this post was submitted on 15 Oct 2024
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Pleasant Politics
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Politics without the jerks.
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Highlighting bad faith and sloppy argument is more important than addressing nonsense on its face.
You're in here insisting that private prisons can't be so bad, because we're not executing jaywalkers or whatever. That's not worth taking seriously. Politely refuting that as if it's asked out of innocence or informed sincerity would be a mistake. You should fucking know better. The same way you should be able to figure out, all on your lonesome, how potential medical uses for a drug don't somehow make it "more potent" than anything that'll fuck you up over-the-counter.
Benedryl's effects get buck-wild if you take a handful. We let kids buy it. You know alcohol does harm, in basically any quantity, but we still leave it unregulated, except for production standards and age requirements. So the idea that marijuana could only possibly be worse, just because it's restricted, is a childlike insistence on a just and rational world.
Have you looked outside and seen that, lately? Does everything work the way you expect it must? Not one injustice or absurdity, as far as the eye can see?
Are you happier to be called-out at this length?
Guy. Relax.
He's sharing his viewpoint. You might not agree with it. You have no call to be escalating into "bad faith" "sloppy" "childlike" "weak trolling" and so on.
I'm leaving this up, I don't see a reason to censor you from speaking to people this way if you want to, but you need to chill.
Bad faith is a real problem, moreso than someone identifying it. When a commenter cannot stand by what they write, projects emotion as a dismissal, and repeatedly jukes to even less reasonable claims - either mods deal with that, or users have to. Playing along is not dealing with it.
Sometimes a user's viewpoint is badly-constructed and badly-defended. Sincerity doesn't make it better. Unless you think escalation is somehow never appropriate - having a conversation derailed by nonsense is plainly an appropriate time to escalate into pointing out it's nonsense.
The thing your robot's supposed to do turns out to be really hard to automate. Bad actors don't always show up numerically even when scored by human votes. People are capable of expressing infuriating contradictory garbage in seemingly polite terms. Or: simply by making cogent and polite rebuttals to something nobody said. These are violations of civility, far more than anyone saying, cut that shit out.
I could express that frustration in seemingly polite terms. I choose to be blunt. I want to convey that the social contract has already weakened. Disagreement isn't even relevant. This is a problem of behavior and reasoning, not where some winding nonsense ends up.
There's a big difference between nonsense, bad faith, and something coherent that you just don't agree with.
Being unable to make sense of something that isn't what you believe, pretending that the person saying it must be horrible or stupid, is a hallmark of intellectual weakness. That's your option, but I would recommend that you grow out of it at some point.
The robot has nothing to do with this. No one involved is going to get banned or moderated, because everyone involved is interested at least on some level in real conversation and debate. I'm just weighing in to tell you interpersonally that I think you're being a jerk in this instance. I think it would be to your benefit to back up and realize that the person may have a point about self-medicating with weed being a bad idea after a certain point, irrespective of any legal issues. Whether or not you wind up ultimately being convinced by any of it, that's a more mature way to do it than immediately going on the warpath against them.
But calling me too intellectually weak to understand it is totally different somehow.
Again, being deliberately blunt, I have no respect for 'just because you disagree.' It's effortless all-purpose denial. Mere disagreement isn't what I'm excoriating. Reasons matter. Behavior matters. When someone clutches their pearls about the opposite of what I wrote, that is not a me problem. It derails any conversation.
This user failed at their own debate. They bitched about a one-sentence rebuttal of their one-sentence claim. They lied about a more detailed explanation for how that hypocritical bitching was also incorrect. Their "viewpoint" on marijuana's classification is a tangle of fallacies. The only point which you think they're making is so wishy-washy that it's nearly meaningless, and it's about zero percent of what's gone wrong.