Well, fair enough — I mean, you can always make technically incorrect arguments on purpose (by leaving out necessary caveats and qualifiers, for instance) because you think they’re more effective and still have the right gist, but then the appropriate thing to do when challenged on that is immediately add back the caveats and qualifiers, no?

Anyway, I reject your criticism because I’m not centering it on any particular form of libertarianism — I’m just objecting when statements are made as general truths when in fact they only apply, if at all, to specific cases.

If I see a claim “grapefruit are sour”, I don’t think this means “there exists a grapefruit that is sour”. I also don’t think it means “there exists a variety of graprefruit that is sour” or “in stores, you can often find sour grapefruit” or “idiots on the internet say that grapefruit are sweeter than grapes”. No, I assume (and ought to assume) that it means that the dominant experience of grapefruit is sourness, without enough exceptions to be worth mentioning. When I was a kid, this appeared to be true. But these days, with the prevalence of variants like Oro Blanco and Rio Star, your typical grapefruit experience is not sourness, even if you can detect some residual sourness.

I accept the criticism that my claims about prevalence of different flavors of libertarianism has a somewhat U.S.-centric bias, but in my defense I plead that our potential audience on Medium has a U.S.-centric bias too, and therefore this is the correct bias to have given the presumed audience. It is nonetheless more correct to point this out.

And I agree that some libertarians think voluntary contract enforcement is an option, but even then your criticism wasn’t on-target, as the contract isn’t supposed to be upheld by-others-but-for-free, but rather via a dubious hypothetical reputation mechanism which everyone expends effort on maintaining. (Particularly telling is that the example used — orthodox Jewish diamond merchants — are among the least economically rational, in a libertarian sense, populations imaginable: they have extremely strong religious and social constraints that they follow instinctively.)

Finally, I think we just have somewhat different perspectives on the point of argumentation. I think elevating discourse is highly valuable — often more valuable than any of the specific points being made — because it opens the possibility for people to be convinced by reasons. Perhaps you think strident opposition to foolishness, even if phrased inaccurately, is more important for limiting foolishness. I suspect that given how human defense mechanisms work, this is mostly not true, though I suppose it can be convincing for a few people who have no opinion. In support of my speculation, I would offer “The Righteous Mind” (Haidt, 2012) as an impressive body of scholarship that touches on many relevant things, including this. (I do not think that I manage to achieve the necessary conditions for being able to sway people through logical argumentation most of the time. But I’m hopeful that at least sort of trying is better than not.)

In particular, I am very sensitive about not triggering the fallacy fallacy. That is: my opponent believes X. I give argument A against it, but strictly speaking it has a fallacy. My opponent notices the fallacy, and reasons that because my argument was fallacious, X must be true. Of course, that is itself a fallacy, but a very easy one to make.