• ObjectivityIncarnate@lemmy.world
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      3 months ago

      The typical issue with people making these statements is that they tend to wildly exaggerate and straw man the positions of anyone who disagrees with them on anything.

      Who out there is actually saying “children shouldn’t be fed”, for example? Fucking nobody, lol.

      • Seleni@lemmy.world
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        3 months ago

        Yeah, they’re referring to the old idiom ‘actions speak louder than words’.

        When people pass laws saying kids don’t get lunch at school, that trans people can’t legally change their gender, that being homeless is a crime, and that women can’t have abortions, they are saying all those things.

        And when people tell you who they are, believe them.

        • ObjectivityIncarnate@lemmy.world
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          3 months ago

          Yeah, they’re referring to the old idiom ‘actions speak louder than words’.

          What actions? This is done most commonly toward strangers they don’t know at all.

          If someone were to say, for example, “I’m okay with the government picking up the slack to keep a kid from starving, but it shouldn’t be treated like a solution. Instead, it should be seen as a temporary necessary measure while resources are put into solving the real problem, by preventing children from being in a position where their own parents aren’t capable of feeding them to begin with, since they’re the ones who should be doing it”, the people I’m talking about would happily contort it into “they want kids to starve”, because that requires no thought/effort, and you get to look morally superior to boot, since now that guy’s just evil, because what a horrible thing it is to want children to starve!

          Fact is, almost nobody is willing to even take the majority of people at their word, much less actually steelman an argument, which is how you really end up with rock solid positions and arguments, instead of having to rely on stupid rhetorical and semantic maneuvers.

          • Seleni@lemmy.world
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            3 months ago

            Oh for… that’s not the law they passed. The law they passed banned school lunches, and they did nothing to address child hunger to make up for it. I would say they most certainly want kids to starve.

            And if your take overall is ‘that person’s actions/beliefs are fine as long as they only impact people they don’t know’ that’s… not great. To quote Calvin & Hobbes, ‘we’re all ‘someone else’ to someone else’.

            • ObjectivityIncarnate@lemmy.world
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              3 months ago

              they

              The OP is talking about maintaining friendships with individual people. When was the last time you actually picked an individual person’s brain about where they stand on something, instead of just putting people in whatever stereotype bucket confirms your biases the best?

              if your take overall is ‘that person’s actions/beliefs are fine as long as they only impact people they don’t know’

              I have to say, in a comment chain about people uncharitably extrapolating and twisting viewpoints, this is very fitting, lol. What an absolutely ridiculous interpretation.

              • Codex@lemmy.world
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                3 months ago

                I’ve picked at coworkers brains on this frequently. They hedge, avoid, and misdirect about what they believe, or try to change the subject to something banal so as to avoid discussing their actual values.

                In my experience, what Republican voters care about is personal wealth. The ones who will commit to values anyway. They feel like voting Republican makes more money for themselves and they don’t care about literally anything else. The ones who hedge and act like that’s what they care about usually give me the impression that they’re bigots of some kind and know better than to speak their bigoted views outside of people they already know to agree with them.

      • asap@lemmy.world
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        3 months ago

        Who out there is actually saying “children shouldn’t be fed”, for example? Fucking nobody, lol.

        I’m not even American and I know that plenty of people are saying this 🙄

        Here’s one example:

        Congress ended the free-lunch-for-all program in June

        Here’s another example:

        The Republican Study Committee (of which some three-quarters of House Republicans are members) on Wednesday released its desired 2024 budget, in which the party boldly declares its priority to eliminate the Community Eligibility Provision, or CEP, from the School Lunch Program. Why? Because “CEP allows certain schools to provide free school lunches regardless of the individual eligibility of each student.”

        Children who had access to food now don’t have the same access, thus “children shouldn’t be fed”.

        Fucking nobody, lol.

        You’re fucking callous.

        • ObjectivityIncarnate@lemmy.world
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          3 months ago

          “There are plenty of people saying this”

          shows no one saying this, and does the exact kind of extrapolation and exaggeration I talked about

          Thanks for making my point for me.

      • samus12345@lemmy.world
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        3 months ago

        It’s rarely said in that exact manner because it sounds bad, but the policies they support amount to it.

          • voracitude@lemmy.world
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            3 months ago

            If you don’t realise how supporting a politician who defunds school lunches is an active statement that childen shouldn’t be fed, then your cause-and-effect detector is broken.

            • ObjectivityIncarnate@lemmy.world
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              3 months ago

              I’m not falling for that, I know the games legislators play with bundling shit into a bill so that anyone who votes for/against it based on one part is now declared as being firmly for/against everything in it, because ‘they voted for/against it’.

              And what you’re saying here takes it a step further than that, by taking it beyond a bill to “supporting a politician”. So let’s say a politician makes it so that hospitals have to be more transparent about itemizing things on their bills. Okay, I support that, and say so. But now people like you come along and say that I’m “supporting a politician who” and then name all sorts of shit I said nothing about supporting.

              No.

              • voracitude@lemmy.world
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                3 months ago
                • Vote for a politician who defunds school lunch programmes
                • Children go hungry
                • ???
                • I did not vote for children to go hungry, Bill Riders said I’m not responsible

                Yeah, your cause-and-effect detector is busted as fuck. Sorry little buddy, good luck fixing it.