What’s wrong with my form? Was I the only one, or even the first, to refuse leeway? Have I been anything but civil in my firmness? Are accusations of bad faith and name-calling becoming of good socialists? Do you not think the threat of moderative action somewhat undermines the whole anarchic stance on authority and hierarchy? If not, doesn’t that kinda prove my point?
Avoiding being a “debatebro” is much, much lower on my list of priorities than discouraging rhetorical habits that make leftists look like oblivious fools. Obviously everyone who has ever worked on any kind of group project knows that you need some kind of hierarchy and authority to accomplish anything at a scale above half a dozen people. When you say you want to abolish authority and hierarchy, your audience (who isn’t already in the in-group) doesn’t know that you’re using a cheeky private definition of those words where you’re only talking about the oppressive versions. They just know that the sentences you’re building with those words, which they have common definitions for, sound like naïve nonsense.
If all you care about is circle jerking with the in-group, fine. I don’t want to be a part of that anyway. But if you actually want to move the general population to the left, and that’s never been more crucial than now, you need to seriously examine your rhetoric. If your platform sounds stupid to the general audience, they’re not going to entertain it for a second.
What’s wrong with my form? Was I the only one, or even the first, to refuse leeway? Have I been anything but civil in my firmness? Are accusations of bad faith and name-calling becoming of good socialists? Do you not think the threat of moderative action somewhat undermines the whole anarchic stance on authority and hierarchy? If not, doesn’t that kinda prove my point?
Avoiding being a “debatebro” is much, much lower on my list of priorities than discouraging rhetorical habits that make leftists look like oblivious fools. Obviously everyone who has ever worked on any kind of group project knows that you need some kind of hierarchy and authority to accomplish anything at a scale above half a dozen people. When you say you want to abolish authority and hierarchy, your audience (who isn’t already in the in-group) doesn’t know that you’re using a cheeky private definition of those words where you’re only talking about the oppressive versions. They just know that the sentences you’re building with those words, which they have common definitions for, sound like naïve nonsense.
If all you care about is circle jerking with the in-group, fine. I don’t want to be a part of that anyway. But if you actually want to move the general population to the left, and that’s never been more crucial than now, you need to seriously examine your rhetoric. If your platform sounds stupid to the general audience, they’re not going to entertain it for a second.