Here I posted the transcript to a debate I had. Was it fruitful? Well, the guy is clearly never going to change his mind. He is an old hippie socialist from the 1960s and he thinks that the suggestion that the government not take care of us, cradle to grave, is absurd. The poor deluded old fool thinks he has the wisdom and writings of the revolutionary generation on his side.
However, the debate wasn’t all bad. I removed the comments of the other chatters, but had I left them in, you would see that many of them found what I was saying to be very compelling, and though we weren’t talking about anarchy per se, everyone there knows I am an an-cap.
Disagree–at least in part. You’re not going to flip someone’s opinion entirely overnight, but you may plant seeds of doubt that opens their mind to alternatives. Many people probably don’t realize this because they don’t actually see it happening very often, but I’m sure it does. It also depends on your audience’s level of indoctrination, too of course. I don’t think it’s a waste of time. The alternative is to sit down and let them destroy everything.
You know what might be kind of fun-- gathering a large number of like-minded people from here and going on simultaneous group assaults on various public forums, just for kicks. hehe
Partly depends on how you value your health. High blood pressure is bad.
But, really, I don’t debate (except with students) with no one listening. If someone cares enough to debate, he’s usually already sure of his position. The point is the audience.
There are probably many statists out there who are very logical people. It is just that they are building their logical arguments on premises that may not actually be true (or you would assert they are false). In other words, their arguments might be technically valid ones, ones correctly derived from their base premises using the rules of logic, but those arguments may not be sound ones if the premises on which they are based are not actually, objectively true. I have found that the most effective method of debating viewpoints on any topic is to clearly identify what premises are foundational to a dissenting individual’s arguments and then ask them if they would come to different logical conclusions if those premises turned out to be false.
For example, you might encounter someone who asserts, “There are some people in society who are not able to care for themselves; therefore, government welfare programs are a necessity.” That argument might assume that one or both of the following (unspoken) premises or sub-arguments are objectively true without even realizing it:
(a) If the government does not provide welfare to the truly needy, then no one in the private sector ever will.
(b) Even if someone in the private sector would/could, the government is the most capable agent for doing so equitably, efficiently, or fill in some other positive adjective.
In such a scenario, I posed the following question: “If it could be demonstrated that private charities are (and have been) much more capable of helping needy people than government-sponsored programs, would you be willing for the latter to be replaced with more of the former?” Even if the person responds, “Yes, but … ,” you have at least helped him identify the “fulcrum” of his argument for further consideration. Most people reach hundreds of conclusions in their lifetimes based on assumed premises of which they are not even consciously aware, so even if all you accomplish is create that awareness, your efforts have not been completely in vain.
Agreed. One writer I followed in the past referred to that act as “putting a rock in someone’s shoe.” They may not change their mind on the spot, but something you say might stick with them and cause them a degree of mental discomfort going forward, a discomfort they cannot ignore indefinitely and, therefore, must fully address to their satisfaction eventually.
If you are a good debator (as in, you can hold your ground against the absurdities spewed by a statist), then debating a statist can help you convert the spectators. But I would focus on debating those not yet infected by the statist bug.
i don’t think that this adresses the issue of homosexuality and why it is wrong enough. i hate to tell you this eric but no homosexuals allowed. GO AWAY FAGGOT
debating in private is a waste of time. you will never change the mind of the person you are debating. the point of debate is to do it publicly so that passerby see that the claims of morons have excellent refutations. I can’t tell you how many times I had people approach me after a debate and tell me that they ere going to use my refutation of some commonly heard argument.
"Okay. It seems like we agree on some fundamentals, but get lost somewhere in the middle. Let’s just start from the very beginning, and build our way up.
Do you agree that scarcity exists in the world?"
I didn’t read that entire abominable thread on that site, but given that you had to go back this far to such a basic and obvious concept with these people, that forum might as well have an intro page saying:
Abandon hope, all ye who enter here!
But this was rich, thanks for generating it from them, I laughed:
“We only live in a world of scarcity because of the relation of our population with our lifestyle. If either one of those things was to reduce enough, we would no longer live in a world of scarcity.”
You have a lot of work ahead of you, good luck. Maybe it would be easier to try and convince him to read this? It has pretty pictures so it might keep them entertained.
I think everyone on that thread has finally run out of arguments. It’s been a couple of days now without a response.
The irony of the fact that the RichardDawkins.net forum’s motto is “A clear thinking oasis” is becoming more and more trenchant every day.
I don’t know if you noticed, but I also had one guy on there trying to tell me that mathematics was a solely empirical science (and that Pythagoras could only prove his namesake Theorem via physical experiments), and no one but me contradicted him.
Just for the sake of bagging on the experimental mathematicians, have you ever asked him how one can falsify the pythagorean theorem? It’s a definition for crying out loud, how are you supposed to falsify something that tautological!
I got so disgusted with the socialists on the Richard Dawkins forum that I left the place for months. Just decided to come back and poke around today, and I’ve already had one guy tell me “Monetary expansion has never caused a rise in prices in all of history! It has always caused economic growth!”
Oh! Another gem! Just had someone tell me that we need to do away with money, because “without a price system, we no longer have to worry about profitability or cost effectiveness. … We just have to make sure that production is reliable, environmentally safe, and energy efficient.”