Weak Men Are Superweapons

When you look at negative news coverage of some group, it almost always focuses on some fringe caricature of what that group actually believes in. For example, BLM's coverage in the conservative media sought to paint them as "black racists" due to pictures/comments/videos portraying a small number of BLM supporters in that light. Note that the Russians are aware of this tactic because they ran several BLM-related twitter accounts that they would occasionally use to this effect (although that's more of a false-flag).

This can be used to frightening effects. A lot of alt-right recruiting spaces (tumblrinaction, /pol/, cringeanarchy, the_donald, KotakuInAction, breitbart, Drudge Report) deliberately focus on a caricature of "leftists" and liberals that is designed to make relatively-rational people feel disgusted and alienated by what they feel the "left" or liberals represent. It's way easier to discredit people in favor of "forced diversity", or unattractive people with weird colored hair who identify as different animals, than it is to discredit actual champions of equal rights or transgender(fixed!) people.

Well, that was fascinating as usual from SSC.

"Remember, not wanting to be stereotyped based solely on your sex is the most sexist thing!" /s

Even better was the link to the The Worst Argument in the World[0] (2012) (not Stove's Gem, though they link to that):

"If we can apply an emotionally charged word to something, we must judge it exactly the same as a typical instance of that emotionally charged word."

- about which they say "I propose that an outright majority of the classic arguments in American politics, and no small number of arguments in religion, philosophy, et cetera, are in fact unmodified examples of the Worst Argument In The World."

e.g. Taxation is theft! Abortion/capital punishment/euthanasia is murder! Affirmative action is a form of racial discrimination! Obamacare is socialist!

Now that's a useful pattern to look out for.

[0] http://squid314.livejournal.com/323694.html

If we say roughly half the country is of the Foo party and half Bar:

If half the Foo party decided they had a problem with the other half and decided to split into their own group, there'd be roughly a quarter of the country in each of those two split parties. But then half would still be Bar, and would completely dominate the government. So despite whatever differences the Foo/1 and Foo/2 party have, it's not worth splitting their identities over, because their differences with Bar are still larger, even if only slightly.

Kind of obvious if you think about it, but rarely articulated as well as SSC does.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Straw_man#Contemporary_work