| There are certain keywords people use that are instant red flags. They usually mean I can immediately ignore everything they've written. "Common sense" has become a big one. It's code for "my feelings trump your facts" (pun intended). But another one is "both sides". There are a number of reasons people fall back to this. Usually it's intellectual laziness, not wanting to know any of the details, usually because it's an issue that the person saying it doesn't actually care about the issue. Some people derive validation from somehow being "above the fray" on some partisan issue. Another reason is simply not caring about the issue and trying to create a moral equivalence is intentionally or unintentionally used to silence a particular topic. Not everything is some disagreement between equivalent positions. Sometimes, a given position is just plain wrong. Slavery, genocide, apartheid, ethnic cleansing. These are issues historically that have a right side and a wrong side. On Gaza, there is the side that wants to live, not be bombed and not exist in an apartheid state and there's the side that wants to ethnically cleanse millions of people to create lebensraum. Merely going to Israel has been a radicalizing experience for a lot of people because they instantly recognize what's going on. There are countless examples of this now. I'll choose just one as an example: Sde Temain [1]. [1]: https://www.aljazeera.com/program/newsfeed/2024/8/13/israeli... |