I don’t believe your country was ever under communism in the last two thousand years. I think you’re actually from a former USSR state. Not even Stalin ever dared to claim that the USSR had achieved communism, and he was an arrogant git who would have said it if he’d had a shred of evidence.
Comment on We live wasted lives
Maalus@lemmy.world 3 weeks agoAnd yet over here it is exactly what happened. So we have 3 years during a civil war, and 60 years of a failed state.
Genius@lemmy.zip 3 weeks ago
Maalus@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
No true scotsman fallacy. I could say that no country was under ideal capitalism so you can’t criticize it either. You have to look at reality, not make believe nations that never existed.
squaresinger@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
Throwing around the names of fallacies that don’t apply instead of actual arguments doesn’t further your cause just as much as you might think it does.
The no true Scotsman fallacy applies if:
- Person A makes a generalized statement (“No Scotsman puts sugar on his porridge”)
- That statement is falsified by providing a counter-example (“I know a Scotsman who puts sugar on his porridge”)
- Person A does not back away from the original falsified statement but instead modifies the original statement and signals that they did modify that statement (“Well, no true Scotsman puts sugar on his porridge”)
The main issue here is that using this fallacy, the claim becomes a non-falsifiable tautology. Every Scotsman who puts sugar on his porridge is not a true Scotsman, thus the claim becomes always true by excluding every counter-example.
Let’s apply that to the situation at hand.
- Genius@lemmy.zip made the statement that communism can work, providing an example where it apparently did work. This statement is not generalized, so the first condition for the true Scotsman fallacy already doesn’t apply.
- Maalus@lemmy.world provided a counter-example, where communism didn’t work. This doesn’t actually contradict the first statement, because Genius@lemmy.zip never claimed that communism always works, so providing a single counter-example doesn’t negate the statement that communism can work.
- Genius@lemmy.zip then pointed out that USSR states never actually claimed to have achieved communism, and that statement is true. According to USSR doctrine, the goal was to get to communism at some point, but that point was never reached. While this can sound like an appeal to purity, there’s no basis for a “no true Scotsman” fallacy here.
Please read up on your fallacies before throwing around the names of them.
When you claim that something is a fallacy, even though the fallacy you claim doesn’t actually apply, then you are doing so to discredit the whole argument without actually engaging with it. This is a perfect example of the Strawman argument, which itself is a fallacy.
Genius@lemmy.zip 3 weeks ago
Actually, I think this is a case of the fallacy fallacy
Maalus@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
“I don’t believe your country was under communism, that’s not real communism” is EXACTLY the scotsman fallacy. But by all means, go for a lengthy post that says nothing.
dbtng@eviltoast.org 3 weeks ago
Nerd up!
Genius@lemmy.zip 3 weeks ago
I just gave you a true scotsman 4 messages ago, genius. You pick those debate skills up at Harvard?
Maalus@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
You gave me a singular anecdote from a state that didn’t exist for even three years.
Deme@sopuli.xyz 3 weeks ago
Huh. It’s almost as if all the various alternatives to capitalism couldn’t be lumped into one… Revolutionary Catalonia was Anarcho-Syndicalist, so about as far from the soviet system as possible.