Well, there’s fairphone. And farmers markets.
Honestly, most of the things people buy are things they don’t even need… housing, cars, and insurance excluded.
Bottled Water by Nestle? ❌
Learning to love the taste of your local tap water? ✅
An individual instance may be driven by some ideology… but as a decentralized collective of instances, there isn’t one governing ideology. It’d be super funny to have a pro-capitalism one… and it’s anyone’s right to create it or contribute to it if they want to.
Surely one of these instances allows videos of cats.
Now that’s what I call Ethos!
The best existing phrase I have is, “Dropping your guard.”
It doesn’t necessarily imply anything about why you dropped your guard, and only slightly implies that the bad thing happened while your guard was down.
We could coin a new phrase here by brainstorming. I’ll start:
Fumbled the shield
Sure, until next place changes their block function as well. Changing the rules to something that is objectively less safe is a bad thing, even if people are free to leave.
Edit for clarity.
I think most of us are on-board with police body cameras. The fundamental difference is that they are recording things in the presence of the police, and that they have the measurable benefit of holding the police accountable to their actions (sometimes).
Rats are good people
Hahaha, but that would have been a great question.
I’m going with snails. When I was younger, my family made a big deal about hating them in our garden, which is maybe fair. But now I’m an adult without a garden, and they’re just some cute, hungry little freaks.
So shifting the discussion towards that rigid quantitative numbers is shifting away from where the conversation should be. That’s been my point this whole thread.
You’re implicitly assuming that there’s one place that this conversation should be. MY point this whole thread has been that “where the conversation should be” depends on your audience. To repeat myself, “if your target audience consists of people who already agree with the basic economic principle, then by all means, add as much nuance as you like.” That’s a situation in which you can have “where the conversation should be” wherever you please.
But if someone disagrees with you, and if your goal is to be persuasive, you need more than just being right. OP is not about the pure distillation of facts. OP is about how to be persuasive. And he’s right. That IS something that can be persuasive.
No, I’m not making an emotional argument.
Perhaps not, but you indicated that the “emotionless language of finance and economics” constitues “conceding ground”.
If you’re not making an emotional argument, then why would emotionless language be a problem? If we have no intention of making emotional arguments, why would we be conceding ground by focusing on “emotionless” disciplines?
And then we’re talking about “winning” an argument that no longer cleanly maps onto what actually matters.
I entered this conversation by specifying a target audience. In the same capacity, “winning” depends on who you’re talking to, as does the mappability of the argument onto real life.
If someone already agrees with the same basic principles you do, you can just talk, and they’ll believe you, because people aren’t skeptical of people they agree with.
But I’m not always having a discussion with someone who shares most of my fundamental beliefs. That’s simply not a situation where nuance matters. Just getting them to understand a single basic principle that they disagree with is already hard enough.
implicitly conceding ground by framing things in the language of emotionless finance and economics
Your mileage may vary, but I do not consider this a concession. Anyone can make an emotional argument. You usually need to actually be right in order to make an emotionless academic argument.
may actually be fighting things on less friendly territory to begin with.
When it comes to arguing for the claim being discussed… whether you’re closer to homelessness or being a millionaire (the three month thing is incidental to the main point)… then whether these disciplines are friendly territory pretty much boils down to whether you can explain it or not.
If your target audience consists of people who already agree with the basic economic principle, then by all means, add as much nuance as you like.
If your target audience is a single, white, cis male, 55k per year salary-making, apartment-renting, roommate-having, college dropout normie, then maybe a simpler distinction will be more effective?
the modern American use of “liberal” as a synonym for the progressive left… but word usages change
Modern American civics education is, on average, basically non-existent. All changes in word usage trends toward less nuance, greater redundancy, and greater ambiguity.
And that’s fine, I guess, because Descriptivism or whatever. But in the event that moderately educated people use the terms “Liberal” or “Leftist”, it’s probably okay to assume the formal meanings.
makes references to the “liberal media” confusing."
You seem to not be that confused, since you correctly pointed out that these companies are owned by conservatives.
the baking
Is this a typo, or a new term for me to learn?
Can you tell me: What is the y-axis of that graph? How would a person use this graph to determine how much we spent per homless person per year?
A) The right-most column, upper value
B) The left-most column, upper value
C) The sum of all upper values
D) The sum of all lower values
E) This graph doesn’t say anything about price, and anyone trying to draw a conclusion abiut price doesn’t know how to read even the simplest type of chart.
In California, the 2026 budget for homelessness programs is $1.7 billion. The homeless population is 181,000. This is an average of $9400 per person per year.
Note: some of these programs are for homelessness prevention meaning it helps far more people than just the 181 thousand, meaning the cost per person is actually much lower.
Steamboat Willie is an example of Copyright. Twitter is an example of a Trademark. A Copyright is much much much easier to defend than a Trademark.
https://www.uspto.gov/trademarks/basics/trademark-patent-copyright
Most people can be convinced of something. I have a lot of debates, both in person and online, and I’ve gotten somewhat decent at it. I think the most important thing is setting a realistic goal.
Did I convince a group of young earth creationists that the theory of evolution by natural selection is the best explanation for the diversity of life? No I did not. Did I convince some of them that biologists aren’t a part of a satanic conspiracy, and that they’re just trying to come up with good explanations for the stuff they see? Yes, I think so.
Did I convince a “pro-life” friend that abortion should be exclusively the host’s decision? No I did not. Did I make them recognize that drawing the line on when abortion should or should not be allowed is harder than they had assumed, and that IF the government is going to draw that line, they should at least consult some medical experts? Yes, I think so.
On some level it might feel like it’s not enough… But there isn’t anything better, so I’ll take what I can get. Good luck out there.
That’s not how that works. A smart person would recognize that there are degrees of smartness and degrees of immunity. Even if we accept that smarter people are less susceptible to propaganda, there is no threshold of smartness that grants immunity to propaganda.
The most important service one can provide to a kind-of-smart person is to tell them when they’ve said something stupid. I’m happy to provide this service. Please rate 5 stars.