Arguing With Integrity

I’ll be up front here: I do not support leftist ideology, democrat ideology, Joe Biden, or Kamala Harris. Those things are an affront to morality and we should fight against them for the poison that they are.

With that out of the way, I need to talk about that “fight against them“. I think we need to do better. The arguments are often cheap shots much like strawman arguments. They are weak and partially blind arguments meant to damage the opposing side even though there’s an obvious explanation which justifies their actions. All it takes is someone with half a brain to point out the fact that it’s a terrible argument and then you look dumb.

Let’s take this screenshot for example:

The implication is that Kamala is a hypocrite. Why? Because she “oversaw 1,900 convictions for marijuana offenses, some of which resulted in jail time”, but now she is saying that “nobody should have to go to jail for smoking weed”.

Here is the problem: Her job was to enforce the laws of the community she was in. She was not a law maker. True hypocrisy would be legislating laws that imprison weed smokers and then using rhetoric against imprisoning weed smokers. What she did was take a job that requires enforcement of laws using prison as a penalty, and she executed her duties of that job. Had she neglected proper enforcement of the “drug laws” and failed to imprison offenders when the “law” called for it, we would say she was “soft on crime” or otherwise wasn’t doing what she was elected for.

If the shoe were on the other foot (the right instead of the left), we would point out these obvious explanations and use them to defend the person we wanted to get elected.

I’m writing this to encourage integrity of our rhetoric, meming, and political arguments against the left. They are fraught with contradictions and easy to defeat logically. When you make an argument against them, first pretend that “your” candidate was in that position and determine if you would defend them for it or not. If their actions are defensible then you will recognize it when you put yourself in their position. You might as well stay away from these arguments because they won’t help you much. They might even make you look like you’re losing the argument when the claim is easily defeated.

If we all do this, we can be unburdened by what has been.