquer. Kill it with fire,
Adrian Price
The problem is that the left doesn't debate in the first place. They are not interested in the pursuit of truth, only power. They project their own prejudices on others. In the last couple of decades they created an environment where it's not unthinkable that an actual Hitler could rise to power.
Anthony Campbell
kys liberal
Brayden Baker
what
Ethan Lopez
To be honest, what you describe sounds exactly like the SJW-batshit-Tumblr kind to me.
Easton Martin
No, that would be accepting their framework of discussion. You should know how to either quickly dismiss or reshift the comparison to another historical figure or subject more suitable for the point you're trying to make.
I'm not moralizing debate culture, and largely agree with you. But the right wins so frequently because they're willing to "fight dirty" both physically and psychologically and, unfortunately, debate tactics definitely work on the average human. If we want to convince people it's an unfortunate necessity that someone will know how to craft an appealing narrative.
Keep in mind that Marx and Engels wrote all their polemics by engaging the bourgeois debate culture of their time and its common rhetoric. If they hadn't, none of their ideas would have proliferated as they did.
Jaxson Jones
meant to quote the "comparing everything to Hitler" part not the "feels dirty" part
Jose Wood
Establishment is probably more accurate. The right in many ways is just as retarded.
Noah Bailey
It's not their tactics which I disrespect. It's their presumed authority over the shape and size of any particular discussion that I seek to break. Playing by their rules, which they enforce selectively anyway, gives them a systemic advantage. Nobody, or almost nobody, re-derives the quadratic formula when calculating the air time of objects thrown off tall buildings.