Posts

Sensible people are capable of making the real-world distinction
between (i) deciding that it is a poor use of limited resources to
prosecute low-level drug offenders and (ii) nakedly attempting to
commandeer the apparatus of law enforcement to prosecute political
enemies and suppress voter turnout.

Since we don't yet have an actual argument, there's no specific argumentative fallacy to highlight. The idiom would be "apples to oranges," I guess, though this is more like apples to elephants.

Let me see if I can cook up an argument through. (Restricting the domain of things to executive acts.)

(i) Bush did things without Congressional approval.

(ii) The things Bush did without Congressional approval were illegitimate.

Lemma: Anything without Congressional approval is illegitimate.

(In symbols: ?x (¬Cx & Ix) ? ?x (¬Cx ? Ix))

(iii) Obama proposes doing things without Congressional approval.

Conclusion (from (iii) and Lemma): What Obama proposes doing without Congressional approval is illegitimate.

(In symbols: ?x (¬Cx ? Ix); ?a (¬Ca) ? Ia.)

See the fallacy? It's from (ii) to the Lemma. Cum hoc ergo propter hoc. It doesn't follow that because something has two properties, anything with one property will have the other. In particular, it doesn't follow that any presidential act without Congressional approval is illegitimate just because some are. Presidents can do many things without Congressional approval yet perfectly legitimately.

Memento, right, what were we talking about? Oh yeah, how no true Scotsman libertarian could support Obama. I pointed out how drug war policy provides clear grounds for a libertarian to support Obama. The response was threefold: (a) "yeah, well why didn't he do anything about it while a Senator," which is a red herring fallacy, (b) "yeah, well how convenient; yet you accuse Bush of arrogating power illegitimately," which we've just discussed, (c) Obama Kool-Aid Ayn Rand Not A Real Jew I Love Atlas Shrugs Blog

CBO = Congressional Budget Office. Link. A "spending cut" that is actually a national subprime mortgage is not a spending cut. 

I can't spare much more time to this, however:

According to the CBO, McCain's slate of proposals would add $5.8 T to the national debt; Obama's would add $1.9T, or approximately one third.

"Judicial activism" is a contentless term. O'Connor, Scalia, Rehnquist, and Thomas ruled on the side of liberty in Kelo. Scalia flipped to the authoritarian side in Raich. Now let's separate libertarians from glibertarians. In Hamdan, a case whose subject matter was even closer to the fundaments of liberty than Kelo or Raich, the majority upholding ancient rights was Stevens, Souter, Ginsburg, Breyer, and Kennedy. The authoritarians were Scalia, Thomas, and Alito, with Roberts recusing himself because he'd ruled for the government in the case when he was a circuit judge. All these considerations make Obama vastly preferable to McCain or Clinton on judicial appointment grounds.

Since Obama is in the Senate, can he not introduce a bill to curtail the war on drugs?

He can. It wouldn't get anywhere. Instead he's pledged to roll back parts of it as president, which he can do unilaterally. Maybe he'll break the pledge, and that would be a huge betrayal. On the other hand, no president has done anything but escalate the internal war against American citizens using a disfavored class of pharmaceuticals since it began. I've written a more thorough and substantive criticism of Obama than any of your strings of ad hominems, but because you steadfastly refuse to credit him with anything, ever — at the cost of dwelling in fantasyland — I'm a hack. Whatever.

Ismail, there's nothing objectionable about your construction — in fact it's obviously a standard usage — but it is, importantly, a weak claim; to weak, for example, to rule out Rand's failure at being a novelist, which on my terms, also standard, is equivalent to trying and failing to write good novels (on some aesthetic conception of "good"). So your precisification of Mateo's claim is fine, and he's welcome to it, but his point was to undermine my claim that Rand was a failed novelist, and there is no conflict between her having been successful on your understanding of Mateo's lights, and her having been a failure on my lights.

Jeffrey, I'm fascinated: What part of "Atlas" calling Jeffrey Goldberg a jihadist buggery-bottom exemplifies finery to you? Also, I view voting as a collective action problem; I don't cast protest votes that would hurt my preferred choice between the two people with a chance to win; the libertarian case for Obama is straightforward, and, I promise, shared by a large swathe of libertarians (do a poll of Reasonoids, if you don't believe me) — some of us think ending wars, ending torture, restoring civil liberties, curbing the drug war, curbing the militarization of police, filling the federal bench with civil libertarians, protecting women's reproductive freedoms, adding a third of John McCain's proposed increase in the national debt, loosening restrictions on immigration, dustbinning the conventional wisdom that you have to be a reflexive hawk to be credible on national security, sparing us the presidency of somebody who thinks private lives and private choices should be subsumed to "national greatness", and on and on, is more important than lowering corporate tax rates and taking a symbolic stand on gun rights, which are the only libertarian grounds for supporting John McCain, as far as I can tell.  

But please, tell me more about Nozick.

The claim was: high book sales demonstrate success as a writer. That is clearly false, cf. Dan Brown. Hence the shifting of goal posts:

selling books that plenty of smart people reread, enjoy, recommend to friends

Really? So now we can bring judgments about the sorts of people reading certain authors to bear and restrict the "sales = successful writing" claim to just the right sort? Should we use my precisification of 'smart' or yours? Or should we come up with standards for judging literature on its merits?

Rand's place in the history of this concept

Right, she does have one. About the same place that Square One had in the history of mathematics.

popularity (measured by sales) is a legitimate standard
by which measure a writer's success.

Success at making money, nothing else (in particular, not at writing good novels). Dan Brown is wildly popular. Rand has sold more books than any philosopher except possibly Plato or Nietzsche. So, Top 3 all time or what?

We still talk about "rational self-interest" as a viable
ethical force.

Rational self-interest is an important concept in several disciplines at the intersection of philosophy and economics. Suggesting Rand had anything to do with that is about on a par with suggesting that geometers operate under the influence of an episode of Sesame Street that discussed triangles.

Anon: I assure you it isn't Rand's fame that keeps her out of philosophy curricula. I'm a Nozickian libertarian, have I mentioned that before?

Mateo, I see you equate book sales and popularity with success as a novelist, and indeed, as a philosopher, so I'm not terribly swayed by your assessment of the relative elevations of voices. My advice is to always keep a fainting couch on hand, lest vulgarity strike you unawares. Anyway, if Glick's disparagement of Goldberg's Zionism seemed to you to come from on high, I can only imagine how lofty her follow-up, in which she accuses Goldberg of "taking another cue from the radical leftist, anti-Zionist playbook," will strike you.