Tankies’ reasoning makes a lot more sense if you think of them as paid Russian trolls. Their paycheck depends on them understanding false ideas as if they were true.
Yes a lot of them do seem to be pushing an agenda, and they feel very trained on how to escape answering… anything. If they feel they are losing, they resort to insulting, and trying to make you feel foolish. Anyone with half a brain can see this coming a mile away, but the tankie carries on, patting themselves on the back.
I just assume there is no way to convince them of anything, because to even try is an absolute insult. Their opinion is the only correct opinion. Like, China is great, and everything bad is western propaganda. But, ask a gay tankie how they feel about China not having same sex marriage and their arguments start to fall apart.
If you’re even going to try to argue with one, just find out how to make them feel undesired in China and Russia, and then they fumble.
If you just read this pile of hundred year old books, you’d understand. Of course I’ve read them. I just can’t tell you about them. They only make sense as one complete unit. It’s impossible to understand any of it until you’ve read the last word on the last page. That’s why I can’t use all the reading I’ve done to make a point other than “lol you haven’t read my books”.
Only way to prove they don’t know something is by knowing it yourself. Do you have any examples of communist readings with names that “sound nice,” because I don’t know of many.
This is actually why insulting people’s intelligence is generally just lazy and inaccurate, aside from any problematic aspect. Because many people who believe wrong things are actually quite intelligent, and they apply that intelligence quite cleverly to defending wrong positions. I would have hoped that someone like you, with all your pretenses of being an enlightened progressive, wouldn’t resort to attributing every disagreement to your opponents’ innate mental inferiority.
For example, the reason you come to wrong conclusions like this has nothing to do with a lack of intelligence or any innate characteristic, it’s because you’re full of yourself. You don’t bother to understand people’s actual reasons for coming to the conclusions that they do. I suspect that I have a pretty decent read on you, actually - you’re probably rather sharp and grew up a big fish in a small intellectual pond, the people around you generally were wrong and uninformed, so there was little value in listening to them. I can recognize this psychological profile because I fit it myself. Eventually, you find a room that you’re no longer the smartest person in, and you either learn to listen or you burn out and avoid it (for me, I aced every test through high school and undergrad and then hit upper division physics and realized that I couldn’t just instantly grasp it like I could with other stuff and suddenly had to learn how to study with others). Because the thing is that actually good ideas and conclusions come from cooperative, collective effort, beyond what even the sharpest person in the world could come up with on their own - it’s why the peer-review process is such an essential part of science.
Like, have you ever considered the possibility that a disagreement might not stem from one side being deficient, misinformed, or developmentally impaired, but rather from people having different values, experiences, and priorities? Is it possible that you haven’t actually solved philosophy with objectively correct positions that a person would have to be brain damaged to disagree with? Can reasonable people ever disagree?
Don’t tankies struggle with basically all reasoning? Abstract or otherwise?
Tankies’ reasoning makes a lot more sense if you think of them as paid Russian trolls. Their paycheck depends on them understanding false ideas as if they were true.
Yes a lot of them do seem to be pushing an agenda, and they feel very trained on how to escape answering… anything. If they feel they are losing, they resort to insulting, and trying to make you feel foolish. Anyone with half a brain can see this coming a mile away, but the tankie carries on, patting themselves on the back.
I just assume there is no way to convince them of anything, because to even try is an absolute insult. Their opinion is the only correct opinion. Like, China is great, and everything bad is western propaganda. But, ask a gay tankie how they feel about China not having same sex marriage and their arguments start to fall apart.
If you’re even going to try to argue with one, just find out how to make them feel undesired in China and Russia, and then they fumble.
If you just read this pile of hundred year old books, you’d understand. Of course I’ve read them. I just can’t tell you about them. They only make sense as one complete unit. It’s impossible to understand any of it until you’ve read the last word on the last page. That’s why I can’t use all the reading I’ve done to make a point other than “lol you haven’t read my books”.
Oh, they will copy and paste all 50,000 pages of you talk to them long enough. ;)
Complaining that they both can’t explain an argument and that they’ll send you 50,000 pages about it is hilarious.
The trick is that they haven’t read it either, tankies just copy/paste stuff with titles that sound nice
Look, he’s doing the thing live! Right how, for us!
Only way to prove they don’t know something is by knowing it yourself. Do you have any examples of communist readings with names that “sound nice,” because I don’t know of many.
They’re very good at excuses, fallacies, and mental gymnastics. Those are reasoning too. Just not very advanced reasoning.
This is actually why insulting people’s intelligence is generally just lazy and inaccurate, aside from any problematic aspect. Because many people who believe wrong things are actually quite intelligent, and they apply that intelligence quite cleverly to defending wrong positions. I would have hoped that someone like you, with all your pretenses of being an enlightened progressive, wouldn’t resort to attributing every disagreement to your opponents’ innate mental inferiority.
For example, the reason you come to wrong conclusions like this has nothing to do with a lack of intelligence or any innate characteristic, it’s because you’re full of yourself. You don’t bother to understand people’s actual reasons for coming to the conclusions that they do. I suspect that I have a pretty decent read on you, actually - you’re probably rather sharp and grew up a big fish in a small intellectual pond, the people around you generally were wrong and uninformed, so there was little value in listening to them. I can recognize this psychological profile because I fit it myself. Eventually, you find a room that you’re no longer the smartest person in, and you either learn to listen or you burn out and avoid it (for me, I aced every test through high school and undergrad and then hit upper division physics and realized that I couldn’t just instantly grasp it like I could with other stuff and suddenly had to learn how to study with others). Because the thing is that actually good ideas and conclusions come from cooperative, collective effort, beyond what even the sharpest person in the world could come up with on their own - it’s why the peer-review process is such an essential part of science.
Like, have you ever considered the possibility that a disagreement might not stem from one side being deficient, misinformed, or developmentally impaired, but rather from people having different values, experiences, and priorities? Is it possible that you haven’t actually solved philosophy with objectively correct positions that a person would have to be brain damaged to disagree with? Can reasonable people ever disagree?