How to Argue Agains Stupid How to Argue Against Stupid

There is a quote I like that shows upward occasionally in my Facebook feed: "Never contend with stupid people, they will elevate you down to their level then beat out yous with experience." Information technology is normally accompanied by a veiled insult from the poster and an epitome of a stern and stately Mark Twain, long the go-to guy for apocryphal maxims. This particular quote seems to exist derived from Proverbs: "Reply not a fool according to his folly, lest thou also exist like unto him" (26:four). Equally with many of Twain's own lessons, however, this is immediately followed by a reversal: "Respond a fool according to his folly, lest he be wise in his own conceit" (26:5).

Regardless of the quote'due south origins, its sentiment is echoed in Twain's "The Privilege of the Grave," a short piece, written in 1905, that appears in Who is Mark Twain?, a posthumous drove of the satirist'due south unfinished and unpublished works. "Every bit an agile privilege," Twain says, "[free voice communication] ranks with the privilege of committing murder: we may exercise information technology if nosotros are willing to accept the consequences." The principal difference betwixt the ii? "Murder is sometimes punished, gratis speech always." As a event, Twain suggests writing one's true thoughts downwardly and uttering them just from the grave. Fittingly, Twain specified that his autobiography was not to be published until 100 years after his death. (This asking was honored, and the first book of the book was published in 2010.)

I idea of these quotes over the last couple of days equally a sure news story was passed effectually among Facebook friends. The story cites a new report by the fine fellows at the Cato Found, and it alleges that in 35 states, people who receive welfare benefits make more coin than those who work minimum-wage jobs. Some may see this as bear witness that minimum wages are as well low, but the report and the bourgeois news outlets that featured it instead criticize liberals for devaluing work and sentencing generations of poor Americans to lives of welfare dependency. For my friends, nonetheless, the lesson was much simpler: we would all be rich if it weren't for poor people.

As its typical welfare family, the report presents a unmarried female parent and her two children, both under the age of five. This decision does not require a rationale, apparently, despite the fact that only 23% of single mothers take children under the age of half dozen (with the largest percentage of those having only one). The pick does, however, allow the study'due south authors to continually allude to the stereotypical "welfare queen" while they add together benefit after benefit to the poor, greedy woman's income.

She receives SNAP, WIC, TANF, Medicaid, Section 8, utility assistance, and more, each do good added speciously, with reasoning like: "While not all low-income households receive utilities assist, participation levels for households with income comparable to our profile family averaged well-nigh 50 per centum, sufficient for inclusion in the hypothetical benefits package." And once again: "While not all eligible low-income households receive WIC benefits, approximately 61 percent of eligible families participate in the program nationwide, which justifies including WIC in the hypothetical benefits parcel."

Each time a benefit is added, our "typical" family unit becomes fifty-fifty more atypical, and as the authors perform statistical gymnastics rivaling those of a gambling aficionado, 23% becomes 11% becomes two% becomes one%. Meanwhile, a statistical study devolves into a fairy tale about a single mother with two children who never age, temporary help that never ends, and a free home with free electricity, which she uses to cook her free food.

The report ignores the fact that many people who work total-time, minimum-wage jobs qualify for some of these programs, as well, as well as the fact that most able-bodied people who receive nutrition assist, excluding children and the elderly, have jobs. However, the conclusion is damning: "The current welfare system provides such a loftier level of benefits that it acts every bit a disincentive for work. . . . states should consider ways to compress the gap between the value of welfare and work by reducing electric current benefit levels and tightening eligibility requirements." Ironically, the Cato Constitute as well thinks that nosotros should incentivize work by abolishing the minimum wage.

These are just a few of the points I typed and deleted below my friends' Facebook posts, trying to not sound pedantic while others piled on in a higher place. The conversations soon spread to "Obamacars," "Obamaphones," and other entitlements funded direct from the paychecks of hardworking, Facebooking Americans. I establish myself needing to indicate out that Obamacars are not existent, and that discounted phones, which are not paid for with tax dollars, accept been around for over a decade (previously as landlines) and actually help people secure jobs from employers who, for some reason, like to be able to contact their potential employees. But I refrained. As Twain says: "Sometimes my feelings are and then hot that I have to take to the pen and pour them out on paper to keep them from setting me afire inside; and then all that ink and labor are wasted, considering I can't print the event."

Anyone who has ever argued with people similar this, or has witnessed some poor soul try, knows the futility of the try. For every factoid discredited, the person has two more at his disposal, and he will casually toss them bated, i by 1, until you lot understand that he has zilch invested in them. This if the chat even makes it that far. When a commenter recently disagreed with our mutual friend posting an image comparison Trayvon Martin with Marley Lion, he was speedily rebuffed to the effect of, "You may take a point, merely don't ever call me out on MY Facebook wall again!"

This inhibition may seem to run counter to the notion that Facebook has created a generation of unfiltered oversharers, highlighted by stories of young people posting incriminating pictures online. Whether social media has actually midwifed these monsters or has simply given them another outlet, I can't say. (I can say that I recently sat next to a woman on the bus equally she described the toe procedure she was about to undergo, and I wish she had been express to 140 characters.) But the two behaviors are not antithetical.

A certain degree of safety is required to experiment with new personas and politics, a process of identity cosmos to which Sherry Turkle, author of Lonely Together, attributes oversharing. We mail things on Facebook that we wouldn't say in person, Turkle says, considering online, we exercise non face up the immediate admonishment that tin exist conveyed in another person's smirk or roll of the eyes or abrupt modify of subject. Only the people who agree with us will take the time to comment, we assume; the others will simply whorl on to the adjacent items in their feeds. It is natural, so, that the person who violates this contract must "take the consequences."

I am always wary of blaming engineering for human weakness, and indeed, Twain assures us that these behaviors are non novel ones. "None of us likes to be hated," he says, "none of us likes to be shunned. A natural effect of these conditions is, that we consciously or unconsciously pay more attention to tuning our opinions to our neighbour's pitch and preserving his approval than we practise to examining the opinions searchingly and seeing to information technology that they are correct and audio." Still, I am regularly disappointed to see a friend or colleague whom I take known for years call Trayvon Martin a deserving thug or attribute a bogus second subpoena quote to a Founding Male parent.

Perhaps my friends have been harboring thoughts similar these for as long as I have known them, reserving comment for visitor that does not include me. Or perhaps, despite a healthy ignorance of politics, a friend may decide, for one reason or another, that he wants to be political today, that after eight hours at the job he hates, he wants to panel himself with the self-righteous thought that, at least he'southward non a leech. Even if I consider this resentment misplaced, I know that it is best to let him have it. Tomorrow he will go dorsum to talking about what he actually cares about: his wife; his kids; his team; his car. And I will become dorsum to scrolling.

Eric Jett is a writer, designer, and teacher from Charleston, WV. He is a founding editor of Total Cease.

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Source: https://www.full-stop.net/2013/08/23/blog/jett/never-argue-with-stupid-people/

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