I feel as though we’re at this point, metaphorically speaking. So many people in this country support an autocrat in the highest office, cheering whenever he flouts the law, custom, and hurts their fellow citizens. What is MAGA if not a direct message telling us we’re done talking?
This I understand. There are at least 70-80 million of them and they’re not going anywhere. The best I can hope for is the leaders being discredited after the movement collapses and former MAGA supporters doing all they can to avoid admitting the loved Trump.
People argue and correct you online like you just butchered their family in front of them. You can concede and they still need their pound of flesh and applause from the peanut gallery. It’s tiresome and only encourages more groupthink, echo chambers and abstention from discussion entirely.
It might help to consider what you want to get out of those conversations. Focus on what’s in it for you as the real “victory condition” rather than what the resolution to the debate is.
For example, if your goal is to gain insight into how the “other side” thinks or to fill gaps in your knowledge, then as the conversation is winding down, ask yourself if you achieved this. Decide if you got something out of the conversation. Let the other person decide if they got something.
This is all about inaccuracies induced by brevity, sometimes used on purpose to shut down differences of opinion, sometimes caused by laziness and sometimes the result of a superficial analysis that nonetheless has satisfied the intellect of the speaker. There are two responses that can be used to clear up any issue of this nature, and they are: “What do you mean?” and “What’s your point?” If these prompts do not elicit frank elucidation then bad faith engagement must be assumed, which terminates any obligation for reciprocation of cordial discourse.
I believe it may be impossible to not argue over definitions unless everyone agreed to do so, and that just isn’t human nature.
The individual you are interacting with might understand the basic facts, but have an honest disagreement with you about whether a word should be applied.
But it’s a slippery slope to agree with them that you should temporarily, for argumentation’s sake, assume that the word has an additional meaning. Because the next person to use the argument won’t be as liberal, and will declare that their definition is the only correct meaning, and thus try to erase the usefulness of the word in turn.
Sometimes it doesn’t matter too much. However, regardless of how important, the two meanings will subconsciously be linked in peoples minds, leading to connotations between them. And I think that the people who want to expand definitions know on some level that words have connotations. A lot of them want to actively change language in other instances because of the connotations of objectionable phrases. So the argument that their new and expanded terms are simply neutral, and in fact have always been the only acceptable terms, whose meaning has always been objectively set in stone falls flat.
Another reason people’s definitions vary so widely is because people genuinely have different lived experiences of the same term.
Using “political correctness” as an example: A whole lot of people on the left say PC is just being polite, avoiding slurs like the N-word, being respectful, etc. And in their lived experience, that’s what they see it as. Who could be against PC?
But a whole lot of people on the right see PC as “suppressing unpleasant truth, or going out of one’s way to be offended over absurd things, like saying Oreo cookies are racist because they are black layers sandwiching white in between.” And they can point to an unlimited number of outrage-anecdotes online of people indeed being unreasonable and call that PC.
So now you have two sides who cannot possibly agree on what “PC” means because their lived experiences, and what their eyes are looking for and looking at, are so different for that term.
I think this is an issue defining the scope of the topic. Both sides understand what PC means, but there is a disagreement on whether (a) it is necessary and (b) the extent it should be applied. For a conversation like this, it is more fruitful to first identify where the sides agree, cross those off, and then move on to the rest. But the real gold in the conversation is actually understanding why one side resents PC terms and why the other embraces it.
To me the “left” example is attempting to have a conversation based on the general/original/academic definition of PC, and the “right” example is totally incoherent, something based off of vagueness and then weaponized into a debate point. Nobody thinks that Hydrox or Oreos themselves are racist. Referring to a person as an “Oreo” definitely sounds racist, or at least objectifying and demeaning. If someone is arguing that it’s not, then I question if they are in good faith.