There are a couple of reasons why “they make good points”.
First, It’s a stealth disparagement of the opposition. When you’re running a policy campaign against a political party and you say things like - “Immigrants must obey the law” or “Illegal votes shouldn’t count”, you aren’t just stating the obvious, you’re implying that your opposition feels differently from you on the subject, even if the opposing position to something like “we’re against child murder” is ridiculous.
Secondly, sometimes the way to sell a bad idea is to surround it with ideas that aren’t bad, like a triple chocolate heroin sundae. You’ve got to ease people into extremism and you hook them in by surrounding your message with “sensible” ideas. Sometimes they’re the type of meaningless self-evident statements like I described above, and sometimes they are feel good platitudes like “Save The Children” and “Make America Great Again”.
These are things that make people feel good about themselves. Very few people are so overtly racist that they identify as such - The “Keep our Children Safe” club is going to get a lot more members than the “Keep My Neighborhood White” club. There are a lot of people that are vaguely scared of their neighborhood darkening, but would never explicitly voice that fear or advocate for a whites only neighborhood. But they will join the “Keep our Children Safe” club and they’ll feel positive about doing so. The more that club meets, the more explicitly racist it will get as the members get comfortable. It’s the “get the frogs in the pot first, then turn up the heat philosophy - and there are a scary number of parallels to the thought reform techniques used for cult recruitment.
The entire manifesto feels like a trial balloon of sorts, an attempt to see how much they could raise the temperature all at once. And it looks like they overshot and made the frogs uncomfortable- but they keep trying and unfortunately, they’ll probably get there.
It seemed to me through the start of the exchange that TOWP was more upset about being indirectly insulted (though they TOTALLY VOTE BOTH PARTIES BASED ON IDEAS) than Republicans being racist pieces of shit.
He’ll happily vote for a Democrat, unless, of course, that Dem is secretly for open borders or could be persuaded to vote for open borders at some point in the future. White supremacists are better than that type of Dem.
Just because someone asks you for an argument does not make it disingenuous for people to argue against you or, in the appropriate forum, mock said argument. When asked for an argument, you’re still supposed to bring a good argument you can actually defend.
That said, that’s not what this thread seems to be about. As part of his defense, he admitted that the people involved were indeed white supremacists, but then argued the thing that’s in the title of this thread. That’s why he gets a special pitting, rather than just the expected pushback in the other thread.
You don’t get to argue that we somehow tricked him having white supremacist sympathies. Those had to exist before we said anything.
… or if he heard a rumour that someone said at some point in a certain place that a Democrat somewhere might have advocated for open borders or something that sounded a lot like that anyway.
Total Dealbreaker.
Much better to vote for the white supremacist party.
Let’s be fair… That’s also what Pro-Choice and Pro-Life does.
“The other guy wants to take your rights!”
“The other guy wants to murder babies!”
It’s dirty politics but unfortunately far too common. Of course, when you wrap up white supremacy in that tactic it makes it even less palatable than usual.
“This statement is not totally accurate” vs “This statement is totally false and full of loaded words”
The point is that there is a false equivalence between conceding that one “side” could stand to be more accurate and the idea that “both sides are equally bad”. And that equivalence, clearly made several times and in bad faith, is all over this thread by TOWP.
I’m not really sure how this address my post. One side does want to take away your rights, the right to an abortion and the right to control your own body. The other side does not want to murder babies, since fetuses aren’t babies and aren’t “persons”, and you can’t murder a non-person.
So do you disagree that the term “Pro-Choice” is misleading?
That’s not a false equivalence that I made. That might be a false equivalence you inferred. I stated that both were misleading. PP agrees with me. I’m not saying that both sides are equally wrong, I quite firmly stated they weren’t.
I could certainly have stated it better. Compare for example, “they want to murder babies” to “they want to enslave women”. That would have been a better comparison. Because a person with no choices is a slave. I will own that poor phrasing.
I definitely am not trying to play both-sideism here though. There definitely is not an equivalence between the two beyond the fact that both labels are poor at representing the issues. Albeit, one label is misleading and the other is flat-out false.
No one even brought up that term until you brought it up in response to my response to you.
Anyway, this is all pretty off-topic. I think we can agree that TOWP’s responses in that thread were baffling, in that he never pinged my asshole radar before.
I can’t say that I remember TOWP very well but they weren’t on my radar as one of the “troublesome” posters on this board before that thread.
I have to give @ShadowFacts some credit for pointing this out in the previous thread:
That is extremely troubling, the idea that we should give people the choice to stay in this country in exchange for literal slavery. That’s fucked up. Even giving someone the “choice” is wrong. If I’m fleeing to the USA from atrocities in my homeland I might accept that offer, but you end up with a new slave class. Combine that with some handwaving of white supremacy and what kind of picture does that paint?
It’s a matter of degree, of proportionality. Putting a negative spin on your opponents position and trying to elicit an emotional reaction has always been part of politics, but it becomes problematic when it becomes the ONLY tactic you use.
That said, that wasn’t really my point…my point rested in the difference between my example “We’re against murdering children” and yours “The other guy wants to murder babies”. It’s the tactic of reframing your argument as a positive self-evident statement that doesn’t overtly smear the other guy — and by not overtly smearing the other guy you’re free to imply anything without regards for truth.
That said, I screwed up by using the child murder thing as my example and I wish I could rewrite the post. As I was writing it, I was thinking of QANON and Pizzagate conspiracy theories -not abortion- and I was trying to demonstrate a tactic used to lure people into the conspiracy rabbit hole. Using “baby murder” to describe abortion is definitely a technique that appeals to emotion, not reason…but there’s a big difference between disparaging a political figure as a child murderer because he’s pro-choice and disparaging a political figure as a child murderer by implying that he snatches kids off the street, kills them and drinks their blood to keep himself eternally young.
The puzzling thing to me is, that it’s not like there weren’t already other Conservative political leaders and platforms promoting stricter border security/immigration/general law-and-order policies. The floated Greene-Gosar Anglo-Saxons First Caucus proposal with its absolutely deal-breaking ethnosupremacist foundation would be utterly redundant when it comes to those policy issues. There should be NO need to say “well they do have a point on item 7”. There’s ethnosupremacism in your manifesto? Then it’s not just no, it’s not just Hell No, it’s FUCK NO. I don’t care if it includes unlimited cannabis, strippers and guns.
There are other hills to make a stand on in the “The Other Side has a Point” battle and it is unexplainable as to why would they choose this one.
And for example, here to be fair you could read that as referring to the Constitution’s notion of “involuntary servitude as punishment for a crime” which is something we have on the books right up to this day, and NOT to chattel slavery. So we could argue about promoting inhumane terms w/o saying he is advocating actual slavery.
Sure, yes. I think I’ve mentioned this before on this board but one of my favorite lines from the film Thor: Ragnarok was when Jeff Goldblum’s character objected to the term “slaves” and his henchwoman/enforcer dead-panned the suggestion “prisoners with jobs” as a euphemism. You could charitably suggest that TOWP is doing the reverse.
However this requires you to skip the not unimportant detail about how and why that person became a prisoner in the first place. It’s one thing if a person is a murderer or scammed millions of dollars out of people or rapes children; in other words, they are a danger to society and need to be taken out of it. If you then put those prisoners to work, that’s understandable (assuming this is done humanely, not breaking rocks in a desert until they literally pass out from heat exhaustion for example). But when you do this for someone who is no danger to society, who comes to the country to flee awful conditions or look to improve their situation and/or that of their families, that’s twisted. It’s exploitation. It’s a massive setback to social progress and human rights. It’s really, really bad.