Liberal Fallacies

[stevea]

I have tried to understand this post but it makes no sense.

It's really quite simple, but perhaps I was too terse.

Looks like a straw man [...]Kinda like when they gave blacks the special right to marry whites.

1/ You *REALLY* need to look up "strawman fallacy". You misuse it repeatedly.
2/ Your conversion of "special privileges" into "special rights" like marriage brings your reading comprehension skills into question.
3/ Perhaps you meant that YOU were creating a strawman fallacy by mischaracterizing my statement, tho' it looks like another fallacious, slanderous claim of racism by Libs (like you) against any non-Lib position - for the purpose of derailing the topic.

--

In our society it is clear that married hetero couples have certain special privileges that are not extended to either singles, nor homosexual couples, nor poly-amorous groups. This is special treatment under law or contracts. These include tax law, property transfer law, inheritance law, extension of medical benefits from work, inability to force testimony against partner and several others. The reason these special privileges were afforded to hetero couples has to do with things like historical tradition and the socializing costs of child-rearing and such.

There is no question that this is unjust in the sense of being non-egalitarian. It seems to clearly violate equal protection that my wife and I get a tax break, inheritance breaks, or get special treatment in court testimony that singles or homosexual couples do not get.

So if we wanted to make everything equal for all - we should ALL have the same rights and ALL be treated the same. IOW if I get to extend my insurance to my wife, then why can't *ANY* employee extend their insurance in the same way to any other person. Why should it matter if they are single, hetero-married or homosexual-married - ALL should be treated alike. Why should married homo&hetero couples get a special tax treatment that singles can't get ?

[If we need to socialize child-rearing costs, then that advantage to anyone actually engaged in child-rearing - regardless of marriage status or sexual preference]

It should be obvious to the shallowest thinker, that the solution is to treat all citizens alike and not give any special privilege to anyone due to marital/single or sexual preference status by law or contract.

The ridiculous Liberal position is that since we have one special privileged group of hetero-married, that creating a second privileges group of homosexual-married makes for some peculiar sort of 'fairness', but they neglect that they are just harming singles and other non-couples.

===

My second point is that Libs obstinately refuse to create any objective definition of "fair" when used to refer to things like "the wealthy should pay a fair share". We've seen it on this forum. If you disagree then define the term as used. To a Liberal "fair" generally means whatever they selfishly prefer. It's part of the envious "want something" = "right to something" equation that no one can morally rationalize.

But they already have equal rights - the right to marry other blacks! Everyone knows that how fundamental rights work.

TeeHee {sarcasm} ! I thought much better of you Dessi before you jumped on the, "people who disagree with me are racists" bandwagon of mindless slander without even reading. Best take a close look in the mirror; people who accuse others of racism glibly may be compensating for their own latent racism.

 

[KoihimeNakamura]

In our society it is clear that married hetero couples have certain special privileges that are not extended to either singles, nor homosexual couples, nor poly-amorous groups. This is special treatment under law or contracts. These include tax law, property transfer law, inheritance law, extension of medical benefits from work, inability to force testimony against partner and several others. The reason these special privileges were afforded to hetero couples has to do with things like historical tradition and the socializing costs of child-rearing and such.

There is no question that this is unjust in the sense of being non-egalitarian. It seems to clearly violate equal protection that my wife and I get a tax break, inheritance breaks, or get special treatment in court testimony that singles or homosexual couples do not get.

So if we wanted to make everything equal for all - we should ALL have the same rights and ALL be treated the same. IOW if I get to extend my insurance to my wife, then why can't *ANY* employee extend their insurance in the same way to any other person. Why should it matter if they are single, hetero-married or homosexual-married - ALL should be treated alike. Why should married homo&hetero couples get a special tax treatment that singles can't get ?

Equivocation detected; misapplication of principle. Generally speaking, married couples also share costs.

[If we need to socialize child-rearing costs, then that advantage to anyone actually engaged in child-rearing - regardless of marriage status or sexual preference]

It should be obvious to the shallowest thinker, that the solution is to treat all citizens alike and not give any special privilege to anyone due to marital/single or sexual preference status by law or contract.

"It should be obvious" - red flag.

The ridiculous Liberal position is that since we have one special privileged group of hetero-married, that creating a second privileges group of homosexual-married makes for some peculiar sort of 'fairness', but they neglect that they are just harming singles and other non-couples.

Hasty generalization. Also, see above point.

===

My second point is that Libs obstinately refuse to create any objective definition of "fair" when used to refer to things like "the wealthy should pay a fair share". We've seen it on this forum. If you disagree then define the term as used. To a Liberal "fair" generally means whatever they selfishly prefer. It's part of the envious "want something" = "right to something" equation that no one can morally rationalize.

This post is all sorts of wrong. 1) fair is a hard word to define, and you know it. 2) ad hom attack - no, that's not what fair means to a liberal, and you should know it.

TeeHee {sarcasm} ! I thought much better of you Dessi before you jumped on the, "people who disagree with me are racists" bandwagon of mindless slander without even reading. Best take a close look in the mirror; people who accuse others of racism glibly may be compensating for their own latent racism.

No. No they aren't.

 

[stevea]

If we have a woman president, there won't be any wars

In 1982, Geraldine Ferraro (D-NY, one time VP candidate) was quoted by AP as, "I tend to think that with more women making policy we would have fewer wars".

I think this point gets lost very easily by Bush defenders. If he wasn't at least exploiting misinformation about WMDs and links between Saddam Hussein and the 9/11 attacks, he could have easily clarified his position by stating in no uncertain terms that he wanted to oust Saddam but not because he was an imminent threat to the U.S. or because he was complicit in any way with the 9/11 attacks

I parsed the speeches in the weeks leading up to very carefully, and Bush & Cheney both were very careful to NOT directly associate Iraq/Saddam with 9-11. They did however mention 'terrorism' or 'war on terror' in Iraq related speeches witout making any specific connection. Weeks later there was chatter about Iraq potentially supporting Al Queda financially. Yes he certainly could have done more to dispel the false perception.

OTOH it's a common thing for politicians to use this sort of conflation of ideas to get support. It's called demagoguery. There has been no lack of demagoguery from the Whitehouse this millenia.

I think Bush was pretty careful not to make any obviously false statements himself, though--other than stating things that were only suspected as if they were certain. I think he let others (Rice, Rumsfeld, Powell, Cheney) do that for him.

No matter, the Pres takes responsibility. Here is a better list than my recollection.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saddam_Hussein_and_al-Qaeda_link_allegations#Cheney.27s_claims

 

[stevea]

Funny, I could've sworn this was a forum dedicated to critical thinking.

Genuinely peculiar that you imagine that forming opinion (in the sense of reasoned judgment) is not a major part of critical thinking.

 

[stevea]

Equivocation detected; misapplication of principle. Generally speaking, married couples also share costs.

Yes, of course married couples usually share costs. And sometime roomates or friends share costs too. Sometimes married couples live apart and do not share costs. So what ? You've failed to rebut any point.

The choice of individuals or groups to share costs or not has zero bearing on whether they should each be treated the same in contracts of before the law. The egalitarian principle of treating each individual the same (in law and contract) is not impacted by how these individuals choose to share their goods.

"It should be obvious" - red flag.

Red flag that you fail to understand debate ? I am a proponent of one position and a detractor of the opposing position. I am free to describe my position as clear, obvious, whatever and he opposing position as silly, ridiculous, whatever. You are free to rebut these terms with logical argumentation or evidence. "Red flag" is not a rebuttal; to does not contradict any assertion, nor demonstrate a fallacy is present.

Again you fail to rebut any point of the argument.

Do you actually want to claim that it is NOT obvious that treating all ppl the same achieves equality, and treating a privileged class and a unprivileged class differently does not ?

Hasty generalization. Also, see above point.

If by "hasty" you mean "true", then we agree. There is nothing hasty about observing 10 years of proposed legislative progress. Yes it's true unless you can rebut it successfully, and apparently you can't or else you would.

===

This post is all sorts of wrong.

Then why did you fail to rebut even a single point ?

1) fair is a hard word to define, and you know it.

I completely agree, which is exactly why I object to liberals using the term as in "fair share of taxes", while they refuse to define it in detail. You are supporting my point.

2) ad hom attack - no, that's not what fair means to a liberal, and you should know it.

No, wrong. An "ad hom" fallacy is an attack against the person delivering the argument, which attack actual avoids the argument at hand. That is not the case here.

This issue in this thread is the assertion that some liberals hold ridiculous positions. I gave an example that some libs abuse the term "fair" as meaning whatever they want it to mean. No one rebutted my point at all so an ad hom is impossible. Biscuit said my original description made no sense to him, so I expanded on my position. that is not a rebuttal. I did not call any proponent or opponent any names. No ad hom exists.

I gave a very unflattering description of a certain liberal's position, but this is not an ad hom - since the subjet of the thread is about silly positions held by liberals. If you think this is harsh, you should read the posts against tea-partiers on this forum. ((BTW I am not a conservative nor a TPer)).

I did not suggest that anything I wrote is "what it means to be a liberal" and anyone attempting to generalize such notions from a population of 100 million is on a fools errand. However .....

Many liberals do use the term "fair share" and refuse to define this purposely subjective and fuzzy concept.
http://fairshareonline.org/
http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2012/04/10/buffett-rule-asks-wealthiest-pay-their-fair-share
http://www.whitehouse.gov/issues/taxes
http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press...uffett-rule-so-everyone-pays-their-fair-share
http://www.americanprogress.org/iss...7/issue-pulse-support-for-occupy-wall-street/
http://www.npr.org/2011/10/15/141382468/occupy-wall-street-inspires-worldwide-protests
http://www.politico.com/news/stories/1211/69965.html
http://technorati.com/politics/article/what-does-obama-mean-by-fair/

Liberals use the term "fair share" in fiscal matters regularly, often, and without definition of their meaning. It's a 'weasel word', meaning whatever the arguer wants it to mean.

As for my suggestion that some liberals equate "want" with "right" ...
There are numerous examples,

Pres Obama speaks of a 'right' to healthcare, a 'right' to education, even a 'right' to a job, but of course government provided services necessarily paid for with money forcibly taken from other citizens. So these can't be rights, they are merely wants, and a rationalization for wealth redistribution.

On this forum we repeatedly see liberals suggest that based on their preferences they have some legitimate reason to take things things away from some other entity (rationalize theft, envy). Take money from those mean-ol' big businesses, the top 1%, servitude from a national service corp of younger people, money and ownership from shareholders, bondholders, patents from big-pharma. The liberal mindset seems rife with dreams of theft.

http://occupywallst.org/forum/nationalize-the-multinationals-and-support-small-b/

Of course the real socialists and communists are more extreme about taking what they want and considering it a right to do so.

No. No they aren't.

Brilliant argument you have there. My rebuttal in kind .. ."Yes they are".

 

[MarkCorrigan]

E=mc² is liberal claptrap.

Wh...but that...it makes no....WHAT?

 

[Dessi]

Yes, of course married couples usually share costs. And sometime roomates or friends share costs too. Sometimes married couples live apart and do not share costs. So what ? You've failed to rebut any point.

I understand your argument that should not create a privileged status for certain couples, and agree with it, but its completely orthogonal to DOMA or Prop 8. Same-gender couples ought to have the same rights as opposite-gender couples whether married couples have a privileged status or otherwise.

 

[Polaris]

And even that claim is somewhat justifiable. The U.S. certainly gave billions of dollars worth of aid to Iraq during that time. While we didn't actually "give" them these weapons (afaik, we provided no U.S. made weapons), we certainly helped them. Whatever aid we gave them arguably made it possible for them to do whatever they did if only by freeing up resources that they would otherwise have had to spend on the things our aid was used for.

I was referring specifically to Michael Moore in either Bowling or Fahrenheit saying the US gave Saddam weapons as narration to a video of an Iraqi BMP driving over a sand-dune.

The funding angle is defensible, you're right.

 

[Ladewig]

Have you ever met someone who really thinks Liberals care more about animals than people?

No, I have never shaken hands with Rush Limbaugh or Glenn Beck.

 

[KoihimeNakamura]

stevea: You really don't want to hear my thoughts on that. (I actually am kinda indifferent to people complaining married people get more rights. Life isn't fair, deal with it.)

Correspondingly, fair share for wealthy people isn't something I care to say, it's more "make more, pay more, because you have the money, and squeezing blood out of a stone isn't going to work."

As for the "no." I don't feel like arguing obvious statements.

 

[Malcolm Kirkpatrick]

Really? What a strange and unsupported notion.

Just like "the sun rose in the East today" is unsupported. Consider all the "Liberals/Conservatives/Republicans/Democrats are stupid" threads. It makes JREF boring, after a while. Some people probably feel it elevates them to diss others. Maybe their wives get sexual satisfaction from door-to-door salesmen, their job at the office is to fetch coffee for people with real skills, and running others down (anonymously) is the only source of self-respect for them. That's my working hypothesis.

 

[Dr. Keith]

Make no mistake, Saddam was playing a most dangerous game and he lost as spectacularly as he could.

I remember* thinking at the time that hanging this whole war on WMDs is a dangerous strategy. It was a gamble that didn't need to be taken.

I couldn't understand why Bush couldn't just say: Saddam is making a mockery of the UN inspectors and acting as if he has WMDs. We are invading Iraq. If he has WMDs we will secure them. If he doesn't, then we will have confirmed that once and for all.

It is less hyperbolic, but I still think it is a pragmatic message most Americans at that time would have gone along with. More importantly, I think more of the international community would have gone along with it as well.

Sure, it belittles the UN inspectors, but at that point it seemed like Saddam had them by the short and curlies. In retrospect, he didn't, but that was the perception at the time: they aren't finding anything because Saddam is too sneaky and they don't have the right level of force.

*In particular I remember having this discussion with a lawyer I worked with as the strategy related to a case we had just wrapped up where our client convinced us that a fact was "certain" and we hinged the whole case on that fact. Needless to say, the client was wrong and we could have taken the case in a different direction if he had let us know that his "certainty" was somewhat equivocal. In the end he made out fine and we made lots of money for the firm, so no harm. But he could have made out better if he had just been more honest with us. Likewise, I think Bush could have gotten the country behind him with honesty.

 

[Malcolm Kirkpatrick]

The U.S. certainly gave billions of dollars worth of aid to Iraq during that time. While we didn't actually "give" them these weapons (afaik, we provided no U.S. made weapons), we certainly helped them. Whatever aid we gave them arguably made it possible for them to do whatever they did if only by freeing up resources that they would otherwise have had to spend on the things our aid was used for...

So, that's the argument for trade war, right? Howard Zinn attributed the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, in part, to the embargo that the US placed on strategic materials after the Japanese invasion of Manchuria. On the other hand, he criticizes the US government for failing to embargo trade in strategic materials to Italy after the Italian invasion of Ethiopia. It seems reasonable to criticize one policy or the other, but not both simultaneously.

 

[respect]

"people who disagree with me are racists"

This nonsense has a lot of cousins. Anyone who disagrees with me hates black people, gay people, women, teachers, brown people, union members, poor people etc. The smallish, but very vocal, percentage of liberals who seem to be convinced that everyone actually agrees with Obama about everything but pretend not to because he is black are particularly silly, as though he would have gotten 100% of the vote if he were white.

 

[RandFan]

I remember* thinking at the time that hanging this whole war on WMDs is a dangerous strategy. It was a gamble that didn't need to be taken.

I couldn't understand why Bush couldn't just say: Saddam is making a mockery of the UN inspectors and acting as if he has WMDs. We are invading Iraq. If he has WMDs we will secure them. If he doesn't, then we will have confirmed that once and for all.

It is less hyperbolic, but I still think it is a pragmatic message most Americans at that time would have gone along with. More importantly, I think more of the international community would have gone along with it as well.

Sure, it belittles the UN inspectors, but at that point it seemed like Saddam had them by the short and curlies. In retrospect, he didn't, but that was the perception at the time: they aren't finding anything because Saddam is too sneaky and they don't have the right level of force.

*In particular I remember having this discussion with a lawyer I worked with as the strategy related to a case we had just wrapped up where our client convinced us that a fact was "certain" and we hinged the whole case on that fact. Needless to say, the client was wrong and we could have taken the case in a different direction if he had let us know that his "certainty" was somewhat equivocal. In the end he made out fine and we made lots of money for the firm, so no harm. But he could have made out better if he had just been more honest with us. Likewise, I think Bush could have gotten the country behind him with honesty.

Good post.

I said at the time (shortly after the invasion) that there was no WMD and I still supported the war. I also said that Bush probably could have made a case for war without the WMD assertions. I don't know if that is true anymore but I otherwise agree with your post. At the very least Bush should have made an honest case and he should have listened carefully to those in the know. There was little evidence for WMD. In fact most of the evidence was against the notion.

 

[Malcolm Kirkpatrick]

...There was little evidence for WMD. In fact most of the evidence was against the notion.

That was not the CIA's assessment. Go back to that National Intelligence Estimate.

 

[jj]

That was not the CIA's assessment. Go back to that National Intelligence Estimate.

Since we all know that the CIA, from at least Bush Sr's years if not earlier (and I do expect much earlier), was seriously influenced by what its bosses want to hear (despite the many good people like Valerie Plame out there) why does this mean anything, Malcolm?

 

[Malcolm Kirkpatrick]

Since we all know that the CIA, from at least Bush Sr's years if not earlier (and I do expect much earlier), was seriously influenced by what its bosses want to hear (despite the many good people like Valerie Plame out there) why does this mean anything, Malcolm?

What "we all know" is false. See David Kay's testimony. Kay specifically said that "command influence" was not the problem. A further disproof is my original observation: the intelligence did not change between the Clinton administration and the Bush II administration. So, unless you mean to suggest that a Republican Governor can influence the CIA analysts of a Democratic administration, hanging faulty intelligence on Bush won't work.

 

[jimbob]

But one does that by pretending to have *working* weapons, not pretending to have a project to acquire them, which encourages a pre-emptive strike.

Here. "High Confidence:...Iraq possesses proscribed chemical and biological weapons and missiles."
You can't sensibly rebut what you don't read.

That wasn't my point.

Saddam Hussain was doing his best to persuade the rest of the world that he was trying to acquire WMDs.

It seems that actually he wasn't. We know this because we have the benefit of hindsight and the Coalition has had full access to Iraq to look for WMD programs.

The earlier CIA report you are quoting from was from when Saddam was in power. We know stuff now that the CIA couldn't know about then.


My point was actually supporting yours because it is irrational to encourage a preemptive strike against oneself. Intelligence analysts would be ready for disinformation but maybe not from someone working so much against their interests.

It would have been rational for Saddam to try to fool people into thinking he hadn't got a WMD program when he had, or that he already had well-hidden WMDs when he didn't, or even that he lacked WMDs when he did. What was actually the situation was the one option with no benefit to him.

 

[Chaos]

But one does that by pretending to have *working* weapons, not pretending to have a project to acquire them, which encourages a pre-emptive strike.

That is indeed a bit of a problem with this hypothesis.

My take on this:
If he actually did have working WMD, or was very close to having them, the US (and/or Israel) would find out about it in short order and bomb the crap out of his WMD program and stockpile - see for example the bombing of Osirak reactor. Saddam´s enemies knew that, too, so they could infer from the fact that he was not having the crap bombed out of his assets that he was not (yet) even close to having working WMD. So, that sort of bluff wouldn´t have worked.
Instead, Saddam went for the tightrope act of trying on one hand to look as dangerously close to having WMD as possible, while on the other hand not looking so close to having WMD that the US or Israel would have reacted to that already.
I´m sure that, if he´d seen the possibility to acquire WMD without the US or Israel stopping him before he actually acquired them, he´d have done it in a heartbeat - only he couldn´t (or didn´t see a way to do it, at least), so he didn´t.