My mom says they make me look handsome and agrees that it's neat that I can carry all the sticks and rocks we find at the park!
Promethiel
Fuck. I cleaned everything on tax day and forgot to file!
I see your points through the semantic fog. You had it at a problem of definitions and it doesn't appear to have gone away. One side defending personal intent and the other highlighting historic institutional malaise. Very little actually discussing, you both just happened to be making adjacent points in the same topic for the most part.
They're right in their analysis of the mores and norms that the system allows, even if their claim of no good people existing under a broken system is absurd.
You ain't in bad faith, it's more exhausting to get pinged by friendly IFF misreadings than extreme ideological opposites nowadays. That whole leftists eating leftists series of jokes applies somewhat.
You can't read. Those are facts and written in a passive voice. Condoning the behavior reads something like: "The state of Israel has sown seeds of ill will nurtured by lies and here comes harvest time" or "Yeah fuckers, get dunked on world stage" or something similar and in-between.
Are we sure OP isn't being meta? The message and demographics change if the punch is coming from other community posters.
In case your statement wasn't actually carefully crafted to make your point (kudos if so!): Yeah, you got it right.
That was a post correctly identifying the problem of the decades long rising anti-intellectualism cultured amidst the populace (See Carl Sagan's excellent and chillingly prescient "I have a foreboding of an America in my children's or grandchildren's time..." quote).
Said post then really had the gall to not just take all agency from the willfully ignorant alongside their responsibility, but it then goes further to state that the fault lies with the non-willfully ignorant.
Then it suggests that the non-willfully ignorant are in fact being willfully ignorant to the fact that they have to (I had to pause and re-read here, the weight of the author's cojones was throwing me off) locate simpler and/or rougher folk more like 'The Midwestern' to do the messaging in a more "relatable" (air quotes) way.
I admit, my born and raised through the abject poverty and bare unfinished construction found the world around from the Favelas to the heights of Appalachia was quite "ready to slap a smarmy ass city fucker" by the end there.
But then I realized: If not maliciously posted then clearly they may not realize it. They may actually think that the miseducation, furthering divide, and increasing tensions amongst those who consider themselves team "knows better about feelings" and those who consider themselves team "feels better about knowing" have anything to do with the direct interactions between the two groups, and not the reality: The messaging being bought and paid for.
Who benefits from the poors not realizing that the scope and limits of their wits are quite the same human potential as the inhabit of any gilded tower?
That post was saying that intelligence and fact-finding is making people feel stupid and attacked, but it failed to correctly attribute that to the fact that people are being told and taught to feel that way, as part of the ever present real issue.
That is what being willfully ignorant of the fact you're carrying water for the sick and mentally twisted Billionaires who remember the human mental potential and must live constantly suppressing it in terror of the alternative, looks like.
People are supposed to include the fact that the pencil can go through because (layman terminology abuse ahead) of the "shape" the space-time topology is presenting (or I guess being induced to present as, if Sci-fi hypothetical) before you get to the explanation of the pencil as craft/observer and how the hole is how that shortened path through the wormhole appears from frames of reference not the pencil.
I like the bagel idea but then you have to hold it all horizontal while explaining so they don't see the hole too early and you're then just left intently staring at your audience across a bagel held at eye height like a slowly hungering loon. Or so I've heard.
But neither of you know that. That's just the most anecdotally likely. You're doing the same thing as the presumably real friend is doing: discounting the reality OP is saying they're experiencing (they don't feel like celebrating currently because ofcurrent affairs) and replacing it with head in the sand "touch grass" disguised with the words it takes for you to feel like you're correct.
Maybe that friend always has their head in the sand. Maybe that friend is maliciously giddy about the possibilities espoused by shit like Project 2025 and deflecting.
I, am hoping you can both understand I'm saying you look like hypocrites. No inference needed.
How do you select the worthwhile content without the use of your opinion or taking the matter to your tastes?
Your comment, but without irony or sarcastic pretention. What exactly do you think semantics are?
There is. The more they stumble, the more they are questioned. The answers to the question cannot be anything but utmost certainty because "maybe" is simply not a message that sways anyone.
Pretty answers don't change reality though, so the stumbles continue or even increase leading to more questions and the doubling down. You just can't do anything else unless you're ready to commit to another answer.