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Peak logic
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this post was submitted on 23 Jul 2025
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Jean-Paul Sartre
Sartre was optimistic. He believed these people say wrong things on purpose, as a tactic. Like they're rationally advancing a goal through irrational rhetoric.
I think they honestly believe this is how things work. The word-games are their entire worldview. Ideas aren't right or wrong, people are right or wrong, and whatever the people on your side say, you have to shuffle cards to justify it. COVID proved they would continue this behavior whilst gargling their own lungs.
And they think it's all you're doing, because they think that's all there is.
Well I think he was actually spot-on. But this was decades ago. Those people and these tactics have led to a lot of idiots. Those idiots make up the majority of the antisemites these days. You’re right that they’re not consciously running these tactics, but they are just parroting the grifters and conmen the Sartre was speaking of.
They’re despicable, but those kinds of people are smart. However, the mental offspring they shed like dandruff are the idiots you’re thinking of. They don’t do these things with any kind of cognizance. They just live in it. They’re the feeder-stock plugged into The 24hr Fear, and those talking heads employ these tactics. The idiots just emulate.
'But bigots of the past were playing 4D chess!' is a brave opinion to offer.
Nobody invented antisemitism as a clever scheme. It's always been ad-hoc justifications and libelous story-telling, to bolster the kneejerk conclusions of ingroup supremacists. Rational argument has to be taught - tribalist pretense is instinctive to all people. Grifters emerge to take advantage of them, and spread the bullshit, but that dirt was always in your brain.
You think “basic interpersonal skills” or manipulation is “4d chess?” That’s kinda sad.
Antisemitism has been around since long before Sartre wrote a book about them in the 40s. He wasn’t talking about the invention of antisemitism, he was talking about the tactics of undermining logic that are still very present even in the dipshit rightwing now. For fucks sake there was a post on 4chan back in like 2017 talking about it openly—they called it how to piss of libs or some shit, but it’s still the same even if the words have adapted. We think of the right wing as mostly incompetent. But that’s not always the way they were seen. Shit even in my lifetime I remember the era of the neocons, they were scary motherfuckers inside and out. Fox News and the right wing has gone on a 40 year long anti education rout, and we do see that in their followers. But the sort of “joker” persona of the fascist movement isn’t new.
I think it's self-evidently silly to blame ancient patterns of bigotry on specific assholes who secretly know they're wrong.
This card-shuffling behavior, in service to strict hierarchy, has produced organized violence since at least Sulla's civil war in the Roman republic.
To be clear: this is all that conservatives have ever been. They didn't suddenly get stupid. They've always been making shit up. Some of them do the same thing you're doing - they go 'ah ha, this must be a clever move we all pull, despite being total bullshit.' Nope. The vast majority of them honestly think making shit up is all there is.
The distinction is crucial because we can still teach them that words mean things. Rational argument is a learned behavior.
You're touching upon what C.S. Lewis called men without chest in his book The Abolition of Men. From personal experience I believe both the author and you are spot on.