Why Slogans Don’t Make Good Belief Statements.

[condensed and expanded — yes, both at the same time — from a thread on Twitter]

Signs like the above are annoying; they’re a textbook illustration of virtue-signaling, letting all and sundry who pass your manicured lawns that you believe All The Right Things.

What’s funny is that I agree with each of these propositions as stated.  That doesn’t mean, of course, that I believe the baggage which the Left has stapled to every one of those feel-good slogans.

BLACK LIVES MATTER. Obviously; people’s lives matter, and black people are just as much people as any other color of people. That doesn’t mean that cops are on some kind of targeted vendetta against African-Americans (statistics certainly don’t bear that out), or that darker people are uniquely justified in, and not culpable for, Burning Shit Down.

NO HUMAN IS ILLEGAL. Correct. “Illegals” should correctly be called “illegal immigrants,” in that they crossed the national border in contravention of the law.  The person isn’t illegal; the actions which the person undertook are illegal, as is the person’s presence in a location arrived at by said illegal actions.

LOVE IS LOVE. Sure. Tautology is tautology; I’m cool with that. It doesn’t necessarily follow that (as one of the issues for which “Love is Love” is bizarrely seen as a slam-dunk argument) the social purposes of the institution of marriage are served when the definition of that institution is stretched beyond its rational or traditional bounds.

WOMEN’S RIGHTS ARE HUMAN RIGHTS. Yep. Just as with “Black Lives Matter” above, women are human and thus woman’s rights are a subset of human rights, and the overarching category of human rights applies to women just as much as any other variety of human.  In fact, I probably support a more expansive application of human rights than most people who deploy that bumper-sticker slogan, as I believe human rights apply whether the male or female in question is born yet or not. Preventing a woman from killing her baby isn’t a violation of her human rights, any more than preventing me from killing the shopper inconveniencing me in the checkout line is a violation of mine.  The questions about the moral significance of abortion will always — ALWAYS — go back to the adjudication of the unborn as “human,” and focusing on any other part of the issue (such as framing the decision to undergo an abortion as a “human right”) is not only misguided, it is a tacit admission on the part of such a framer of being unable to mount a cogent rational defense of their position on the whole “humanness” thing.

SCIENCE IS REAL. Depending on the definitions, that’s not just true, it’s tautological. It doesn’t necessarily mean that all people employed in science-related fields are always correct, especially when political and financial pressure is brought to bear. And it certainly doesn’t mean that “science” is not to be questioned or doubted; the scientific method is one of attacking one’s hypothesis with facts which might destroy it, not protecting the inviolate pronouncements of Science from the foul heresy of doubters.

WATER IS LIFE. Is that controversial to anyone? Did they just need one more line to fill out the yard sign?

INJUSTICE ANYWHERE IS A THREAT TO JUSTICE EVERYWHERE. You bet. Just don’t assume that your nebulous definition and emotionally charged use of “injustice” is inviolate, or that challenges which request a firmer explication are somehow arguments in bad faith. The greatest miscarriages of justice which I perceive in the public square right now are things like unarmed, nonviolent trespassers in the Capitol on January 6th being held in solitary confinement before trials over a year later in which exculpatory evidence is excluded by judicial order and multi-year jail terms are handed down, but somehow I don’t think that that’s the “injustice” on the sign-poster’s mind.

Slogan-based “thought” is very rarely thought at all; it’s a substitute for thought, a stopgap to keep the fuses in the brain from blowing over the effort required to actually think about things. Don’t let the non-thinks own the slogans and use them as debate-stoppers; show them to be non-load-bearing buzzbords.