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postflopclarity

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>speak for themselves.

You sure about that? It's not hard to find people using the same video to come to different conclusions.

https://xcancel.com/doranmaul/status/2009308798159097922

https://xcancel.com/NewDayForNJ/status/2009395703634698358

it's also not hard to find people who think fluoride in the water is turning the frogs gay. doesn't make it true

I'm not claiming that those people are right, only that the "videos ... speak for themselves" claim isn't true. If people can watch the same video and come to entirely different conclusions, how can you say it "... speak for themselves"? If so, can we also say ambiguous studies on whether ivemectin was effective against covid "speak for themselves"? Or does it just become a no true scotsman where you can say whatever evidence "speaks for themselves", and anyone who disagrees are lunatics?

At some point you have to assume the people are, in fact, lunatics. Your argument is essentially the same as saying there is no such thing as a fact, because you can always find one person who disagrees. Someone thinking that the earth is flat and gravity isn't real doesn't make the evidence ambiguous, it makes the person you're dealing with either willfully ignorant or fucking with you.

> if people can watch the same video and come to entirely different conclusions, how can you say it "... speak for themselves"?

because a disappointingly large fraction of the public is unable to acknowledge facts of reality. the video is speaking, but some people just ain't listening.

>because a disappointingly large fraction of the public is unable to acknowledge facts of reality. the video is speaking, but some people just ain't listening.

If something really does "speak for themselves", but also "disappointingly large fraction" (1%? 5%? 10%? 20%? 50%?) refuse to accept it, is that a meaningful statement? Is it the epistemic equivalent of "80% of the time, it works every time"?

I don't know what you want me to say.

"some people are wrong and dumb" is not an argument compelling enough to me to reject the evidence of my eyes and ears.

The point is that "other people" use the same exact argument too. The evidence of _their_ eyes and ears. This is not meaningful.

I think "ok, I was wrong" is what you could've said.

their eyes and ears are bad I guess. sometimes other people really are just dumb and wrong.

when two people disagree, the truth doesn't always lie "in the middle."

Original context: He was reacting to a study about chemicals in the water triggering the natural sex-change ability of some frogs.

Sooo yeah, "they're turning the frogs trans" would have been more accurate, but would have sounded even more absurd.

Do you think an officer who feared for this life would have used a casual stance with one hand on the gun and the other with a phone, then casually walked away, or would he have held the gun with two hands as trained to make sure he hit his mark?

Or maybe your point is simply that because dissenters exist that their critiques are valid? There are also people who think the 2020 election was rigged simply because a loudmouth claims it to be. They’re wrong.

I don't think so, given the drastically different takes on something that seemed quite obvious to me after rewatching the video many times.

It was quite clear that many takes, on both sides, seemed to bypass the events in the video and jump straight to whatever ideologically-driven interpretation they needed to be true.

I don't think it takes much ideological bias to understand that was an unprovoked murder of a citizen

Indeed, murder is the point. They don’t actually believe that the agent “feared for his life”. The only disagreement here is about whether it’s ok to murder people who you don’t like.

On the contrary, if I learned something from the Rittenhouse case is that there's a type of person who, when stuff like this happens, doesn't care about video at all, they just grab the narrative and go with it.

I'm as liberal as they come and when I watched all the Rittenhouse videos, I thought it was pretty clear that he defended himself in a reasonable fashion when he was being attacked by a mob

how is that "contrary."

Except that if you poll any MAGA person, including basically anyone running the federal government right now, it seems that they see a video of a protester trying to run down an officer.

MAGAs struggle with reality.

When you attempt vehicular manslaughter of an armed federal agent lawfully performing their duties, you find out.

"the bitch had it coming"

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