I want to highlight this exchange, in one of the many Afghanistan threads, between Martini_Enfield and myself, and DemonTree’s attempt at a “gotcha!” moment:
Let me see if I can unpack this. We’ve got:
Martini_Enfield putting forward a perfectly valid reason why people might think it would be a bad idea to annex Afghanistan. But of course “woke social justice types” are just emotional wah-wah babies (or words to that affect) and that’s why they would oppose annexing Afghanistan.
My response is to highlight how curious it is (here, in the pit, I’ll go ahead and call his post what it is: bad faith, disingenuous, shit-posting-borderline-trolling) that he would use such loaded language, effectively mocking “woke social justice types” by use of the label alone. I also question how/why he would discount the possibility that these “woke social justice types” might in fact have a good reason to be opposed to annexation, particularly as the one he puts forward seems to rely on premises that I suspect would be shared by people on the left (that annexation would lead to an unending insurgency and that would, at least implicitly, be a bad thing to have to deal with).
DemonTree then responds to my critique of martini’s incredibly disingenuous and bad faith argument with words to the effect of: “Oh, seeeee! Doesn’t feel so good when it’s conservatives doing it people on your side, eh? Now you know how it feels to be accused of holding to positions for stupid reasons!”
/summary
But you see, DemonTree, that completely misses the point. This isn’t an instance of diverging facts, with one side chanting “Fake Newz!” and “sheeple!” in response to well-sourced scientific claims and the other side accusing them of being deluded/ignorant/buying into or spouting propaganda. This is an instance where we are to believe that some how, even with shared premises (the whole thing about unending insurgencies being “bad” and all–a strong disincentive to certain courses of action) and perhaps even a shared conclusion (that maybe we shouldn’t annex Afghanistan), Martini_Enfield, conservative jackwad, is just CONVINCED that “woke social justice types” couldn’t have arrived at that perfectly sound conclusion through reason. Because even where there may be common ground, he can’t possibly contemplate that “woke social justice types” might arrive at their shared conclusion through logic.
So the equivalent left to right argument would be if I were to put forward the proposition that: “I can see how some people might be opposed to kicking puppies because it would be needlessly cruel, and we should generally avoid doing needlessly cruel things, but if a CONSERVATIVE were to come out against puppy-kicking, it’s probably because they somehow have tied puppy-kicking into some whacked-out QAnon-like conspiracy theory involving ‘democrat politicians’ feasting off the life forces of puppies as practice for then doing the same to children. Stupid fascists!”