this post was submitted on 17 Mar 2025
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Leopards Ate My Face

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[–] DragonTypeWyvern@midwest.social 42 points 12 hours ago (3 children)

Man, this isn't even "doing your research" it's just knowing what very basic words mean.

[–] Grandwolf319@sh.itjust.works 2 points 3 hours ago (1 children)

That’s actually a huge problem I’ve had with a right winger.

Even though he was relatively reasonable, we got stuck because we could not agree on what fascism means.

I was good to use a dictionary or better yet Wikipedia. He said it can only mean what Mussolini meant when he came up with the term.

What was annoying is that all I wanted to do was say, group X does Y things, Y things are fascism and fascism is bad.

It’s just mental gymnastics because it doesn’t matter what we call it, group X is still doing bad things, but instead we got stuck on details.

Imo this is pretty much all right wing’s only play, dismantle the tools of logic so the conversation doesn’t even happen in the first place.

Mussolini also said that fascism was whatever it needed to be in the nation it was in, for future reference. There is only the pragmatic consolidation of power.

It does not even matter if is the state consolidating power, or the church, or corporations, only that the process is aimed at merging their powers in the end.

[–] ChickenLadyLovesLife@lemmy.world 46 points 12 hours ago (4 children)

I bet a coworker $20 that "tariff" and "tax" were synonyms. Motherfucker refused to pay up, calling merriam-webster.com, thesauraus.com, wikipedia etc. "fake news".

A tariff is a tax or custom duty on an imported good.
Tariffs can lead to a reduction and higher prices on foreign imported goods.[1] Like the corporate income tax, domestic consumers ultimately pay the tax in higher prices.

https://www.conservapedia.com/Tariff

[–] towerful@programming.dev 23 points 10 hours ago

Your mistake was referencing a woketionary.

Arguing with idiots is like playing chess with a pigeon. No matter how good you are, the bird is going to shit on the board and strut around like it won anyway.

[–] Jesus_666@lemmy.world -5 points 12 hours ago (2 children)

I would've made you pay him. Every tariff is a tax but not every tax is a tariff. Of course your actual point still stands.

[–] SacralPlexus@lemmy.world 4 points 6 hours ago (1 children)
[–] Jesus_666@lemmy.world 0 points 4 hours ago

According to Merriam-Webster, "income tax" is a synonym of "value-added tax" and "property tax". And it can be, depending on context, but few people would argue that they are always synonymous. It's the same with "tariff" and "tax". Whether or not they are synonymous depends on context.

[–] null_dot@lemmy.dbzer0.com 21 points 11 hours ago (1 children)

That's not what a synonym is.

[–] Jesus_666@lemmy.world 3 points 9 hours ago (1 children)

My point exactly. The bet was about whether "tariff" and "tax" are synonymous. They aren't synonymous if they describe different things, even if one of those things is a subset of the other. (This is complicated a bit by the fact that synonymity is context-dependent so in some contexts they can be synonymous. I'm assuming a general context.)

To give a different example, every iPhone is a smartphone but not every smartphone is an iPhone. The two terms aren't synonymous except in specific contexts like when discussing the inventory of an Apple store.

In a general context, I would argue that the bet is lost – tariffs are taxes but taxes encompass more than just tariffs. The definition of synonymity is not fulfilled.

The actual point of the bet, namely to illustrate that tariffs are paid by people in the country that raised them (because they are taxes on imported goods and services), remains valid.

[–] null_dot@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 points 30 minutes ago

thesauris.com, merriam-webster, and collins all disagree with you.

They aren't synonymous if they describe different things

This is clearly false. Obviously the degree of difference determines whether terms are synonymous. You're correct that not all taxes are tariffs. Apparently however that doesn't mean they're not synonyms.

Additionally one term being a subset of the other evidently does not preclude being a synonym.

If you have a bet, and every dictionary says that you're wrong, then you should just graciously pay up.

[–] null_dot@lemmy.dbzer0.com 10 points 11 hours ago

It's anti-intellectualism.

You don't need to understand any of it, you can just ask people who spend their lives researching this stuff.