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    Default A typical liberal fallacy

    Doctor: After having administered the curative, I'm confident the patient will recover.

    Big Bro: Pfft, you're naive. The curative will kill us all, so while you weren't looking I mixed sulfuric acid into the concoction.

    Doctor: But that will kill the patient!

    Big Bro: No, his death is proof that your solution didn't work. If I hadn't taken action, the consequences would have been much worse.

    Doctor: How do you know?

    Big Bro: Well... err...

    Doctor: Die in a fire.

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    So this is about making false assumptions?

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    That could just as easily go the other way. Or maybe like this:

    Liberal doctor: After having administered the curative, I'm confident the patient will recover.

    Conservative know-it-all: Only if you take out this part.

    Liberal doctor: That's the active ingredient! How is the medicine going to work without the main ingredient?

    Conservative know-it-all: When it doesn't work, it'll be proof that your "cure" was faulty.
    It ain't what you don't know that gets you into trouble. It's what you know for sure that just ain't so.
    -Mark Twain


    You can't wake a person who is pretending to be asleep.

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    I don't understand.

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    Quote Originally Posted by Uniden View Post
    I don't understand.
    No biggy.

    The crux of my point is that liberal political positions usually omit the consideration of unintended consequences. You have to balance dreams with reality, which they persistently neglect to do.

    When the doctor asked the liberal to share his reasoning, the liberal had none, meaning he didn't even consider what might actually happen as a result of his actions beyond what he hoped and assumed would happen. In my experience dissecting liberal politics, I'd say that close to one hundred percent of liberal political positions are based on this kind of normative thinking.

    The conservative, when pressed, presented a body of historical evidence showing that he had good precedent for acting and had given due consideration to the possible effects his actions might trigger. This is because conservative (i.e., libertarian, not neo-con) politics is based on impartial consideration of factual evidence, which makes conservatives seem cruel and heartless to liberals, who see the world filtered through their 2D glasses.
    Last edited by discojoe; 04-06-2011 at 09:33 PM.

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    Quote Originally Posted by discojoe View Post
    No biggy.

    The crux of my point is that liberal political positions usually omit the consideration of unintended consequences. You have to balance dreams with reality, which they persistently neglect to do.
    This argument's also liable to cull innovation, especially as reality in most people's minds really means tradition.

    ps: I have no opinion specifically related to policy though.
    LII?

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    Quote Originally Posted by Slacker View Post
    That could just as easily go the other way. Or maybe like this:

    Liberal doctor: After having administered the curative, I'm confident the patient will recover.

    Conservative know-it-all: Only if you take out this part.

    Liberal doctor: That's the active ingredient! How is the medicine going to work without the main ingredient?

    Conservative know-it-all: When it doesn't work, it'll be proof that your "cure" was faulty.
    Note this part of the original post:

    Doctor: How do you know?

    Big Bro: Well... err...
    Now let's turn the tables like you suggest:

    Liberal doctor: How do you know it will work?

    Conservative know-it-all: Oh, here's this mountain of historical evidence that proves it decisively. You may not have heard of it, since it was conspicuously left out of your entire education.

    Liberal doctor: FUCK YOU

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    Quote Originally Posted by discojoe View Post
    You think the government altruistically researches technology for the good of society? What you're saying sounds like a national security and/or political argument(s) in disguise.

    If some theoretical new technology is viewed as pivotal to the nation's security, then fine. Fund it.

    But the idea that government R&R is a humanitarian venture is preposterous. Politicians allocate funding toward these projects for political gain, which is why so much money is wasted on useless research on popular things like "green" energy.

    The fact is that unless our security is at risk, it makes no logical sense to pay for these new technologies when we could just wait for someone else to, or for the free market to gradually become efficient enough to do so itself--much more cheaply.

    This non-vital category of research takes place because politicians want to exert control, appease interest groups, and flaunt faux conscientiousness at ignorant constituents who favor pointless research that they think is important.
    No, the good of society has nothing to do with it. What I should have said is that if we suddenly stopped funding our military-inudstrial-complex, then Germany, China and/or Japan's military-industrial-complexes will out-tech us. Then we'd probably lose our share of the world economy/markets (that sustain our wealth and power) to generally more high-tech foreign products.

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    Quote Originally Posted by jxrtes View Post
    No, the good of society has nothing to do with it. What I should have said is that if we suddenly stopped funding our military-inudstrial-complex, then Germany, China and/or Japan's military-industrial-complexes will out-tech us. Then we'd probably lose our share of the world economy/markets (that sustain our wealth and power) to generally more high-tech foreign products.
    Well yeah, I agree. But that has nothing to do with economics. Any economic benefit is a side-effect, and the market would take care of itself if national defense were not an issue (e.g. a stateless society where there are no nations to defend).

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    Yeah I agree, but I think that a pure free market is too Utopian an ideal and not feasible at our current state of development.

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