Current Events — HabitableZone

Current Events » in reply to Dear Virginia

re: Dear Virginia

As usual you try and turn a shades of grey situation into black and white. Anything that doesn't fit is either shoehorned into being black and white or forgotten about. And after all that you claim to be using logic of all things. You have no basis to discard shades of grey information you don't like, just because it doesn't fit well into your ideology.
Actually logic was itself invented to show how wrong people like you are. In its original form it was a game where someone had to take a give position and was only allowed to answer yes or no to questions and not to ask any questions themselves. The questioner had to lead him to having to say the opposite of his original statement is true.
After this Aristotle formalised the rules of logic but it's original purpose was a word game to distort facts. Actually this is the origin of the "up is down" complaints about the way Bush explains things. Once you toss out all the shades of grey information then just trying to use logic at all leads to a chain of reasoning where the opposite to the correct answer comes out of it.
That's what's wrong with extremist arguments, they go right back to thousands of years ago and pull out perhaps the oldest trick in the logic book to make their arguments look other than the nonsense they are. The sad part is they probably don't even realise just how old a trick it is.
The question is not a black/white tax cut/no tax cut option, but what shade of gray of tax cuts and other stimulations are appropriate in a modern economy. Usually this is conducted in a scientific manner by mainstream economists.
When you exclude all this middle ground options then yes Bush was right to stimulate the economy in the way he did, better than not stimulating it. The problem is he picked virtually the worst possible way to do it, and if he had looked at nuance and all those shades of grey the recession would have been over long ago. In black/white the worst performance since Hoover on jobs looks like a triumph.
The bottom line is these guys stumble endlessly into disasters from their own idiotic policies. This happens because of this black/white logic which excludes all the information int he shades of greys. Just because they excluded it doesn't make all these shades of greys less real and so time and again they run into them and people wonder what went wrong. They can't plan these things because their philosphy assumes real things (shades of grey information) doesn't exist. The result is like walking onto a crowded freeway believing cars don't exist.
I suppose people deserve some credit for conducting policy in the historically number one most stupid technique in the history of logic and reason. The Ancient Greeks would be rolling in their graves.

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