You're Generalizing!!!!

Yup. Everyone generalizes all the time. You're only criticized for it because they disagree with what you said and that's when they notice you generalized. There are two things going on, one that they know you're speaking the truth, and two, they don't want to hear it. Everyone knows a conservative who supports the UN, so they try to shut you up about how [most] conservatives don't support the UN.

What you probably don't realize is how many times people have been told that generalizing is wrong. Starting in fifth or sixth grades their teachers have been drumming that into their students' heads, scolding them for making a generalization in class, or lowering a grade for turning in a paper with any generalization on it.

Here's the distinction, though. They don't notice the generalizations that they like. If, for example, you said, "Mean people suck!!!" which is most certainly a generalization since surely 90% of the mean people in the world do indeed suck, they don't even notice. I've never heard one person complain about that generalization. There are some mean people who don't suck, you know; often we end up calling them "leaders". Sometimes we call them "Sarge". We would expect a large number of parents to be called "mean" by their children while the kids are growing up, or while they're learning to drive. So this generalization, like every generalization, isn't always true, but the haters of generalizations don't notice it.

How many generalizations have I made so far?

Now comes the real problem: talking to a liberal about this. Critical thinking is not what liberals care much about. Breaking through the crust and trying to show them where they go wrong is often very difficult, which we've seen as people call Dennis on his show to argue with him that making generalizations is wrong. Dennis should point out to them that what they just did was make a generalization, which by their thinking isn't valid, which means that they can't make that generalization.

We call this a self-referentially incoherent statement. To put it more plainly, it negates itself.