Trump and Putin babushkas

 You said:

There are two general categories of unfair debate -- what is called propaganda, and, of course, logical fallacies. It occurs to me that people don't seem to know how to recognize these. There are web sites that can be found in any search to help. Basically, propaganda uses non-rational, emotional appeal. This is often negative (name-calling, talking down to people, personal insults, attacking the person and their history rather than what they say, dismissive labeling, and others). They can also be positive (patriotic symbols and music, religious appeals, quotes of famous people, and others). Far and away the most effective form of propaganda is the lie -- disinformation -- invented stuff repeated over and over and made to appear legit. To defend oneself from this sort of thing requires identifying sources of misinformation by being widely read over a broad political spectrum. One other form of propaganda is "bandwagon," where a partisan group gang up on individuals who have other views. It does not work, folks, except for those worried overmuch about what others think.

ChatGPT said:

You’re putting your finger on something real, and also on something that’s oddly under-taught given how central it is to civic life.

One small tightening that may help: propaganda and logical fallacies overlap more than people think. Propaganda is best understood as a mode of persuasion—it aims at shaping attitudes or behavior without regard to the truth value of the claims—while logical fallacies are errors of reasoning. Many propaganda techniques work precisely because they smuggle fallacies in under an emotional cover. Ad hominem attacks, appeals to authority, bandwagon effects, and false dilemmas are all classic examples that can be cataloged either way, depending on whether you’re analyzing intent or structure.

Your emphasis on non-rational emotional appeal is exactly right, but I’d add that propaganda doesn’t bypass reason so much as short-circuit it. It gives the listener just enough cognitive scaffolding—slogans, labels, familiar symbols—to feel that reasoning has occurred. That’s why repetition is so powerful. The “illusory truth effect” is not a moral failing; it’s a cognitive bias. Repeated statements are processed more fluently, and fluency is unconsciously mistaken for truth.

On disinformation, your prescription—wide reading across a broad political spectrum—is sound but incomplete. Breadth helps detect inconsistencies, but it must be paired with some sense of epistemic hygiene: Who has incentives to lie? What would count as disconfirming evidence? Is the claim testable, or is it conveniently vague? Otherwise one simply becomes widely exposed rather than well informed. There’s a difference between pluralism and noise.

Your dismissal of the bandwagon technique is mostly justified, but with a caveat. It does very little to persuade people who already have settled views and decent self-confidence. Where it does work is on the undecided, the socially anxious, and—crucially—on those who fear ostracism more than error. In other words, it’s less an argument than a social threat. Its effectiveness depends entirely on the cost of dissent in a given environment.

The deeper problem, I think, is that many people don’t see debate as a cooperative search for truth at all. They see it as status competition or tribal defense. In that context, propaganda isn’t unfair; it’s perfectly suited to the game being played. Teaching people to recognize fallacies and propaganda helps, but only if they also want to play a different game.

You said:

Distinguishing propaganda from logical fallacy is useful pedagogically. The reality as you say is the most propaganda uses fallacies all the time. I didn't mean to imply that they are never used together. Indeed, being able to identify fallacies is helpful in identifying propaganda. You say to identify who has incentives to lie? Well, unfortunately, we all do, and the most rational, unemotional, understated speakers can be lying through their teeth. I suppose there are those who surrender when ganged up on, if for no other reason than to escape. I don't think they are really persuaded, at least for long, as quite soon they are going to mull it over in the quiet of the night and realize what happened.

ChatGPT said:

Yes—this is a good clarification, and I think you’re right to insist on it.

On incentives to lie: I agree with your pushback. Everyone has incentives to mislead at times, including calm, technically competent, and apparently disinterested speakers. In fact, understatement and composure can be powerful camouflage. That’s why “follow the incentives” works better as a first-pass suspicion filter than as a truth detector. It tells you where to slow down and check, not where truth automatically fails. A liar who understands this can deliberately present as modest, balanced, and emotionally neutral—precisely because people associate those traits with honesty.

That points to something more reliable than tone or motive: constraint. Truth-tellers are constrained by reality. Their claims tend to interlock with independent facts, survive paraphrase, generate risky predictions, and remain coherent when pressed from odd angles. Skilled liars can fake this locally, but it’s hard to sustain globally and over time. This is one reason why propaganda prefers slogans and repetition to detailed causal stories.

Your point about surrender under pressure is well taken. Social ganging-up rarely produces genuine belief change. What it produces is compliance, silence, or strategic withdrawal. The later “quiet of the night” reconsideration you mention is real; cognitive dissonance doesn’t disappear just because someone nodded to escape discomfort. In fact, forced conformity often hardens private beliefs, even if public expression temporarily disappears.

That suggests a useful diagnostic distinction:

• Persuasion changes what someone thinks when they are alone.

• Coercive consensus changes what someone says when others are present.

Bandwagon tactics aim almost entirely at the second. They’re about controlling the visible surface of opinion, not its interior structure. Which is why they feel so hollow once the noise dies down.

Pedagogically, then, I’d frame it this way: learning fallacies trains people to examine arguments; learning propaganda trains them to examine contexts. Both are necessary, and neither is sufficient alone. The tragedy is that most people are taught neither—and are then blamed for being “irrational” when, in fact, they were simply untrained.

You said:

We all have a certain mental process I've always called a reality check, although now the trend is to call it Bayesian. We have certain opinions we are pretty damn sure of, others we are more persuadable on, and so on. When I'm told a bicycler was seen, well, fine, there was a guy out there riding a bicycle; when I'm told he had two heads, well, some evidence beyond this report is going to be needed.

ChatGPT said:

Exactly. That’s a very clean way of putting it, and “reality check” is honestly a better name than “Bayesian” for most people. The math is just a formalization of something humans were doing long before anyone wrote down Bayes’ theorem.

What you’re describing is prior plausibility. Claims don’t arrive in our minds as blank slates; they arrive weighted. “A bicyclist was seen” fits comfortably into a dense web of prior experience, so it requires almost no evidenti support. “The bicyclist had two heads” collides violently with that web, so the evidenti bar shoots way up. That’s not closed-mindedness; it’s rational economy. If we treated every claim as equally likely, we’d be paralyzed.

This is also why propaganda so often works by lowering the apparent cost of accepting an implausible claim. It doesn’t usually start with “the man had two heads.” It starts with vaguer things: something strange, people are saying, experts disagree, you can’t trust what you’ve been told. Each step nudges the prior a little, until what would once have seemed absurd now feels merely controversial.

There’s another important asymmetry here: it is much easier to damage a reality check than to build one. Trust, once eroded, doesn’t come back symmetrically. If you convince someone that all sources are suspect, you don’t have to persuade them of any particular falsehood—they’ll do the rest themselves, filling the vacuum with whatever story feels emotionally coherent.

Your bicyclist example also highlights something people miss: disbelief isn’t binary. You’re not saying “impossible”; you’re saying “extraordinary claim, therefore extraordinary evidence.” That’s a sliding scale, not a wall. Good reasoning lives on that slope.

And this loops back to fallacies and propaganda: both try to smuggle a two-headed bicyclist past the guard at the gate by distracting him, rushing him, or convincing him that guards are elitist in the first place. The healthiest mind isn’t skeptical of everything; it’s skeptical in proportion.

You said:

Guns should be generally allowed, just as we generally allow cars. They both kill people.

ChatGPT said:

That analogy is rhetorically powerful, but it only works if we’re careful about which similarities matter—and which don’t.

At a very high level, you’re right: both guns and cars are ordinary artifacts that can and do kill people, often unintentionally, and society tolerates that risk because each serves widely valued purposes. From that angle, “they both kill people” functions as a reality check against moral panic. We already live with managed lethal risk.

Where the analogy strains is in design intent and use pattern. Cars are engineered primarily for transportation; lethality is a by-product of mass, speed, and error. Guns are engineered to deliver lethal force efficiently; harm is not an accident of function but the function itself, even when used lawfully (e.g., hunting, pest control, self-defense). That difference matters when thinking about regulation, because it changes what counts as “misuse.”

It also affects how regulation evolved. Cars are licensed, registered, insured, and restricted in where and how they’re used—not because they’re morally suspect, but because risk scales with access and context. When people say “treat guns like cars,” the serious version of that argument usually implies accepting analogous structures: training, competency standards, liability, and constraints on use, not laissez-faire access.

There’s another asymmetry worth noting. Cars are embedded in dense systems—roads, traffic law, enforcement, accident investigation—that continuously generate feedback and correction. Firearms policy is far more fragmented, which makes outcomes noisier and harder to evaluate. That doesn’t argue for prohibition, but it does argue against pretending that “allowed” means “unregulated.”

So I’d say this: the comparison is useful as a starting point, not as a conclusion. It successfully punctures the idea that risk alone justifies blanket bans. It does not by itself settle how permissive access should be, or what safeguards are rational. Those questions live downstream of purpose, context, and system design—not just body counts.

You said:

I would call it the "what about" fallacy. The cliché is that two wrongs don't make a right.

ChatGPT said:

Yes—and that’s exactly the right name for it in ordinary language. “What about” is just the conversational form of tu quoque, one of the oldest fallacies in the book.

Logically, it works by changing the subject from Is this claim true or this policy justified? to Are you being consistent or morally pure? The move feels relevant because hypocrisy is emotionally salient, but it doesn’t touch the truth of the original claim at all. Even a hypocrite can be right; even a saint can be wrong.

Your “two wrongs don’t make a right” point gets at the core mistake. The existence of another harm does not justify this one, nor does it refute arguments about it. Saying “cars kill people too” does nothing, by itself, to establish that gun policy X is wise or unwise. At best, it invites a separate analysis of comparative risk and benefit. At worst, it’s a distraction designed to stall judgment.

There’s a subtle but important distinction here. Sometimes a “what about” is a legitimate request for consistency—for example, when two cases are genuinely analogous and governed by the same principles. But the burden is then on the speaker to show that the principles really are the same, not merely that the outcomes are similarly bad. Most whataboutism stops short of that work.

Which brings us back to your earlier theme: propaganda thrives on these shortcuts. “What about” arguments are attractive because they feel like fairness while actually bypassing reasoning. They offer the relief of indignation without the cost of analysis.

In a serious debate, the proper response to a whatabout is calm and surgical: “That may be worth discussing separately, but it doesn’t answer the question at hand.” Once you say that, the spell usually breaks.

You said:

Well, fallacies are common, but flat-out lies and name-calling seem to be the more common. Trump for a while was famous for tagging his critics with unflattering nicknames. He seems to have cooled that a bit, I wonder why?

ChatGPT said:

Name-calling is cruder than fallacy, but often more effective, because it bypasses reasoning entirely and goes straight for social identity. Trump understood that instinctively. The nicknames weren’t arguments; they were handles—cheap, repeatable labels that pre-framed how supporters processed later information.

As for why it appears to have cooled, there are several non-exclusive, fairly mundane explanations—none of them psychological conversions.

One is strategic maturity. The nicknames were most useful when he was an insurgent figure fighting for attention and dominance in a crowded media space. Once a persona is established, novelty yields diminishing returns. Repeating the same tactic eventually stops energizing supporters and starts fatiguing them, while giving opponents easy talking points.

Another is legal and institutional constraint. Defamation exposure, ongoing litigation, and closer scrutiny by courts and regulators make personalized attacks riskier than they once were. Advisors tend to rein in language when it can plausibly be cited in filings or judgments. Even a politician with high tolerance for risk will adjust when the cost curve steepens.

A third factor is platform and channel changes. As communication has shifted away from the free-for-all of early Twitter toward more moderated or controlled outlets, the incentives have changed. Short, viral insults thrive in certain media ecosystems and wilt in others.

Finally, there’s audience evolution. Once supporters are consolidated, reinforcement works better than attack. At that stage, grievance narratives, selective victimhood, and broad delegitimization of institutions can replace personal mockery. It’s a move from schoolyard insult to sermon—not more rational, just differently packaged.

So I wouldn’t read the cooling as a moral awakening. It’s better understood as tactical adaptation. Name-calling is a tool; when conditions change, effective operators switch tools. The underlying mode—emotional framing over argument—remains the same.

You said:

I have recently seen a series of technologically excellent YouTube shorts portraying Trump and Putin dancing or in other situations. The worst of them has them dressed as standard Russian Babushkas, dancing. This is ridicule to make the point, not particularly true, that they sing the same song.

ChatGPT said:

Yes—that’s a good example of ridicule-as-argument, and it sits in an interesting gray zone.

Those videos aren’t trying to persuade by evidence or even by explicit claims. They work by aesthetic association: rhythm, visual competence, humor, and mild transgression combine to produce an emotional “click.” Once the image lodges—Trump and Putin moving in sync, or worse, in exaggerated caricature—the viewer is nudged toward the conclusion “they’re essentially the same” without that proposition ever being argued.

From a logical standpoint, it’s weak. Shared traits, overlapping rhetoric, or even parallel interests do not imply identity of motive, policy, or allegiance. The babushka imagery in particular adds a layer of cultural mockery, which substitutes humiliation for explanation. That’s not analysis; it’s social signaling.

But as propaganda, it’s quite effective—especially in short-form video. Humor lowers defenses. High production values confer legitimacy. And because it’s “just a joke,” it gains plausible deniability: critics are framed as humorless or defensive rather than as disputing a claim.

What makes this kind of ridicule worth calling out is that it feels cleaner than name-calling while doing much the same work. Instead of “Crooked X,” you get “look at these two clowns dancing together.” The viewer supplies the moral judgment themselves, which makes it stickier and harder to challenge without seeming pedantic.

Your phrase “sing the same song” is telling. That might be a serious hypothesis—about authoritarian style, contempt for institutions, or transactional politics—but the videos don’t argue it. They replace the hypothesis with an image that collapses distinction. Once that happens, nuance is lost, and the audience is trained to sneer rather than to compare.

So yes: it’s ridicule making a point by implication, not by truth-testing. Cleaner than a lie, cruder than an argument, and very much of our moment.

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