Educating people about Biological Realism. In my personal experience, when people fully understand population dynamics, they tend to be more supportive of Georgism. This is because there is a surprisingly coherent and interesting Connection between Georgism and Population Control, since both concepts aim to conserve resources and deal with natural resources that exist in fixed supply.
Here you are proposing to take a simple and straightforward idea of Georgism that people from all across the political spectrum can agree on, and explain it through the complexity and controversy of “Biological Realism”. This seems to be one of the worst moves possible if you want to get Georgism back into mainstream.
This is the same intellectual sin as with longtermism—explaining a idea using a premise, which is much more convoluted than the idea itself. But also with terrible political implications, alienating a lot of potential supporters.
Feel free to promote Georgism among supporters of “Biological Realism”, of course, but I don’t think you should frame it as a general strategy for making Georgism more popular, or subscription to BR as a prerequisite for Georgism. Currently there is a lot of common ground with people all across the political spectrum and we should use all of it.
You literally put “Educating people about biological realizm” in the “Ideas For Re-Popularizing Georgism”. What else can you mean by this strategy if not spreading the ideas of BR and then build upon them to spread the ideas of Georgism?
It’s at least not obvious, considering that you seen to disagree with George himself about population dynamics. But regardless of whether the objective point is true or not, there are a lot of different things that make people support Georgism—it has intersections with all kind of views across the political spectrum. However, instead of making a general point to take advantage of this versatility, and sell Georgism to different groups of people appealing to different talking points which this particular group would be more likely to be influenced by, you specifically talk about a niche view such as BR.
So this seems to be the actual reason why you single out BR like this. Not because it’s actually going to make Georgism more popular, but because you like both of them, you see their connections and you want to spread both of their memes.
Again, there is nothing wrong in wanting to spread multiple memplexes at once, the problem is when you delude yourself and others into thinking that spreading one is a great strategy of spreading the other.
I absolutely sympatize with the last sentence. But whether something is a fallacy or not is irrelevant when we are specifically talking about popularity. Without public appeal Georgism is not going to be popular. And if the public is vulnerable to fallacies, then we should be concerned with them.
If you think BR is so important that burning reputation of Georgism to promote BR is worth it, then please frame it like that instead of misleading people that promoting BR is net good for popularity of Georgism.