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Comment by professor_x | Hacker News Reader

Learning from history and still ending up on the side of almost every issue that is considered unspeakably cruel a generation later.

Slavery, segregation, women’s suffrage, child labor protections, labor rights, Social Security, interracial marriage, homosexuality, civil rights legislation, same-sex marriage, the Vietnam War, the Iraq War, prohibition, environmental protections, public education expansion, healthcare reform, voting rights expansion, immigration rights, disability rights, reproductive rights, minimum wage laws, workers’ compensation laws.

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>> rely on immediate emotional values....Thus, you get the left calling the right heartless/immoral/racist

> considered unspeakably cruel

You're not disagreeing on any pragmatic basis, just the emotional one. Like I said.

They gave you a whole list of pragmatic policy differences, are you ignoring them or in agreement?

No, they gave a list of policy differences - and justified them with an emotional argument: "cruel". They said nothing about the pragmatic justification of them. Which is exactly my point: the left tends to operate on ideological emotional values.

They could have said things like 'reproductive rights leads to X goods for the populace' or 'prohibition was a net positive in Y ways' or 'minimum wage laws are shown to improve GDP by Z amt on average' - but they didn't. They used an emotional argument. Like I said they would.

They used examples where almost every reasonable American knows what the right and wrong side of history ended up being. He doesn’t need to teach us with detailed policy that slavers ended up on the wrong side of history — we all know.

The point he's responding to is about epistemology - how the conclusion is come to, not what the conclusion is.

And 'wrong side of history' (bandwagon fallacy) and references to 'cruelty' (appeal to emotions) is really, really bad epistemology.

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