Logic doesn’t seem to be working. I converse with people and see how they’re saying one thing and doing another and I try to show that to them, and ooooo boy, that seems to start or escalate a fight.
A friend of mine has been asking me for a few days to watch a video by a political commentator on the internet and I had avoided it until now. When I first tried to watch it, the guy’s voice turned me away; not so much his voice itself, but the sarcasm and anger he seemed to carry in it.
I just finished watching about 80% of it. In it, he talks about how the mainstream media tries to manipulate people, how they can’t be trusted, and how they are trying to split people into different teams. I mean, for me, this is perspective and opinion, not really any fact, so I can’t argue much on this. He also says that Governor Cuomo and President Trump are saying the same thing when they say to reopen the economy, and seems to get angry at the mainstream media for not getting angry at Cuomo but lashing into Trump. You know, I thought this was going to be another fact, but again, maybe it’s just perspective, or rather, the facts that we notice and to which we pay attention. While they both said to reopen the economy, Cuomo seemed to express it with more uncertainty on how to do it, also expressing a strong need for testing as a requirement if we are to do it—and asking the federal government for help with testing, saying he cannot do it without federal assistance. Trump also said to reopen the economy and said that it is the governors’ decisions when to do it—and then went on Twitter and put out three tweets telling the states of Michigan, I think Wisconsin, and Virginia to “liberate,” even saying that Virginia was “under siege.”
To me, I don’t believe they’re saying the same thing. To the guy speaking in the video, he seems to think they are saying the same thing. Perhaps I’m missing some of the things they said, or finding more differences than there were. Perhaps he’s missing things they said and is finding more similarities than there were. Probably it’s both.
Maybe this is the challenge with trying to argue with someone over the “facts.” There are too many facts in almost any conversation, and it’s not just the facts, but how we see all these things related.
Another example from the video: Cuomo said they didn’t get enough ventilators for New York, Trump said they asked for too many. I imagine Cuomo was believing that they didn’t get enough because, in a crisis, having extra is the smarter strategy, like having life preservers on a boat: if you need them, they’re there, and if you don’t, well, at least you had them. Perhaps Trump was thinking more from an efficiency standpoint, or even from the end result, not the process.
Regardless, even in this article, I get swept up in the “facts” instead of how people might be feeling. We have lots of feelings and different views. Maybe that matters more. No?
