Closely related to the No True Scotsman fallacy is Sliding Definition Ploy1. It goes like this: "for the sake of argument", give a slightly-odd definition to some common term, like Mind, or Freedom, or Justice, or Beauty. Deduce some consequences from that definition (ideally, this stage should take a while, to overflow your audience's input ( Read more... )

A useful data point in the largely fact-free argument between Libertarians and everyone else: private-only health care doesn't work, in the sense that it delivers substantially lower levels of public health....the United States has been the unwitting control subject in a 30-year, worldwide experiment comparing the merits of private versus public ( Read more... )

For those of you who don't know, Libertarianism is a political philosophy that aims at maximising human freedom, by shrinking government as much as possible and leaving everything up to the free market. Now, I'm definitely in favour of freedom, and I accept that free markets are a very elegant way of allocating scarce resources, but I'm rather less ( Read more... )

Up until a couple of weeks ago, I used to be an occasional contributor to the discussions on Eric Raymond's weblog. For those of you that don't know, ESR's one of the Open Source community's "leaders". He doesn't have nearly the programming cred of (say) RMS, but he scares business types a lot less, and has written some interesting stuff explaining ( Read more... )