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Culture War Roundup for the week of October 28, 2024

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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 :)