[fbags]

I directly addressed the "no true Scotsman" issue, for example.

No, you didn't. You simply asserted that you weren't committing that fallacy.

Similarly, you simply asserted that when evaluating unexpected positive and negative consequences of an action, it is acceptable to dismiss nearly all of the positive ones while including nearly all of the negative ones. This is obvious nonsense, but you couldn't see the problem because you're blinded by your ideology.

And after that you engaged in the always fun sport of moving the goalposts. You switched your argument from 'there are no unintended positive consequences' to a completely unrelated set of complaints about public discourse.

You were intellectually dishonest. If you can't see this, it is only because you do not wish to see it. Your cognitive dissonance will not change reality.

I respond poorly to people accusing me of intellectual dishonesty without demonstrating in what way I'm being dishonest.

Grow up.

[CWuestefeld]

* You simply asserted that you weren't committing that fallacy.*

I acknowledged that there was room for debate, yet you offered none. I explained why I thought that I was on the correct side of the line (because the NASA case had objectives too fuzzy to judge), despite it being a close call.

I also acknowledged that a further example you gave (ARPAnet) was, in fact, a pretty good response to my initial question. You didn't pursue this point, yet I think it demonstrates that I'm not dishonestly throwing out all counterarguments.

You accuse me of "purposefully conflating completely different arguments to try to score cheap political points." Yet in my remarks about JFK and the space race, which in the sequence of the conversation seems to be what you're referring to, I was quite explicit in admitting "in pointing this out, I'm making your point to a certain degree".

I don't believe that your claim that I'm moving the goalpost has merit. I was pretty explicit in that I was looking for positive results that were qualitatively unexpected. The examples cited to me (with the exception of ARPAnet) were positive ones, but they were quantitatively unexpected. Saying "that worked better than we thought" is very different from saying "that had benefits that we didn't foresee".

Turning this around, now, and looking back on your own claims... your initial statement was "One other thing we can be very sure about this law: there's going to be a bunch of 'unintended consequences'", i.e., with certainty there will be positive consequences that weren't intended. Based on the context (that we're discussing employment effects of a sort that I don't recall ever seeing discussed in the PPACA debating), and the connotations of the word "intended" (as contrasted to the word "expected"; to me, the latter might have referred to quantitative differences but this doesn't work so well for the former), I interpret this to mean that there is a certainty of positive consequences that were qualitatively unintended.

You were intellectually dishonest.

It seems to me that -- as you're accusing me -- you're making brash and unfounded ideological pronouncements. That's what I intended to challenge, because it sounds preposterous to me. If the outcome you promise is certain, then there must be such a laundry list of them from past endeavors that you'll be able to rattle off a list in no time. I couldn't think of a single one (although, as noted above, ARPAnet is one example). So I challenged for examples.

And only one of the examples met the conditions that I believe were implied by your original statement (or how I interpreted it, anyway), that is, positive qualitatively unintended consequences to a large, complex governmental program.

You may disagree with me, but I think the fact that we've only come up with a single example (in between the name-calling) pretty well shows that such outcomes are far from a certainty.