Hacker News Reader

Comment by wolverine876 | Hacker News Reader

It's typical rhetoric for (what I'm calling) the neo-reactionary movement worldwide. You'll notice they all use the same tactics.

The words are not meant to convey meaning, they are weapons, meant to disrupt you. If other words or the opposite words disrupted you, they would use those. The trick is not to look past the words at the speaker: Why are they saying it? Who does it benefit and how? The words themselves are meaningless; they are wadded up pieces of paper thrown at you; they are as meaningful as text printed on a bullet aimed at you.

So have heart, the people are not crazy. They don't believe those things, they just are tactically saying what is most disruptive to you - which in part is done by making others think they are crazy beyond control or reason.

View on HN

No, no, no, no, no... you're wrong here. Mrs. Damares Alves, Minister of Woman, Family and Human Rights Cabinet really believes this stuff. She believes it 100%. And when Bolsonaro (the president) says that men wouldn't be gay if they were beaten enough as children whenever they did feminine stuff, he says it with conviction. He really believes this stuff. A lot of his tactics are just copied from Seteve Bannon/Trump (Bolsonaro actually hired Bannon), but the difference is that he actually believes 100% in the ideological views he espouses. If you elect a hardline evangelical fanatic to the White House, and he starts spewing bible stuff, would you say he doesn't believe it, it's just politics?

> No, no, no, no, no... you're wrong here. Mrs. Damares Alves, Minister of Woman, Family and Human Rights Cabinet really believes this stuff.

That's what the targets of the rhetoric say every time. You are playing exactly the role they want.

> he says it with conviction

Yes, that's exactly how you do it. It wouldn't work without the conviction. IMHO past a certain threshold, the more conviction, the more likely they are trying to demonstrate conviction that isn't here. the lady doth protest too much, methinks, as Shakespeare wrote about it centuries ago.

Right, religious fanatics don't really exist, it's just rhetoric. You can confirm this by noticing how they never really blow themselves up. All the temples from african religions that are burned or destroyed every year in my country is just a made up thing, since the fanatical christians who burn them don't really do it, I'm just falling for their rhetoric. I don't know how it is going in other countries, but religious fanatics have held positions of power here, quite a few times.

I don't know about you in particular, but IME people seem strongly invested in taking the rhetoric at face value. The reactionaries advance not only unopposed, but aided by their enemies and victims.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com