wat

"But how did he smell?"
"Terrible"

agreed

Something annoying me in several threads is legal/magic word thinking.

Is x rape, genocide, terrorism etc? In court, it matters a lot if some threshold is met that moves your charge from 2nd degree murder to 1st. It matters a lot if your BAC was .79 or .80.

This is not usually important in a moral/practical context. Just because you use a word to describe something, doesn't make it interchangeable with all other things labeled by that word.

People now like to use "pedophile" very liberally. This doesn't make sex with a 16 year old the same as molesting a six year old. It's just as bad as it was before. It doesn't matter that much what you call it.

If a trans person is deceptive about their status with a partner, you could call it rape or not. Calling it rape doesn't make it the same thing as forced sex at knife point. Saying it is not rape doesn't make it 100% fine. The moral question remains the same.

If you kill a bunch of civilians, same thing. Dresden, Hiroshima, Gaza, Gaul, manifest destiny, 9/11.... these things don't bounce back and forth between being totally fine or 100/100 evil based on how you label them. What really matters is the actions themselves, the context, the motivation, etc.

These labels can be significant for propaganda or rhetorical purposes, but not so much for honest discussion.

I'd argue it doesn't.

the labels are shorthand. generalizations. abstractions.

otherwise you would be saying things like

-mass murder of people
-mass decapitation of people
-mass burying alive of people
-mass burning alive of people
-mass blowing up of people
-mass starvation of people
-mass amputation of people
-mass torture of people where they are forced to sit blindfolded and in diapers for months on end
-destruction of all infrastucture including electricity, water, housing

which is actually a bit more to jarring but also annoying to type out. so I tend to agree with you but in some cases, like genocide at least, it glosses over the actual disgustingness of it.

Haha. I guess we're talking morgue, not court at that point.

There's got to be a name for this fallacy, no? That is:
-give situation X the label Y.
-note that some situations labeled Y have attribute Z.
-attribute Z to X.

It's a slippery slope fallacy. It's also not applied consistently at all, so it is disingenuous. People will make sweeping generalizations based on their slippery slope fallacies, then point to minute differences to attack other, far less slippery slope based, generalizations.

this is often done the opposite way

-not that some situations labeled Y do not include some attribute Z
-claim X cannot be Y

Dead is dead, if those figures are percentages.

It's a similar thought process. But i think strictly speaking, slippery slope refers to future outcomes. If we allow gay marriage we will inevitability have man/animal marriage and adult/child marriage.

This is more like "i found a passage in the bible forbidding homosexual sex, therefore it is a grievous sin against God and a great moral wrong, like murder." It's wrong because i found a reason to put in a category or under a word.

Probably shouldn't have included religion as that complicates things. But that was the first slippery slope argument to come to mind.

Correct. And that’s 50% of the problem.


Sometimes it can be helpful to use these words for brevity. Some of these words might have no good purpose at all.

My point is more that whether you apply the word or not is not very important for honest discussions outside of court.

Suppose I say, "genocide must refer to the attempted extermination of a group as a primary goal, like the Holocaust." That's not an outrageousl or irrational thing to say.

One could then easily argue that Gaza, or even manifest destiny were not really genocide.

This has no substantial impact on if it was OK to give Indians infected blankets, hoping they would die so you could take their land.

One might argue, exterminating people out of pure ethnic hatred is worse than doing it to take their land. But we can simply make that argument.


You can also (and many do) use 'terrorism' so that car bombing a military target is terrorism, but carpet bombing civilians is not. This style of argument is used by all sides for many purposes, like any other fallacy.

ya I agree that it shouldnt. but a lot of people will argue that if its not genocide then its ok. but most people are bad faith as you have described.

I've never seen on heard anyone make the argument that everything which is not genocide is 'ok'. Or even that any particular action is ok because it is not genocide.

Right, because that’s not defensible and people are more deceptive in their arguments. Instead, they’ll argue something doesn’t meet a definition, dwell exclusively on that, and then simply never address whether the state of things is otherwise acceptable, because they’re not interested in a fair assessment of things They’re interested in defending their side and making up the rules arbitrarily to do that.

They might also say any response to X event or condition is morally justifiable because of how terrible X was or how evil the perpetrators are. They might also not question whether there could have been reasonable alternative responses to X. Instead, saying something akin to, if you didn't want Y to happen, you shouldn’t have done X, completely ignoring whether Y is a reasonable response. They might also argue that all deaths are the fault of the other side because they started the hostilities. They might also just say, “it’s war”. There are more examples I could give but I’ll stop.

None of those things is explicitly saying an action is ok as long as it’s not genocide but it is a pattern of reasoning that gives cover to or refuses to address anything that doesn’t meet the absolute highest standards of atrocity, because it weakens the moral authority of your side. I don’t think this is exclusive to one side or the other btw.

People shouldn't misuse words as part we their propaganda campaign and then people would not have to disprove it

sup bubble, good post

If that is their motivation I would agree. They’d be doing it disingenuously to strengthen their own claim to moral authority. On the other hand, discussion about whether a situation meets a definition or is in any case acceptable or not is exactly how you prevent atrocities. Staying mum up to the point that things have gotten so bad that they meet the textbook definition isn’t helpful either.

I’m somehow both surprised and not that the conversation hasn’t moved one inch since I left it months ago.

I think its shifted a little

My dog's got no nose.

for words like genocide and human right (and some others) precise definitions matter because they trigger actual significant legal consequences.

so if you argue event x is a genocide , it's not only a moral assessment, it's also a call for legal (and so violent, but justified) action to prevent it.

it's not only about fairly assessing, it's about which reactions are possible within the rule of law to the situation you are discussing.

if people claim X is a human right, and X isn't achieved in a country, they are transparently implying it would be legal (and compelling) to mandate any action to achieve X.

and they are saying people who disagree have illicit political preferences, not only different political preferences.

that's very very very different from claiming "I would like x in my country" and accepting as a democratic outcome x won't come because elected representatives decided otherwise.

if what Israel is doing was actual genocide, it would be illegal (as in criminal, as in subject to prosecutions) to help Israel in any way.

So proponents of that thesis aren't just saying "I dislike what Israel is doing, I would want my country to be out of it, and I'll vote for that outcome". they are saying "all domestic residents who want to help Israel are actual criminals who belong to jail".

and the other side believes that for people who in any way, direct or indirect, help Hamas achieve it's goals.

it's not just about moral authority nor it is mainly about it. it's about whether it's actually legal, acceptable, tolerable, to have that preference in a western country.