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Has anyone else noticed a sudden lack of reading comprehension skills?
(sh.itjust.works)
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this post was submitted on 22 Aug 2023
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I recently got into a long, really dumb argument. I used the phrase "lesser of two evils" and what seemed like fifty people (actually two or three) seemed to think that meant I approved of, strenuously endorsed, and would defend the actions of the "lesser evil."
To me, this seemed like a basic misunderstanding of what the phrase meant, so I defined it. Their response to my definition was to say the same sort of thing they'd already said while claiming to totally know what "lesser of two evils" meant.
I lost my cool, and explained what the phrase meant again. One of the folks explained themselves calmly while the others seemed to think I was a congenital idiot because I kept repeating myself.
I don't want this to get any longer, so I'll just say that we were talking past each other. Nobody (well, except fr the one guy who stopped to explain what he meant) was really comprehending what the other person said. So everyone was a dumbass, basically. Story of my life, really.
At least, I think that's what happened. Watch the asshole who called me a liar and an idiot show up here to not explain how I'm a liar and an idiot again.
I don't think it's a reading comprehension problem, it's some sort of cultural problem. These people are reading what we are typing, but that's not what they want to talk about. So they will take anything, even tangentially related and disprove a component of it so they can reframe the conversation back to what they wanted to argue about.
I actually find myself doing similar things. Essentially I will write out a long winded comment, then realize that the person I am replying to has nothing to do with what I wanted to say. Instead I was paraphrasing all of the comments, coming up with a point I wanted to make and then ramming it round peg square hole style into someone else's comment tree. I have been deleting a lot of comments before even hitting the post button in the last 6 months or so since I realized I was doing it.
TLDR: A lot of people online are not arguing in good faith.
Lol, Lemmy is still small enough that I know the thread you are talking about. It was a political discussion, yeh?
If I remember right most of the people who argued with you were from hexbear, which tracks lol.
Yeah, that's the one. I figured I'm small potatoes so no one's gonna bother looking it up. It never even occurred to me that someone might have already seen it lol.
Or a troll. There are trolls, even here.
That sounds more like someone just rejecting all "lesser of two evils" scenarios rather than a reading comprehension problem.
Yes, that was the gist of their point I think. The thinking being that choosing the lesser evil is still choosing evil. My point was that if evil is going to win no matter what you do, isn't it better to pick which evil you're going to have to deal with?
It's seldom the case that the lesser of two evils has to win save when you aren't allowed to choose a good path because of entrenched interests better served by evil.
Are you familiar with the U.S. Presidential electoral process?
Exactly the situation described. It's possible to fix that process but too many entrenched interests render this impossible
Mm, I think what you're likely arguing about is super contentious, AND complex. I agree that picking the lesser of two evils is still choosing evil (because it is, it says so right in the phrase!). That isn't to say you're necessarily endorsing the second evil, or that youre evil for making the choice. The world is fucked up and complex and no one is perfectly good.
But yeah I think conversations around voting, especially in the US, are really difficult to have because people are extremely opinionated and none of us REALLY know what would happen if we stopped voting altogether, which makes a lot of people anxiously compelled to do it(such as myself)
As an uninvolved party, after reading the thread, I understand that you feel frustrated and misunderstood. But I'm sorry to say that I feel like the failure of reading comprehension was on your part more than theirs.
It seems like the majority of people who responded to you argued that there are not two evils, but two parts to the same whole evil.
No one, that I saw, claimed you were saying that the Democrats were not evil. But the disagreement was that you see the Republicans and Democrats as two evils, while your opponents see them as one.
Whether or not you agree, that seems like a logically coherent belief to hold.
Sigh. Not uninvolved anymore I guess.
When one guy stopped calling me names and arguing against points I wasn't trying to make, I backed down and listened and then acknowledged that he had a point.
I'm not rehashing the argument again. I'd appreciate it if you didn't go into my post history and throw things back in my face. I don't know what the etiquette is, but it seems rude.