My Preliminary List of Things That Irritate Me The Most About Modern Discourse
In no particular order, and sure to grow as I ponder it more:
- Tribal rather than thinking responses to any argument
- Using the wackiest person that can be found as representative of an entire group
- Judging the individual by the group to which they belong ("racism" and "sexism" used to be examples of this but apparently these words are defined very differently in practice today)
- Bad headlining (can include social media summaries) that obscures complicated situations with definitive black and white judgments. When was the last time you clicked through from a social media headline to the underlying article and ever found it to actually say what the headline claimed?
- Using tortured logic (or even no logic at all) to claim the worst possible interpretation of a person's arguments
- Attacking a speaker's hypothesized motives, rather than their actual arguments
- Using ad hominem attacks rather than rational responses to arguments (the prior #6 is really a subset of this, but the claimed ability magically be able to read opponent's minds is so prevalent that I wanted to break them apart).
- Post-modern "fake but accurate" facts. "It does not matter if fact X is wrong because it fits in so well with narrative Y we have created." e.g. "this story about AOC turns out not to be true but it pretty accurately illustrates how uninformed she is."
- Stretching definitions of words to try to tar lesser crimes with the opprobrium meant for greater crimes (modern examples include "sexual assault" and "racism."
- Only learning about the arguments of person X from people opposed to person X (a sure path to failing the ideological Turing test). Examples: Relying on Rush Limbaugh as one's only source for knowing what Hillary Clinton's political positions are. Never reading climate skeptics directly but only learning about what they supposedly say from those opposed to climate skeptics.
- Failure to be skeptical about any story or argument that support's one's own position or "side." (I know I struggle with this in my personal reading."
