Thought-Terminating Cliche | Hacker News Reader

Thought-Terminating Cliche

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My teens love internet memes, some of which are commonly used to close a conversation.

I’ve heard from my teens that in highschool the term ‘simp’ [0] is often used to shut down conversations; To the point of stopping boy/girl relations in the School class as every attempted interaction by a boy to a girl is shouted down by the other boys with a loud collective delclarion of ‘SIMP!’

0. https://www.dictionary.com/e/slang/simp/

Some other examples I've seen in current discourse (mostly in the US context):

* Calling someone Antifa

* Calling someone a "Karen"

* "Play stupid games, win stupid prizes"

* Something being a constitutional right.

* "Mainstream media" as a way of invalidating any facts presented by the main media outlets.

Well at least OK Boomer seems to be over for now.

> Something being a constitutional right

Wouldn't that usually be a question of fact which should be resolvable based on the constitution and associated case law?

In my experience, it's pretty common for people to bring up the fact that something is legal to avoid the question of whether it's right.

In my experience it's pretty common for people to bring up the fact that something isn't morally right in order to imply that it shouldn't be legal. This is, when challenged, usually followed either by evasion or claims that the other person is immoral. Because obviously, if you don't want to ban all immoral things, obviously you're immoral.

So some people bring up the founding principles of our nation and the case law built around it because it's the best kind of common ground - agreed upon societal basis/"social contract" - they can think of to explain why some immoral things should be illegal but some immoral things shouldn't.

I was actually referring to the cases where something is deemed right _because_ it is a constitutional right.

I am going to dispute "it is what it is" as a meaningless cliche, because I understand it to have a meaning like:

"We all know that this thing is not ideal, but, for various reasons, we are stuck with how it currently is."

It is acceptable to use this expression if those listening are already aware of the various reasons why "it" can't be changed.

It's more a summary of the situation as currently understood, than an argument in itself.

> a form of loaded language, commonly used to propagate[sic] cognitive dissonance

For anyone curious about the inversion error, the change from "quell" was made in December by a "the owner of this account has abusively used multiple accounts". I wonder whether there's tooling for bulk reverts, or if was this just missed.

"Here we go again" is an example of one of my least favorite phrase classes, the discussion-killer.

"Rape is rape"

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