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?
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.