http://www.tomwoods.com/blog/presidential-war-powers-revisited/#disqus_thread, bold and underlining added: Ridin' Dirty [A.K.A. Retopper]: For the 5th time, I am challenging you to cite the article in the Constitution that prohibits the President from waging war. William Leggett: It doesn’t have to!! It’s a document of limited and granted powers. If the power is not there they don’t have it. Pretty simple, yet hard to understand, I suppose. Ridin' Dirty: Then you and Tom are supremely naive and clueless. If the Constitution prohibits the President from initiating armed force without Congressional approval then those bombs hitting Libyan soil being dropped from American attack aircraft must be a fantasy like Tom's ideological views.
Ridin' Dirty: Then you and Tom are supremely naive and clueless. If the Constitution prohibits the President from initiating armed force without Congressional approval then those bombs hitting Libyan soil being dropped from American attack aircraft must be a fantasy like Tom's ideological views.
If this was intentional, it was arguing just to argue, in the worst kind of way. If Retopper was sincere here, then this was an error that happened in his own mind. It was a WTO that made him conclude he was right even in the face of damning arguments by Woods and others. WTOs like this happened all through the lengthy debate, but I chose this one because it was clearest.
Why anarchy fails
I think the vast majority of the time this is intentional. I think it's the easiest way for someone who has no real argument to continue arguing (i.e. to have something to say).
I'd like to think most arguers are more sincere than that (I'm almost certain Hoppe is sincere in the A.E.), but I don't doubt that happens quite a lot because people just want to back talk. But I wonder to what extent they sort of still believe it themselves.
No, people are not aware of it. They actually confuse concepts if they have the same name. They just have no incentive to be specific about definitions, it would not be emotionally satisfying to do so. It would mean admitting that they were wrong and it would mean being out of their comfort zone and having to think critically. Sticking with an equivocation and maintaining ones beliefs is just the easy thing to do. Equivocation is like the main defense of bad memes. It's protection against being discredited by facts. That's why prevailing memes rely heavily on equivocation and it's so hard to argue with anyone because the words have no meanings.
They just have no incentive to be specific about definitions, it would not be emotionally satisfying to do so. It would mean admitting that they were wrong and it would mean being out of their comfort zone and having to think critically. Sticking with an equivocation and maintaining ones beliefs is just the easy thing to do.
I couldn't agree more. My experience with people is that most of them prefer the warmth and protection of ambiguous terminology, and any attempt to pull the blanket off by clearly defining terms is met with ill-tempered panic. It's why so many people dismiss libertarians as kooks and cranks: we insist the words employed in argumentation have specific meaning, and this undermines their ability to cloak arguments in platitudes and rhetoric.
Just this weekend an aquaintance told me that "free market capitalism" had caused the economic crisis. When I pressed him to define what "free market capitalism" was, he initially acted like I was the idiot. When I broke it down further, asking him whether or not government control of interest rates were a feature of "free" financial markets, his confusion quickly turned to anger, a transformation I've seen too many times.
If you're not speaking in vague abstractions and over-generalizations, then you're simply not speaking their language. Molyneux has an excellent blurb on this.
Really good additions, gentlemen. I'd like to keep track of key WTOs that happen in debates.