If I'm arguing with someone who's from the start clearly not going to change their minds, it becomes a game where all I'm doing is exposing their arguments' weaknesses and trying to plant seeds in the minds of those around us.
Most ideas can be put into a few select categories, and those categories are largely demographically traceable. The easiest red flags are appeal to emotion, pilpul, Ebonics, and nihilism/cynicism.
Appeal to emotion/ pathos is women logic, everything in their argument will eventually boil down to their emotional state or the emotional state they want you to “feel”. You will see this argument style ad nauseum with 90% of women from feminists to “conservatives”.
Pilpul is essentially Jewish pedantry. It’s the debate form of throwing the chessboard by arguing every semantic down to the finest detail in order to obfuscate the larger issue which the person does not want to argue.
Hoe_Math did a decent summary here:
pilpul is characterized by making arguments you know to be false in a verbally confusing manner in order to appear to have a point when you don't.
like "ok but how do you KNOW that you're a man? Did you look at your Y chromosome under a microscope?"
see how that introduces doubt of something that was previously obvious and creates a problem? now you'd have to argue with me about how you know you're a man, and I would cast similar doubt on everything you say.
it's deceptive and time-wasting.
Another example is the stonetoss meme with the libertarian saying “but if we use the government, how will we stop other people from using it against us?”
Ebonics is self explanatory, I’ll just post this for those who don’t understand, https://www.bbc.com/pidgin
Cynicism/ nihilism are society killers, they (shockingly) share similar argument structures to pilpul, one of the biggest and most recognizable ones are “how does this affect you?”. These are some of the most distrustful people on the planet, yet demand authoritarian state control of the economy, that should tell you just about all you need to know for their motives.
TL/DR: 80-90% of Women, Commies, Jews, Blacks, and Troons can, essentially, safely be ignored because they don’t know how to frame ideas outside of those categories.
TL/DR: 80-90% of Women, Commies, Jews, Blacks, and Troons can, essentially, safely be ignored because they don’t know how to frame ideas outside of those categories.
Jews/Commies/Troons can be safely ignored because they are incapable of arguing in good faith, since their only desire is to manipulate you to further their goals. I can count on one hand the amount of jews I am even willing to listen to, let alone entertain their arguments, and that is solely because they have built a reputation of being reasonable, even if they have their own personal bias.
Women are mentally children when it comes to serious matters, and so should probably be ignored as a safety mechanism.
Blacks can be a bit of a mixed bag. There are great men like Thomas Sowell, Clarence Thomas, etc. who are black, but the modern aggregate black community is too anti social and greedy to really take seriously. For every Malcolm X there are dozens of ibram x kendi/charlemagne/talcum x/etc.
Ultimately, none of these groups are going to come to save you because they have their own in group preference that does not include you nor I.
Blacks can be a bit of a mixed bag. There are great men like Thomas Sowell, Clarence Thomas, etc. who are black, but the modern aggregate black community is too anti social and greedy to really take seriously. For every Malcolm X there are dozens of ibram x kendi/charlemagne/talcum x/etc.
That’s why I put Ebonics. The simple fact is about ~20% of black men/women don’t want to associate with “black culture”, these are your Thomas Sowells, Clarence Thomas’s, Larry Elders, Ben Carson’s, etc. if a Black person is talking like a normal person they’re usually worth hearing out.
It amuses me that pilpul actually has a positive meaning in Judaism as a sort of rabbinical skill. A Jew would say something like: 'Wow, that rabbi has proven that he is an excellent rabbi, because he excels at pilpul!'.
Somehow this term eventually became synonymous with something negative, such as sophistry or even bullshit. I imagine that this was once Jews became prevalent in other societies and non-Jews thus observed their rabbis arguing amongst each other. A non-Jew would have once said something like: 'These rabbinical arguments are full of bullshit and sophistry, and they call it pilpul. Well, let's just call all sophistry and bullshit pilpul.'
Then it took on, probably initially as a sort of joke, and here we are in the present day, calling bullshit of all sorts pilpul, with no real idea of how that came to be.
Other points you've missed are relativism (e.g. 'I'll grant that your argument X is only true in a specific time &or place, but false in our current time &or place') and subjectivism (e.g. 'I'll grant that your argument Y is true in your reality, but isn't it only true for you or people like you and not true for me or people like me because there is no objective reality that we jointly inhabit?')
Shifting Christian attitudes on 'anti-semitism', e.g. Catholicism pre- versus post-Vatican II, for instance, could easily be defended by downgrading things from objectivism to relativism: 'You say that because we have changed our mind on the Jews that therefore we were either wrong for two millennia or are wrong now, and therefore that our religion must be false. However, the truth is that God changed His Mind when man reached a certain level of progress. Thus, we were anti-semites back then and we weren't wrong, and we are not anti-semites now and we aren't wrong. When we were primitive, anti-semitism was in line with God's Will; but now that we are Enlightened, God has revealed His new Will, and opposing anti-semitism is now in line with His Will. We were never wrong because anti-semitism was actually in line with God's Will all along; that is, it was a stage God Willed us to go through until man reached a certain level of progress and God revealed to us that He had changed His Mind. He had changed His Mind because harbouring grudges is unbefitting of Him - He had chosen to forgive the Jews - and, after all, such tolerance is more befitting of our Enlightened Age.'
Notice that such an argument would get the defender out of a double bind.
Online, this is rare because I usually balance the content of the ideas with who said it to determine whether I ought to ignore it or not.
Like if the Times of Israel posts some article that's titled something like: "new study confirms jews are better than Whites" I'm just going to completely discount the content without even bothering to look because I know it's trash and wrong to begin with. But if the Times of Israel posts some article: "New evidence suggests Out of Africa theory is wrong" I might take a look at the evidence and consider it true.
Depends what the content is and who says it...
As for completely discounting something because of the person who said it; well, I typically discount all things jews and women say if I know a jew or woman said it regardless of what the content is. That's my default position; however, still depending on what exactly the content is I might investigate it more. Depends how much I care and how important the content is.
I usually judge people by how they look or act. There are patterns, whether its posting history or physical behavior in Minecraft.
I also usually just ignore women because I have never heard anything intellectual from them. Almost all blacks and faggots. Also jews, but I also wouldn't hear anything intellectual from a rat so.
Pretty much anything a woman will tell you came from someone else and she's just repeating it; there's no point conversing. For them, words are actually just tools to get them to do what you want (and vice versa) because there's no cognition happening.
It's far too much effort to remember individual people's names. Like, I will on occasion in passing, but I will register the lies and the deceit before I register who is doing the deceiving.
Any dismissal of ideas based on the source of the ideas would be an up-river issue: The percent of ideas I get exposed to that are sourced from the idiots, irrational, and psychopaths, is far less than that of the sane, rational, and kind. So in a heuristic sense, I dismiss the ideas before the ideas ever reach my ears, because I don't tend to seek out their content.
I'm not going to watch an 8-hour Hasan stream as he zaps his dog, glazes houthi terrorists, and waxes poetic about communism. 8 hours is a lot of verbal output, he probably would have, accidentally, said one or two reasonable and sane things across it. But as I do not watch the stream, I have now dismissed those ideas, alongside his terror-glazing, out of hand: I never even heard them.
If I DO hear the ideas, I'll assess them independently. I may be more prone to charitable interpretations of vague points or unclear conclusions from one side over another, but in terms of the strict statements said, I feel like if they DO manage to reach me, they're impartially assessed.
"That's a great idea. Shame you and yours will never follow it, and it's just propaganda." is often an end-result of the assessment, of course. There's a reason the Motte-And-Bailey argument style works. It's because there IS a valid idea, a defensible stance, at the core of things: they just torture and abuse that stance until it is unrecognizable, then retreat to the sane stance if called out upon.
In court it's supposed to be the truth, the whole truth, nothing but the truth.
All of that is needed, and nobody can consistently provide that. It's up to you to construct that for yourself.
Example: Ivermectin.
Ivermectin is "horse medicine". That's true, but it's also human medicine.
Study proving it worked in vitro used a lethal dose. That's true, but the study didn't attempt to find a minimum effective dose.
'Gold Standard' UK trial said it wasn't effective. That's what they concluded, but their reason was that while the data did in fact show it worked, they wouldn't say it was "effective" when Pfizer's version was available and better (after waiting 4 years to publish).
In each of these the Media didn't lie, they just didn't report the whole truth. They convinced lots of people of the complete opposite of reality just by using selective facts, by playing on their assumptions. Some of these people even looked up the facts, "GPT did the in-vitro study use a lethal dose yes or no? Yes." and became even more convinced of their upside down world, because that reporting was actually true.
So if you dismiss what they're saying you're probably dismissing actual true facts (except from liars and ignoramuses). The most important thing is to always ask what are they not telling me? This is also why you should ask AI to disprove what you believe, not whether something is or why it is true, so it focuses on any parts you don't know about.
That's a good example. How quickly I dismiss ideas from a person or article is proportional to how far they get without trying to lie to me. For example, the old favorite of including suicides as "gun violence." I don't care which side you're arguing for or who you are. I'm not reading/watching anything beyond that point. Same with things like "horse medicine" or trying to pivot between "immigrant" and "illegal immigrant" as if the reader can't tell what you're doing.
This applies in the opposite direction also….there are certain political commentators I trust enough to take their political views and their solutions for problems that face our society a lot more serious than others because of how much I trust that person…..Devon Stack for instance, he and I generally share the same positions on most everything, so when it comes to something I haven’t thought deeply about yet that he is articulating his position on, so long as there’s nothing that glaringly contradicts how I feel about the issue at a surface level, I don’t have a problem assuming he’s probably on point enough to adopt his position as my own to some degree without really studying the issue or his opinion more for myself. Honestly, he may be the only content creator I truly trust just because he’s had the skills for years to become one of the biggest WN content creators out there, especially if he just decided to take a more moderate conservative type of position on current events and the state of the nation, but he chooses integrity over money and regularly shits on wishful thinking which I’m sure pushes a lot of viewers away from his channel, but there’s no substitute for honesty and integrity, even if the truth hurts. We have to be honest about how bad things truly are if we ever care to successfully mitigate the problems we face. You can hide from reality, but you can’t hide from the consequences of hiding from reality, so let’s just face reality head on.
It's less about 'who' it's coming from so much as what kind of (often blatant) rhetoric they're using. Which naturally does end up lining with and reflecting 'who' they are and what kind of per-established leanings they have.
A person who regularly circulates any NPC-like low-effort thoughts in their heads like that as some kind of 'gospel' on a frequent basis is clearly not someone who exercises a high capacity for original thinking.
And this applies to a zealots anyone can easily spot from wide variety of different groups, not just leftists.
And then beyond that I tend to take a moderately skeptical approach regarding peoples' intentions, especially when it comes to theatrics being played out in more public spotlights.
If it is coming from a person who already has a reputation for huge bias or bad takes i.e. vaush/destiny/hasan, or someone who has demonstrated an inorganic change in their behavior i.e. Jordan Peterson/Tim Pool/etc. I am almost automatically going to ignore what they say. The reason I do this is because it is far more likely that they will attempt to manipulate me rather than inform me.
Once in a blue moon, they might be right about something, but it is likely that their correct take is something that I could have found in another less repulsive source.
That is not to say that you should fall into an echo chamber and be totally unaware of other points of view, but patterns are patterns for a reason.
It depends on how often that person has lied to me in the past, and if I suspect the lie was intentional. Like Nick Fuentes, he lied to his followers for a very long time about Trump, long after it was obvious Trump wasn’t on the side of Whites and Nick continued to make asinine excuses for why he’d say and do the things he repeatedly did against our interests. The Covid lockdown support, the militarized bioweapon/vaccine he had produced with no way to hold anyone accountable if it turned out to be dangerous to the public’s health, the Trump stimmy bucks, the bump stock ban, failure to investigate the Vegas shooting that was a clear criminal conspiracy involving more people than just Stephen Paddock.,protecting jews and criminal democrats repeatedly, etc.
Nick isn’t stupid, we all know that, the only explanation for his Trump dick riding late into that first term was that he was playing a role to control the right and steer them toward things that wouldn’t help us, just as he does today. I’ll still listen to someone like Nick, but I don’t just swallow his ideas hook line and sinker.
I'm I'm talking about reading, I'll read almost anything with a slant but I really rarely dismiss on source alone unless it's just a well known massive propagandist rag. I read all sorts of things that wouldn't be approved by someone because there's value in the opposing perspective even if what they are saying is complete and total shit because it helps you see the depth (or lack thereof) of their thought. I don't take almost anything from a single source as a fact. You can tell me the Declaration of Independence was signed on July 4, 1776 and you may be right or wrong but I won't take just one word for it if it's something I'm not already familiar with.
If not written media, I have little patience for videos/audio that is a talking head rambling whether it's Rachel Madcow or whatever the hell is the opposite, Mark Levin, or someone on "our" side. Mostly because even if they have a valid point, it's a point that could be written in a paragraph they want to ramble about for an hour.
To echo what other people said, the subjective (the who) matters in social settings, unfortunately. In different countries, support or opposition to the covid jab by the recognized "left wing counterculture" was determined more by which faction was in office than a mass of individuals independently looking up assessments. Maddox made a video in early 2020 using high-schools/undergrad understanding of medicine to make reasonable predictions and policy assessments. Yet only a large minority chose to look past authority and superstition; the pandemic should been retired by mid 2020.
The stance on a topic is arbitrary, whoever is chasing power determines the make up of society, until society collapses under dysfunction like all the fortune 500s of the past 70 years. As soon as interstellar travel becomes affordable, Earth is going to have a drastic brain drain.
As to whether I consider someone's ideas, I attempt persistent first-principles thinking on subjects. Like with economics, I don't expect everyone to worship Mises, but I do expect respect for the window maker's fallacy (opportunity cost). If someone cares more for Marx or for televised drama wrapped as insight, whatever 5% of useful things they might say is so entangled as to not be worth extracting. If 50% of citizens attempted consistent first-principles thinking and general virtue, our financial and legal systems would see massive beneficial reforms.
I have a varied and eclectic knowledge base which allows me to critically evaluate new information when I see it.
I almost never see new information from most people.
I have been arguing on the internet for almost 30 years. I have seen everything, and every logical fallacy. I dismiss the opinion of the morally righteous out of hand, because making me the villain so as to disqualify my argument is not an argument.
What I have decided is that Progressive policies always lose when exposed to rigorous and objective argument.
Always.
Therefore the debate over policy isn't really one of policy, but power. I want to deny them the ability to implement their policies, because their policies are Bad.™
I will entertain any idea from any source, no matter how retarded, if it's made in good faith. Especially online, correcting misconceptions is important because other people are reading, even if the person I'm arguing with won't change their mind.
If I think someone is arguing in bad faith by, for example, making outlandish, unsubstantiated claims specifically to make me waste my time verifying them, I just mock them.
Being university educated inculcates 'attack the message, not the messenger' even harder than liberalism does. Nevertheless, I still see it as erroneous.
There is a certain truth to it in the sense that even if some disabled Antifa trans-Jewlatto were to say '1 + 1 = 2', it remains as true as if anyone else said it.
But that's around about where it ends. As ideas become more interpretative, the messenger becomes more relevant.
Example 1: 'Leftists are always socialists or communists, and anti-capitalist'.
This is obviously a false statement. These people idolized 'big pharma' companies like Pfizer to the extent that they developed a trend of getting vaccine manufacturing company names tattooed on their injection sites, effectively becoming walking advertisements for said companies. They then proceeded to defend the liberal economics of the likes of Smith and Friedman against the Trump tariffs.
Generally, the key to understanding it is that the Left is increasingly reactive: if they sense their perceived enemies as taking a stance, they can't stomach holding the same stance, because they feel that this means that they've crossed the aisle to become 'Nazis' and the like. Consequently, when they see terms that suggest a distancing of their enemies from capitalism (e.g. 'Woke Capitalism'), they feel compelled to defend it.
The people who usually utter this are always either Far- to Extreme- Left (I once recall as a university student hearing a young man say: 'If you aren't a communist, you aren't really Left-Wing', implying that 'Left versus Right' is reducible to 'communist versus absolutely everything else') or Cold Warrior types who simply misattribute liberalism's myriad failings to Marxism. Both sides then reinforce each other's false beliefs: the Cold Warriors look at the Antifa types as continuers of Soviet-style Bolshevism whilst Antifa types see the Cold Warriors as the fascists they've opposed since the Weimar. Nobody else believes it. In short, the view can be discarded because the psychological mechanisms of its messengers are easy to infer.
Left-Wing nut-jobs will always go on and on about the statistics of the 'Bible Belt' and how said statistics supposedly confirm their worldview regarding White people.
However, this relies on a hidden false premise, namely, that the Bible Belt is actually White to begin with. As the video's last slide shows, the Bible Belt is, amusingly, also the blackest part of America, containing many black-majority areas.
Why blame MAGA-supporting Whites for a problem that almost certainly has significant contribution from Democrat-voting blacks?
It's simply the product of motivated reasoning: Left-Wing nut-jobs simply lack any motive to see black dysfunction in anything at all, and plenty of motive for misattributing said dysfunction to Whites. Any impartial observer would swiftly see that the correlation between the various maps he brings up and the map inserted at the end is far stronger than any correlation between them and Republican or MAGA support. Take the literacy map: observe that the most literate (most light blue) states are also mostly Republican - he, unsurprisingly, is oblivious to that, focusing solely on the most illiterate (most dark red) states also mostly being Republican - and thus any attempt to associate Republican support with illiteracy is mired in falsehood.
Again, the messenger's errors are easily exposed. Furthermore, I think that it is almost certain that this smug melon-ated muttoid is simply regurgitating nonsense that came from White Leftists and others. That, of course, is another reason he shouldn't be taken seriously: he doesn't exactly look the type to even be capable of looking through his own arguments for potential false premises.
Example 3: Ignorance leads to racism, racism stems from ignorance
This is easily refuted by the observation that they will freely admit that the most 'racist' area of the United States is the 'Bible Belt', but they must too admit that it is also the blackest area.
Here, Leftists actually have the truth standing on its head: closer proximity to blacks actually increases White racism (only a few Leftists like Andrew Yang are really cognizant of this), whereas they simply invert it into something false; namely, that closer proximity to blacks decreases White racism.
Of course, the messengers have obvious reasons for reasoning their way to falsehood: their entire multi-racial project is imperiled if they accept the reality. Ergo, the intelligent thinker already senses that something is wrong before he even looks at the relevant statistics and the like.
In conclusion, the messenger absolutely matters. Whilst you cannot with the utmost certainty dismiss a claim based on its bearer, you can, in all probability, still safely use the messenger as a premise against accepting it, e.g. 'If the argument about communism being the only real Left is true, why is it that only Far- to Extreme-Leftists seem to believe in it; if the argument that Bible Belt dysfunctionality says something about Whites but not blacks is true, why is it that only White Leftists and melon-ated muttoids whose social media accounts are full of anti-White vitriol seem to believe in it?'.
Never have I once found a claim from such people where I have decided to look into said claim to actually be correct, forcing me, as an intellectually honest person rather than a mere sophist, to reassess my own position.
With the understanding that occasionally you can find a gold nugget in a trash can, comes the understanding that most of the time you're not going to.
One should always consider the source. And thus, the motivation.
I think of those situations as resilience training. Yeah, you could only ever listen to good sources, but how would you learn to recognise deception?
If I'm arguing with someone who's from the start clearly not going to change their minds, it becomes a game where all I'm doing is exposing their arguments' weaknesses and trying to plant seeds in the minds of those around us.
Most ideas can be put into a few select categories, and those categories are largely demographically traceable. The easiest red flags are appeal to emotion, pilpul, Ebonics, and nihilism/cynicism.
Appeal to emotion/ pathos is women logic, everything in their argument will eventually boil down to their emotional state or the emotional state they want you to “feel”. You will see this argument style ad nauseum with 90% of women from feminists to “conservatives”.
Pilpul is essentially Jewish pedantry. It’s the debate form of throwing the chessboard by arguing every semantic down to the finest detail in order to obfuscate the larger issue which the person does not want to argue.
Hoe_Math did a decent summary here:
Another example is the stonetoss meme with the libertarian saying “but if we use the government, how will we stop other people from using it against us?”
Ebonics is self explanatory, I’ll just post this for those who don’t understand, https://www.bbc.com/pidgin
Cynicism/ nihilism are society killers, they (shockingly) share similar argument structures to pilpul, one of the biggest and most recognizable ones are “how does this affect you?”. These are some of the most distrustful people on the planet, yet demand authoritarian state control of the economy, that should tell you just about all you need to know for their motives.
TL/DR: 80-90% of Women, Commies, Jews, Blacks, and Troons can, essentially, safely be ignored because they don’t know how to frame ideas outside of those categories.
Jews/Commies/Troons can be safely ignored because they are incapable of arguing in good faith, since their only desire is to manipulate you to further their goals. I can count on one hand the amount of jews I am even willing to listen to, let alone entertain their arguments, and that is solely because they have built a reputation of being reasonable, even if they have their own personal bias.
Women are mentally children when it comes to serious matters, and so should probably be ignored as a safety mechanism.
Blacks can be a bit of a mixed bag. There are great men like Thomas Sowell, Clarence Thomas, etc. who are black, but the modern aggregate black community is too anti social and greedy to really take seriously. For every Malcolm X there are dozens of ibram x kendi/charlemagne/talcum x/etc.
Ultimately, none of these groups are going to come to save you because they have their own in group preference that does not include you nor I.
That’s why I put Ebonics. The simple fact is about ~20% of black men/women don’t want to associate with “black culture”, these are your Thomas Sowells, Clarence Thomas’s, Larry Elders, Ben Carson’s, etc. if a Black person is talking like a normal person they’re usually worth hearing out.
Lol, this sounds a lot like the "germs aren't real" arguments.
It amuses me that pilpul actually has a positive meaning in Judaism as a sort of rabbinical skill. A Jew would say something like: 'Wow, that rabbi has proven that he is an excellent rabbi, because he excels at pilpul!'.
Somehow this term eventually became synonymous with something negative, such as sophistry or even bullshit. I imagine that this was once Jews became prevalent in other societies and non-Jews thus observed their rabbis arguing amongst each other. A non-Jew would have once said something like: 'These rabbinical arguments are full of bullshit and sophistry, and they call it pilpul. Well, let's just call all sophistry and bullshit pilpul.'
Then it took on, probably initially as a sort of joke, and here we are in the present day, calling bullshit of all sorts pilpul, with no real idea of how that came to be.
Other points you've missed are relativism (e.g. 'I'll grant that your argument X is only true in a specific time &or place, but false in our current time &or place') and subjectivism (e.g. 'I'll grant that your argument Y is true in your reality, but isn't it only true for you or people like you and not true for me or people like me because there is no objective reality that we jointly inhabit?')
Shifting Christian attitudes on 'anti-semitism', e.g. Catholicism pre- versus post-Vatican II, for instance, could easily be defended by downgrading things from objectivism to relativism: 'You say that because we have changed our mind on the Jews that therefore we were either wrong for two millennia or are wrong now, and therefore that our religion must be false. However, the truth is that God changed His Mind when man reached a certain level of progress. Thus, we were anti-semites back then and we weren't wrong, and we are not anti-semites now and we aren't wrong. When we were primitive, anti-semitism was in line with God's Will; but now that we are Enlightened, God has revealed His new Will, and opposing anti-semitism is now in line with His Will. We were never wrong because anti-semitism was actually in line with God's Will all along; that is, it was a stage God Willed us to go through until man reached a certain level of progress and God revealed to us that He had changed His Mind. He had changed His Mind because harbouring grudges is unbefitting of Him - He had chosen to forgive the Jews - and, after all, such tolerance is more befitting of our Enlightened Age.'
Notice that such an argument would get the defender out of a double bind.
Online, this is rare because I usually balance the content of the ideas with who said it to determine whether I ought to ignore it or not.
Like if the Times of Israel posts some article that's titled something like: "new study confirms jews are better than Whites" I'm just going to completely discount the content without even bothering to look because I know it's trash and wrong to begin with. But if the Times of Israel posts some article: "New evidence suggests Out of Africa theory is wrong" I might take a look at the evidence and consider it true.
Depends what the content is and who says it...
As for completely discounting something because of the person who said it; well, I typically discount all things jews and women say if I know a jew or woman said it regardless of what the content is. That's my default position; however, still depending on what exactly the content is I might investigate it more. Depends how much I care and how important the content is.
I usually judge people by how they look or act. There are patterns, whether its posting history or physical behavior in Minecraft.
I also usually just ignore women because I have never heard anything intellectual from them. Almost all blacks and faggots. Also jews, but I also wouldn't hear anything intellectual from a rat so.
Pretty much anything a woman will tell you came from someone else and she's just repeating it; there's no point conversing. For them, words are actually just tools to get them to do what you want (and vice versa) because there's no cognition happening.
It's far too much effort to remember individual people's names. Like, I will on occasion in passing, but I will register the lies and the deceit before I register who is doing the deceiving.
Any dismissal of ideas based on the source of the ideas would be an up-river issue: The percent of ideas I get exposed to that are sourced from the idiots, irrational, and psychopaths, is far less than that of the sane, rational, and kind. So in a heuristic sense, I dismiss the ideas before the ideas ever reach my ears, because I don't tend to seek out their content.
I'm not going to watch an 8-hour Hasan stream as he zaps his dog, glazes houthi terrorists, and waxes poetic about communism. 8 hours is a lot of verbal output, he probably would have, accidentally, said one or two reasonable and sane things across it. But as I do not watch the stream, I have now dismissed those ideas, alongside his terror-glazing, out of hand: I never even heard them.
If I DO hear the ideas, I'll assess them independently. I may be more prone to charitable interpretations of vague points or unclear conclusions from one side over another, but in terms of the strict statements said, I feel like if they DO manage to reach me, they're impartially assessed.
"That's a great idea. Shame you and yours will never follow it, and it's just propaganda." is often an end-result of the assessment, of course. There's a reason the Motte-And-Bailey argument style works. It's because there IS a valid idea, a defensible stance, at the core of things: they just torture and abuse that stance until it is unrecognizable, then retreat to the sane stance if called out upon.
In court it's supposed to be the truth, the whole truth, nothing but the truth.
All of that is needed, and nobody can consistently provide that. It's up to you to construct that for yourself.
Example: Ivermectin.
Ivermectin is "horse medicine". That's true, but it's also human medicine.
Study proving it worked in vitro used a lethal dose. That's true, but the study didn't attempt to find a minimum effective dose.
'Gold Standard' UK trial said it wasn't effective. That's what they concluded, but their reason was that while the data did in fact show it worked, they wouldn't say it was "effective" when Pfizer's version was available and better (after waiting 4 years to publish).
In each of these the Media didn't lie, they just didn't report the whole truth. They convinced lots of people of the complete opposite of reality just by using selective facts, by playing on their assumptions. Some of these people even looked up the facts, "GPT did the in-vitro study use a lethal dose yes or no? Yes." and became even more convinced of their upside down world, because that reporting was actually true.
So if you dismiss what they're saying you're probably dismissing actual true facts (except from liars and ignoramuses). The most important thing is to always ask what are they not telling me? This is also why you should ask AI to disprove what you believe, not whether something is or why it is true, so it focuses on any parts you don't know about.
That's a good example. How quickly I dismiss ideas from a person or article is proportional to how far they get without trying to lie to me. For example, the old favorite of including suicides as "gun violence." I don't care which side you're arguing for or who you are. I'm not reading/watching anything beyond that point. Same with things like "horse medicine" or trying to pivot between "immigrant" and "illegal immigrant" as if the reader can't tell what you're doing.
This applies in the opposite direction also….there are certain political commentators I trust enough to take their political views and their solutions for problems that face our society a lot more serious than others because of how much I trust that person…..Devon Stack for instance, he and I generally share the same positions on most everything, so when it comes to something I haven’t thought deeply about yet that he is articulating his position on, so long as there’s nothing that glaringly contradicts how I feel about the issue at a surface level, I don’t have a problem assuming he’s probably on point enough to adopt his position as my own to some degree without really studying the issue or his opinion more for myself. Honestly, he may be the only content creator I truly trust just because he’s had the skills for years to become one of the biggest WN content creators out there, especially if he just decided to take a more moderate conservative type of position on current events and the state of the nation, but he chooses integrity over money and regularly shits on wishful thinking which I’m sure pushes a lot of viewers away from his channel, but there’s no substitute for honesty and integrity, even if the truth hurts. We have to be honest about how bad things truly are if we ever care to successfully mitigate the problems we face. You can hide from reality, but you can’t hide from the consequences of hiding from reality, so let’s just face reality head on.
It's less about 'who' it's coming from so much as what kind of (often blatant) rhetoric they're using. Which naturally does end up lining with and reflecting 'who' they are and what kind of per-established leanings they have.
A person who regularly circulates any NPC-like low-effort thoughts in their heads like that as some kind of 'gospel' on a frequent basis is clearly not someone who exercises a high capacity for original thinking.
And this applies to a zealots anyone can easily spot from wide variety of different groups, not just leftists.
And then beyond that I tend to take a moderately skeptical approach regarding peoples' intentions, especially when it comes to theatrics being played out in more public spotlights.
If it is coming from a person who already has a reputation for huge bias or bad takes i.e. vaush/destiny/hasan, or someone who has demonstrated an inorganic change in their behavior i.e. Jordan Peterson/Tim Pool/etc. I am almost automatically going to ignore what they say. The reason I do this is because it is far more likely that they will attempt to manipulate me rather than inform me.
Once in a blue moon, they might be right about something, but it is likely that their correct take is something that I could have found in another less repulsive source.
That is not to say that you should fall into an echo chamber and be totally unaware of other points of view, but patterns are patterns for a reason.
It depends on how often that person has lied to me in the past, and if I suspect the lie was intentional. Like Nick Fuentes, he lied to his followers for a very long time about Trump, long after it was obvious Trump wasn’t on the side of Whites and Nick continued to make asinine excuses for why he’d say and do the things he repeatedly did against our interests. The Covid lockdown support, the militarized bioweapon/vaccine he had produced with no way to hold anyone accountable if it turned out to be dangerous to the public’s health, the Trump stimmy bucks, the bump stock ban, failure to investigate the Vegas shooting that was a clear criminal conspiracy involving more people than just Stephen Paddock.,protecting jews and criminal democrats repeatedly, etc.
Nick isn’t stupid, we all know that, the only explanation for his Trump dick riding late into that first term was that he was playing a role to control the right and steer them toward things that wouldn’t help us, just as he does today. I’ll still listen to someone like Nick, but I don’t just swallow his ideas hook line and sinker.
Quite a lot of the time. Pronouns in bio etc stuff like that.
Also where you hear it influences that a lot as well due to the increasing compartmentalisation of the internet and ideas.
This place is one of the ones I take everything with a grain of salt for example.
In my teens and 20s = the latter
Now = the former
I'm I'm talking about reading, I'll read almost anything with a slant but I really rarely dismiss on source alone unless it's just a well known massive propagandist rag. I read all sorts of things that wouldn't be approved by someone because there's value in the opposing perspective even if what they are saying is complete and total shit because it helps you see the depth (or lack thereof) of their thought. I don't take almost anything from a single source as a fact. You can tell me the Declaration of Independence was signed on July 4, 1776 and you may be right or wrong but I won't take just one word for it if it's something I'm not already familiar with.
If not written media, I have little patience for videos/audio that is a talking head rambling whether it's Rachel Madcow or whatever the hell is the opposite, Mark Levin, or someone on "our" side. Mostly because even if they have a valid point, it's a point that could be written in a paragraph they want to ramble about for an hour.
To echo what other people said, the subjective (the who) matters in social settings, unfortunately. In different countries, support or opposition to the covid jab by the recognized "left wing counterculture" was determined more by which faction was in office than a mass of individuals independently looking up assessments. Maddox made a video in early 2020 using high-schools/undergrad understanding of medicine to make reasonable predictions and policy assessments. Yet only a large minority chose to look past authority and superstition; the pandemic should been retired by mid 2020.
The stance on a topic is arbitrary, whoever is chasing power determines the make up of society, until society collapses under dysfunction like all the fortune 500s of the past 70 years. As soon as interstellar travel becomes affordable, Earth is going to have a drastic brain drain.
As to whether I consider someone's ideas, I attempt persistent first-principles thinking on subjects. Like with economics, I don't expect everyone to worship Mises, but I do expect respect for the window maker's fallacy (opportunity cost). If someone cares more for Marx or for televised drama wrapped as insight, whatever 5% of useful things they might say is so entangled as to not be worth extracting. If 50% of citizens attempted consistent first-principles thinking and general virtue, our financial and legal systems would see massive beneficial reforms.
I have a varied and eclectic knowledge base which allows me to critically evaluate new information when I see it.
I almost never see new information from most people.
I have been arguing on the internet for almost 30 years. I have seen everything, and every logical fallacy. I dismiss the opinion of the morally righteous out of hand, because making me the villain so as to disqualify my argument is not an argument.
What I have decided is that Progressive policies always lose when exposed to rigorous and objective argument.
Always.
Therefore the debate over policy isn't really one of policy, but power. I want to deny them the ability to implement their policies, because their policies are Bad.™
I will entertain any idea from any source, no matter how retarded, if it's made in good faith. Especially online, correcting misconceptions is important because other people are reading, even if the person I'm arguing with won't change their mind.
If I think someone is arguing in bad faith by, for example, making outlandish, unsubstantiated claims specifically to make me waste my time verifying them, I just mock them.
Being university educated inculcates 'attack the message, not the messenger' even harder than liberalism does. Nevertheless, I still see it as erroneous.
There is a certain truth to it in the sense that even if some disabled Antifa trans-Jewlatto were to say '1 + 1 = 2', it remains as true as if anyone else said it.
But that's around about where it ends. As ideas become more interpretative, the messenger becomes more relevant.
Example 1: 'Leftists are always socialists or communists, and anti-capitalist'.
This is obviously a false statement. These people idolized 'big pharma' companies like Pfizer to the extent that they developed a trend of getting vaccine manufacturing company names tattooed on their injection sites, effectively becoming walking advertisements for said companies. They then proceeded to defend the liberal economics of the likes of Smith and Friedman against the Trump tariffs.
Generally, the key to understanding it is that the Left is increasingly reactive: if they sense their perceived enemies as taking a stance, they can't stomach holding the same stance, because they feel that this means that they've crossed the aisle to become 'Nazis' and the like. Consequently, when they see terms that suggest a distancing of their enemies from capitalism (e.g. 'Woke Capitalism'), they feel compelled to defend it.
The people who usually utter this are always either Far- to Extreme- Left (I once recall as a university student hearing a young man say: 'If you aren't a communist, you aren't really Left-Wing', implying that 'Left versus Right' is reducible to 'communist versus absolutely everything else') or Cold Warrior types who simply misattribute liberalism's myriad failings to Marxism. Both sides then reinforce each other's false beliefs: the Cold Warriors look at the Antifa types as continuers of Soviet-style Bolshevism whilst Antifa types see the Cold Warriors as the fascists they've opposed since the Weimar. Nobody else believes it. In short, the view can be discarded because the psychological mechanisms of its messengers are easy to infer.
Example 2: Leftist views of the 'Bible Belt' (See the following video: https://scored.co/c/ConsumeProduct/p/1ATBlyYnYZ/biggest-selfown-of-all-time-/c)
Left-Wing nut-jobs will always go on and on about the statistics of the 'Bible Belt' and how said statistics supposedly confirm their worldview regarding White people.
However, this relies on a hidden false premise, namely, that the Bible Belt is actually White to begin with. As the video's last slide shows, the Bible Belt is, amusingly, also the blackest part of America, containing many black-majority areas.
Why blame MAGA-supporting Whites for a problem that almost certainly has significant contribution from Democrat-voting blacks?
It's simply the product of motivated reasoning: Left-Wing nut-jobs simply lack any motive to see black dysfunction in anything at all, and plenty of motive for misattributing said dysfunction to Whites. Any impartial observer would swiftly see that the correlation between the various maps he brings up and the map inserted at the end is far stronger than any correlation between them and Republican or MAGA support. Take the literacy map: observe that the most literate (most light blue) states are also mostly Republican - he, unsurprisingly, is oblivious to that, focusing solely on the most illiterate (most dark red) states also mostly being Republican - and thus any attempt to associate Republican support with illiteracy is mired in falsehood.
Again, the messenger's errors are easily exposed. Furthermore, I think that it is almost certain that this smug melon-ated muttoid is simply regurgitating nonsense that came from White Leftists and others. That, of course, is another reason he shouldn't be taken seriously: he doesn't exactly look the type to even be capable of looking through his own arguments for potential false premises.
Example 3: Ignorance leads to racism, racism stems from ignorance
This is easily refuted by the observation that they will freely admit that the most 'racist' area of the United States is the 'Bible Belt', but they must too admit that it is also the blackest area.
Here, Leftists actually have the truth standing on its head: closer proximity to blacks actually increases White racism (only a few Leftists like Andrew Yang are really cognizant of this), whereas they simply invert it into something false; namely, that closer proximity to blacks decreases White racism.
Of course, the messengers have obvious reasons for reasoning their way to falsehood: their entire multi-racial project is imperiled if they accept the reality. Ergo, the intelligent thinker already senses that something is wrong before he even looks at the relevant statistics and the like.
In conclusion, the messenger absolutely matters. Whilst you cannot with the utmost certainty dismiss a claim based on its bearer, you can, in all probability, still safely use the messenger as a premise against accepting it, e.g. 'If the argument about communism being the only real Left is true, why is it that only Far- to Extreme-Leftists seem to believe in it; if the argument that Bible Belt dysfunctionality says something about Whites but not blacks is true, why is it that only White Leftists and melon-ated muttoids whose social media accounts are full of anti-White vitriol seem to believe in it?'.
Never have I once found a claim from such people where I have decided to look into said claim to actually be correct, forcing me, as an intellectually honest person rather than a mere sophist, to reassess my own position.
Outside zoomer/nigger babble never - retards saying retarded shit is pretty predictable though.