You’re late. Another user did what you couldn’t. I took the L, but not from you.

I’m gonna break it down for future reference… My statement:

Funny how recessions only exist under capitalism.

The other user moved the goalposts by bringing in non-capitalist countries. I excluded mixed economies and state run capitalism because that is still capitalism. They had to reach back in history to find examples. Those examples were:

1. Not capitalist.
2. We’re not recessions. Because the term did not exist yet.

So my statement was still true.

Another user gave good examples when recessions did exist. Those examples were socialist (albeit some could be considered mixed economies).

This makes my statement fallacious, and therefore, an L. This is not about my feelings, or winning and losing. It’s about logic and truth.

Also, from a Linguistics professor:

“‘It’s just semantics’ is a common retort people use when arguing their point. What they mean is that their argument or opinion is more valid than the other person’s. It’s a way to be dismissive of language itself as carrier for ideas. It implies that ideas and arguments can be separated from the words and phrases used to encode those ideas. The irony, of course, is that the words and phrases we use are the ideas. There is no way to communicate a complex argument or message without language. Language and thought are completely interconnected. In fact, words shape concepts and can lead to drastically different understandings of the same thing. For example, inheritance taxes can be called ‘death taxes’ or ‘estate taxes.’ These two political phrases frame the same tax law in drastically different ways. Semantics really matters.”