>> ^imstellar28:
I do not enjoy nonfiction which requires faith, because the claims are so intellectually impotent they do not arouse in me any desire to see what the author has to say next. I can force myself through the 11 pages of 10th-grade-level writing from an online pundit such as Kangas, but why should I when the question has already been forcefully answered almost 82 years ago in 224 pages of masterful prose by a genius in the field?
I mean, here are both authors answering the same question:
http://mises.org/liberal/isec1.asp
http://www.huppi.com/kangaroo/ShortFAQ.htm#liberalism
Just compare the force of writing for yourself.


Nonfiction which requires faith? Neither of those links employ science. They are both intellectual claims, one much more thorough than the other. You can argue in favour of one or the other but don't stand there dismissing one because of "faith".

As an example, in section 2-4, it says:

"It is a matter of common knowledge that national and municipal enterprises have, on the hole, failed, that they are expensive and inefficient, and that they have to be subsidized out of tax funds just to maintain themselves in operation."

Where is this claim backed up? In fact, I'll make the claim nationalised healthcare is highly successful. Take the WHO's World Health Report 2000. Overall rankings are at about page 200.

I know the Mises piece was written in 1927 and it shows. Pages 90-95 detail the argument that monopolies are of no concern, that they are undamaging and can't ultimately manifest. He makes the argument (note: argument) that this holds as long as there is no monopoly on land or a resource. I can say the same thing you did about this raising many more questions. What about entry barriers to the market? The desktop OS market has a huge entry barrier - with Windows with the vast majority of the market share it makes it incredibly difficult to promote your own OS, not because your product isn't as good itself but because the usefulness of your product depends on how much market share it has.

What about situations where there is a high up-front cost like running a cable to a house, but running a larger cable costs a tiny fraction more? With private ownership of the cable, the only way for competition to exist is if they run another cable with that high up-front cost. For x competitors you need to run x cables when simply one large cable could perform the task at a fraction of the cost. This is why you see ISPs subsidised for laying a cable and then regulation forcing the renting out of it to other ISPs, or total unbundling, or other schemes involving last-mile broadband.

Those were just as quick examples. There are dozens of ways in which reality breaks things. There is no general case for the economy.

Thus, my point being, the large text is just another argument. It it not definitive, it is not empirical, it should be shrouded in discussion like everything else. If you regard the two earlier linked writings as arguing from different fundamental bases then you are employing a double standard.

And don't even start implying force of writing and eloquence means a better argument. It just means it's a better read.

Regarding the specific issues brought up, those were examples. What has been discussed about them here is a drop in the ocean.

This is why we humans fail so much. "...any evidence I could have gotten to prove death of hypothermia is out the window."

Talk about confirmation bias.

What an idiot. This guy decided long before the autopsy what the cause of death was. The autopsy, the best method by far of establishing unknown death, says uterine toxity from death of kittens? Too bad, there's no changing his mind now. Intuition and cognitive bias "triumphs" yet again. Intuition says cold = hypothermia. How about after any cause of death metabolism stops and the body cools to its surroundings? How about looking at all explanations objectively?

Depressing. Now Joe Average will watch this and think automatically the airline must have "done" something to the cat and pay no attention to the actual vet's diagnosis.

What's the big deal with a video like this? Its purpose is clearly not to showcase death but to show an actual event, a train accident. Why is no attention paid to context? This video is not about death at all...

>> ^imstellar28:
^If you want to argue that a spider has 4 legs, we might as well bust out the bibles and start quoting revelations.


His point is that under strict definition pretty much anything is socialism. And you're the one insisting on this strict definition being used. It's a problem of langauge and arguing semantics at the surface of a debate is meaningless.

And it's funny that pennypacker brings up:

>> ^Winstonfield_Pennypacker:
...saying that it isn't REALLY 'socialism' because the government is not completely 100% the owner of the business itself

The system "capitalists" endorse is certainly greater than 0% socialised. What you've been using for years is much greater than 0%. Does that make it socialism and the people behind it socialist?

Clearly a false dichotomy.

It's more of a spectrum from one side to the other... but still reality is much more complex than that - the two concepts are only even rough opposites. Debating in these simple terms of calling stuff/people socialist with shallow context is meaningless.

Imstellar, you are calling "weak evidence" faith. A birth certificate is evidence. How strong is a matter of debate. It is a physical observeration you make when you see a birth certificate. And since birth certificates tend to be created at someone's birth (another physical observation), then seeing a birth certificate (in a typical context) implies someone was born. Faith would be believing someone was or was not born despite seeing any number or lack of birth certificates. Faith is explicitly believing for the sake of believing. As soon as reality influences your belief it is not faith.

Anyway, we have two models here of what happened. As scientists we simply have to see which model fits reality best - ie, which appears most likely.

So, what is more likely:

- The personal testimony was truthful, and
- He was able to get by checks going back into the country, and
- Was then able to circumvent registration and get a birth certificate saying he was born inside that hospital

OR

- The personal testimony was simply made-up or a misunderstanding


Come on, this is anecdotal evidence (the worst kind) against physical documentation. Of course you can't know 100% either way, but like in all of science, what is the likelihood of one compared to the other? What we have available is certainly not rigorous, but that just means we can't get that much closer to being certain, not that it's automatically 50/50 (a fallacy in its own, anyway).

Documents can be falsified but anecdotes are worthless.

>> ^Krupo:
Hahaha - class warfare - "no no, don't tax me more, I'm rich and want to keep my money."
Can't blame him for being that way, but still...


I'm not sure he was actually against it, it just seemed he was saying it wouldn't solve the crisis. Taxing more in that bracket would be for general economic efficiency in the long run, not solving the large problems.

>> ^imstellar28:
I'm not refuting anything, I'm asking a question: please provide evidence supporting the consensus. I have yet to ever receive an answer. You and others are making a claim here "Alan Keyes is insane" yet nobody has provided a single reason for this. I'm not making any claims here, I'm asking a question!
Again, if this man's claims are insane the evidence should by definition be readily available--why has nobody provided it, especially if I said I will watch your entire personal queue?


People said he was insane colloquially, probably because of several of his views being percieved as far from reality. I don't think anyone here is really saying he his clinically insane, despite a couple comparisons being drawn.

The main problems I believe include him calling Obama a "radical socialist", which we've gone over already. That appraisal is waaay off. He takes it to the extreme like some of his other points, like Obama somehow single-handedly destroying the USA. He spins the infanticide thing like crazy, removing all context whatsoever and turning it into something like "Obama supports killing babies", literally inferring that's his general stance. Like it applies to every baby, like he personally wants them dead. Again, way off reality.

And the Obama not actually being president thing? Wow. He says it isn't a laughing matter. It is. The level of fact-ignoring is worse than creationism.

1. These accusations have been rebutted time and time again, yet they keep repeating the same old arguments. For example: "He refused to show his documents!" comes up EVERY SINGLE TIME. At one point during his campaign this came up. Later on he provided the documents. They're on the web even. Anyone can see his birth certificate. But, no, it keeps getting repeated as a "reason" and "evidence". Let's keep calling this orange a banana over and over and over and...

2. It's on technicalities anyway. Blindly trying to apply law without regard to it's original intent. Even if some obscure law changed his status, why would it even matter? With a straight face can you make the argument that a word in our language determined by arbitrary law is more important than evaluating the situation itself? You know, how a judge would? To determine whether one is qualified would you not look at the evidence and use reason?

I'm sure there's more I'm forgetting that he said. His appraisals of reality are simply in the extreme, presented as black and white issues, with no context.

This is why he is being colloquially labelled as crazy... just because he's "on the same side" as others who make rational arguments against, say, economic stimulation, doesn't mean HIS arguments or he himself is rational.

imstellar, this is a problem of definition. What, exactly, makes someone a "socialist"? Some people are working from the description of supporting any further amount of nationalization no matter how small, some people are working from thoroughly supporting it all the way to communism.

So, socialist compared to what? Here in Europe, Obama would be right-wing with the rest of the US political system. I would argue that with the current general usage of the word socialist, Obama is not. Perhaps "more socialist" compared to other people (if you want to put it in non-useful terms like that) but certainly not *a* socialist.

Anyway, how is that simple trait important without context anyway? It depends *what* you want to nationalise. There are things the free market simply doesn't do as well - there are 100 different scenarios in game theory which turn the perfect market into a complete mess. That is reality; we need to be pragmatic, not idealogical.

>> ^Flood:
Does this guy think people shouldn't be allowed to take risks with their own money?
Capitalism is working as intended. This economic crisis is the result of a lot of people (directly or indirectly) making a lot of risky choices, and in many cases just plain stupid choices because they had no idea what the risk was.
That's not to say we couldn't improve on things. A "Negative Income Tax" system would be nice for example.


Systemic risk.

The problem is, it's not just yourself you put at risk, but others, depending on your actions. The failure of a single bank because they were too risky with their money hurts the rest of the financial system because of interdependencies, etc. The damage this does to everyone else is not taken into account when calculating your own risk with your own money.

Sorry for the wall of text, but it's split up - just three individual rebuttals(mostly). Three posts in one maybe? 1 is about potential life, 2 is our screwed up scale and the attacks made utilising the opponent's uncertainty and 3 is the broken terminology being used to implicitly argue.

If just one person is better off for reading just one of these points I'll be happy

Ok, some argument flaws to point out which I see have seen largely unaddressed so far:

1. Argument for potential life (I think thepinky used this one, as well as others). Left alone in its unique environment x will become y; z will not. This is pure inaction bias. The absence of taking action is an action itself. When making a choice, either doing something or not bestows the exact same responsibility given a neutral context. In real social situations, there are other actors which may have brought about a situation, etc, so it's a bit more complex there.

Basically, leaving a fertilised egg in place and removing it are both positive actions. You cannot say that there is potential life because of "what would have happened". This is also countered by pretty much any cell in the body being able to become an individual human being. From skin cells you scratch off to millions of sperm to eggs, they are all potential human beings. This is usually "countered" by saying it is innate potential, not just potential. That is the no true scottsman fallacy. It also stems from inaction bias.

What are the consequences? Whatever scale you use to rate or determine if something counts as a person you must apply it objectively to both the fertilised egg and everything else. Just prepare for cognitive dissonance, however, since when rating a fertilised egg's level of consciousness or personhood generally a sperm of unfertilised egg is pretty much rates exactly the same.

2. Which leads us to point two. The scale we try to make to classify varying levels of devlopment is completely messed up. This would be a scientific problem if only science were actually in the position to answer our questions to a degree of confidence. Nobody knows what constitutes consciousness or the nature of it. At the moment our most informed observations say that brains are conscious. We don't know how, why, if consciousness is anything but an illusion, if it is specific to brains (or things like brains), if it is physical, the nature of existence and so on!

The passive argument "Look at all these unasnwered questions in your reasoning! If you're more wrong, we're more right." is silly. It just makes that argument more "wrong"; your own retains however much wrongness it had!

Also, the absence of unanswered questions does not make a good argument. Wanna see me answer all questions in existence? God did it. There! No, you build a model and apply it to reality. The better it fits, the better the model. I heard things brought up like why do dogs and pigs not have more rights than human fetuses then? Good question. Our scale is messed up, but we at a species are trying. We can hope to eventually have these things sorted, if at all physically possible for us.

3. Being hung up on the term "human life" or similar. Arguing in a biological sense about whether a fertilised egg (or sperm, or egg) is "human" or not, is classed as part of the human species or other definition.

The problem is people stop at that definition. For example, "From a fertilised egg to birth to death it is always a human being, for such and such sound reasoning, therefor they have the interests of a person." In the case of being a human as in part of this species, you have to remember species is a distinction for purely usefulness purposes in biology. It is arbitrary and meant as a tool - it has no bearing to the actual debate at hand.

My point being, many of the terms used around here have no basis in the context of the argument. One person is talking about a human life in the strict biological sense as basis for personhood and the other is using a description more along the lines of sentient, conscious, able to feel, etc. Be careful around the terms human, life, etc.

That's it for what I can remember for now

So, despite everything we don't know, the best we can go on at the moment says a fertilised egg is nothing special, that a fly's brain is over 100,000 neurons, so what of that 50-cell blostocyst mentioned so much? The best we can determine is it's a gradual scale from no consciousness to more. Drawing lines is horribly messy but observation of reality at least says if it has no neurons it is no more different than any other clump of matter or cells or anything. So far. What happens if we try to draw the line closer, when we try and determine at which point it becomes "conscious enough"? Fierce debate. That is good, but right now debating whether a fertilised egg is anything special is drawing attention away from the important area.