Alien Nathan Edward

Solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short

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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 4th, 2023

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  • I never understood why that phrase was ever used as if it were an excuse.

    A thought-terminating cliche is a rhetorical device intended to end a discussion without actually resolving it. The idea is to say something that the other party more or less has to agree to without regard to whether it actually has any bearing on the discussion at hand, and then refuse to discuss further. This makes it seem like the discussion is over and, as the last person who scored a point, you’ve won. “It’s just a few bad apples” is one. “Let’s agree to disagree” is another. Trump almost singlehandedly invented one in the phrase “fake news”, which is ostensibly intended to mean “I don’t trust the source of that information” but is often used in an infinite regression where everything unfriendly to the arguer is fake news. It’s basically a deus ex machina for arguments; a way to escape a corner you’ve been backed into without ever admitting that you were wrong about anything.


  • this one is just trigger-happy incompetence, but the phrase “a few bad apples” ends with “spoil the whole barrel” and the police are a perfect example of that. The way they close ranks and try to protect one another from responsibility for really egregious shit means that not every cop is a criminal, but that every cop ignores crimes that other cops commit.