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Notes -
It’s about creating a strong unconscious distaste for Trump by associating him with the most universally distasteful political “thing”. Its Cue->Response, pure animal psychology. My dog doesn’t leave the yard because she will get zapped; my sibling gets nauseous smelling cinnamon rolls because it reminds them of long car rides; the subject doesn’t vote for Trump because when his name is said by the TV the tone gets grim and they hear the word Hitler. I think that’s it. Vance weird, Trump Hitler, say it over thousands of trials across different contexts and it will stick. There’s no thinking required at all. How did Voldemort and the N-word become verboten? The same process: the word is said (cue), there is an immediate stimuli associated to it (response, the verbal response of others), this occurs over iterations until you are now afraid to utter the word.
Truly believing Trump is Hitler would lead to the moral prerogative to commit illegal acts. Clearly, the vast majority of Dems do not believe he is Hitler, or even Hitler-lite, because they aren’t storing weapons and organizing resistance networks. “The resistance” political meme is like Star Wars cosplay, whereas if they really believed he was Hitlerly it would be like the IRA. You can draw a comparison to abortion. How many people really believe that abortion is murder? The same amount of people spending every weekend protesting it and being jailed in doing so. If the store down the street were massacring children by the dozens every month would you really be watching football on the weekends?
The valence of 'people thinking it is murder' is actually non-zero, given the bombings and the murders of abortionists.
But I think that in of itself is an inaccurate measure, because it is very rare that people are strong enough of conviction in their beliefs to kill for them. Even Islam, who certainly puts in clear terms the valor of dying for the faith, only a very few are actually suicide bombers.
In both cases, "if you really believed X, you would Y; you don't Y, therefore you don't really believe X" is an insincere rhetorical tactic. Factual belief X does not in fact necessarily imply strategy Y, all the more so because, in cases like these, strategy Y would most likely be counterproductive.
In the "Trump is Hitler" case - it may be worth the reminder that the spread of violence was a factor in Hitler's rise, as one fellow's ACT review noted. If you really think Trump is Hitler, "let's not recreate the circumstances that allowed Hitler to seize power" seems like a sensible move!
In the abortion case, it's fairly straightforward - is bombing abortion clinics an effective way to reduce the number of abortions? No? Then maybe it's a bad idea. And this isn't even considering that many pro-lifers have a deontological commitment not to kill, or even to to take actions that plausibly risk killing. They're pro-lifers: being against killing is the point! Some make exceptions around cases like criminals or in war, but nothing that would apply here.
"You're not fighting this the way I think you ought to fight it" is a bad faith dismissal, that's all.
Your link seems to be broken.
I tried to edit it, but it seems to automatically re-add the distorting part of the link about the Motte. The link should be - www.astralcodexten.com/p/your-book-review-the-rise-and-fall
Oh, that's weird. The source looks right, and then it...concatenates? Is it treating it like how you can link to /comment/262705?
@ZorbaTHut
@OliveTapenade It's treating it like a relative link; without an http:// or https:// in front of it, it's considered relative to this current directory. Note that it's not even The Motte doing this, The Motte is dutifully linking to whatever you ask for, that's web browser behavior.
If you paste it in raw, then The Motte says "oh shucks that's a website link isn't it? I'd better do all the appropriate processing!" and dutifully stuffs a http:// on the front of it.
Fix it by adding an https:// .
one fellow's ACT review noted
one fellow's ACT review noted
(click the "view source" button)
We should probably be autoprefixing it with https:// but I think this is literally the first time this has come up :)
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