I don't do this often, but I want to tell you I downvoted you for passionately arguing against a strawman. I can find no evidence that nirvana ever claimed libertarianism wasn't an ideology, only that it is a minority one. Unless perhaps there was an edit?
>I don't do this often, but I want to tell you I downvoted you for passionately arguing against a strawman. I can find no evidence that nirvana ever claimed libertarianism wasn't an ideology, only that it is a minority one. Unless perhaps there was an edit?
I don't see any edit, so the current text is what I replied to.
You're saying that "you can find no evidence that nirvana ever claimed libertarianism wasn't an ideology".
Well, I read the sentence: "most people are not libertarian, and so they down vote comments that don't fit their ideology" as a claim that a) libertarianism is not an ideology, b) libertarians don't down vote comments that don't fit their ideology.
Isn't he basically arguing as if libertarians are somehow above downvoting people who disagree with them? That is, they are, somehow, above ideology?
I consider both claims as false.
Even more so, because what the ideology you follow claims and what you practice are not really related. Christians are as prone to breaking the "seven-deadly-sins" as anybody else, and libertarians are just as prone to downvoting people they don't agree with as anybody else.
That I was downvoted because of arguing against libertarianism is as good evidence as any, isn't it?
He actually made no claim whatsoever about the downvoting habits of libertarians. You seem to be inferring the claim from that he thinks that libertarians must be the opposite of those who downvote them. That inference has no basis in this thread.
You are making similar assumptions about the sentence you quote. He only makes claims about the downvoters ideologies, with no reference to libertarians' ideologies. Even if he does think something idiotic like that libertarianism is not an ideology, which I doubt, he had the sense to keep it out of this conversation.
This is practically the definition of the straw man fallacy.
>He actually made no claim whatsoever about the downvoting habits of libertarians. You seem to be inferring the claim from that he thinks that libertarians must be the opposite of those who downvote them. That inference has no basis in this thread.
Maybe in some "axiomatic-pure-logic-language-land" what you said holds true, but in real natural language land, when we mention something about X, we do it in order to compare it to that which is not-X.
That is, if we are to assume that the libertarians have the same downvoting habits, then there would be ABSOLUTELY NO NEED for him to even mention the downvoting habits of the rest of the population.
>This is practically the definition of the straw man fallacy.
No, it's practically the very definition of extracting the meaning of a statement beyond what it explicitly states, i.e the very cornerstone of having a discussion: drawing conclusions.
He was merely explaining a phenomenon, with no reference to other phenomena. Only some statements imply comparison, not all.
I think that extracting meaning beyond what a statement explicitly states is actually responsible for a lot if not most of the nonsense that happens in Internet discussions, because it's too easy to be wrong. Best to stick with pure logic when you can, or start off asking questions rather than refuting something they might not have meant.
You're wrong. All I was communicating was that libertarianism is a minority of ideologies and thus since most people (including libertarians) tend to down vote comments that support ideologies they disagree with, libertarianism is often under-represented.
Further the rest of your comment was equally fallacious. But by pedantically arguing for your right to put words in my mouth, you have managed to derail the topic into a meta discussion.
So, you illustrate another tactic-- besides downvoting- that is used to prevent effective discussion of libertarianism on social news sites.
>You're wrong. All I was communicating was that libertarianism is a minority of ideologies and thus since most people (including libertarians) tend to down vote comments that support ideologies they disagree with, libertarianism is often under-represented.
If that's "all you was communicating", then you phrased it badly.
"most people are not libertarian, AND SO they down vote comments that don't fit their ideology".
AND SO explicitly states that the reason people vote down post they disagree with is because they are not libertarians.
What you probably WANTED to write --which is made clear only by your subsequent clarification-- is:
"most people are not libertarian AND SO libertarian comments (as well as comments of other marginal ideologies) are voted down more".
