• mozz@mbin.grits.dev
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    6 months ago

    Suppose I tell you your house is flooding.

    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, and a little strange from someone who keeps swearing that their primary concern is for good things to happen for Palestinians and for US politics. Really that was all I wanted to say about it.

    • TropicalDingdong@lemmy.world
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      6 months ago

      I mean, do you recognize the kind of gaslighting you are engaged in?

      Like I really tried to make the structure of what you are doing clear for you.

      • mozz@mbin.grits.dev
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        6 months ago

        gaslighting

        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.

        Edit: I made it 5 sentences. Some earlier stuff is maybe debatable, but then you got to “Saying that Joe Biden’s electoral chances are weak and he has little chance of getting elected doesn’t mean I support Trump.” Nobody on any side said even word 1 about Biden’s electoral chances being weak, that I know of, let alone anything about what that would imply about their motivation (although I did draw a conclusion about someone’s motivation from a totally different-from-that behavior.) I’m all done with what you have to say now. You can keep talking, but I don’t plan on reading it or responding.

        • TropicalDingdong@lemmy.world
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          6 months ago

          “Saying that Joe Biden’s electoral chances are weak and he has little chance of getting elected doesn’t mean I support Trump.”

          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.