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Dara Harvey's avatar

Agree. I suspect that people who love to remind us of exceptions aren’t really concerned about the exceptions; they just want to demonstrate that they are more enlightened than the rest of us. It’s virtue signaling. If we could stop putting ourselves on the pedestal and showing off our enlightenment, then we could begin to actually listen and communicate. It all comes down to pride.

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A C's avatar

Holy shit, reading this was cathartic. This is one of the most frustrating aspects of communication today. The preemptive (and often futile) statements people make reminding their audience of what should just be assumed when presenting any kind of argument is particularly exhausting. Every conversation or presentation on an issue inevitably gets bogged down in these braindead preambles.

I wish there was a way to filter these idiots out somehow; normally I’d advocate for the creation of some way to ruthlessly mock these people, but I reckon there are too few of us and too many of them for this to get off the ground and be effective.

If this is indeed a simple matter of intelligence, then this problem really was inevitable once the internet expanded to include more and more of society — inevitably the idiots will outnumber the non-idiots and public discourse will descend to the level of the majority. Worse yet, because the internet allows idiots to network with one another (creating a kind of positive feedback loop of stupidity), I believe it has emboldened them and made their behavior extra obnoxious, both online and IRL.

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