True-enough logic treats hostile intent and capacity as adequate support

Evidence

It might have been that Obama’s FBI tapped Trump’s phones, as Trump claimed. And if it might have been, that’s true enough—even without evidence to support the charge. For those who think it’s true enough, what matters is that the hostile intent and capacity to commit the subterfuge were there. The logic of “true enough” breathes life into the new conspiracism as it corrodes standards of verification and validation. Consider the response to questions about Trump’s tweet of a video that falsely purported to show a Muslim migrant committing an assault: the White House press secretary responded, “Whether it’s a real video, the threat is real.” Because the world is one in which the claim could have been true, it is true enough. — Russell Muirhead and Nancy L. Rosenblum, A Lot of People Are Saying, 124

Categorization

• CANDY: The press secretary’s line ‘Whether it’s a real video, the threat is real’ is a compact, quotable instance of the whole theory.
• XREF: connects to: Failure to denounce violence equates to ideological support for it in security logic; Perceived outgroup power plus malice lets mass murder self-justify as self-defense — , Rudman, Laurie A - On the Nature of…, 1587; Power-imbalance and equivalence justifications are self-contradictory yet function together to excuse killing — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement: How People Do Harm…, 2238

Broader Connections

• Perceived outgroup power plus malice lets mass murder self-justify as self-defense #exemplifies (0.90) — , Rudman, Laurie A - On the Nature of…, 1587
• Power-imbalance and equivalence justifications are self-contradictory yet function together to excuse killing #exemplifies (0.85) — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement, 2238
• Failure to denounce violence equates to ideological support for it in security logic #complicates (0.70)