Comment by EL_Loco | Hacker News Reader

Comment by EL_Loco | Hacker News Reader

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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.

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