I recently read a post from someone whose blog I’ve followed with mixed feelings, and I’ve decided (again) not to follow this person any more. I try to expose myself to contrary points of view on occasion–often enough I can feel smugly superior in my open-mindedness, anyway–but I really am rather picky in how those points of view should be expressed.
Rule #1: The only group you should really compare to the Nazis or ISIS are, respectively, the Nazis and ISIS.
As tempting as it may be, insisting that Kim Davis is analogous to ISIS is not going to sit well with me, for example. To the best of my knowledge, she has never publicly beheaded gays who came to her for a marriage license. To my knowledge she has never tried to blow up Mount Vernon. And I don’t think (I may be wrong here) she ever threatened her assistant clerks with death if they didn’t convert to her way of thinking.
I’m not saying I agree with the way she’s handled her position, mind you. I just feel that equating her with ISIS is going a little overboard and does not bolster a blogger’s credibility in my eyes. I’m also not prepared to accept equating Planned Parenthood, Barack Obama, or Feminists with ISIS, either. There. I’ve alienated both sides. But if you’re going to go there with the analogies, you’ve alienated me first.
I’m not sure where along the road we stopped teaching argumentative writing. Good argument does not consist of finding the worst thing you can think of and then equating your opponent to that. Ask some of the millions of refugees fleeing ISIS’ violence which they would rather deal with, ISIS fighters or bigoted county clerks, and I suspect they’d look at you like you were asking what they would prefer for dinner; spicy curry or broken glass with thumbtacks and acid sauce.
Somewhere along the line we decided that clever invective trumps reason and persuasion. Why bother thinking of appeals to logic when you can really zing the opposition with a good sound bite? Why waste time looking at the other side’s arguments, even to devise counter-arguments, when you can just settle the matter once and for all by calling them Nazis? Heck, these days about the only people we would hesitate to call Nazis would probably be…Nazis.
Bonus Rule: It really doesn’t help your case with me to insist you are a long-time member of the group you’re criticizing (and equating with ISIS) and still to this day maintain your membership, and then spend the majority of your posts insisting that group is the source of all evil in the world. My thoughts would be, “Really? You think that poorly of them, and yet you’re still a member?! What is wrong with you? Clearly your judgment is lacking and I shouldn’t listen to you.”
If you are really convinced that group A is the source of all evil in the world, you would separate yourself from it faster than money separates from a fool at a P.T Barnum Convention. … unless you are, yourself, a victim of some VERY illogical logic. But, yeah, society has become so narcissistic that trivial things like logic and facts are irrelevant if they stand between me and what is “rightfully” mine.