““What is the purpose in this context of appealing to opinion and semantic relativism? The purpose is to get your opponent off your back and to get some breathing space. If your opponent accepts that the debate is a matter of opinion or semantics, then your losing the argument does not matter: nobody is right or wrong. But if your opponent does not accept that everything is a matter of opinion, then his attention is diverted away from the subject matter at hand—namely, politics—and into epistemology. For now he has to show why everything is not merely semantics, and that will take him awhile. Meanwhile, you have successfully diverted him. And if it looks like he is doing a good job on the semantics argument, then you can throw in—“Well, what about perceptual illusions?””
![“Yet mere membership as a matter of duty is not enough for Hegel, given the grandeur of the state’s divine historical purpose: “One must worship the state as a terrestrial divinity.”[211]” quote by Stephen R.C. Hicks](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/img-quotes/371/stephen-r-c-hicks-12692_quote_yet-mere-membership-as-a-matter-of-duty_229759.jpg)
![“Given the pervasiveness of capitalism’s domination, the revolutionary vanguard can come only from those outcast intellectuals—especially among the younger students[282]—those who are able to “link liberation with the dissolution of ordinary and orderly perception”[283] and who thereby can see…” quote by Stephen R.C. Hicks](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/img-quotes/b31/stephen-r-c-hicks-12692_freedom_given-the-pervasiveness-of-capitalism-s_775059.jpg)
![“[The public lands represent] in a sense, the breathing space of the nation.” quote by Richard M. Nixon](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/img-quotes/3c7/richard-m-nixon-727_breathing_the-public-lands-represent-in-a-sense-th_755492.jpg)
