They know exactly what they're writing. They're not saying it because it's true; they're saying it because saying anything else would leave them open to certain rhetorical attacks from the people willing to manipulate their audience to get these bills passed.
Remember: the goal of political speech isn't to convince reasonable people of anything; reasonable people don't need convincing, they just need facts. The goal of political speech is to (somehow) convince unreasonable people of things. Which requires, for a start, showing deference to what they already believe.
> Remember: the goal of political speech isn't to convince reasonable people of anything; reasonable people don't need convincing, they just need facts. The goal of political speech is to (somehow) convince unreasonable people of things. Which requires, for a start, showing deference to what they already believe.
I think this says less about political speech and more about the time we're living in
...no? "Political speech" is a jargon term; it doesn't just mean "anything said by a politician." Political speech is speech intended to influence people's political beliefs. And political beliefs, in turn, are beliefs rooted in people's subjective preferences, which cannot be swayed merely with facts-about-the-world, but where you must instead convince people of deficiencies in the logic they use to evaluate various world-states as satisfying, or not satisfying, their preferences. A politically-conservative person can not be made politically-liberal, or vice-versa — even temporarily, on just one issue — by presenting facts-about-the-world alone. Such a change can only be effected by shifting how the person thinks — what mental tools they will reach for to evaluate information. If only temporarily.
And that's what political speech does: attempts to shift or reprioritize the mental toolkit people are using, at the same time as giving them information to apply this (temporarily) reorganized mental toolkit against.
Usually, this process of temporarily rearranging someone's mental toolkit using speech is referred to as "rhetoric." (Which is really annoying to me personally, because that's also what you call things that don't do that, but rather just attempt to confuse people by activating the bad, naturally weak or biased tools in the human mental toolkit, using e.g. ad-hominem attacks, equivocations, etc.) Thankfully, "political speech" (at least when used as a jargon term) can capture the nuances of "rearranging someone's mental toolkit" without the default implication that the speaker is committing professional malfeasance as a communicator.
Also, in case you were presuming that I was attempting to insult "unreasonable" people: actually, "unreasonable" people are the vast majority of people, and always have been; and that's not really a bad thing, per se. "Reasonable people" are extreme outliers — they're people who will take raw facts, explore their implications, and then use those implications to argue themselves into having different political beliefs, grinding the facts against their mental toolkit until the mental toolkit is what gets broken and reshaped. They're people who are willing to accept and internalize "repugnant conclusions" if they're inescapable due to the facts at hand; without first requiring a lens through which the conclusion can be made non-repugnant to them. Even people who can sometimes think this way, usually don't. Anyone who can manage to think this way most of the time, could get a job as a professional philosopher.
(And sometimes, the goal of political speech is to activate the dormant "reasonable" mental tools in these sometimes-reasonable people — a.k.a. to "get people to see reason!" Usually not, though; due to quirks of personality, "reasonable" people are rarely also thought-leaders in such a way that swaying them becomes key to swaying others; so they're rarely the targets of political speech.)
> Reasonable people" are extreme outliers — they're people who will take raw facts, explore their implications, and then use those implications to argue themselves into having different political beliefs, grinding the facts against their mental toolkit until the mental toolkit is what gets broken and reshaped. They're people who are willing to accept and internalize "repugnant conclusions" if they're inescapable due to the facts at hand; without first requiring a lens through which the conclusion can be made non-repugnant to them.
If I could offer a different perspective: reasonable people are people who understand and see their own irrationality for what it is. There is no process of breaking and reshaping, they simply see their broader thought pattern in a way that is unchanging. While different phases of thought come and go (along with political beliefs that follow), reasonable people understand the temporal nature of their current configuration and the inherent irrationality of the world and themselves. Out of this they create an unshakeable sense of direction for themselves that transcends any attempts to sidetrack it
Governments in Canada have tried to pass similar laws and have literally made statements saying 'Stand with us or with the child pornographers' [1].
It's quite obvious they use these tactics to make people have a hard time arguing against the laws and it's honestly a disgusting tactic I wish people could recognize.
This is actually a smart move by the author, as this type of debate will usually lead to someone try to call him a pedophile in an attempt to shut down conversation.
It's literally the same as the HN guideline of responding to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says; it enables the debate to proceed on a substantive basis, rather than becoming a pointless back-and-forth of unfalsifiable allegations about motives.
It seems at least equally naive to me to ignore the strategic value of choosing the ground on which to make your rhetorical stand instead of charging forward blindly.
How can a grown adult be this naive?
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