Read on Twitter
RE: Pedants. An important safety tip.
Most people who speak pretentiously do it so you won't notice how bad their ideas are.
Most people who speak pretentiously do it so you won't notice how bad their ideas are.
For example, TERFs. They talk. A lot. It sounds vaguely academic and feminist-esque. They try to sound Very Concerned. But they're actually just shrieking "penis" in the same tone I use when there's a spider near me. And at least I realize my reaction to spiders is irrational.
Modern fascists, too, love to bury you in verbiage. And nowadays memes. But an ironic Nazi is still a Nazi, and at the bottom of their wannabe Sith Lord screeds, they still want to make themselves and other white men into kings and enslave or exterminate the rest of us.
There is also the garden variety focus-grouped politico consultant speak we're all familiar with where the goal is to make you not notice what they're not doing.
Now you should also be on the lookout for people offering easy solutions to complex problems because they're also trying to get one up on you, and human cognitive bias means we're suckers for: "It's all his fault! Get him!"
But doing the right thing for the right reasons is usually pretty straightforward.
"This person is suffering. This helps. So let's do that."
"This person is suffering. This helps. So let's do that."
People pile words like stones on top of helping others in order to sink the idea.
You should be pretty darn suspicious of people who would rather talk about abstracts than the suffering of others because they're trying to distract you from the fact they only care about themselves.
