I want to draw attention to the elephant in the room.

Leading up to the election, and perhaps even more prominently now, we’ve been seeing droves of people on the internet displaying a series of traits in common.

  • Claiming to be leftists
  • Dedicating most of their posting to dismantling any power possessed by the left
  • Encouraging leftists not to vote or to vote for third party candidates
  • Highlighting issues with the Democratic party as being disqualifying while ignoring the objectively worse positions held by the Republican party
  • Attacking anyone who promotes defending leftist political power by claiming they are centrists and that the attacker is “to the left of them”
  • Using US foreign policy as a moral cudgel to disempower any attempt at legitimate engagement with the US political system
  • Seemingly doing nothing to actually mount resistance against authoritarianism

When you look at an aerial view of these behaviors in conjunction with one another, what they’re accomplishing is pretty plain to see, in my opinion. It’s a way of utilizing the moral scrupulousness of the left to cut our teeth out politically. We get so caught up in giving these arguments the benefit of the doubt and of making sure people who claim to be leftists have a platform that we’re missing ideological parasites in our midst.

This is not a good-faith discourse. This is not friendly disagreement. This is, largely, not even internal disagreement. It is infiltration, and it’s extremely effective.

Before attacking this argument as lacking proof, just do a little thought experiment with me. If there is a vector that allows authoritarians to dismantle all progress made by the left, to demotivate us and to detract from our ability to form coalitions and build solidarity, do you really think they wouldn’t take advantage of it?

By refusing to ever question those who do nothing with their time in our spaces but try to drive a wedge between us, to take away our power and make us feel helpless and hopeless, we’re giving them exactly that vector. I am telling you, they are using it.

We need to stop letting them. We need to see it for what it is, get the word out, and remember, as the political left, how to use the tools that we have to change society. It starts with us between one another. It starts with what we do in the spaces that we inhabit. They know this, and it’s why they’re targeting us here.

Stop being an easy target. Stop feeding the cuckoo.

  • Lvxferre [he/him]@mander.xyzEnglish
    17·
    2 days ago

    Watch out for the following five fallacies, and the cuckoo is easy to spot:

    • oversimplification: false dichotomy, ignoring relevant factors
    • genetic fallacy: instead of focusing on what is being said, the cuckoo always focuses on who says it
    • straw man: cuckoos are really eager to put words into your mouth, and try to force you to defend claims you never did in first place
    • ignore refutation: if you prove without a shadow of doubt that the cuckoo’s claim is wrong, they’ll ignore your refutation and still use it to back up even dumber claims
    • ad nauseam: same claim over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over.

    Then as you spot the cuckoo, the rest is easier - for example, IMO a sensible approach is to point out what the cuckoo is doing, to whoever might be reading your comment, while disengaging so you aren’t giving the cuckoo further time to sing.

    • LukeZaz@beehaw.orgEnglish
      1·
      16 hours ago

      I think it’s a very common belief amongst forums like these to look to logical fallacies to root out dishonest behavior, in the hopes that it’ll provide a nice and easy way to deduce when someone’s a grifter. That you can tell if someone’s a liar – or for that matter, real – by applying them sufficiently.

      The problem is, humans are fallible. They fuck up. Innocently. Constantly. It’s normal to make fallacious arguments, and doing so should not cause you to be automatically marked off as a robot, troll or spy. Some examples for your given fallacies:

      • Oversimplification can also occur if someone is tired and does not want to go into rigorous academic detail for their argument. Alternatively, they may simply not know the detail to begin with.
      • Genetic fallacy can occur due to simple human anger; if someone feels that their interlocutor has made bad-faith arguments frequently before, they’re inclined to ignore what that individual has to say outright, likely without even reading it. (This one has happened in this thread, several times)
      • Strawmen happen all the time and extremely easily, because people will inevitably end up making assumptions about the position of others based on previous discussions they’ve had. If you spend enough time arguing a point and getting response X, you’re going to start assuming that the person you’re talking to about that is implying X, even if they haven’t said it and never intended to.
      • Ignoring refutation happens plenty simply when people get defensive. Admitting you’re wrong is hard, and it’s much preferable to instead change the topic or find some other way of pretending you were never disproven of anything. This is inherently a logical leap, and that’s why it leads to often dumber positions.
      • With regard to ad nauseam: If someone finds a particular point very convincing and easy to understand for themselves, they may find it confusing as to why you don’t agree on it. This can lead to them repeatedly trying to explain it more thoroughly and in different words under the assumption that the way they said it was why you didn’t get it. I’ve done this a lot in my past.

      With those examples out of the way, I just want to emphasize the fact that you should never pretend the presence of logical fallacies is a guarantee of bad faith, much less use it to dehumanize others. If we let ourselves do that, we’ll all tear each other apart under the mistaken assumption that we’re rooting out an evil that has no promise of even being present at all. To err is human.

      • Lvxferre [he/him]@mander.xyzEnglish
        1·
        12 hours ago

        Just to be clear:

        I am not proposing to categorically label anyone using those five fallacies a cuckoo. I said that it’s easy to spot the cuckoo when you look for those fallacies. Because cuckoos rely on those fallacies to convey their “As A Leftist®, I say we should disempower ourselves!” discourse.

    • PhilipTheBucket@ponder.catEnglish
      10·
      2 days ago

      straw man: cuckoos are really eager to put words into your mouth, and try to force you to defend claims you never did in first place

      This one is a really key tell. The people who spend most of their message emphasizing what it is that their opponents believe, and only in passing deal with what they believe (which tends to be along the lines of “well they all want to kill Palestinian babies but I don’t want that, so clearly you can see the difference”), and immediately start telling anyone who talks with them what they believe also… that’s an important signal.

      I think it is so popular because it is substantially lower-effort than engaging with anything the person is actually saying, and also it works on anything. You don’t have to be on the right side of the argument, you can just assign your opponent some awful crazy shit, and then get to work disagreeing with that.

      Edit: Just for some examples. Here are things people have told me today:

      your attitude that good people who would absolutely give you their last meal for days or literally stand in front of you to take a bullet that you may or not deserve are disposable lives

      (Literally no idea what this is about)

      I don’t think it’s unconscionable that the police are minimally held to that expectation

      (I, also, think that the police should be held to the expectation they’re talking about, and said so repeatedly)

      you were unnecessarily bringing race into this discussion

      (I wasn’t, I did bring BLM into a discussion about the police)

      Your saying things like “don’t refuse to give ID” or “Just talk with them. Tell them what you know, help them figure out the situation.” as a blanket suggestion

      (I said the exact opposite of that)

      I don’t mean to condescend to liberals – shouldn’t have used “libs” I guess – but I think of them, in the US, as primarily just trying to get the democrats back into power and then mostly disengage. The most outspoken of them tend to have much more energy to fight universal healthcare and other the social democratic reforms of a Bernie Sanders rather than actually take aim at the capitalist, state, and other hierarchies making our lives worse.

      (I wasn’t explicitly included in this grouping, but this person was explicitly talking to and about me when they said this. Obviously none of this has anything to do with anything I think or want. This is a form of indirect strawman “You are group X and all group X people think Y and Z” that is particularly hopeless to ever have any kind of success in disagreeing with)

      So kindly fuck off with your genocidal apology nonsense

      (I pointed out with alarm that there is literally 0 food in Gaza currently and people are likely to start to starve on a mass scale this month)

      And so on

    • millie@beehaw.orgOPEnglish
      7·
      2 days ago

      That’s quickly becoming my approach. Point it out and then immediately block them and stop engaging. Once you block them, they can’t keep following you around spamming the same noise.