It just is what it is that most people have no idea what’s actually even being said when they make claims like this. They’re mostly just repeating kind of an ambient consensus. But since they don’t really know what it means, it’s easy for them to get tripped up like this.

Much of what people get wrong in political discourse rounds to what are basically category errors. One I’ve talked about many times before is the difference between trying to understand the world and practicing politics. Often conversations go sideways because people forget (or were never even aware) which of those things they (or their interlocutors) are trying to do at any given moment. But another big one is the difference between political action/messaging vs actionable individual advice. Personal advice and policy prescriptions are frequently at odds with one another. Often, where you should be fighting tooth and nail in the political arena to reject intolerable conditions, you should simultaneously as an individual resign yourself to reality as it currently exists and more or less just get on with it as best you can. There may be political conditions in which it’s just literally impossible for this or that group to get ahead, but that’s not true of any group in the United States of America in 2025, whatever real challenges exist. A lot of heated disagreement on this website comes down to a mismatch between these two modes of messaging.

A lot of people have “it’s actually really complicated” themselves into denying some pretty simple syllogisms