The Left Can't Discern: revisited

@TheCynicalVixen asks, "What, in this specific political context, do you mean by "discern" (especially since you never use any other words after it)? Can't discern _what_?"

The emphasis isn't on what the Left can't discern (which is functionally whatever it needs to be) but on what is meant by "can't."

While the strongest part of "can't," in most cases, is exactly what Gita says—"not allowed"—when I make the claim, I like "can't" to mean all the various meanings of "can't."

So sometimes the left can't discern because they are somehow barred from it—usually because it would expose their worldview or offend fellow leftists. But sometimes they're just simply incapable of grasping differences between things.

Perhaps I prefer "can't" phrasing to more specific terms because, to get it, one needs to momentarily slip into leftist headspace, where words with multiple meanings have all their meanings, no matter how contradictory, all at once.

This is how bad faith functions. It targets ambiguities and exploits them.

But discussions on bad faith are unsatisfying because they tend to get conceptually overloaded and tend to become dominated by rightist good faith where leftist bad faith is always discounted.

Discussions of bad faith are also unsatisfying because they tend to slip into pointing out logical fallacies which the left couldn't care less about. Sure, leftists will point them out to trip you up, but holding to logical consistency is like trying to nail jello to the wall.

I may as well nod to my stance against magic words thinking: the notion that the right (magic) words can't be misinterpreted. Many a conservative has been sacrificed to this idol.

Holding a writer/speaker whose words have been malevolently twisted to account for the twisting is the worst style of victim-blaming. Every word has more than one meaning and, at some level, everything implies its opposite. Nothing that can be said is immune to bad faith.