New category: Extremier than Extreme

[ by Charles Cameron — possibly simple-minded, but offered to our mentor JM Berger — includes a horseshoe & a neat paradox, too ]

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Today’s example:

GOP Senate candidate that Trump called to vote against claims he's "Trumpier than Trump" https://t.co/DY3vahzOQn pic.twitter.com/z1URpZp0j9

— The Hill (@thehill) May 7, 2018

Trumpier than Trump. Okay..

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Let’s generalize from here, and diagam this:

Extremier than the Extreme.

This isn’t the first time I’ve seen this. I’m pretty sure ISIS was AQier than AQ in the day, and that even earlier, there was a splinter group within AQ that was “more extrem”. Might have been Zarqawi, in which case our two examples collapse into one..

“Extremier than the Extreme” — within its own extreme context, it can be one helluva claim to make!

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While we’re on the subject..

There’s also the oft-noted Horseshoe effect, whereby opposite expremes come to resemble one another:

This one, Revolutionary > Dictator > Dictator is well known because of the frequency with which Revolutionaries come to resemble the Dictators they overthrew.

A concatenation of horseshoes of this sort would give you Revolution > Dictatorship > Dictatorship > Dictatorship ad nauseam, with a Dictatorship currently in power, and a Revolution constantly brewing.

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Oh, and by the way, an intriguing paradox: