The half time super bowl show is on, if you're really having a _problem_ with Bad Bunny, I agree to disagree ;) "shut the fuck up"
Example:
A: I cant believe they have Bad Bunny doing the half time show!
B: Yeah its crazy... but you know how the lizard people are, they are just trying to distract us from the flat earth.
And keep upping it until they no longer agree.
Hare Krishna, Hare Krishna, Krishna Krishna, Hare Hare Hare Rama, Hare Rama, Rama Rama, Hare Hare.
To use an example from the article, if I were to say "Let people enjoy things", and you were to denounce that as a TTC without consideration of my true intent.
In that case you may inadvertently be the one that shuts down the debate prematurely, and I may have actually had a valid perspective.
So I've taken more of your kind of approach. Either both people are willing to understand each other at that time or are not - and heck you may be wrong in thinking the other person wants to engage / thinking they don't want to engage and make the wrong call. But in a controller-feedback system, you'll inevitably be wrong sometimes - the point is to course correct.
But then you even run into edge cases with this - sometimes people want to engage on a physical level, but not really engage and try to understand. But then how do you differentiate that from the possibility that you see that in others unfairly?
Ah, life is complicated.
In effect, you end up getting them to agree with some otherwise unthinkable positions, just one plateau at a time. There's only so much erosion that can take place before they fall back to their own lines of thought termination (like "all I care about is immigration", or whatever). So you end up with a kind of "anchor" that we can both agree on (ex: corporations are fucking us), which still has the hard edge of politics. At that point, all it takes is for the politics to do enough that the hard edges start to erode. But, there's no accounting for that. Just gotta assume the people who are doing wrong will keep proving it (as they historically have been unable to avoid, no matter how hard they try or how long they are successful at it prior).
As you say: life is complicated. I know people will roll their eyes at this answer as much as any other response I could give you. And I know that a political-focused answer isn't directly analogous to many other situations. But, my answer is as simple as I can think to make it. Just meet people where they're meeting you and don't worry about forcing a point.
“Just go forward in all your beliefs and prove to me that I am not mistaken in mine.” ― William Hartnell, Doctor Who
Essentially if you dismiss someone's argument as false just because it may have had a fallacy within it, that reasoning is itself a fallacy.
Some fallacy-seeking people ironically ignore this and just dismiss anything when they have the "gotcha, you made a fallacy therefore everything you said can be concluded as false" moment.
Most people prefer to change their minds on their own terms and schedule. I'm also surprised there's not a 'most people..." thought-terminating cliche on this page
Anyone who has old friends that became politically radical will know the dance.
It conveys disagreement. It conveys that I'm out. But it's still respectful.
I find myself saying stupid things like "ain't that just the way" or "such is life in our times" around those in my life with an endless capacity for political outrage but limited capacity for political action.
It's like the magic "yes." when neither "yes and" nor "no" will do.
"If only I was rich"
"If only I was born rich"
"If only I was better looking"
"If only I had the energy"
"If only I was smart"
"If only I had the time"
All of the above are usually excuses we make to not do the things we wish to.
It took me embarrassingly long in my youth to understand that when people said "I don't have time" or "I can't afford to", what they really meant was "I don't want to".
But when we're telling this to ourselves it is also lies almost 100% of the time.
Then it's better to either put those thoughts aside and start making things happen. Or admit to yourself when you don't want to.
And "I don't want to" often means "I don't want to make the effort, but I would like the outcome if I did."
How do you parse this sentence? Dismiss, dissent or justify fallacies? The fallacies are being dismissed, dissented (from?) or justified with a thought terminating cliché? So, the fallacy is the thought that's being terminated with the cliché?
The sentence would make grammatical sense if you remove the comma between dismiss and dissent, so that the thought terminating cliche dismisses dissent or justifies fallacies, but that only leads to more fundamental questions: Why do intentions matter? How could a cliche not be inherently thought-terminating? Are there different kinds of clichés, some thought-terminating, others thought-inspiring, or does the intention make the same cliché thought-terminating or thought-inspiring?
> Some such clichés are not inherently terminating, and only become so when intentionally used to dismiss something, to dissent, or to justify fallacies.
The fact that “dissent” is an intransitive verb is an important clue. You can’t dissent fallacies. You can only dissent from something.
Instantly closes the door to any thoughtful discussion.
I didn't see it as closing down discussion, so I'll be mindful of that in future.
There is a real danger when presented with a problem to discard a partial solution because it fails to tackle a much larger problem.
It's a call for pragmatism over idealism.
And for some of us, with some specific personality traits, using it as a mantra is how we get anything at all done some days.
"This is not important for me to think about or discuss right now."
Is there a particular part of the article that notably reads to you as unhelpfully negative or overgeneralising? I'd like to see what you're seeing here for how it might improve the article.
Iirc when I've first seen someone linking this wiki article on HN I got so angry at it (both the person and the wiki article) that I wrote a ~15-sentence rant how stupid I found it.
This is definitely a tool that I would never use and only get angry when I see it. IMO it's no good.
EDIT oh there you go, most people https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46944903
Poor, and nonsensical paraphrasing aside, I really do enjoy them because challenging them is amusing in a laconic, snippy kind of way.
"It's not that deep.": "Oh good, I won't have to keep going much longer".
"Lies of the Devil.": "Yeah, but you never want to talk about the lies of god, so here we are."
"Stop thinking too much.": "Don't give me orders, you fucking cop."
"You clearly care way too much about this topic.": "Oh dang! My bad. How much caring is just right?"
"There are worse things in life to worry about.": "Oh yeah? More relevant to what we're talking about? What? Sounds like something else I'd like to discuss!"
"Here we go again.": "Rain falls. Fire burns. When the fuel is spent, the discussion will be over, and not until then."
"So what? What effect does my action have?": [contextual; but something along the lines of "the effect that I'm describing to you", or "it depends on your actions? The question is what effect do you want to have, and then we can work backwards to your actions".]
"Let people enjoy things.": "Sorry, which part of my concern makes it impossible to enjoy things?"
I could go on. I did leave out "It's all good.", though. I don't think I've ever had someone try to use that on me as a way to stop me from arguing. Mostly to stop me from trying to do something for them. "Let me get you a pillow!", "Oh, no, it's all good." That doesn't really seem like what we're talking about here. And I left out "Let's agree to disagree.", because it's too direct for me to consider it here? Like...it's not an evasion of an argument to say "I don't want to have an argument". That's just, straight up, holding a firm position. We don't have to agree to disagree, we can just disagree. But, either way, what you're trying to say is "I'm not going to discuss this with you", not "I don't think you should think about this." It's a different thing.
What I'm really getting at, though, is that none of these are particularly thought-terminating. Even though I agree they are annoying for people to try to deflect with, that's really my issue with all deflection. Doesn't really hinge on their poor use of rhetorical device. Almost every use of rhetoric is flawed in some way. The best way I've found to avoid these frustrations and those with other deflections, is to just run them down to their natural conclusion, maintaining the "north star" that we're both earnestly trying to reach a settled position on this discussion/argument. The second that stops seeming to be the case, things are better left unresolved and we SHOULD terminate the discussion. But as long as we can all be cowed back into the goal of mutual satisfaction, there's no reason to let irritating phraseology rattle you.
Well sometimes agreeing on that is the hard part.
Would you have an example of a discussion where you weren't able to determine if both people were working towards the same goal?
It's actually meant to say if someone provides an exception, e.g. "No parking on Wednesdays", then that proves the existence of another rule, e.g. "Parking is allowed". Since an exception, without a rule, makes no sense.
But, in my experience, people do use it to mean "Oh, this one thing is wrong, but that proves everything else is right", which does not track.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thought_Reform_and_the_Psychol...
"The language of the totalist environment is characterized by the thought-terminating cliché. The most far-reaching and complex of human problems are compressed into brief, highly reductive, definitive-sounding phrases, easily memorized and easily expressed. These become the start and finish of any ideological analysis"
Examples of such phrases might be encountered in political protests by activists. The phrases can be mainly for the members of the group particularly the call and response type.
Lifton's book explains some other factors of such societies which I think can help identify whether a group is more like a cult: Leaders control information, hidden knowledge, demand for purity, confession of "sin", truth deciders, language control, doctrine > persons, only the in group are awakened.
This feels like it's aimed at leftist activism, but the American right has plenty of thought-terminating dogmas: the unitary executive, backing the police and military unequivocally, "if you don't like it here you can leave", the "original intent" of the founders. "Patriotism", the Constitution, and the American conception of Protestant Christianity are cudgels to be employed against wrong-think.
attila-lendvai•1h ago
dennis_jeeves2•23m ago