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I have no idea why this is being downvoted, this is a legitimate comment. If there were ever a point that the emotional argument will try and force others out,

• adricnet 12y ago
  Not a downvote, but the idea that an issue only has "two sides" is itself a fallacy, a bad argument sometimes used to confuse. https://yourlogicalfallacyis.com/black-or-white https://yourlogicalfallacyis.com/black-or-white
• djur 12y ago
  You don't think "godonearth, I mean, government" and calling half the population "collectivist", "communist", "fascist", and "brainless" might be a little bit emotional? I downvoted it because it was a content-free screed full of political shibboleths and mantras.
  • innguest 12y ago
    Given two or more sides of an issue, there will be those that use more emotional arguments in their rhetoric, and there will be those that won't care about the pathos side of rhetoric and focus on the logic. According to my experience, a good heuristic to know which side is right is to pick the one that is more grounded on logic and relies less on arguing from pathos. Unfortunately, this simple heuristics is out of reach for most people. First, let us establish that because we have a democratic government, this must mean more than half the population wants it to be like this (otherwise this is not a democracy). Therefore more than half the population is composed of people who are collectivists. Collectivists believe that by utilizing a middleman to share costs amongst everyone, they can make the cost of goods and services cheaper. The word "collectivist" is used disdainfully by those who reject the idea that adding a middleman central planner to decide how resources will be allocated in an economy will make goods and services cheaper. Now we can argue that collectivists cannot grasp the heuristics suggested herein, because they fall time and again to government propaganda, and it can be demonstrated by public polling that most people accept unquestioningly any narrative that the government puts forward about important political and economic events. That is why news anchors are fatherly figures that seek to gain their viewers trust, so that they won't think they need to research by themselves what they are fed by the media, since the tone and emotion set by the anchor give the information an aura of authority. Because collectivists are so prone to being lied to and manipulated by hyperpathetic rhetoric, I can only see one solution for the individualist: coarsely put, they should all move to a place and establish an individualist colony, and peremptorily reject the influence of collectivists by accusing them of fascism, which is a suitable moniker for a group of people that believe in the authority of a central planner over a region; much like the kings and the pharaos of yore, the collectivists still believe there is a numinous person that is pure and incorruptible that must pull the excalibur of power and peacefully rule over and for us all. This much has never been seen matter-of-factly in objective reality. I believe if this secession were to happen and enough individualists moved to a separate place and claimed it their own and carried on with their lives for generations, that eventually the average collectivist would realize that prosperity and wealth blossom in a free society at a much more efficient and rapid pace than in the collectivist side. djur: Is this non-offensive enough for you? It's the same points I made above when I used those words you don't like. I hope from this you will learn that as a critical thinker, you are supposed to see past the shape (the rhetoric, the pathos, the choice of words) of the discourse and examine the arguments being put forward for their validity (not harmony, not beauty, not political correctness). If you can't see the arguments amidst the "bad words", keep trying. You will get it eventually. Also consider that if you downvote those that use bad words, you probably upvote those that use good words. The media targets people like you that react positively to good words and badly to bad words. They rely on that reaction mechanism to shape your opinion. By reacting emotionally you are publicly proving that you are easily swayed by pathetic rhetoric.
    • djur 12y ago
      Your definitions of "collectivist", "fascist", "individualist", and for that matter "heuristics" are novel and vacuous. I see in your comment a great deal of ten-dollar words and not a single citation or even a verifiable claim of any sort. The existence of a democratic government does not begin to mean that "more than half the population wants it to be like this", whatever "this" is. The failings of formal democracy in representing the desires and interests of the population are well-known, and most democratic systems are openly designed to prevent a bare majority from getting everything they want (including ours -- see the Federalist Papers). Your definition of "fascist" would apply to any sufficiently powerful central government, from Hammurabi to the tsars to the UK parliament. There are numerous working definitions of fascism but all of them recognize that fascism is a reaction to liberal democracy and thus inherently modern. There is also no fascism without militancy, or without nationalism. You also don't seem to see the contradiction to your "heuristic... to pick the one that is more grounded on logic" inherent in your proposed strategy of "accusing ['collectivists'] of fascism". And your flight of fancy about a "numinous person... pure and incorruptible" wielding "the exalibur of power" (which looks a lot like an argument from pathos to me) has nothing to do with any standard definition of "collectivist". Nor does it have anything to do with "making goods and services cheaper". You yourself admit it's just a slur ("used disdainfully by those that reject the idea"). Mises, Hayek, Marx, none of them used the term this way. Collectivism is a sociological concept, not a political position. A rationalist should start with observations of reality and proceed from there, not from the axioms which one presumes to be self-evident.
      • innguest 12y ago
        Do you disagree that most people want a government? I think not. Do you disagree that most of those people want a government because they want government to intervene on social and economic issues? Do you disagree that most of those people want a government because "otherwise we'd have to make every decision" and they like to delegate some decisions to representatives so that they don't have to bother to check for themselves if their water is clean, so that they don't have to bother having to contract with a garbage collection company, so that they don't have to bother to check if restaurants aren't poisoning their customers, and so on? In other words, so that they can trust things will be taken care of and don't have to manage every aspect of their lives? Do you disagree that because most of those people seem to want to abstract away certain aspects of their lives, namely those they want government to take charge of, that they also won't be as willing to discuss those issues, seeing that the reason they delegate those things to government is because they don't want to think about it, let alone argue about it? Do you then disagree that maybe, because of this unwillingness to engage in these discussions, that if a group of people, namely individualists, that believe governments cause more harm than good, would like to see things changed towards freer markets, that it might be fruitless to think the way to achieve those changes is to engage in discussions with those people who are unwilling to engage in discussions because they are in favor of not thinking about those issues and instead abstracting them away onto government? That's all I'm arguing. Coarsely put, one side wants to debate. The other doesn't. The side that wants to debate usually uses logic because that's the fundamental tool of debating. The side that doesn't want to debate uses emotion because that's the fundamental tool of avoidance.