this post was submitted on 17 Mar 2025
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Leopards Ate My Face

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[–] DragonTypeWyvern@midwest.social 47 points 2 days ago (3 children)

Man, this isn't even "doing your research" it's just knowing what very basic words mean.

[–] ChickenLadyLovesLife@lemmy.world 48 points 2 days ago (12 children)

I bet a coworker $20 that "tariff" and "tax" were synonyms. Motherfucker refused to pay up, calling merriam-webster.com, thesauraus.com, wikipedia etc. "fake news".

[–] towerful@programming.dev 27 points 2 days ago

Your mistake was referencing a woketionary.

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[–] Grandwolf319@sh.itjust.works 9 points 2 days ago (1 children)

That’s actually a huge problem I’ve had with a right winger.

Even though he was relatively reasonable, we got stuck because we could not agree on what fascism means.

I was good to use a dictionary or better yet Wikipedia. He said it can only mean what Mussolini meant when he came up with the term.

What was annoying is that all I wanted to do was say, group X does Y things, Y things are fascism and fascism is bad.

It’s just mental gymnastics because it doesn’t matter what we call it, group X is still doing bad things, but instead we got stuck on details.

Imo this is pretty much all right wing’s only play, dismantle the tools of logic so the conversation doesn’t even happen in the first place.

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[–] Fedizen@lemmy.world 11 points 2 days ago

He's a sucker. And his news media knows it.

[–] zephorah@lemm.ee 42 points 3 days ago (4 children)

To be fair, economics is not intuitive. Half of it is built out of unicorn dust and human imagination. How else would bitcoin even exist? For those of you who are economists and love the money side, vs the behavioral side, that’s great, we need people like you to explain it to the rest of us.

I work with a real system that will still exist no matter what happens with politics or money, so it takes work, for me. That said, tariffs and inflation are not difficult concepts provided you simply take the time to learn.

I know someone who lost their job in December due to tariffs anticipation, and they were not alone in that group of layoffs. The effects are there even if you fail to learn the reasons.

[–] some_dude@lemm.ee 20 points 3 days ago (2 children)

I'm of average intelligence so if I can understand it, so can they.

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Omg. We’ve come full circle now that smart people are telling idiots to do your own research…

[–] Evil_Shrubbery@lemm.ee 23 points 2 days ago

Isn't this the same debate as to how one country can (or cannot) force another country to pay for a random construction project that isn't in anyones interest (that wall)?

It's not like the concept is beyond (basically, 99.9+%) anyones cognitive abilities. It's just how ads (the science behind it is plentiful, it's a giant business sector) work on human brains.

[–] Kichae@lemmy.ca 16 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (8 children)

Of course the employee is wrong, but the OOP isn't tackling the argument in a really productive way. There's an opportunity to meet the employee where they are.

People caught in the right wing noise machine always seem to understand that businesses pass on business taxes to the consumer. So, if other countries were paying the tariffs, why wouldn't they pass those costs on?

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[–] Aceticon@lemmy.dbzer0.com 12 points 2 days ago

The whole thing was very purposefully talked about using the word "tariff" and never ever its synonym "import tax" exactly so that the traditional Fascist technique of redefining the meaning of words could be easily used: if all the Fascists' speech had been about "import taxes" they would not have been able to leverage most people's ignorance anywhere near this level because the very words "import" and "tax" were already reasonably well understood by most - unlike "tariff" - so the opinion makers would not have been able to miseducate their targets anywhere as easily.

I'm not saying that the people who fell for this are to be excused - if there is something important enough for you to put the effort into educating yourself, it's Politics - I'm saying it's understandable how so many were so easy to swindle.

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