Permanently Deleted
If I’m allowed two, “common sense”. Rarely do good ideas get suggested when those words are said, and it’s particularly annoying because it’s obviously supposed to be an implication that an idea is not only good for no other basis than because a lot of people think it (or at least you’re trying to suggest that regardless of whether it’s true), but that an idea is actually superior to other solutions because of that fact. It’s the last bastion of somebody with no arguments as to why a thing should be.
Many other words that I dislike are the typical ones in a wordsalad when describing the positive attributes of America: “freedom”, “liberty”, “justice”, “truth”, “law”, “order”, etc. Again, relates back to the idea that something is good just because you’ve described it as being good without actually demonstrating why that is. How are we “free”? In what way is there “liberty” or “justice”? What is “truth” in a propagandized world? How is “law” and “order” good when seeing what the police do every single day? They’re just frustrating thought-terminators.
Graeber goes off on the idea of “rationality” in… one of his books… for the same reason. The implications is that if I’m making a rational argument the other side is irrational, and this is of course almost never true and defeats the whole point of discussing a topic and coming to a consensus.
the other side is irrational, and this is of course almost never true
Counterpoint: :liberalism: