Comment on Why Biden's New Bill Is So Terrifying - Second Thought
TropicalDingdong@lemmy.world 1 year agoI haven’t watched the video, but I want to address your rhetoric, because it has several issues.
What you are engaging in is a form of projection.
No one is obligated to give you a solution to a problem, or does their identification of a problem imply they have some kind of ulterior motive. You are projecting what you wish their motivation was onto them, and then attacking them what you imagine their motivation to be.
Saying that Joe Biden’s electoral chances are weak and he has little chance of getting elected doesn’t mean I support Trump. Before we can have a conversation about alternatives, we need to be honest with ourselves about what the facts are. Being clear eyed about facts doesn’t mean I support your perceived opposing interpretation of what those facts mean.
When and if you do this thing, you are projecting a false narrative onto people. In projecting that false narrative, you shut down the legitimate criticism they are bringing forward, which is a kind of gaslighting.
There are two primary fallacies at work here, the red hearing fallacy and the false choice fallacy.
The red hearing fallacy is that instead of addressing the premise of the argument the interlocutor is making, you are projecting onto them a perceived motivation (your perception), identifying that as the issue, and attacking that. Its way of distracting from their premise and making the argument about something it isn’t or didn’t’ start as.
The false dichotomy fallacy is that this is a binary between Trump and Biden, which has nothing to do with the arguers premise. Its not clear to me that the video even mentions Trump (I’ll check it out once I get this response written), which isn’t at all what they were arguing. Its another form of gaslighting, that if you are bringing these criticisms forward, you must support Trump.
The original interlocutor owes you answers to neither of those. I bring this criticism of your rhetoric to your attention because I’ve been seeing the identical sequence of fallacies, in almost the exact same order, being used across lemmy in an attempt to shut down criticism of Biden, to ignore his realistic chances of re-election, and in-general, to gaslight people as if they were Trump supporters because they are bringing forward legitimate criticism of Biden.
Suppose I tell you your house is flooding. Your current response would have two components: “Flooding is far less damaging than fire”, and “You must be a fan of fire if you aren’t telling me how to put stop the flooding”.
Neither of those have anything to do with the original premise of if the house is, in-fact, flooding.
No one owes you a solution to your problems. Them bringing up that you have a problem doesn’t make them a proponent of some other problem.
mozz@mbin.grits.dev 1 year ago
I have a better analogy.
My house is flooding.
Someone comes in the house and says OH MY GOD THERE ARE TERMITES ALL OVER THE HOUSE, and demands that any conversation about what we're going to do about the house has to include the termites, and if you try to talk about the flooding then you're crazy and trying to change the subject away from the termites, and even if something else is going on (like furniture floating away), it must be connected to the termites, and also by the way there are termite exterminator companies in this town who have a vested interest in selling termite exterminator solutions, although the person in your house who wants to connect anything and everything to termites treats any attempt to bring this up as some crazy conspiracy theory which is just more indication that you're not taking the termite problem seriously and you must be making things up.
In this case, something totally unrelated to Biden (the antisemitism bill) is getting linked to him in this particular propaganda-adjacent way in this video, and I think that's notable. That's pretty much the beginning and end of it from my end. You can come up with whatever strawman you like, where somehow me saying that means I don't care about the election or trying to silence criticism or defending genocide or whatever. I honestly didn't even read your whole message. But, the point remains that something totally unrelated to Biden is getting linked to him in this video, and to me that's notable. Really that was all I wanted to say about it.
TropicalDingdong@lemmy.world 1 year ago
I mean, do you recognize the kind of gaslighting you are engaged in?
mozz@mbin.grits.dev 1 year ago
Okay, sure. Let's see. I'm gonna go back and read your message in full, and then as soon as you start lecturing me on something I clearly already agree with, or tell me that I believe some wrong / evil thing that I clearly don't believe, I'm going to stop and come back here and just quote the point at which you did that. I will bet that I won't get 30% of the way through your message before it happens.
TropicalDingdong@lemmy.world 1 year ago
That’s just an example of the kind same kind of fallacy I’m outlining for you. Its fine that you don’t want to respond. I’ll be posting a similar analysis of this kind of rhetoric wherever I see it, so don’t expect it to go away.
Its important because what you are doing is an extremely disingenuous/ deceptive type of rhetorical slight of hand, that I think many people have a ‘sense’ of being present, but if they don’t see it broken out in specific terms, can’t quite put their finger on exactly what you are doing. I’m using you as a test to see where the gaps are, so thanks for the feed back. I’ll tune up paragraph four in the future to draw directly upon the particulars of the demonstrated gaslighting.