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This is an example of the False Equivalency logical fallacy.



When you feel real love for your favorite celebrity convict, whose incompetence is beyond denying, you'll put your mind to work to search for any device that will enable you to excuse anything he does and who he nominates.

People will talk about "politicians being incompetent", or act like actually anyone who has ever been in the office was like this. It's a pretty close and comforting way to deal with the reality of supporting a fraud without having to admit that you were duped.


"A false equivalence or false equivalency is an informal fallacy in which an equivalence is drawn between two subjects based on flawed, faulty, or false reasoning"

What is the faulty reasoning here? Apart from "My side good, your side bad."


You can find incompetence in previous cabinet officials. This batch of cabinet officials has far more people who are far more incompetent and unqualified than any previous cabinet.

The faulty reasoning is saying that "this is just like previous administrations". It's not.


But the previous president was in the advanced stages of alzheimers and struggled to form coherent sentences. I think he alone beats anyone in the current organisation.


> and struggled to form coherent sentences

As opposed to the current guy, who hasn’t completed a sentence or a thought in twenty years and regularly goes off on tangents about black people eating pets. Great take. Love when you folks make it clear you’re just here to shitpost dishonestly.


Nor can the current guy remember things for more than the day and the then he admitted it live on tv after taking a dementia test!

Perhaps one of the more depressingly funny thing to learn is that in the first Trump term people would just steal papers and etc from Trump because by the end of the day he'd forget about something if there wasn't a sheet in front of him. And this would keep him from doing something crazy.


The faulty reasoning is the conduct is different.

Obama's and Hillary's blackberries were government procured devices altered by the NSA for security purposes.

The current US defense secretary isn't doing that.


What about Hillary's personal email server?


It was pretty bad, and there should have been more serious consequences for sure.

Did they discuss details of upcoming military operations on it, though? Because that's a whole other level of wilful negligence.


Hilary answered questions for 11 hours in front of a partisan House committee regarding her email server.

Trump's admin won't get a fraction of that scrutiny.


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> government is immoral

Maybe you're going to find out how much more immoral warlordism is. "Not having a government at all" is a weird fantasy of teenagers.

(the really odd combo is people who hold both the "government is immoral, especially the US federal government" and the "the US federal government should go to war with China" combo, which a few moments thought will show the contradiction)


Let's imagine we do go to warlordism and I do get to see how immoral it is.

At least I won't have to pretend that the coercion and theft is actually moral and good, right? At least I won't have to doublethink myself, turn myself inside out to justify the unjustifiable.

Ackonwledging the problem (immoral government) is just the first, esxential step towards making an actual difference. Why continue to pour in more effort to support an already failed system?


> I won't have to pretend that the coercion and theft is actually moral and good, right?

Of course you will. Not praising the warlord as moral and good will result in real physical consequences for disloyalty, maybe even summary death. As opposed to saying the same thing on HN when just your position is attacked.


>I don't have a preference between blue or red.

In other words, you prefer red, but prefer not to admit it.


> In other words, you prefer red, but prefer not to admit it

Lazy nihilism doesn't belong exclusively to one party.


No, but in this context, it's hard to disagree with the comment


> In other words, you prefer red, but prefer not to admit it.

No.

I invite you to look into my historical comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=verisimi


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