Code switching
Wednesday, 12 Mar 2025
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Meet people where they are, not where you want them to be
“He got freedoms too” is such a raw line holy shit
This is what I’ve found works best.
“Them transgenders shouldn’t be using whatever bathroom they feel like.”
“Why’s that, Dathan?”
“Well what if they’re just goin in there to hit on the ladies and make em uncomfortable?”
“Dathan you know I’m a gay guy and you’ve never minded me being allowed into the bathrooms.”
“Yeah but you’re just there to take a shit or piss.”
“Bro so are they! It’s the same deal”
“why the fuck do *you* give a shit, he aint hurting anyone” is a pretty good attitude to have in any discourse/argument
15 Minute City vs. “I just wanna get blind drunk at the Nut Shack and not have to pay the uber $50 to get home
I agree with this sentiment. It generally helps to speak to people “in their language”, but I’m not sure “patriotic” is the right word for the one exemplified here.
You know, I’m glad whenever I see someone learning how to do this.
“Health insurance companies? You mean the definition of wasteful spending and middle management? Hell yeah do away with those thieves.
Part of the reason Trump is so popular is that “he talks to people in their language”. (In quotes because I don’t really agree with that statement, but I’ve repeatedly heard people say that.) Code switching is *insanely* powerful, and can be used for good or evil. If you talk in a different “style” than your environment, people are less likely to listen to you and trust you, and this goes in every direction. You need to play the game of polite (if sometimes passive-aggressive) office politics, and you need to play the game of straight-shooting (usually playful) negging that comes with more physical labor.
By the gods do I miss blue collar talk 😩 Let me cuss out, and get cussed out by, my coworkers. Those bonds are so much closer and more stable than the “Regards vs Kind Regards” office horsecrap. Though it’s probably good that I’m not overhearing conversations that would petrify any HR employee anymore…
“don’t matter if the fella wants ta dress in dresses, right? Let’s be free to be free”
Almost as if they’re human…
“You catch more flies with Honey than you do Pickle Juice” as in, being nice even to someone you can’t stand has a better chance of getting through to them than being a dick. I was once arguing with someone who didn’t believe in Transgender rights and I had to calmly explain to them that we all know the media likes to blow things out of proportion, and that these are american people who just want to live their lives, they’re less than 1% of the population and the media will jump on anything that even has a whiff of “trans bad” on it because that’s what every media does now, is try to divide us. He seemed to be like “wow yknow you’re right about that” afterwards. Dunno if he really even changed his mind but he at least thought about it in a different way.
This 100000x. Liberals and leftists spend so much time angry at conservatives and trying to one up them instead of just agreeing with them, because most of them actually agree with some leftists talking points, if you told Jimmy from alabama “Those damn rich folks havent had a fair day of work in their entire lives and theyre over here paying less taxes than you and me, fuck them, lower our taxes and make theirs higher!” im pretty sure he’d agree with you. Ive had a lot of conservatives just agree with my liberal views because if you phrase it like you and the person youre talking to are both working class and together, theyll actually listen to you instead of being a pretentious prick
Assuming the speaker doesn’t misgender, it is nice to see Jimmy not do that either
I’ve managed to keep a friend somewhere in the “enlightened centrist”-tier by asking him why he holds the opinion of an unwashed cockroach landlordtuber in such high regard when his cleanliness standards are so much higher and talking shit about a far right march blocking the road, just like those green hippies.
Looking at it the other way around, the “correct” phrasing is often more about reaching a highly educated elite audience than anything.
It’s not the people in tents who care that you use “unhoused” instead of “homeless.”
Something really big was lost when the left gave up or was perceived to give up the high ground of libertarianism and defending “rights and freedoms”, when it was the leftist side that became associated with utilitarian authoritarianism and “sometimes you little people need to make sacrifices you don’t understand for the greater good”
“What the fuck do you think FREEDOM means, Earl?”
No one likes being preached at. If you’re trying to convince liberals of conservatism, or any ideology of any ideology, you do the exact same thing. You phrase your values in their words, and it’s more convincing.
Refer to tariffs as “corporate taxes on imports”
My momma said you can be whatever you want in America.
This is a great message for politicians, but will be lost on this website. Too many of us here are focused on having the moral high ground and feeling superior simply because we have a certain opinion (let alone actually advocating for something on the streets).
Most people would rather laugh at poor, working class white people from Alabama or Mississippi than actually have a dialogue of any kind with these people. I’m not saying everyone can be reached, but I grew up in redneck country and the OP rings true.
This definitely encapsulates the problem. Academia ended up making theories on society which might be interesting, and sometimes accurate to what we know or can measure, but the downside is this means academic language moves out of sync with plainer language.
One example of this is the maxim “you can’t be racist against white people”. In academia, this is basically understood as true because racism gets understood as the structure of hierarchy with whites being the dominant group who have taken all the power. That’s a fine definition but for most normal people racism means “judging someone based on their skin colour” and the unfortunate confluence of these two is “racism is judging someone based on their skin colour unless they’re white (doesn’t it suck to be white in this system? Shouldn’t we do something about those who are judging us based off our skin colour? Aren’t we whites the true oppresssed?)”
In an attempt to define terms to more suitably reflect society, and in an attempt to have a discussion like this, one interpretation is declared victor because it’s all about structural problems. Racism becomes less solvable in this way because now it’s bundled with a whole bunch of theory and literature which most people don’t know.
I am a truck driver, and a leftist. I say “they got the same right to self determination as you and me, Jed, and they used it to be the right gender.”
I feel like people are missing something *really* important about this.
It’s not just about the way you talk about the issues or if you use their own dialect. The bigger issue is that 99% of conservatives really just do not give a shit. They want to be left alone to live their life. The only reason they even know about the “issues” is because the talking heads on TV or YouTube or wherever made it sound like this big scary deal that is going to change how they are allowed to live their lives.
You can get the average conservative to agree with you on almost any issue by just reframing it as having no impact on their life. Don’t use buzz words or whatever. Just talk to them like a normal person who isn’t aware of the issue and explain how it doesn’t affect them.