Was reading a university sub- and I saw the same two hypocrisy gotcha responses from chuds.
1 ) These protesters should go live in Gaza since they keep complaining. I don’t see the logic here? The protesters don’t like the place getting bombed so they should go to that place and experience the bombing themselves? If anything shouldn’t it be the opposite? That people who think current treatment of Gazans is justified should go experience Gaza for themselves to walk a mile in their shoes? Now that I think about it, maybe the logic behind the gotcha is that alternative left-wing types would not be accepted in a socially conservative muslim country? Even if that were true, still doesn’t mean kids from there should get bombed.
2 ) The protesters are against the walls and checkpoints encircling Gaza from, yet the protesters have barricaded their encampment with a plastic sheath so they can control who comes in and out. So are the chuds here saying they’re against all barricades including the Gaza one? Or are they saying they agree all barricades are bad? Or just hypocrisy in and of itself is bad? Denouncing the wall is fine, as long you stay consistent and also don’t use a plastic barricade yourself? How are these things even being equated in the first place? Oh you’re against the Berlin Wall yet your apartment complex has a fence behind the dumpsters. You’re a hypocrite which is the real crime here.
Anyway I know I’m preaching to the choir. How do you all deal with braindead smug gotchas? I guess it’s time to touch grass?
University sub are just filled with CS majors and nerds from that university. Best to stay clear away since you’re are going to interact with the worst of the worst.
If you want to do a funny, just get them to say horrid shit and then report them the dean or someone similar if you can tie their reddit account to their university identity, but that’s a sign you should just shitpost on hexbear instead.
“Never believe that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The anti-Semites have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert. If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past.”
- Jean-Paul Sartre, Anti-Semite and Jew
The point isn’t to show any flaw in our logic, the point is to make us shut up and let the one group they hate destroy the other group they hate. Ideally for the chuds, Isn’trealis and Palestinians would simply wipe each other out. The point is to keep us playing defense so we look weak to outsiders as the chuds keep making ridiculous, baseless claims that make for good soundbites and quotes.
It’s all in The Alt-Right Playbook (and other places, but I learned it off YouTube from Innuendo Studios)
As for what to do about it…I’m not sure. The masses crave easily digestible answers to their concerns, and we simply don’t have those. Plus, to the outsiders, the chud position isn’t that materially different from the status quo. “You’re already doing the right thing” is a persuasion lay-up, and all of our answers require changes, some of them quite drastic. We need better ways to communicate our goals and our theory, or at the very least a find a way to keep peoples’ attention while we explain it to them using what comes across as politics/economics technobabble. Other users in this thread might be onto something with mimicking/mocking their behavior, though in my experience they tend to just tune out after a while.
Except for demanding they post hog. Always demand they post hog.
edit: expanded on the last point a bit.
I’m a cynical person but i still think you are wrong in your conclusion. Yes, masses crave easy and digestible answers, but there’s a genocide going on. There isn’t anything more easy and digestible than “genocide is wrong, fuck off zionists”. The easiest way to combat them is simply ti show everyone how dishonest and monstrous their politicians and zionist influencers are.
I agree, but the problem is
show everyone how dishonest and monstrous their politicians and zionist influencers are.
doesn’t usually entail saying the kinds of things that make for short, quippy, quotable soundbites.
These aren’t gotchas. This is cope from the worst, most spoiled, most out of touch, most absolutely rancid individuals in a website that has no shortage of other things that fit that description. There is no explanation for this behavior that isn’t already covered by the general behavior of the most horrific racists and their usual mental gymnastics. No sense behind it, just pure circlejerk cope.
I’m slowly realizing that libs/chuds are mostly reinforcing their own beliefs when they talk. They’re trying to convince themselves. The accusations of hypocrisy are to discount any outside opinion as valid so they no longer consider it. They’re not coming from some rational, principled set of values. They already have a position that Palestinians either deserve to die or don’t matter, then everything else they say flows from that.
I don’t think there’s much you can do with these types of people. I’m also tired of them. Just tell them to go fuck themselves. The message is simple enough. “Genocide shouldn’t happen” is such a clean, simple message. If they’re still spinning themselves into knots arguing against “genocide shouldn’t happen” then tell them to go fuck themselves. There’s nothing left to say to them.
Chuds are dumb and also don’t care at all if what they’re saying is actually true, it’s bad faith gotchas all the way down. Rhetoric is a game to them, with zero consequences except getting to feel smug. They’ll happily adopt whatever position let’s them get an own in, even if it means ridiculous stuff like insisting everyone be “pro-barricade” or “anti-barricade” regardless of context. Don’t ever go in assuming you can reason with them, just post PPB and tell them to post hog.
My dad argues this way. You know what happens when I utterly destroy whatever stupid thing he just said? Absolutely nothing, no reaction, no effect, no acknowledgement. He just moves on to the next stupid point. It’s just throwing up chaff and hoping you lose interest in plunging through the bullshit. They know what they are saying is wrong and stupid and flawed. They might even know the counterarguments. They’ve almost certainly used it in an argument and had it dispatched before (my dad tends to reuse talking points I killed some weeks earlier). They don’t care.
How do you all deal with braindead smug gotchas?
Nitpick their grammar. Make them sound stupid. Purposely misinterpret minor aspects of what they say, and insist they explain themselves clearly. Agree with their talking points, and then suggest something even worse and see if they agree.
And most of all, demand they post hog.
Anything else is a waste of time.
I think that if you’re gonna do the “agree with them and see how far you can take it” it’s generally better to play clueless, give them a chance to talk to you like you’re a normie. Then after a while you can start to tie the threads of the things they’re implying and call out to their face how horrific the things they’re saying are. Bonus points if you don’t let on that you had already made up your mind before the conversation started.
These are Hasbara propaganda. Zionazis can’t justify what they do in Gaza. So they accuse the protestors that which they do. Spin it to put the protestors on the defenseive. Then when the protestors state the historical violence against them this opens up Hasbara trolls to “justify” the treatment of Gaza and the aparthied.
They will counter "see Hamas just wants to hurt us and now you understand why we have to build walls and clean their camp. What they call “mowing the lawn” trimming. They see the protests working and are a direct thrrat to the parasitic colonial project that is their root of ethnic cleansing.
It’s also to defelct from the violence the Zionazis commit against the protestors. These questions shouldn’t be entertained. These assholes know what they do and why they do it.
Essentially victim blaming,
How to deal: never go on reddit
The first ones not really a hypocrisy dig. It’s not that they think if we went to Gaza we would decide that they were right and Arabs are subhuman actually. They just think anyone opposed to genocide should be killed. This is a way of saying that that makes them feel clever and isn’t legally an actionable threat.
university sub- s are a subset of local sub- which makes them extremely and you should not attempt to engage with them.
A tobacco company exec says alcohol is bad for you, therefore, because hypocrisy, alcohol is actually good for you.
I love logic.
Edit: realized that this makes it look like I think they have a point about it being hypocrisy, they don’t. It just has multiple layers of being wrong.
Hypocrisy is like a power button you can press to get anyone who wanted an “out” to disagree with someone to go “that’s enough for me, owned, lmao” and then never think about it again, no matter how stupid the framing is. Argue with people you think are more likely to change their mind. If the point is to argue at the audience and not the person themselves, then the conversation changes.
For #1 I laugh at them and ask them if they really expect me to take them seriously when they’re presuming that I can just catch a passenger flight to Gaza (you can’t) to land in the Gaza strip on an airport (there isn’t one) and to get Israel’s permission to cross the complete military blockade they have imposed in Gaza (they won’t let you). I usually throw a dig in about how they might think it’s neat to base their politics on fantasy but it’s a completely different thing to do that while demanding that people should take your politics seriously.
For #2 it’s just simple - you can equate them having a home and only allowing certain people in with Apartheid or segregation etc., or you can get them to describe what they see as the parallel between a protest blockade and what Israel is doing then ask them if they think the thing that protesters are opposed to is walls or if they think they are protesting things like imposed starvation, ethnic cleansing, and genocide. It’s usually good to ridicule them by telling them that with this level of insight they must think that people are opposed to the Nazi concentration camps because they don’t like fences, then laugh in their face about it.
Don’t bother debating with them, just draw them out into a position and mock their terrible takes.
An example of this is that elsewhere on social media there’s a diasporic Ukrainian nationalist in their 20s dissing “tankies” and saying that they don’t know shit about Ukraine under the USSR. I refuted this on the basis that they weren’t there and they don’t know shit about what they’re presuming to talk about either, knowing exactly what would come next. And of course it did: “She has grandparents who lived in Ukraine under the USSR!!” in my replies. So my response was something along the lines of “My grandparents lived in Nazi Germany and they supported the Nazis, can you tell me why you think I should believe what they tell me about Nazi Germany and why you think I should adopt their politics exactly? After all, I wasn’t there but they were so I should defer to their expertise in the matter - that’s what you’re arguing for, right?”
Godwin’s speedrun and all that but the point stands - I’m not going to take the grandpa who is an OUN sympathiser seriously and I’m going to laugh at the person who takes the OUN sympathiser seriously just on the basis of the fact that they lived it.
You can still get that garbage shouted at you when you go touch grass, it’ll come in the form of some coward shouting nonsense from his clean white pickup truck as he speeds away from you. Or in the form of some Karen coming up to your barricade and demanding to speak to the protest’s manager. The pudding-headed gotchas are just another common part of the ambient American fascism at this point.
Or in the form of some Karen coming up to your barricade and demanding to speak to the protest’s manager.
I’ve gotten a lot of mileage out of a sarcastic “Would you like to speak to the manager, Karen?” in casual IRL conversations with that type. It’s especially effective when “Karen” is a man.
If I ever end up modding my own community I would classify all instances of #1 as a death threat. They want to tell you to go ‘k’ yourself but are too much of a coward to say it out loud.