You Are Still Crying Wolf

This is very extensive and on the face of it does something many pieces don't - back up the claims with sources (mostly).

I'm sure there will be argument over the semantics and specifics but that's not important to the points I want to make and which is implied in this piece:

1) If you continually brand some group of people as some derogatory thing if all they want to do is talk about an issue, it's only a matter of time before they stop listening to you.

2) If your only response to dissent to your world view is to brand the dissenter some derogatory term and then turn inward to others of your own mind, it's only a matter of time before you lose influence outside your inner circle.

3) You can't hope to influence others behaviour by labelling them something you yourself would hate to be labelled. The label may have no meaningful effect on them, other than to reject your statement entirely, thus actually diminishing your effect on them.

The trouble with all these things is people cherry pick statements, occurrences, inferences and associations to match their own narrative. This includes the media, popular groups and individuals themselves, despite the double standards this might expose when their favoured candidate/group does the exact same thing (of has done it previously).

Only through actually communicating with others of differing viewpoints in somewhat of a reasoned fashion can any effective influence hope to be achieved.

Point 16 brings up especially good angle on this so skip to that if you don't read the rest.

The conclusion is one I support strongly too - stop fear-mongering, stop labelling dissenters racist, stop playing identity politics.

As a side note it's happening here in the UK over Brexit. Despite unemployment going down, retail sales up faster than any time in the last 15 years, the economy growing etc etc it's all framed in the context of 'yeah but everything is going to go to shit and you're all racists for not wanting free movement'.

Sure, be suspicious/cautions/prepared of/for the future but don't actively sabotage it before it's happened, or all you've done is create a self-fulfilling prophecy.

> As a side note it's happening here in the UK over Brexit

And I wish more people wrote pieces like this one that actually discuss the political/economic arguments without descending into name-calling. It was too hard to find well-written pieces on Brexit before the vote (perhaps harder on the Leave side but I'm not sure) and this is still the case.

I gave it a go just for the immigration figures[0]. Though I stripped it back to mostly plain data and nothing as extensive as this post.

I did this because a lively discussion sharing all sorts of random data was taking place between my friends, most of whom were simply pushing a biased narrative for once side of the other.

I parsed some of the plain data from the ONS and all it lead to was killing the debate dead. Literally no one wanted to continue when faced with actual data to work from.

That point has sort of turned my opinion on these events really. It's not about facts, it's about emotional viewpoints and personal world views and facts be damned. There seems to be so little actual reasonable debate seemingly because so few people actually want that.

Both sides of the Brexit campaign peddled absolute horseshit and people lapped it up to validate their preexisting views. And that worries me because the destination at the end of that particular road is blind extremism.

[0] https://josharcher.uk/blog/brexit-eu-referendum-uk-immigrati...

I could have written that comment verbatim.

> It's not about facts, it's about emotional viewpoints [...] facts be damned.

This is absolutely my experience as well.

Thanks for sharing your post, I'll check it out!

The worst part of both for me was labeling everyone without a college degree as uneducated.