I have heard it mentioned before "It is not our job to educate you" but in rational discourse, isn't that how it is supposed to work? 1 make claim 2 make demonstration/proof from claim 3 extend logical chain ? AFAIK Saying "educate yourself" is a shifting of the burden of proof, and would lead the skeptic finding likely biased evidence supporting your point, and would only serve to weaken your credibility by trying to pass off bad proofs. This turns people away further, so why not?

Asked by

1zacster-blog

In rational discourse during the Greek era, perhaps, when you didn’t have Google. What amazes me is that I’m on the very oldest edge of the Millennial generation (I graduated high school in 2000), yet I’m constantly telling younger Millennials how to do research on the fucking internet. It’s absurd. This isn’t a game whereby you parry and I thrust until one of us has hit the other; this isn’t some archaic back-and-forth with rules more suitable to the pre-telephone era. Pick up a fucking book if you hate the internet, I don’t care. But no, especially in the Google era, I am not obligated to educate you.

Besides, like MG said in her most recent PSA, folks who try to draw us into these parry-and-thrust arguments aren’t really interested in the evidence we have to provide, and they rarely have little evidence of their own except ‘common wisdom’ evidence or the latest push-propaganda from a paywalled anti-obesity study being press-released in all the major news outlets.

Thirdly, and also like MG said, we have repeated ourselves and linked and re-linked to evidence over, and over, and over again. If you were really interested in what we had to say, wouldn’t you at the very least read our FAQ first and the links provided therein?

But this isn’t about some wide-eyed skeptic educating himself. This is about trying to reduce the reach of our message by making us focus on you instead of on the folks we actually give a shit about (yanno, fat folks being discriminated against). This is about reining in the power of social justice in the digital age, which is spreading like wildfire due to technological tools like quick information lookup, and which scares the fuck out of bigots (hence the reactionary anti-sjw movement).

Also, when it comes to proofs, you have the power to construct the bits of evidence we don’t link to within our own blog itself. That’s like requesting that an author of a math book always rehash every lemma she used to build up new theorems even though she presented those lemmas in the beginning. This has nothing to do with us not being rigorous enough to be believed, this has everything with you being either 1) ignorant of your intellectual laziness, 2) willfully intellectually lazy because you know it diverts our energy away from our cause and towards you.

Also, that semester of Greek philosophy really isn’t all there is to know about rhetorical argumentation, proofs, and logic. Sorry to burst your bubble, but you’ve got many years of proper and self-schooling left before that tool’s ready for prime-time.

-ArteToLife