More seriously, though, do you have any examples that aren’t based on the instinct-to-punish(reality, facts, people,...) that I ranted about in Curse of the Counterfactual? If they all fall in this category, one could call it an Argument With Reality, which is Byron Katie’s term for it. (You could also call it, “The Principle of the Thing”, an older and more colloquial term for people privileging the idea of a thing over the substance of the thing, usually to an irrational extent.)
When people are having an Argument With Reality, they:
Go for approaches that impose costs on some target(s), in preference to ones that are of benefit to anyone
Refuse to acknowledge other points of view except for how it proves those holding them to be the Bad Wrong Enemies
Double down as long as reality refuses to conform or insufficient Punishment has occurred (defined as the Bad Wrong Enemies surrendering and submitting or at least showing sufficiently-costly signals to that effect)
A lot of public policy is driven this way; Wars on Abstract Nouns are always more popular than rehabiliation, prevention, and other benefit-oriented policies, which will be denigrated as being too Soft On Abstract Nouns. (This also applies of course to non-governmental public policies, with much the same incentives for anybody in the public view to avoid becoming considered one of the Bad Wrong Enemies.)
“The Human Condition”? ;-)
More seriously, though, do you have any examples that aren’t based on the instinct-to-punish(reality, facts, people,...) that I ranted about in Curse of the Counterfactual? If they all fall in this category, one could call it an Argument With Reality, which is Byron Katie’s term for it. (You could also call it, “The Principle of the Thing”, an older and more colloquial term for people privileging the idea of a thing over the substance of the thing, usually to an irrational extent.)
When people are having an Argument With Reality, they:
Go for approaches that impose costs on some target(s), in preference to ones that are of benefit to anyone
Refuse to acknowledge other points of view except for how it proves those holding them to be the Bad Wrong Enemies
Double down as long as reality refuses to conform or insufficient Punishment has occurred (defined as the Bad Wrong Enemies surrendering and submitting or at least showing sufficiently-costly signals to that effect)
A lot of public policy is driven this way; Wars on Abstract Nouns are always more popular than rehabiliation, prevention, and other benefit-oriented policies, which will be denigrated as being too Soft On Abstract Nouns. (This also applies of course to non-governmental public policies, with much the same incentives for anybody in the public view to avoid becoming considered one of the Bad Wrong Enemies.)