> "I unapologetically think people who use phrases like “un-American” are dumb as rocks, but if anything seems un-American, it’s that." I agree but have come t

> "I unapologetically think people who use phrases like “un-American” are dumb as rocks, but if anything seems un-American, it’s that." I agree but have come to realize it's a rhetorical or reasoning strategy. When you criticize something as "un-American" (or un-German, or un-British, or un-Chinese, or whatever), you are dismissing the thing without having to reckon with it, and by extension, dismissing the person behind it as not worth considering. It's a way of avoiding defense of beliefs or schemas, or to avoid accomodating something other than what you want, and by extension the people challenging your egocentrism, a kind of pseudojustification. You can't say "I don't want to defend my beliefs against this reasonable argument because I'm an intellectual coward or lazy", so you say it's un-Whatever as a way of making it seem like you're arguing against it on moral grounds. Similarly, you can't say "I don't want to bother with the human rights of these people" so you make a pseudomoral appeal that these individuals' very existence is a kind of moral offense, the offense being that they are not part of the group. Is it dumb? Maybe, but it's also selfish.