How to deal with One-sided argument
How to deal with One-sided argument
You're viewing a single thread.
47 comments
-
Is this how nazi Germany started? Cutting all "unnecessary" projects and personnel then introducing "necessary" projects and personnel that they control...
-
Did they? Do you have any sources? Because I did a quick search and couldn't find anything about it (though I'll admit I did not invest too much time into that search)
The Nazi regime did lots of shitty things over half a century ago. The Trump administration does lots of shitty things right now. There is an overlap - but this Venn diagram is not a circle.
-
-
What about it? I don't see anything there that's about "Cutting all “unnecessary” projects", and rather than "introducing “necessary” projects and personnel that they control" it looks like they directly took control on the existing ones.
The only thing that, if you squint hard enough, can remotely resemble cutoffs was the Law for the Restoration of a Professional Civil Service - which would be better equated to the DEI purge than to the cutoffs that this post is all about.
-
It's the concept, not the individual steps.
Gleichschaltung is a compound word that comes from the German words gleich (same) and schaltung (circuit) and was derived from an electrical engineering term meaning that all switches are put on the same circuit allowing them all to be activated by throwing a single master switch.[4] Its first use is credited to Reich Justice Minister Franz Gürtner.[5] It has been variously translated as "coordination",[6][7][8] "Nazification of state and society",[9] "synchronization",[5] and "bringing into line".
Every country requires different steps, so you can't copy paste them. Germany was (and still is) a multi-party democracy using plurality voting. Some of the institutions are the same, but not all. Nazification has to be tailored to the system. One important step is to replace opposition at every level. If you haven't noticed, the US is in the middle of a coordinated cleansing at federal level right now.
-
Some generalization is always required when drawing equivalences, but if you generalize too much your logic becomes circular. For example - let's overgeneralize to the max:
- We determine that what the Trump administration did was bad because it's similar to what the Nazi regime did.
- We determine that what the Trump administration did was similar to what the Nazi regime did because both things were bad.
Of course, I'm not claiming that you took it that far. Instead of going all the way to "evil", you've only generalized up to "grabbing power":
- We determine that the Trump administration is grabbing power because it does something similar to what the Nazi regime did.
- We determine that the Trump administration something similar to what the Nazi regime did because they were both power-grabbing moves.
Now, this version does require some non-circular arguing - showing that DOGE's project cuts are actually power-grabbing moves in disguise. But there are two problems with it:
- Power-grabbing is not a Nazi-specific thing - many groups have seized political power during the course of history. And not all these groups were evil - at this level of generalization, one could argue that democratic revolutions took power from monarchs and had to convert the institutions to be democratic. And even among the evil movements that did this - the Nazi were uniquely evil, because of other things they did.
- You were trying to masquerade this generalized argument as a more specific argument:
This is a very specific argument - "here is a specific tactic the Nazis used to grab power, and the Trump administration uses the same tactic!". The logic here is not circular. The only problem with it is that it isn't true.Is this how nazi Germany started? Cutting all “unnecessary” projects and personnel then introducing “necessary” projects and personnel that they control…
Comparison to Nazism is the nuclear weapon of debates. Trumps administration did some things that warrant an exemption from Godwin's law. Concentration camps for immigrants is one of them. Purging minorities from federal jobs is another. But this? The very fact they are trying to grab power? This does not justify a comparison to the Nazis.
-
-
-
-
-
47 comments