John Sexton
This is a really good summation and insight. I keep trying to get my conservative friends to stop gloating about having better arguments. These people don't care about your "better" arguments. In fact, they're using your willingness to argue with them against you.
Here's how it works: Your woke interlocutor will make a word-based accusation against you for, say, having privilege. But when you use words to challenge their accusation, they will say that you are proving their point, because logo-centricity is part of white oppression. In the debate world, this is called a "Kafka trap". You accuse someone of something. When they deny it, you say "you've proved my point because someone who is guilty would deny it."
It's stupid, I know, but what they're doing is yanking your chain because you assume they are engaging in good faith and are interested in rational inquiry.
They're not. Don't be a sucker.
I am at the point where I make these woke people, even other Christians, explicitly agree to the rules of engagement up front or I refuse to engage with them.
If they want to make a statement, accusatory or otherwise, about what they believe is true, they have thereby forfeited the right to tell me that when I myself use words I'm being oppressive. I don't play that game.
They have abandoned rational inquiry and are only interested in brute power. They're using the residue of western values against you.
That's why I say they're Orcs.
