logicp_writings/new/FreedomConvoy.md

Let's push on a recent post by a local social justice advocating physician and school board trustee. Specifically, I'm referring to Nili Kaplan-Myrth and her post describing the Freedom Convoy as not having been about vaccines, but about "anti-democratic white supremacists".

As expected, this ruffled a few feathers and invited comments from conservatives and liberals (I don't mean in the sense of supporting a party, but in the sense of being a rough representation of someone's belief about their own values). It should be no surprise that the responses consisted almost entirely of an attempt to debunk the notion that the Freedom Convoy was a gathering of white supremacists - that is, people who are believe in the superiority of a "white race" - and they did that by asserting that there was a significant representation of non-white persons attending the Freedom Convoy protests

This is, of course, not something which, from the perspective of someone like Nili, going to carry weight They don't care what proportion of people have a particular skin colour. That is not the point they are trying to make. In fact, before I go any further, we need to really highlight something important here. Someone who is a true believer in the social justice practice of raising critical consciousness is in a cult and, as such, reaching and maintaining a certain degree of epistemic adequacy is not their top priority, except insofar of measure the epistemic adequacy of their pursuit of social justice praxis.

That is to say, they aren't choosing their words based on formulating an accurate description of reality which stands analysis through traditional logic and reason but, instead, they are choosing what words can fit as an argument in a transactory process of inducing social change. This is not the same thing. Their performance has nothing to do with whether or not their statement can avoid being "debunked", but has everything to do with making sure particular words are uttered and put in people's minds.

The chief way this is done is by dialectically sublating the meaning of concepts and words.

So, again, their goal is to make the words fit in order to induce the following:

• a reaction, by those who are ignorant about or unwilling to acknowledge the synthetic definitions of the words
• normalization of particular language in relation to a target they're using to induce social change

With this in mind, it should be clear that reacting to her statement in order to refute it on the basis of traditional definitions might be useful to suggest she fails to comprehend something, but that's really only relevant to a few people who are likely already in your camp.

Those whom are far more productive to draw the attention of are those who agree with the cult, but only do so (or only began to) on the basis of the traditional definitions being used to interpret statements the cult makes. Once they've fallen through with the pattern of support, they become incrementally more entrenched as they are buried contextually through their s ocial commitment.

If you can bring some of these to understand the real meaning of the language being used, you can inspire them to realize what is actually being advocated for.

In this case, let's recap what the meaning of anti-democractic white supremacy. Whiteness means bourgeois property, and it is generally considered as being available to persons who ar e often white. Anti-democractic is anything which stands in the way of transforming society to one where an ideal conception of democracy is made possible - that is, one of perfect equi ty along whatever dimension is relevant (ultimately, perfect equity in an absolute sense). Another way of thinking of white supremacy is as the "ideology" which excuses the conditions u ch as they are, and prevents one from becoming critically conscious and wishing to tear things down.