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Cake day: June 14th, 2023

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  • Some advice I got about how to deal with people who like to use euphemisms and bad faith argument to hide their racism/sexism/XYZ-phobia (but it works even when it’s not the xenophobia stuff) is to just play dumb. Be like Socrates and keep poking at their underlying arguments and assumptions.

    An uncle of mine will talk about “people wearing hoodies” as a euphemism for “thuggish black people” and I’ll just play dumb, and ask stuff like “I wear hoddies, does that make me a criminal?” or “What is it about hoddies that makes people criminals?” “It’s a piece of cotton, I don’t get what it is about hoodies that makes someone a criminal” And just keep asking dumb questions, they’ll get to a point that they’ll either say the quiet part out loud or just won’t say their veiled racist stuff around you.

    It’s a bit of initial work but after a while people leave you alone because it’s just a pain in the ass trying to argue with you.


  • Bad argument techniques are not necessarily bad faith arguments.

    For example saying “broccoli is bad because I don’t like it” isn’t necessarily bad faith, it’s just poorly reasoned and doesn’t consider other perspectives and ideas. If the arguer is willing to listen to other perspectives and ideas and is willing to revise their statement to better reflect reality to something like “broccoli is not for me, because I don’t like broccoli but other people do.”

    Bad faith argumentation doesn’t try to consider other ideas and perspectives and will do everything they can to avoid conceding anything to the opposing arguments, and will continue to adhere to the original despite evidence to the contrary.

    Both can use bad argumentation, but good faith argumentation reflects a willingness to adapt to new information, and bad faith will only double down on their argument despite evidence to the contrary.