There are few things that exhaust and discourage me more than reductionists shouting past each other.
Rottcodd
joined 2 years ago
I doubted this, so I tried it. I haven't used google for ages, so I first had to search "google" in DDG, then I went to the main page. When I started typing it in, it suggested the full text of the search, so I thought it was even less likely that it would work like the OP said - that even if it had been the case that it previously did that, so many people have self-evidently done that search that the results would now be correct.
But no - there it was, right at the top - "While there are 54 recognized countries in Africa, none of them begin with the letter "K". The closest is Kenya, which starts with a "K" sound, but is actually spelled with a "K" sound."
And with that, I'll contentedly go back to not using google.
I stopped trying to contribute to battles between reductionists many years ago, since they're not coincidentally also binarists, so each just takes the fact that I'm not 100% in agreement with them to mean that I'm on the falsely dichotomous other side.
That's an awful lot of why they're so exhausting and discouraging - because I know from bitter experience that there's absolutely nothing I can do about it. I'm constantly tempted to respond - just, if nothing else, to for instance point out that something as enormously complex as the US Civil War cannot possibly rightly be said to have been about one specific thing - but I've learned that that can't possibly accomplish anything.
Should I then have just kept my mouth shut? Probably, in much the same way as I'd likely just keep walking if I saw two drunks brawling in an alley.
But I didn't, and so be it.
And who knows? Maybe somebody somewhere will read this and think, "You know... it really is kind of dumb to reduce a complex issue to just one single idea, then get into shouting matches with people who have reduced it to some other single idea."
Or not. And again, so be it.