Macdoc wrote:You focus on corporations - how about the catholic church, corrupt unions, corrupt politicians....human nature informs all persons and organizations - stop picking on a specific form of human enterprise as necessarily "evil" ....it's a choice.

Exxon stopped the disinformation campaign ....chose to stop or be decapitated by the board. Other organizations pledge to "do no harm " yet still do. I'm sure the xtian bros were mostly well intentioned yet despicable acts went on and the governing bodies of the kirk leadership chose to turn a blind eye.

Pinochet "did for his country" .....and committed unspeakable acts by choice and the each person that chose to go along has culpability.

I am focused on the executives running a corporation, They are the entity capable of not doing evil.

Yes, many companies and individual are evil, these two came to the top of my head as I watched the news about the Texas shooting. I guess because they seem related by the individuals choosing to make profit over killing people.

Chief Engineer wrote:
Doesn't my statement "probably Educated" suggest that I assumed no such thing?

That reads to me personally as though you find it a reasonable assumption to make, hence the word 'probably', but I suppose that could be me.

Does stating the obvious thing, that transitions can be costly, subtract anything from my belief that the executives, who as a group continued to sell their death sticks, meet my definition of real evil?

I wouldn't know; even if I were to quote the explicit definition you provided (results arising from bad behavior or conduct), it wouldn't help me elaborate on this particular situation. All I can do is state the obvious thing, point out that no one individual is capable of overcoming the obvious thing, and see how you react.

Thanks for reading. Do you have an example of real evil that gets under your skin?

I suppose I would point to the rise of fascism in my home country.

Chief Engineer wrote:Do you have an example of real evil that gets under your skin?

Harming, tormenting, or otherwise causing suffering to animals or children.

Greg the Grouper wrote:

Chief Engineer wrote:
Doesn't my statement "probably Educated" suggest that I assumed no such thing?

That reads to me personally as though you find it a reasonable assumption to make, hence the word 'probably', but I suppose that could be me.

Does stating the obvious thing, that transitions can be costly, subtract anything from my belief that the executives, who as a group continued to sell their death sticks, meet my definition of real evil?

I wouldn't know; even if I were to quote the explicit definition you provided (results arising from bad behavior or conduct), it wouldn't help me elaborate on this particular situation. All I can do is state the obvious thing, point out that no one individual is capable of overcoming the obvious thing, and see how you react.

Thanks for reading. Do you have an example of real evil that gets under your skin?

I suppose I would point to the rise of fascism in my home country.

Evil has other definitions, you can choose one that meets your criteria, apply it to someone you believe met that criteria

I guess you have not worked under executive who would be capable of leading the group away from problem identified by science. Tobacco execs showed willful ignorance as they expanded markets and increased addictiveness.


The rise of fascism, I agree an evil that was practiced by far too many in the end. If you had to chose one person from that introductory era, who would you choose as the evil one?

Chief Engineer wrote:

Greg the Grouper wrote:

Chief Engineer wrote:
Doesn't my statement "probably Educated" suggest that I assumed no such thing?

That reads to me personally as though you find it a reasonable assumption to make, hence the word 'probably', but I suppose that could be me.

Does stating the obvious thing, that transitions can be costly, subtract anything from my belief that the executives, who as a group continued to sell their death sticks, meet my definition of real evil?

I wouldn't know; even if I were to quote the explicit definition you provided (results arising from bad behavior or conduct), it wouldn't help me elaborate on this particular situation. All I can do is state the obvious thing, point out that no one individual is capable of overcoming the obvious thing, and see how you react.

Thanks for reading. Do you have an example of real evil that gets under your skin?

I suppose I would point to the rise of fascism in my home country.

Evil has other definitions, you can choose one that meets your criteria, apply it to someone you believe met that criteria

I guess you have not worked under executive who would be capable of leading the group away from problem identified by science. Tobacco execs showed willful ignorance as they expanded markets and increased addictiveness.


The rise of fascism, I agree an evil that was practiced by far too many in the end. If you had to chose one person from that introductory era, who would you choose as the evil one?

Though it may be obvious, I feel the need to say it: when I talk about the rise of fascism in my home country, I'm not talking about some bygone era. I'm talking about today. Tucker Carlson's a good example, though.

EDIT: And any executive in the position of those Tobacco execs would almost certainly do the same; that said, I fail to see how any willing to go against the grain could manage to accomplish anything.

I am reluctant to tell you this but fascism has been in the USA for many decades, Tucker is just its latest face.

I'm willing to chalk that up to my being young and naive.

Spearthrower wrote:Ok, I will expand dramatically rather than in pithy fun form

For me, values are a class of fundamental positions about the world...

- fundamental in the sense that they're not specifically defined statements on particular topics but work more like a general motivating stance preceding the consideration of arising topics; a heuristic resulting from biology, culture, personal experience etc.
- position meaning a perspective of the world, a sense of one's place both perceived and aspirational, specifically with reference to one's family, friends, nation, religion, society, culture or any other perceived community.

... that are quintessentially human.

(This doesn't mean that other animals - particularly social ones - don't have something similar operating that was honed over evolutionary time, and we too are also subject to similar deeply biological values - disgust and reactions to disgust makes for an interesting example seen throughout all human cultures but mammalians generally exhibit strikingly similar response patterns when witnessing a fellow expressing disgust.)

But rather, that humans are, insofar as we know, the only animal which holds a verbally defined mental map of the world which, with consequent imagination, intellectual consideration, moral reasoning etc., allows us to ratchet up consideration of values, such as through the pursuit of ethical philosophy, and in the traditions of many religions.

There are many actions that nearly all humans for nearly all of history have shared opinions of, for the most part. Cannibalism, for example, is nearly universally frowned upon, expect when it's not, but when it's not, it's generally for very specific cultural reasons which make it not an evil act in that specific moment under those specific conditions. Incest more likely has a biological basis (Westermarck effect) but still it became codified as bad nearly universally across all human cultures both in practice and eventually in law.

So values have many layers; they can be instinctive, they can be uncritically recapitulated expressions of one's family/society etc., they can be reasoned, developed and evolved over generations.

All they share is that it basically boils down to someone's feelies. Everyone has feelies. By and large people's feelies are important to them, and they really mean it when they say X is <value> - evil, for example.

A good example of this is looking at the American evangelical right's repeated accusations that 'abortion is evil' - they're not pretending to believe this, they're not doing this to milk lib tears (which has become a rather frequent motivation of the loony new far right), they genuinely consider it an unspeakable act of desecration they cannot bear to permit, the same way most people perhaps might feel about child abuse.

So values really don't have to make much sense, but they're... well... valued by people.

What then is evil? It's something intrinsically anti-social, something that offends the foundations of one's beliefs, something that cannot be witnessed and ignored, but must be publicly rejected in order to stake a position in the world, to say what should be and what shouldn't. A line in the sand.

But because we're a social species, at least partly the motivation is to signal to one's fellows that one is not like that! whether true or not. A web of social expectations, alliances and rivalries - human primates verbal grooming and seeking comfortingly similar grunts in return.

Evil is whatever you define evil is - that's what evil always has been, and what it always will be.

The universe doesn't possess the characteristic 'evil' independent of the human mind (expect possibly in the evolutionary stable strategies of social species) - when humanity dies, evil dies with us!

quoting this here because i don’t think proper regard has been given to ST’s post.

well-written, indeed.

And any executive in the position of those Tobacco execs would almost certainly do the same;

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Insider_(film)

yes some did and accomplished change ....same at Exxon and Chevron

https://www.theguardian.com/business/20 ... er-climate

that said, I fail to see how any willing to go against the grain could manage to accomplish anything.

Greta?

The Fourth Estate is an important factor in initiating change despite the efforts like Putin's to muzzle it.

••••

Evil is whatever you define evil is - that's what evil always has been, and what it always will be.

The universe doesn't possess the characteristic 'evil' independent of the human mind (expect possibly in the evolutionary stable strategies of social species) - when humanity dies, evil dies with us!

yup

scott1328 wrote:

Spearthrower wrote:Ok, I will expand dramatically rather than in pithy fun form

For me, values are a class of fundamental positions about the world...

- fundamental in the sense that they're not specifically defined statements on particular topics but work more like a general motivating stance preceding the consideration of arising topics; a heuristic resulting from biology, culture, personal experience etc.
- position meaning a perspective of the world, a sense of one's place both perceived and aspirational, specifically with reference to one's family, friends, nation, religion, society, culture or any other perceived community.

... that are quintessentially human.

(This doesn't mean that other animals - particularly social ones - don't have something similar operating that was honed over evolutionary time, and we too are also subject to similar deeply biological values - disgust and reactions to disgust makes for an interesting example seen throughout all human cultures but mammalians generally exhibit strikingly similar response patterns when witnessing a fellow expressing disgust.)

But rather, that humans are, insofar as we know, the only animal which holds a verbally defined mental map of the world which, with consequent imagination, intellectual consideration, moral reasoning etc., allows us to ratchet up consideration of values, such as through the pursuit of ethical philosophy, and in the traditions of many religions.

There are many actions that nearly all humans for nearly all of history have shared opinions of, for the most part. Cannibalism, for example, is nearly universally frowned upon, expect when it's not, but when it's not, it's generally for very specific cultural reasons which make it not an evil act in that specific moment under those specific conditions. Incest more likely has a biological basis (Westermarck effect) but still it became codified as bad nearly universally across all human cultures both in practice and eventually in law.

So values have many layers; they can be instinctive, they can be uncritically recapitulated expressions of one's family/society etc., they can be reasoned, developed and evolved over generations.

All they share is that it basically boils down to someone's feelies. Everyone has feelies. By and large people's feelies are important to them, and they really mean it when they say X is <value> - evil, for example.

A good example of this is looking at the American evangelical right's repeated accusations that 'abortion is evil' - they're not pretending to believe this, they're not doing this to milk lib tears (which has become a rather frequent motivation of the loony new far right), they genuinely consider it an unspeakable act of desecration they cannot bear to permit, the same way most people perhaps might feel about child abuse.

So values really don't have to make much sense, but they're... well... valued by people.

What then is evil? It's something intrinsically anti-social, something that offends the foundations of one's beliefs, something that cannot be witnessed and ignored, but must be publicly rejected in order to stake a position in the world, to say what should be and what shouldn't. A line in the sand.

But because we're a social species, at least partly the motivation is to signal to one's fellows that one is not like that! whether true or not. A web of social expectations, alliances and rivalries - human primates verbal grooming and seeking comfortingly similar grunts in return.

Evil is whatever you define evil is - that's what evil always has been, and what it always will be.

The universe doesn't possess the characteristic 'evil' independent of the human mind (expect possibly in the evolutionary stable strategies of social species) - when humanity dies, evil dies with us!

quoting this here because i don’t think proper regard has been given to ST’s post.

well-written, indeed.

Yes good post, It leaves me wondering if he feels humans should even bother considering evil, or by corollary any human activity, because it has no meaning outside ourselves. The Theist hypothesis that without a god, humans have no standard of good & evil. I believe we do, it comes from empathy, seeing ourselves in a situation.

Fenrir wrote:Define "evil"

You may find it harder than you think.

Indeed, defining evil may be a task that is beyond most of us.
In fact, fully and comprehensively defining many, (if not most) words is often a very hard task indeed.

Now, the linguist in me wants to make a foray here and try to unpack the concept a little.

The classical method of definition, handed down to us from the Greeks, is based on the concept of ‘necessary and sufficient’ conditions. That is, a core of traits which all members of a category must possess. In this classical schema, there is a sharp dividing line between category members and non-members.

However, in the 1970’s a new view emerged – prototype theory. This rejected the Aristotelian ‘necessary and sufficient’ view and argues that human defining structures are based on graded membership. The classic example is of the category ‘bird’. For the biological sciences the category is fairly well defined. But innate human categorization will see something like a thrush or a robin as a prototypical bird, while seeing a penguin or an ostrich as a more marginal example of the category ‘bird’.
Similarly, a chair or a table are more prototypical examples of members of the category ‘furniture’ than say, a refrigerator or a hat stand.

(This is a vast simplification of the theory. See here for more: https://psychology.fandom.com/wiki/Prototype_Theory)

Anyways, if we set ourselves the task of defining the concept ‘evil’, we will come to see that the concept is centered around a cluster of sub-components, with some of these being more prototypical and others less so.

So, what might some of these sub-components be?
Well, clearly the notion of doing harm is in there. This could be lethal harm, or bodily injury or causing mental distress. Lethality is probably more central than causing mental harm. A combination of mental harm (terrorization) followed by drawn out death is probably more central to the concept of evil than a surprise attack and shot to the head.

Then we have something like intent. Doing harm for harm’s sake is probably more central than attempting to justify the harm by an appeal to self-defense, revenge or doing justice, or causing harm through recklessness, carelessness, intoxication etc. (Consider a drunk driver who mows down a bunch of kids, versus a school shooter who enters a school and begins a shooting spree.)

There also has to be some notion of community standards. The darker corners of the internet contain many videoed instances of mob-justice in out of the way places. Those accused of witchcraft in some societies can meet gruesome ends and the hands of their community members. In these communities, witchcraft and casting spells are a very real concern- no matter how backward and superstitious they may seem to us. Burning a witch to death in public is a matter of community practice. Like if we had a gun to hand and witnessed a black clad teenager with an AR 15 scaling the fence of an elementary school and starting to loose off rounds. Most of us would feel compelled to act, even if it meant killing the person. Our own societies used to validate public torture and execution by various gruesome methods. The second world war saw the allies dropping atomic bombs on Japanese cities. This was done openly and without obfuscation. By 1945 it seems that the allied community standards of acceptable behavior included this. Perhaps with the reasoning that ‘when we win the killing stops’ as opposed to ‘when the Nazis or Japanese take over, the killing is just about to start.”

Then we have some notion of scale. Torturing a child to death is clearly beyond the pale, but causing hundreds, thousands, or millions of people to die is probably a seen as somehow ‘more’ evil. The 9/11 hijackers who killed 3,000 people in New York would have been happier if they could have collapsed the two buildings upon impact and killed in the tens of thousands at a swoop. What is your intent in causing harm in terms of the scale? Is there a limit after which you will stop, or is it unlimited in scope? Do you just keep going on until you are stopped?

Moving on to the concept of involvement. How ‘hands on’ do you have to be to get right in the center of evil? The SS guards in the death camps were merely one part of the machinery of annihilation. The train drivers, the police who did the rounding up, the neighbors who refused to hide a fugitive, what about them? There is a gradation here, it would seem.
The tobacco company executives who suppressed data showing harmfulness, promoted smoking through advertising and got rich from the process, in the final analysis never actually held a person down and forced them to inhale the product. This is unlike, say, the murderers of the Khmer Rouge at the Tuol Sleng torture center in Phnom Penh who held people down while they poured acid up their nose. It seems to me that they had a much more proximate relationship to the harm they did than the tobacco company executives.

Then we have the difference between the evil thought, the evil word and the evil deed. I think most people would admit to having, on occasion, thoughts of doing harm to some enemy, real or imagined. There is nothing inherently wrong with this, it seems to me. I know that I have a clear blue ocean between the occasional thoughts I have that may be described as ‘evil’ and the act of making these thoughts real through word or deed. I’m fairly sure that my filter is in place and robust.

This is just a quick, off the top of my head, list of things which may constitute some of the components of the abstract concept we invoke when we use the word evil. In its linguistic manifestation it can be an adjective or a noun. The adjective is linked to specific instances (an evil deed, an evil man etc.) but as a noun it is extremely abstract and belongs in the irrealis category.

For those of a more literary bent, let's have a look at what that keen observer of the human condition - Shakespeare - had to say.

This is from the bloodiest and most violent of the plays. Titus Andronicus.
The character Aaron has been apprehended and, rather than denying his crimes or being evasive, he positively revels in recounting his evil.

"Ay, that I had not done a thousand more.
Even now I curse the day—and yet, I think,
Few come within the compass of my curse,—
Wherein I did not some notorious ill,
As kill a man, or else devise his death,
Ravish a maid, or plot the way to do it,
Accuse some innocent and forswear myself,
Set deadly enmity between two friends,
Make poor men's cattle break their necks;
Set fire on barns and hay-stacks in the night,
And bid the owners quench them with their tears.
Oft have I digg'd up dead men from their graves,
And set them upright at their dear friends' doors,
Even when their sorrows almost were forgot;
And on their skins, as on the bark of trees,
Have with my knife carved in Roman letters,
'Let not your sorrow die, though I am dead.'
Tut, I have done a thousand dreadful things
As willingly as one would kill a fly,
And nothing grieves me heartily indeed
But that I cannot do ten thousand more."

"O, why should wrath be mute, and fury dumb?
I am no baby, I, that with base prayers
I should repent the evils I have done:
Ten thousand worse than ever yet I did
Would I perform, if I might have my will;
If one good deed in all my life I did,
I do repent it from my very soul."

Chief Engineer wrote:

scott1328 wrote:

Spearthrower wrote:Ok, I will expand dramatically rather than in pithy fun form

For me, values are a class of fundamental positions about the world...

- fundamental in the sense that they're not specifically defined statements on particular topics but work more like a general motivating stance preceding the consideration of arising topics; a heuristic resulting from biology, culture, personal experience etc.
- position meaning a perspective of the world, a sense of one's place both perceived and aspirational, specifically with reference to one's family, friends, nation, religion, society, culture or any other perceived community.

... that are quintessentially human.

(This doesn't mean that other animals - particularly social ones - don't have something similar operating that was honed over evolutionary time, and we too are also subject to similar deeply biological values - disgust and reactions to disgust makes for an interesting example seen throughout all human cultures but mammalians generally exhibit strikingly similar response patterns when witnessing a fellow expressing disgust.)

But rather, that humans are, insofar as we know, the only animal which holds a verbally defined mental map of the world which, with consequent imagination, intellectual consideration, moral reasoning etc., allows us to ratchet up consideration of values, such as through the pursuit of ethical philosophy, and in the traditions of many religions.

There are many actions that nearly all humans for nearly all of history have shared opinions of, for the most part. Cannibalism, for example, is nearly universally frowned upon, expect when it's not, but when it's not, it's generally for very specific cultural reasons which make it not an evil act in that specific moment under those specific conditions. Incest more likely has a biological basis (Westermarck effect) but still it became codified as bad nearly universally across all human cultures both in practice and eventually in law.

So values have many layers; they can be instinctive, they can be uncritically recapitulated expressions of one's family/society etc., they can be reasoned, developed and evolved over generations.

All they share is that it basically boils down to someone's feelies. Everyone has feelies. By and large people's feelies are important to them, and they really mean it when they say X is <value> - evil, for example.

A good example of this is looking at the American evangelical right's repeated accusations that 'abortion is evil' - they're not pretending to believe this, they're not doing this to milk lib tears (which has become a rather frequent motivation of the loony new far right), they genuinely consider it an unspeakable act of desecration they cannot bear to permit, the same way most people perhaps might feel about child abuse.

So values really don't have to make much sense, but they're... well... valued by people.

What then is evil? It's something intrinsically anti-social, something that offends the foundations of one's beliefs, something that cannot be witnessed and ignored, but must be publicly rejected in order to stake a position in the world, to say what should be and what shouldn't. A line in the sand.

But because we're a social species, at least partly the motivation is to signal to one's fellows that one is not like that! whether true or not. A web of social expectations, alliances and rivalries - human primates verbal grooming and seeking comfortingly similar grunts in return.

Evil is whatever you define evil is - that's what evil always has been, and what it always will be.

The universe doesn't possess the characteristic 'evil' independent of the human mind (expect possibly in the evolutionary stable strategies of social species) - when humanity dies, evil dies with us!

quoting this here because i don’t think proper regard has been given to ST’s post.

well-written, indeed.

Yes good post, It leaves me wondering if he feels humans should even bother considering evil, or by corollary any human activity, because it has no meaning outside ourselves. The Theist hypothesis that without a god, humans have no standard of good & evil. I believe we do, it comes from empathy, seeing ourselves in a situation.

I’m also impressed by Spearthrower’s post, I think perhaps the passing comment at the end about evolutionarily stable strategies gives an entry to a standard of good and evil which is at least not entirely random, nor based entirely on selfishness (the arguments of theists against atheism and evolution)? Humans are an evolved social species, and as Spearthrower points out, it’s characteristic of human societies to have verbally agreed values; so having values appears from that observation to be an evolutionarily stable strategy, one which enables individuals to maximise the number of their genes in later generations. At the same time, this looks odd, as evolution by natural selection might be expected to lead to selfishness or at best to altruism only directed to kin, while standards of good and evil, in all human societies, are typically about concern for others who are not necessarily kin.

I think there are two key points which make the evolution of human value systems understandable, even though they typically mandate concern for non-kin as well as kin:

1) Altruism towards kin is easily understood as an evolved adaptation; for example, many animals look after their own offspring. I think this is sometimes forgotten by theists who are keen to portray evolution as leading to nature red in tooth and claw. Humans are fairly typical mammals in showing altruism within their immediate families. Our cooperation would have evolved initially in groups of largely related individuals, as seen in our close relatives such as chimps.

2) Humans have a unique capacity for understanding other individuals, using our own brains as templates, this is often known as “Theory of Mind”, perhaps it can also be called “empathy”. We are unusually good at guessing what other individuals of our own species are likely to want. This is useful if we are trying to compete with those others, but it’s also very useful for getting the benefits of cooperating with them. Knowing what the other is likely to want, we can tailor a plan of action which will advantage us both, so the cooperation can go ahead without depending on wired-in altruism towards kin. This capacity to manage detailed, flexible cooperation to everyone’s individual advantage has enabled humans to out-compete other animals (until we blow ourselves up and leave the planet to the cockroaches).

Our capacity for empathy leads to our capacity for cooperating with non-kin, because understanding what other people are likely to want makes it possible to plan in a way that gives everyone a motivation to join in. At the same time, we remain competitive: the individuals who managed to get others on board while contributing less themselves (i.e. “cheats”) would be likely to leave more of their genes in the population. We’ve evolved to cooperate, but we’ve also evolved to be good at cheating, and then also to be good at identifying and ganging up on cheats. It’s at that stage, the ganging up on cheats, where I think human value systems are relevant? When a person is identified as having behaved in an “evil” manner, the rest of the group gang up on that person and, usually, quickly bring them back into line (or, occasionally, lock them up or throw them out or kill them.) We live with the threat of becoming pariahs, but we are also the ones who operate that threat, this helps to maintain the tight cooperation which enables one group to out-compete another?

Different human societies, as Spearthrower and don’t get me started both point out, often have the same core values, while their other values may be very different. The flexibility of this system enables humans to manage different environments successfully. The underlying reason for having rules or values in a society is to maintain cooperation by reducing the incidence of “cheating”, gaining individual unapproved advantage over others, while the exact rules will change with circumstances. While cigarettes are seen as harmless mood enhancers, manufacturing them is seen as good; when the evidence comes out that nicotine is an addictive killer, then the CEOs of cigarette manufacturing companies who try to hide that evidence and expand their markets are seen, as you say rightly, as not good.

None of this is to say that we “should” be moral, it’s rather an attempt to put human values as an observed phenomenon into the context of evolutionary inclusive fitness theory. Being part of a closely cooperating society, which includes our kin group but is considerably larger, usually helps our genes, and empathy with the individual members of that society enables us to manage that cooperation effectively?

Greg the Grouper wrote:I can understand to an extent with the tobacco industry, and its desire to cover up the harm its products do; however, when it comes to them selling something widely known to be harmful, I wouldn't call it an incorrigible thing to do myself, mostly because I feel uncomfortable legislating a person's ability to make bad decisions for themselves.

I'd imagine that such ire is better suited for fossil fuel companies, and their attempts to push an anti-climate change narrative for the sake of profit.

Still, to be honest, it seems to me that all of these examples revolve around profit at the expense of a consumer base, and I wouldn't expect any company regardless of its nature to simply give up on profit.

Maybe not a company but its employees xxx

Does evolutionary inclusive fitness theory apply to a bear rescuing a crow?
Link to video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gJ_3BN0m7S8

Republicans are fucking evil. And yes, I mean that in the supernatural sense. I mean, what other than demonic possession can explain these motherfuckers?

Seabass wrote:Republicans are fucking evil. And yes, I mean that in the supernatural sense. I mean, what other than demonic possession can explain these motherfuckers?

Don't get me wrong - I totally hear where you're coming from given the timing and the events - but...

A good example of this is looking at the American evangelical right's repeated accusations that 'abortion is evil' - they're not pretending to believe this, they're not doing this to milk lib tears (which has become a rather frequent motivation of the loony new far right), they genuinely consider it an unspeakable act of desecration they cannot bear to permit, the same way most people perhaps might feel about child abuse.

A significant portion of your fellow citizens also genuinely believe you are evil, or at the very least, unwittingly doing evil.

This is a cycle to break, not to join my friend!

False equivalence. That's like telling German Jews circa 1930s to don't be so mean to Nazis. Fuck that shit.

It's really not a false equivalence because I clearly was not talking about the content or quality of the respective beliefs, but rather what feelings it motivates in people - that's where the parity is. And there is parity in that respect - or do you dispute that many/most anti-abortion advocates genuinely believe that abortion is evil?

Also, you've outright misread what I said: I didn't say 'don't be mean to Nazis' - I said 'don't partake in the same blinding binary stupidity'. The majority of Republicans (some 35 million people) are not evil in any consideration of the word. To defeat this march towards totalitarianism, it's those Republicans that need to be convinced, not demonized.

Some Nazis were nice people, but they were still Nazis.
Not all Nazis wanted to liquidate the Jews. But they were still Nazis.
Some Nazis were sweet little old ladies who liked to bake cookies for their grandkids. But they were still Nazis.

Fuck 'em. Fuck ALL OF THEM, and FUCK ALL REPUBLICANS TOO.

If you remain with a party after it has turned fascist, you get no sympathy from me.