• PugJesus@lemmy.world
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    17 hours ago

    Never believe that [fascists] are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The [fascists] have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert. If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past.

      • TheTechnician27@lemmy.world
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        16 hours ago

        In the future, I highly recommend sourcing to Wikiquote instead. It’s a sister project of Wikipedia which sources its quotes so they can be independently verified, whereas Goodreads just operates on an ad populum approach of upvotes. It also for this reason tends to be more robust to error, and many more prominent figures have specific sections both for popular quotes that are known to be misattributed and for ones that are dubious but not currently falsifiable.

      • captainlezbian@lemmy.world
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        54 minutes ago

        Good question. Best answer is building robust communities that can reject them and not allow them to gain footholds. “Fuck off loser” gives them no room to twist anything