More David Weber rants

Good

It's really hard to portray two conflicting points of view well. But a time when Weber does it surprisingly well is when a couple of ships/fleets are manoeuvring against each other, and A has a plan which eventually works. It's too easy to make the mistake of having B constantly justify to themselves why they believe [thing A wants them to believe], which does happen, but often comes across as ostentatious and forced in fiction. Instead, Weber often does well at portraying B forming plans of their own, which make sense given what they know, and [thing A wants them to believe] is just a detail they've naturally glossed over.

Bad

I only just noticed this, but stereotypical Internet Libertarianism (TM) (as personified by non-dolists in the republic of haven) seems to believe:

(a) People should work hard and make good under their own effort
(b) I, personally, WANT to work hard and resent any sort of government interference, helpful or hindering
(c) Everyone else is lazy scum who the government have to FORCE to work hard

Isn't it a bit paternalistic to assume that it's just you who has a work ethic and everyone else has to be shown how to do it? In fact, couldn't withdrawing government aid of any form to force people to work harder be viewed as just as interfering as granting government aid of any form?

The $0000 question!

Often you get an argument something like this:

Moderator: Should so-and-so be prosecuted for such-and-such act of violence that was sort of self defence but maybe not?
A: Of course! It was murder!
B: No it wasn't!
A: Yes it is!

This is similar to Scott's Worst Argument in the World

The real question is, "is this something that should be punished under the law, or not". Usually you can say "the law should punish murder" and "we all know what murder is", and get a helpful shortcut to the answer.

However, you don't have a god-given right to have your vocabulary do your thinking for you. People define murder in slightly different ways depending on context: any killing, unpleasant killing, illegal killing, immoral killing, aggressive killing, etc. And people have slightly different ideas of what's ok in self defence. But there's no particular reason to expect that those will correlate on difficult edge cases: in fact, if they're determined basically by chance, they probably won't.

The real question with real consequences is "what should the law do" (or "what should we do")?

If you answer the question of "should we call this murder" it makes it easier to talk about, but doesn't actually tell you anything about the best outcome. However, it's seductively easy for both A and B to assume that if they decide "is this murder" they've answered the only question that matters, hence you may have A and B disagreeing violently about whether it's murder, when in fact they've no idea whether they agree or not about what should be done about it.

I call "is it murder" the Nought Thousand Dollar Question, because it sounds really emotive and important, but actually has nearly zero consequence to the actual debate.