Paging RBJ: Debt Ceiling Debate Thread

Rug Burn Junky on 10/8/2011 at 12:40

Quote Posted by CCCToad

And again, I've never said that the "official" rate of inflation is high.

Just that the official rate of inflation right now doesn't really mean anything on the consumer side their cost of living is continuing to rise dramatically. How could it? The two things blue collars spend most of their money on aren't counted.

Christ, you're doubly wrong with one statement - the point being not to re-argue "inflation" but that you get it wildly fucking wrong (because those two things aren't rising, they're fluctuating. Some months they're DOWN, even lately).

And you get it wildly fucking wrong in the same disingenuous way that's parroted by Republican pundits.

Game. Set. Match.

Sg3 on 10/8/2011 at 16:08

Mr. Burn, I feel that you are generally trouncing Mr. Toad in almost every area of your debate, which is unsurprising (given your profession). Regardless of that, I think I agree considerably more with your position than with his. However, with all that said, I couldn't help but notice that you've ignored a few contrary points of his which appear to be valid. It seems that you (and this seems to be the trend with others as well) target the greater number of foolish-sounding things that he says, and avoid addressing the smaller number of intelligent-sounding things that he says. Is there something that I am missing, or are you taking the easy kills and avoiding the tougher battles?

Is it quantity over quality? I feel that Mr. Toad has raised some good points, but these go unaddressed because he also gets himself tangled in stuff that I would call, yes, rather stupid. Pardon my unfamiliarity with this dynamic which you two have going on.

demagogue on 10/8/2011 at 17:50

It's not a dynamic of just those two. Some of it is just inherent in forum threads as a medium of debate. They aren't usually single formal threads of debate that move sequentially down a list of arguments in a rational fashion until there's closure on each one before moving to the next. They're organic with lots of branches that can branch off at any point, on any point, for any reason, and then each branch has its own life that thrives or withers in its own ways, sometimes going on at the same time, and sometimes connecting back, sometimes jumping out of the whole tree to take a look back on it as a whole. But the only way to make it follow the debate-team ideal would be to police the thread, which would suck worse than the benefit you get from it. So it goes.

It's more about people getting out their perspective, or the perspective of whatever they're trying to represent (if they're trying to rep for a demographic or taking on an online character), than formal debate anyway. Or it allows people to jump out of the nitpicking details into the big picture of what's really going on here, which is what I see RBJ doing a lot. Anyway, it's probably more valuable (& entertaining) that way. Too formal debates can put people to sleep & you don't always even get to what's really important or really behind the debate, or how some people really think out there in the world (even if you think incorrectly).

Pyrian on 10/8/2011 at 18:02

Quote Posted by Sg3

However, with all that said, I couldn't help but notice that you've ignored a few contrary points of his which appear to be valid. It seems that you (and this seems to be the trend with others as well) target the greater number of foolish-sounding things that he says, and avoid addressing the smaller number of intelligent-sounding things that he says.

Even a broken clock is right twice a day. If you have a particular concern you'd like addressed, go ahead and bring it up; the rest of us can't always tell what might seem to be a reasonable point to an outside perspective. For my own part, I previously came to the conclusion that RBJ's thesis here is in fact correct: CCCToads posts are worthless, of no value; I do not think they are even worth reading, nevermind responding to, and took the logical step.

Sg3 on 10/8/2011 at 20:50

Quote Posted by Pyrian

If you have a particular concern you'd like addressed, go ahead and bring it up; the rest of us can't always tell what might seem to be a reasonable point to an outside perspective.

Here's an example. In (http://www.ttlg.com/forums/showthread.php?t=136405&p=2081136&viewfull=1#post2081136) this post of his, Mr. Toad made several accusations against Mr. Obama. I do not know whether or not they are true; if they are, then they strongly support his argument. However, no one addressed those claims.

Quote Posted by Pyrian

I previously came to the conclusion that RBJ's thesis here is in fact correct: CCCToads posts are worthless, of no value; I do not think they are even worth reading, nevermind responding to, and took the logical step.

Do you mean all of his posts, or only his posts about politics, religion, and other such topics? Even if only his political posts, I cannot agree. Even if 90% of his posts are ignorant (and I am not saying that this is the case), they at least provide a contrary position or a "devil's advocate," making occasion for other people to provide better information. People will choose the one that makes more sense. As an example, Mr. Burn's posts often make so much sense that, even though I have no way of knowing if he is ultimately right, I feel very much inclined to agree with him.

Pyrian on 10/8/2011 at 21:51

Quote Posted by Sg3

By-and-large those are more-or-less correct; look up the Glenn Greenwald blog for details. The abuses of the security apparatus which Obama criticized as a candidate have continued unabated and even grown in his term. Greenwald actually predicted this, pointing out that it is unusual for any man to voluntarily relinquish power in hand, whatever they may have promised.

I don't like any of that. I'm what RBJ refers to as a left-wing ninny whose pissed off enough at Obama that I would very much like to see him primaried. Even in those areas where he perhaps could not have secured a better negotiation (like the topic of this thread), just making the rational case instead of echoing right-wing nonsense would've been nice. But I can't kid myself that the other side of the aisle holds any answers, Ron Paul notwithstanding; the security apparatus that Obama has expanded was bloody well constructed under Bush, and their primary choices seem to range from worse-than-Bush to utter-nutter. So, I have every reason to expect I'll be voting for Obama (a primary defeat of a sitting president is highly unlikely). Yay lesser evil...

Quote Posted by Sg3

Even if 90% of his posts are ignorant...

Mere ignorance isn't the issue. Ignorance can be informed. CCCToad is very deliberate, I think, in his twisting of facts, and even his own words (which was the final straw for me - you cannot reason with someone who refuses to even carry on a consistent narrative if doing so would get in the way of arguing).

But really, I refuse to wade through 90% - or whatever - of provocative nonsense. Especially since I'm vulnerable to such provocation; I want to correct, to educate, to inform. It's just too easy to get sucked into the neverending vortex of spin and twist. As XKCD immortalized, (http://xkcd.com/386/) "Someone is wrong on the internet."

Quote Posted by Sg3

...they at least provide a contrary position or a "devil's advocate," making occasion for other people to provide better information.

Oh, I read RBJ's responses, sometimes with relish, and sometimes with heartfelt sympathy. :cheeky:

Quote Posted by Sg3

People will choose the one that makes more sense. As an example, Mr. Burn's posts make so much sense that, even though I have no way of knowing if he is ultimately right, I feel very much inclined to agree with him.

I guess CCCToad's sheer inconsistency is self defeating. Still, sounding sensible is a dangerous thing to base a decision on, I'm afraid. All too often it comes down to the better debater (in this case the lawyer :D ) rather than the truth.

Sg3 on 10/8/2011 at 22:16

Quote Posted by Pyrian

Still, sounding sensible is a dangerous thing to base a decision on, I'm afraid. All too often it comes down to the better debater (in this case the lawyer) rather than the truth.

Agreed. This is why I am pretty much on the fence regarding this sort of issue, even if I find myself leaning toward one side. Everyone says something different, and an intelligent and charismatic individual can make almost any idea sound like a good one. (Take a certain man in the 1930s who caused the mustache to fall out of fashion. Not that I'm comparing Mr. Obama, or anyone here, to dear old Adi.)

Azaran on 10/8/2011 at 22:30

Quote Posted by Sg3

Considering the fact that old Adi was also a dictator who sent people who disagreed with him into camps (or executed them), I don't think a comparison could ever be justified

demagogue on 10/8/2011 at 22:51

I can give you a quick litmus test for good argument styles. I can't unpack it all because that would take a "very long post", but in a nutshell... Karl Popper distinguished between "good argument" styles that get us closer to truth and "bad argument" styles that constantly push truth behind endless rows of smoke & mirrors.

The paradigm of the "bad argument" type was Freud's theory. It *started* with the conclusion: the id wants to fuck & push people around; then the ego cleans it up for polite society & to hide our base nature from ourselves (conspiratorially behind our backs). Then whatever data came in, however people behaved, the theory always confirmed it. We think we're nice guys; that's just part of the egos conspiracy; we're jerks, well of course, it's our id acting. No matter what a person does, it will always fit into a box, because there are only 2 boxes, (1) what really happens, (2) a conspiracy (behind our backs) to hide us from what's "really going on", which is (1). Whatever happens, it fits in one or the other box and the theory is always confirmed in an undifferentiated mass.

What Popper didn't like about this style was that it didn't actually explain ANYTHING. No matter what the data was, it always confirmed the conclusion in an undifferentiated way (because you could always put it into box (1) or (2), and it was designed so ALL DATA would go in one or the other box because one box was a conspiracy for the other). The "good argument" type on the other hand, would give you a theory that says, when X-causes happens, X-effect occur, when Y-causes happen, Y-effects occur... And if it turns out X-causes happen & Y-effects occurs, then we can toss out the theory and refine it in more and more detail until we isolate exactly what's going on when X & Y occur (something Freud's theory could never do). It's not an undifferentiated "inherent nature" argument; there are real causes that have real effects you can find the connection.

So, getting to politics, Popper was also very clever to notice that the "bad style" of argument was exactly the same kind of form used by radical or anti-mainstream politics. Toad's arguments aren't as radical as the Nazis and Communists Popper was worried about, of course, but the argument style has a familiar tendency. He's basically taking the libertarian-right spin. Big Gov't by its very nature is always in bed with Big Vested Interest to fuck over the little guy; and it doesn't matter what party it is, Reps or Dems, because they all are corrupted by the nature of Big Govt and the only solution is a radical libertarian one. So when a politician helps a Big Vested Interest, of course he's a shill. And whenever he "claims" to help the little guy, of course that's just part of a conspiracy to dupe the "simple folk" from the fact that he's "really" in bed with the Big Vested Interest, or to cynically get the simple folk to trust him so he can screw them over in favor of his fatcat benefactors, because that's the inherent nature of Big Gov't. Maybe he's not even doing it consciously (Toad said for the precious metal situation, it doesn't have to be a literal conspiracy), but the idea is it's the inherent nature of Big Government, and the conspiracies go on behind our backs; it makes shills of people whatever their best intentions. (It works for all sorts of anti-mainstream politics because you can always substitute anything you don't like into the govt being a shill for it ... Jews, rich folk, crack-using black folk, etc.)

The problem with this, again, is no matter what data you put against it, whatever news story you cherry pick, the hypothesis always reconfirms itself because it starts with the conclusion (Big Govt is just a shell for shills), and fits all news stories into the two boxes, either reconfirming what's "really going on", or a conspiracy to dupe the simple folk. Leaving only a radical solution outside mainstream politics as the only way out, which is the part Sir Popper really didn't like about it (his book was called "The Open Society & Its Enemies). So all news stories can be explained. Or to put it in a nutshell, bad explanations start with the conclusion and shove all data into its boxes. Good explanations start with the data and try to create boxes around the real-world tendencies and craft a conclusion or theory from that.

The mark of good explanations for political outcomes are things that give specific causes for specific effects and can be falsified, so things like: political action theory, political realignment theory, Duverger's law, political economics, social functionalist & conflict theories as they help define groups' preferences & political behavior, organization theory, etc... I wish I had time to go into each one of them to give some good tested theories about how politics works the way it does; maybe you could wiki some of them. But if you wanted to really explain what's going on in those newspaper stories Toad posted, why did Obama do what he did, a good starting place is thinking about his actions in terms of some of the tested theories... To what extent was Obama doing cost-benefit thinking to reserve political capital on one issue to cash in on another to have the most bang for the PC-buck; what were the stakeholders involved and what influence did they have in the actual political dynamics, etc... It's true that acute vested interests are empowered over diffuse (consumer) interests in democracies; that's political action theory.. But that doesn't mean they just run gov't by proxy either, that political parties are suddenly blind to the preferences of their voter base when creating a platform, that broad political values like social welfare don't still have purchase, or that consumer groups are suddenly going to roll over and let vested interests take the farm. Political dynamics are messy, no doubt, but they're still dynamics that you should follow properly. That is, you don't have to be naive when politicians really are trying to pull fast ones to benefit narrow vested interests, there are real dynamics that can have that effect... But you should read those dynamics out of what's actually going on in the ground rather than some nebulous conspiracy grounded in the inherent nature or something.

Rug Burn Junky on 11/8/2011 at 01:45

Quote Posted by Sg3

So, this has spiraled way beyond what I can respond to, thanks to Pyrian and demagogue (neither of whom have said anything I really disagree with, and demagogue has reminded me how badly I need to read more Popper, who's been on my reading list for a number of years. And fucking christ, dema's post just above mine is a tour-de-force.).

To sort of mash it all together - I do really just think of him as a troll, but as you point out, some of the things he says do sound sensible. That is why, despite my better nature, I do tend to get into the "somebody is wrong on the internet" wormhole myself: unchallenged, sensible-sounding nonsense is the most dangerous sort of nonsense of all. Well, that, and, to be fair, the fact that I'm an unapologetic, mean-spirited, petty asshole, but who's counting.

Generally, my responses will fall into two camps: The necessary assumptions, and, as you point out, the easy kills. When he presents a big picture argument, it's often only one aspect that needs to be disproven to render the rest of it, if not false, at least meaningless. Once this is shown as false, the implications usually take care of themselves. That's why I focus on discrete, falsifiable claims from which other conclusions flow. ie. the definition of inflation rendering the conclusion of stagflation meaningless.

The easy kills are really just a guilty pleasure. You ever play poker? You know how sometimes, you're playing in a game with big stakes, and there's really just a small pot. But you have a well hidden full house, that you know is the nuts. Sometimes just being able to slow-roll that and watch the deflated look on the other guys face is worth it (Yes, I know, Shug, slow rolling is bad form). So yeah, that's just me being a dick.

What I try to avoid are exactly those sorts of posts that you linked to. He's shotgunning all of these different things out there in the hopes that one of them hits. Each of them have a factual kernel to them, but they're all subjected to extreme bias and a twisting of the interpretation. Since so much of it is about explaining and interpreting grey areas, that's just more morass than even I'm willing to bear. Since it's not the facts, or a provable assumption that's wrong, but usually more subtle interpretations that let him weasel his way out of without confronting his error.

But in the end, I don't expect to change anybody's mind. I really just hope that anyone who is not already approaching things with a made up position can delve and come to a good conclusion on their own. Which is why I try to at the very least walk through a bit of my logic in how I arrive at my opinions, since I feel it stands for itself. Whether it survives the natural inclination for people to shut down due to the bluster with which I deliver it? Guess that just forces me to be more certain of the soundness of my arguments before I put them out there.