Comment on Never give up
agamemnonymous@sh.itjust.works 5 months agoThere’s no hope in changing the mind of every fanatic you come across.
But we generally don’t have internet debates in DMs, we do it in public forums. The goal isn’t to sway the fanatics, it’s to publicly quash their arguments. To sway curious onlookers away from fanaticism before they become fanatics themselves.
The goal isn’t to sway the fanatics, it’s to publicly quash their arguments. To sway curious onlookers away from fanaticism before they become fanatics themselves.
As I’ve said in another comment, this is return to Middle Ages. Debating skills have not much in common with reasoning skills.
Not are they mutually exclusive. A competent debater can intertwine rhetoric with logic to make a compelling argument for a well-reasoned position.
For my argument it’s sufficient that they are very much not the same.
This is similar to saying that a big company leading in some area can be benevolent and do good things. Yes, it can, like DEC, Sun, at some point even IBM. Doesn’t prove the statement that every social institution and mechanism out there must be replaced by markets.
You’re the only one making that argument, and it doesn’t follow from my initial point. I’m not even really sure what point you’re trying to make.
How does anything you’re saying negate the fact that people make bad but persuasive points online, and gullible people fall for that persuasion? Or that those gullible people lack the entrenchment of the bad actors, and can be redirected from those bad points to better ones if persuasive arguments are presented directly in response to the bad ones?
You aren’t going to kill an idea with name calling online either. You’ll, hopefully, be rightfully called out for using pointless ad hominem attacks and be shot down on the spot, pushing people to the fanatic you’re arguing against.
Wait…do people still do that?
“posting isn’t praxis” isn’t praxis either. But like, there is value in theory, and you must believe that or else you would’ve believed it was pointless to post “posting isn’t praxis”.
This is unbelievably convoluted. You’ve talked yourself in knots but also somehow believe that your argument is so airtight that any attempt to refute it only invalidates my beliefs.
Your argument is circular, self-defeating and also missing some really obvious things, one of which I already pointed out.
The only thing left to do is to ask if you’re actually curious to understand what I mean.
Thunderbird4@lemmy.world 5 months ago
People always forget about the lurkers. Most people with less-informed, more impressionable views on a given topic aren’t posting and debating, they’re reading and learning (despite the unfortunate exceptions). Seeing some wacko extremist nonsense or voter suppression tactic go unchallenged by a more reasonable argument may be enough to sway a not-yet-fanatic in the wrong direction.