Quote: (06-15-2014 11:41 PM)cooledcannon Wrote:
Quote: (06-15-2014 10:55 PM)Walderschmidt Wrote:
Quote: (06-15-2014 11:36 AM)frenchie Wrote:
Maybe satire is more effective than coming up with honest forward stating arguments. Make them blow themselves apart from within by inciting the more radical elements of the group.
Satire is a weapon against which they have no defense but to soften their rhetoric.
Will they ever do that?
Nope.
They'll double down and make satire more effective.
Wald
The bad thing about satire is if people believe your satire is true, it would almost always be far worse than if people only just believed what your satirizing(because your satire is a worse/more extreme version). As the saying goes, "no one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the american people", so you will have to be careful.
I prefer the safe option of calling out shitty arguments and saying what is logically better, despite that it might seem very obvious. Its only in private that I might enjoy sneaky obscure parodies with only those in the know, so we can all feel happy in our cleverness and enlightenment. But even then Im not a big fan of satire as it relies on stupidity/evilness both of which I dislike thinking about.
This is more of the same losing strategy though. The "right" has been taking this approach in the Culture Wars for the past fifty years. It's an approach that assumes 1) everyone is logical/rational, 2) everyone else argues in good faith. If either of those two conditions does not hold, then you're setting yourself up for failure. It seems analogous in someways to rational market theory. The guy who plays by the rules when everyone else ignores them is not noble, he's just a sucker.
What's Einstein's famous quote about repeating the same thing and expecting a different outcome? Time for a reassessment of strategy. I say either exit/starve the beast or start fighting fire with fire. Maybe both.
What is it about people like Andrew Breitbart or the general right wing media that annoys liberals? Is it that they are correct? I don't think so (because they put spin on things, too). Their criticisms are always of an emotional kind: the right spins the truth, the right appeals to emotionalism or ignorance, etc. Those are all standard operating procedures for the left. I think what really annoys the left is that people like Andrew Breitbart cottoned onto this and began playing the same games as liberals. Liberals think that's not fair, that the right should just pony up with the same losing strategy again and again.