[toofy]

> Who gets to decide who is a neo-nazi though?

> I’ve heard jordan peterson and steven pinker called neo-nazis.

It still isn’t clear to me what this brings to a discussion. It seems like such a strange question.

Are any of us under the impression that label misapplication somehow means a label is no longer used? Of course not. After 30 years in the same house, my partners mother still calls the tree in her front yard an oak tree despite the fact it has always been and will remain a maple. Her misapplication of the label doesn’t mean oak trees no longer exist. Tree experts, dendrologists and arborists aren’t throwing their arms up and declaring their entire fields deprecated because a random person, in a casual setting, uses the wrong term.

My father still calls disk storage, RAM.

My partner still calls the serrano peppers she grows, jalapeños.

I regularly see politicians who lean to the right call obvious capitalist liberals, commies.

I still sometimes call giant ships, boats.

None of these misapplications matter, there are still an awful lot of people who rely on what words actually describe, despite a random old lady calling a maple tree an oak.

As always, casual conversations with casual people will at some point lead to casual use of words. It will continue to happen, for as long as we’re a species.

[apostacy]

> After 30 years in the same house, my partners mother still calls the tree in her front yard an oak tree despite the fact it has always been and will remain a maple. Her misapplication of the label doesn’t mean oak trees no longer exist.

What if your partners mothers mom was put in charge of a maple tree conservation arboretum, and decided to cull all the oak trees, but she kept confusing maples for oak trees?

I'm not arguing that neo-nazis don't exist. I'm arguing that we shouldn't arbitrarily censor stuff just because some people call it nazi propaganda.

[toofy]

> What if your partners mothers mom was put in charge of a maple tree conservation arboretum, and decided to cull all the oak trees, but she kept confusing maples for oak trees?

> I'm not arguing that neo-nazis don't exist. I'm arguing that we shouldn't arbitrarily censor stuff just because some people call it nazi propaganda.

She’s not in charge of any arboretum, that’s the point I’m attempting to get across.

We have reached a point where the collective We are treating random people having random casual conversations as if these random casuals have the same weight as experts in their fields. We have collectively started to treat what used to be completely understood as casual forum discussions and casual opinion pieces as if these hold the same weight as an authority in their field publishing a well documented, far more rigorous, and well cited paper. We’ve allowed a fogging in the ability to distinguish between casual people and rigorous experts and this is the outcome. An intelligent collective should never hold these two opinions at the same weight.

My idiot cousin by marriage, who has a very real lack of critical thinking, who has a degree in “google research” from “the school of hard knocks” however, she does have a knack for writing in such a way which absolutely resonates with uneducated mothers. She writes as if she’s an authority in child vaccinations, she regularly goes into her closed facebook group and convinces other mothers why they should ignore their doctors and not vaccinate their children. Her words have more weight than medical research and medical professionals.

She seems to pull the card which almost always seems to work on a certain segment of the population – the “narrative” card. The target of this “narrative” charge is for some reason automatically assumed to be nefarious and the person who spotted this so-called “narrative”, their words now hold more weight than the actual expert in their field who had a “narrative.

We need to get back to a point where my words regarding the best methods to pick coffee beans mean little when compared to an actual coffee bean farmer, because my field of expertise lies elsewhere. I can read an article or three on coffee beans, but there is no rational universe where my words should hold the same weight as actual experts in coffee bean farming.

Until the collective We are able to say, “I don’t know.” or “I can give you my opinion, but you’d be far better off listening to Jill, she has far more knowledge on the subject.” until we get back to a rational discourse, we’re going to continue to find someone who is outraged because some idiot on a forum or some idiot made a video, used the wrong term and falsely labeled someone.

We need to get back to a point where the smartest people in the room are the people who say “I’m not sure. I’m not an expert. I don’t know. I don’t know the nuances of that vast field. I don’t know.”

[concordDance]

The problem comes when the terms spread enough that miscommunication happens. When someone says "Bob is a neo-nazi" meaning "right wing", but the person they are talking to hears "wants to kill jews and blacks and gays". And then Bob gets lynched/ostracized/fired.

When the meaning of a word isn't likely to have a big impact on people's lives we can be a bit more forgiving (though personally I still want to move towards a clearer thinking population).