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Dolores1984 comments on Jews and Nazis: a version of dust specks vs torture - Less Wrong
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Not strictly. It's still explicitly genocide with Venusians and Neptunians -- it's just easier to ignore that fact in the abstract. Connecting it to an actual genocide causes people to reference their existing thinking on the subject. Whether or not that existing thinking is applicable is open for debate, but the tactic's not invalid out of hand.
The supposed positive (making the genocide easier to imagine) is however outweighed by a big negative of the connotations brought by the choice of terminology. It was certainly not true about the Nazis that their hatred towards the Jews was an immutable terminal value and the "known to be in general quite rational" part is also problematic. Of course we shouldn't fight the hippo, but it is hard to separate the label "Nazi" from its real meaning.
As a result, the replies to this post are going to be affected by three considerations: 1) the commenters' stance towards the speck/torture problem, 2) their ability to accept the terms of a hypothetical while ignoring most connotations of used terminology, and 3) their courage to say something which may be interpreted as support for Nazism by casual readers. Which makes the post pretty bad as a thought experiment supposed to inquire only the first question.
I suppose that's fair. I do think that trying to abstract away the horror of genocide is probably not conducive to a good analysis, either, but there may be an approach better suited to this that does not invoke as much baggage.