flamingarms

Yha, all the people around me are staring into their Smartphones and attacking humanism on social media like you are.

I was just reading through y’all’s conversation and this piece stuck out to me. I read a lot of loneliness, hurt, and isolation in your comments, yo, and then I read this piece. Man, do I get that. That reminded me of me throughout high school and college; I didn’t feel like anyone saw what I saw. Which was pain. And if I’m being honest, I was seeing others’ pain, but I was mostly seeing my pain. I met my best friend late in college, and she was a god-send because she got me. She saw their pain too. And more importantly, she saw my pain and honored it, and that was such a relief.

When I feel alone and isolated, I usually feel like withdrawing more. Since her, I’ve found that that’s usually a sign that I actually need to connect. I need to find others that get me. Not as another avenue to vent my frustrations and anger and pain, but as an avenue for joy, as an avenue for remembering that I am more than just my pain.

That’s a lot of shit off the top of my head, and I dunno if you’ll resonate with any of it because I only know you as far as a few comments online. But wanted to write it in case it would resonate with you or anyone else.

Take care of yourselves, y’all.

Should we go ahead and put a curriculum together and start shipping it to universities, or…?

Such good points; I’m convinced. To continue on your line of thinking, after learning some media literacy and starting to notice different patterns and forms of discussion, I wonder if learning Aristotelian syllogisms would be a good next step. So we still aren’t jumping right into fallacies per se, but we start to understand logic structure and what is formally valid/invalid. So now it’s got them thinking about how to structure and challenge their own beliefs and arguments. And while we are now potentially hitting formal fallacies, I think this would not give any immediate tools for dunking on anyone either because, in my experience, converting a real-time argument to a syllogism is very very difficult without a ton of experience and practice breaking arguments down into simpler ideas. What do you think?

Rather than not encouraging focusing and learning fallacies, maybe we are simply saying that they need to also learn to use them appropriately? Fallacies are not just the informal ones that everyone is referencing here in this thread, but also the formal ones which are very much required for logical argument structure. So even in learning about fallacies, there will be opportunities to understand the difference between informal and formal, why they are different, and how that applies to discourse. Knowledge is power; it just needs to be balanced with understanding on how to use and I think a deep dive into fallacies could actually assist in that regard.

You’re right, that is an easier question to answer!