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Then the question becomes whether you reject it as an absurd non sequitur or if you actually think about what kind of circumstances would lead to someone genuinely making such a claim.
And really, is this a posture that's applied consistently? I can't imagine that, when an alt-right person says something nuts about men being oppressed, your first thought is "that statement is so extreme that they wouldn't have made it without a good reason."
The reason I brought up the GOP's plan to repeal the ACA (even though they were having trouble agreeing on a suitable replacement plan) is because that is a government policy where the consequences will negatively affect certain demographics. The major concern with getting rid of it completely is that preventing people from being able to access health care would ultimately lead to people being unable to get better from illnesses and eventually dying. If a person dies because government legislature prevents them from being cured, does that not mean that the state is indirectly responsible for their death? It may not involve death squads straight-up murdering people on explicitly religious grounds, but does that mean the deaths that do happen are automatically more acceptable?
But there are other major problems with the comparison even if you leave the moral distinctions out entirely:
1) If you're going to treat anything the government does that might even lead indirectly to death as if it were akin to a war crime (!), then any significant government policy is going to qualify, particularly anything affecting health care. There's no way to upend an industry of that size without this happening, and that includes the enactment of the ACA. You don't think anyone who saw their premiums skyrocket had to drop insurance as a result, and got sick, or will?So if you want to adopt this kind of ripple-effect standard, you can, but you can't pick just the bad second-order effects and ignore the good ones. Granted, you may not believe these second-order effects will bear out (though I think the preponderance of evidence clearly suggests at least some of them will), but at that point you'd no longer be arguing from a shared premise about how they're "killing" people and don't care. You'd simply have a difference of opinion about what produces better overall care in the long-term.
2) If undoing this kind of policy is the same as killing anyone relying on it, then you'd be unable to avoid the inverse implication that instituting the policy is akin to hostage-taking.
3) If you want to venture into the murky, speculative world of second-order consequences, cool, but you have to consider all of them. If subsidizing insurance less is "killing" people, then it would logically follow that spurring medical innovation would be "saving" people. Ditto any policy that makes it easier to provide high-end care, since the dearth of such care is a hallmark of virtually every socialized health care system the world over.
All I'm saying is that maybe there's a reason people are concerned enough to make such an extreme comparison.
They're both ideologically driven movements that have an invested interest in amassing political power, though I'll concede there are differences between the two and that the practical enforcement of one ideology can be more readily observed than with the other (though who knows how much that'll change with Steve Bannon of all people as chief White House strategist).
As for whether or not I should take Steel's concern at face value, I think that is admittedly the result of spending so long on the defensive and being unable to tell at a glance whether a question is coming from a place of genuine interest or actually does have an ulterior motive (as with aforementioned "concern trolls", which I've spent far too much time dealing with on here alone).
He may not even be a Trump supporter.
