Re: [Ksummit-2013-discuss] [ATTEND] How to act on LKML

Paul Gortmaker
2013-07-24T01:48:57Z

On Tue, Jul 23, 2013 at 9:26 PM, James Bottomley
<James.Bottomley@hansenpartnership.com> wrote:
> On Tue, 2013-07-23 at 19:51 -0500, Felipe Contreras wrote:
>> On Sat, Jul 20, 2013 at 8:02 PM, Daniel Phillips
>> <d.phillips@partner.samsung.com> wrote:
>> > On 07/20/2013 12:36 PM, Felipe Contreras wrote:
>> >> I think you need more than "hope" to change one of the fundamental
>> >> rules of LKML; be open and honest, even if that means expressing your
>> >> opinion in a way that others might consider offensive and colorful.
>> >
>> > Logical fallacy type: bifurcation. You can be open and honest without
>> > being offensive or abusive.
>>
>> You are mistaken, that is not what the false dichotomy fallacy means.
>> I'm not saying you have to be A (open and honest), or B (polite), and
>> that you can't be both, if that's what you arguing (which seems to be
>> the case), you are wrong, and to argue against that position would be
>> a straw man fallacy.
>>
>> Your mistaken fallacy seems to be that you think one can *always* be
>> both A (open and honest), and B (polite), I'm not sure if there's a
>> name for that fallacy, but you don't provide any evidence for that
>> claim.
>
> It's not actually one of the original logical fallacies, but it's called
> argument to moderation or false compromise: The fallacy is the
> assumption that the original statements represent extremal positions of
> a continuum so there must always be middle ground which represents the
> correct statement. To those accepting the fallacy making the middle
> ground statement by that fact alone demonstrates the invalidity of the
> previous proposition.

And when so many of us had convinced ourselves that this thread could
not possibly descend any further into the off-topic weeds... Good job.
That assumption has now been shattered by bringing in ancient Greece.

Given that, I'd like to propose a KS topic that covers Adam Smith, and
John Stuart Mill, Leviathan by Hobbes, and The Politics by Aristotle.

C'mon folks. This is beyond silly. Let us look at the things that we
can really change, or at least influence change within. Things that
really matter to linux today and tomorrow.

P.
---

>
> I think it's not in the original fallacies because they come from Greek
> rhetoric and the Greeks believed dialectic: the taking opposite
> positions and arguing them thoroughly. It's only with the advent of
> Western European political systems that we're conditioned to seek
> compromise without rigorous examination. This actually makes argument
> to moderation one of the most effective rhetorical tools in use today
> for discrediting an opponent's argument without actually addressing it.
>
> James
>
>
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