The Hierarchy of Disagreement

I found this illustration of how to order your arguments at the Starts With A Bang blog. This blog usually leads one to a first source. However, I had to do some digging to find the original creator of this image. This image is all over the web, but I think the first source is here, from the Create Debate blog in April 2008. This image (click on it to enlarge) was created to illustrate an earlier point by Paul Graham, whose text-only posts I've been (occasionally) reading for years. The premise is to always lead with your top level reasonable arguments, and never resort to the bottom layers. As Ethan Siegel (SWAB) put it,

It's sometimes tough to decipher what the central point of someone else's argument is, because most people don't argue clearly and logically. But if you can identify it, that's when you win. When someone else mucks around at the bottom of the pyramid, don't sink to their level; stay up high. Those top two levels are really the only way to ever change someone's mind, or to sway other intelligent, thinking people to your side.

This is an attitude that would serve us well on this site.

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The My Of It

Listening to the harangue over the health care reform squabble, I can't help thinking---even I saw a few episodes of West Wing, I who do not watch television, so of all the Lefties out there who probably hung on every second of that show, why is it so hard to grasp how things don't get accomplished in D.C. ? Yeah, it was fiction, but it was, in my opinion, pretty accurate in terms of the culture. But people complain and wonder why Obama doesn't just "ram his reforms through." Well. The man is a consensus builder. We just got done with a president who wasn't. Obama has not yet been in office a year and already people are ready to jump ship because he's not the second coming of FDR. How thoughtless, ill-informed, and shallow supposedly intelligent people can be. It should not be surprising, yet... First off, instead of presenting his reform package, he handed it to Congress---which is where all the arguing was going to happen anyway. Suppose he had presented a package. What is happening now would have happened anyway, and then he would be directly blamed for having drafted a lame plan. His plan would have been eviscerated and Congress wouold then proceed to draft something possibly worse than what it emerging now since Obama's plan would have been discredited through failure. As it is, the plan being touted is All Congress's. Anything wrong with it, it's on them. Obama has been arguing that regardless what happens, things have to change---which is frightening. With the stimulus package, things were already broken. With health care they are merely on the verge. Secondly, he's got lots of balls in the air just now. A lot. Most of them are disasters he inherited. Now, the metaphor has been used before, but that doesn't make it any less true---this country is a Big Ship and you don't turn it around on a dime. If you do that, you break more than you fix. Maybe that's what needs to happen, and sometimes we've had leaders who did that when there was but one maybe two major things that needed to be tended to. But that's not the case just now. Everything is in a mess. I'm not going to fault the man for failing to meet impossible expectations. Let's assume he did just start "ramming things through" and taking a dump all over Congress in the process, and things would inevitably get worse. For the ideologues who are displeased with what they perceive as half-measures just now, he might be a hero. Maybe, but quite certainly he would be a one-term hero. The Republicans could make good book on a spectacular failure and be right back in power, at least in Congress, and then what? So I think it a stupid thing to start bailing on him this soon into his term when he is possibly the most unifying, certainly the most intelligent and well educated president we've had since...hm. Here's what's going to happen. Congress will put together a lame package. It will pass. Then likely as not it will fail. The system will collapse. On its own. Then the big fix will come in. Congress will be discredited and Obama will be able to present a plan with legs and the public will back it because they will already have seen what happens when the really necessary steps are not taken. Right now, the reality is that health care costs too damn much.

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12 Reasons why the U.S. government should not mandate clean water or clean air.

12 Reasons why the U.S. government should not mandate clean water or clean air.

1. Clean air and clean water are not a right. As such, they not the responsibility of government. 2. Government efforts to mandate clean air and clean water do not in practice guarantee universal access clean air and clean water. Many countries have laws to require clean air and clean water but don’t actually have clean air and clean water. 3. Eliminating the profit motive will decrease the rate of innovation regarding clean air and clean water. 4. When a government mandates clean air and clean water, it slows down innovation and inhibits new technologies from being developed and utilized. This simply means that technologies regarding clean air and clean water are less likely to be researched and manufactured, and technologies that are available are less likely to be used. 5. Publicly-mandated clean air and clean water leads to greater inefficiencies and inequalities. Government agencies promoting clean air and clean water are less efficient due to bureaucracy. Universal clean air and clean water would reduce efficiency because of more bureaucratic oversight and more paperwork. 6. Converting to a national clean air and clean water system could be a radical change, creating administrative chaos.

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Who would Jesus insure?

Who would Jesus Insure?

That was the slogan on a placard that stole the show at a tea party attended by Michael Krantz yesterday:

[T]he Medicare recipients who want nothing to do with government-run health care [were] one of the more amusing right-wing cliches of this long hot August. There were no doubt plenty of them yesterday among a crowd that was predominantly older, overwhelmingly white and, I'd wager, heavily evangelical, a combustive demographic that didn't exactly cotton to the gutsy girl who kept pacing around trying to yell "Health care for everyone!" loudly enough to drown out the repeated death threats and off-topic anti-abortion catcalls that greeted her homemade "Who Would Jesus Insure?" sign. Her question, in fact, was quite a bit more piquant than the ones I was asking.

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Proposed Amendment

I've been mulling an idea for an amendment to the U.S. constitution that probably won't have as much a chance as the failed Equal Rights Amendment, in which persons of the female persuasion would have been defined explicitly as full fledged people with the same rights as the white male landholders for which the constitution was originally penned. How's this?

"Government shall pass no law abridging the right of any person to decide whether an organism living within his or her own body is a harmful parasite or a welcome guest, and to respond accordingly."

A lawyer could probably tighten up the wording, but I think the gist is there. This amendment might save oodles of money on government health care in ways such as:
  • It would limit the ways in which lawyers determine what medical procedures are prohibited or required, and the associated overhead in managing those decisions.
  • It would remove the bureaucracy necessary to separate funding for procedures that everyone accepts under government insurance from those protested by a vocal minority.
Discussion?

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