Saturday, September 17, 2022

Don't sacrifice essential truth to politeness



So much of being "polite" these days is just participating in lies. Which is something I find hard to do-- which is why I am sometimes not as polite as I could (should?) be.

I want to be polite. But not enough to participate in harmful lies.

I saw someone who seems to be an influential (at least, online) libertarian scolding someone that "libertarians are not for open borders because the Constitution gives the feds the authority [sic] to defend the coasts" and called the person they were scolding a commie for disagreeing. This had something to do with the Texas (or Florida?) government vs Martha's Vineyard residents concerning (apparently) unwanted people, I think. (I was still groggy from the anesthesia, so I might have been confused and probably shouldn't have been on my phone.)

If I were polite, I wouldn't have said anything, but would have let the lies sit there unchallenged. Yes, there are borderist libertarians and there are constitutionalist libertarians and there are political statist "libertarians", but to pretend that these encompass the opinions of all libertarians is dishonest.

That is just one example out of many I could list. 

Beyond the self-professed libertarians the situation is even worse. A lot worse. 

The list of lies you are expected to just go along with-- or be considered a horrible person (and risk being canceled)-- is staggering. But I've never been good at staying quiet when someone is deceiving people. Even when they might have "good" reasons.

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