Quote of the day—Tiffany Johnson

One: I really wish my pro-gun friends would stop calling people “libtards.” Two: I really wish my gun-averse friends would stop calling people “Nazis.” #NotHelping. That is all.

Tiffany Johnson
June 24, 2018
Please Just Stop
[I have a strong inclination to agree with this. I used to call certain groups derogatory names and probably still do at times. But I try to avoid the name calling and talk about factual stuff and tendency instead. I still use insulting terms, such as having “crap for brains” for individuals if I think they deserve it on a particular issue or point.

The reason I think it doesn’t help is because it alienates people who might be aligned with you on one or more topics. For example, someone might identify as a liberal because of their strong support for equal rights and access to legal abortion. They might also think gun ownership is important but is not what they mostly identify with. Getting them to help teach an introductory gun class is going to be a lot easier if you haven’t, even indirectly, called them a “libtard”.—Joe]

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19 thoughts on “Quote of the day—Tiffany Johnson

  1. Name calling weakens your argument. Terms like “Obummer” or “Bushitler” do nothing to advance your argument, and simply serve to make the user look petty and weak.

    • Preaching to the choir, it may temporarily bolster your standing amongst your team but, as with indulgence in any sport, both your team and the opposing team, no matter how bitter the rivalry, are playing for the same league and it is primarily the league which profits.

  2. Ok, no more Libtard or sheeple, and in exchange no more small weenie “arguments”. If you want your opponents to recognize that somewhere in your rambling argument is a kernel of legitimacy, reciprocity is the way to that recognition.

  3. How does one convince another that he is being deceived? No one wants to believe he could be deceived, blinded in such a way as to cause the suffering of himself and others. Worse yet, the resistance to acknowledging the truth increases with the depth of the deception to which one has fallen. At some point it becomes easier to double-down on falsity than to admit you’ve been fooled and used as a tool of evil.

    We’ve all seen the alcoholic or drug addict. It’s sort of like that. He will blame anyone and anything but his choices for his sufferings. To tell him the truth of the matter is to insult him in the most egregious way. Truth becomes betrayal. Apostasy. Heresy. “Kill those guys” becomes the order of the day.

    It is possible, and in fact quite common, to be exposed to the truth and yet fail to recognize it, even fail to remember that you were ever exposed to it. Oftentimes it is only after immense suffering that one begins to seek answers outside of one’s world view (a world view designed, cultivated and implanted for the purpose of minimizing, misrepresenting and rejecting truth). Many will die, even, before acknowledging truth, finding suffering and death easier than facing the reality of the depths to which we’ve been deceived, and the evils that we’ve been inadvertently cultivating and promoting.

    Also; small lies require utmost secrecy, whereas the biggest lies are secure in the protection of our own incredulity.

    You’ve broached the subject of salvation, and of The Great Controversy of the world. How far down the proverbial rabbit hole are you willing to go? How much of what you “know”, how much of your self image and world view, how much of your property, “safety” and “security”, and what associations of family and friends, and your public respect, are you willing to put on the table as you go there? Like the alcoholic, we all cling to all of these things, called the temporal world, whence comes the notion; “He that seeks to save his life shall lose it”.

    It may not therefore be a matter of how much ridicule and spite we unleash upon others, but how much we’re willing to have poured out upon ourselves.

  4. Too late. We are no longer one culture or country but at least two mutually hostile entities inhabiting the same physical space. This will end badly.

    • I have never met anyone who changed their mind – I mean really changed their mind – on a political issue as a result of any type of civil discourse. All the platitudes and cordialities in the world won’t change that.

      • You can’t reason someone out of a deeply held position that they didn’t reason themselves into in the first place.

        This is why the anti-gun crowd primarily and almost exclusively works in the emotional argument sphere.

        We have an emotional argument (“Doesn’t feeling helpless suck?”) but we follow it up with a strong logical plan that deals with that emotion. We have a simple offering:

        In the grand multi-player game of Life, you don’t have to be an NPC. Everything else, including bearing arms, follows from this.

      • Drew, it may not be all that common, but it definitely happens. I have two examples. One is Charles Krauthammer, who described getting away from liberal politics because his medical training taught him to judge the evidence, and he saw the evidence said liberal policies harm those they nominally claim to help.
        The other example is my wife, who over a number of years went from being a liberal to a libertarian/conservative and supported of gun ownership. (Still working on getting her to fire one herself; maybe some day, but if not that’s ok.)
        Tiffany’s quote is very relevant to my experience; what made it work is that I used reasoned argument and allowed enough time. Oh yes, and the fact that my wife is receptive to rational argument.

        • Tirno: fully agree.

          PK: I’m going to challenge you on that. My comment was on changing a person’s mind as a result of logic presented through civil discourse. I believe this is exceptionally rare, making this type of debate fun, but nearly irrelevant.

          Krauthammer was one of the most liberal conservatives there ever was, and so I question how much of a conservative success story that guy was.

          The tendency of wives is to grow toward being the very best, most compatible partner for their husbands, and this involves adopting many of the husband’s values. This is a generalization but I can’t think of a good marriage where this didn’t occur to some extent. I am not suggesting women are drones destined to adopt all behaviors and opinions of their husbands, and I’m not saying husbands never change to be better partners, but, per my observation and reading, the wife changes more. I have observed the opposite change on occasion, but usually those men were really weak, disgustingly passive, pathological personalities to begin with.

          It’s entirely likely that your wife changed her political views because she is biologically tuned to want to make you really happy and be your help-meet, rather than based on any civil conversation you ever had.

          • Drew, interesting theory. Given what she has said about this many times, I’m inclined to doubt it. For one thing, after 34 years she still has no hesitation whatsoever to challenge me on points she disagrees with, or arguments I make she feels are faulty or unclear.

  5. Why would anyone have gun-averse friends?

    Is someone who wants you to be an unarmed or inadequately armed victim really your friend?

    Only a libtard would have a gun-averse Nazi like that for a friend.

    • Great turn of a phrase.

      But in all seriousness we all didn’t start here. I grew up anti-gun. My wife was anti-gun, and super pissed the day I showed her my new 1911.

      Tiffany, who wrote that, started out anti-gun as well.

      Now people like David Hogg have invested their lives to banning guns, and I think there is little hope of turning him, and many of the politicians and some of the more vocal anti-gunners aren’t interested in banning guns, but doing sweeping social reform that we know many won’t take willingly. (Hitler wasn’t anti-gun, he just needed to exterminate a bunch of people, and if they had guns they wouldn’t stand for it)

      But a lot of the gun-adverse have been fed a bill of goods on what gun ownership really is. When the media reports every shooting and inflates the mass shooting numbers, meanwhile suppressing defensive gun uses and actual crime data, the only logical solution is more gun control.

      Many when shown the actual data, and given some more realistic view on why we consider personal firearms so important might change their minds…..and if they don’t, then I do often change my mind on them.

  6. I’ll admit that I pay more attention to such things, since my wife and I adopted a wonderful boy with Down Syndrome.

    No one has called him “retard” to his face yet. But they will, and it will hurt; it’s just a matter of time. So for me the word is now personal.

    As it happens, I agree that name-calling is counterproductive. When I can, I prefer making fun of stupid arguments.

  7. My last significant other was a Social Worker with a master’s in counseling. She drove some friends to a Womens march after Trumps election, but wasn’t quite sure why she was there. She had great sympathy for the less fortunate, but also understood, from ten years sobriety, that we are all responsible for our own life situations and that you made your own choices, good or bad, but owned them and the consequences, good or bad. She was a lovely woman and it never occurred to me to deride her politics as they were different from mine. We shared many of the same personal values. She came from a different place.

  8. Saul Alinsky’s “Rules For Radicals”. #5 Ridicule is mans most potent weapon.

    Sorry but the liberal left are morons….retards. Most actually believe that it is possible for the government to spend it’s way out of debt, that open borders make us stronger and safer and many other ludicrous ideas. They are RETARDED. So to call a retarded liberal a ‘libtard’ is to speak truth. As for worrying about disaffecting them…..who gives a damn. With RARE exception they are beyond reach, immune to fact and incapable of rational thought.

    • Confine that to individual ideas and their advocates and I’m with you. But not the entire tribe. Not because it might not be essentially true but because attacking the entire tribe unites them. Pointing out the clear stupidity of individuals fractures them.

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