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by cwillu 678 days ago
Stop trying to lump a heterogenous collection of people with various views, opinions and concerns into a single term whereby you can conveniently dismiss them.
3 comments

They have the common feature of, being glad to trade our lives for money. It's a helpful and useful label for people standing in the way of efforts to save our ecology and civilization.

That's what words are for. Nobody is going to stop because you're upset at being correctly labelled.

I mean when people are ignoring facts, to the point that its probably going to hurt people, I feel like I'm justified in trying to know who they are, like "transphobe", "racist", "ableist", "climate change denier". I'm aware that JK Rowling and Graham Linehan probably have various views, opinions and concerns, but neither of them want me and my friends to exist
See how convenient that was!
...I'm not sure if you're trying to deny that those two people are transphobic?
I'm trying to point out that you've entire dismissed the (incorrect!) views on climate change of many people because two other people are transphobic.
I'm not dismissing the views of people who don't agree with climate change because two people are transphobic. I'm dismissing their views on climate change because of the wealth of scientific evidence we have that climate change is a thing that humans have caused
The problem is "people who disagree with climate change" is too poorly defined to be useful.

This is the pattern: group A comes up with a label for their enemy. They make some progress on getting everyone else to hate that group. Then group B comes along and decides to piggyback on that label for their own slightly different enemy. Rinse and repeat until you get this frankenbullshit:

> The report defined climate deniers as those who say that the climate crisis is not real or not primarily caused by humans, or claim that climate science is not settled, that extreme weather is not caused by global warming or that planet-warming pollution is beneficial.

Eventually, the label becomes useless for actually understanding what a person thinks because there are so many OR clauses in it. Despite this, people still use it for making actual judgements. The net result is the social climate today, where everyone righteously hates everyone.

A-fucking-men. That's our single largest development of the last 20 years or so: not smartphones, not AI, not social media. We developed the confident, decisive, emotional, and wrong use of fuzzy bullshit labels that mean something slightly different to everyone using them.

People are too busy being pious and righteous to be precise enough to actually communicate a point.