tcpkac, the first problem is coming up with a definition of “right wing” that has any operational value. If “hard core libertarian” meant “right wing”, then you’d be including both the free-trade, free-love, cheap-drugs libertarian like me (and Heinlein, I think) with a Pat Buchanan nationalist, isolationist, Christian-privileging paleoconservative, a Ron Paul/Lew Rockwell racialist isolationist paleolibertarian, and, arguably, a Mussolini Italian Fascist into one category—which seems to reduce “right wing” to vacuity. It happens that Philosoblog extends this discussion just today, while critiquing Jonah Goldberg’s Liberal Fascism. It would seem that “right wing” primarily means “I think I’m left wing and I don’t like it.”
Elizer, I don’t think that a skeptic like Heinlein meant any of his characters to be taken as completely authoritative. That said, I don’t see any difficulty in reconciling “perfectly logical” in context—he’s using it as an example of using logic to arrive at an absurdity—with “deceptively logical seeming.”
Of course, to a formalist, the whole syllogism could be perfectly logical in the strong sense you’re using, since we could construct an axiom system in which 1⁄0 is well defined.
tcpkac, the first problem is coming up with a definition of “right wing” that has any operational value. If “hard core libertarian” meant “right wing”, then you’d be including both the free-trade, free-love, cheap-drugs libertarian like me (and Heinlein, I think) with a Pat Buchanan nationalist, isolationist, Christian-privileging paleoconservative, a Ron Paul/Lew Rockwell racialist isolationist paleolibertarian, and, arguably, a Mussolini Italian Fascist into one category—which seems to reduce “right wing” to vacuity. It happens that Philosoblog extends this discussion just today, while critiquing Jonah Goldberg’s Liberal Fascism. It would seem that “right wing” primarily means “I think I’m left wing and I don’t like it.”
Elizer, I don’t think that a skeptic like Heinlein meant any of his characters to be taken as completely authoritative. That said, I don’t see any difficulty in reconciling “perfectly logical” in context—he’s using it as an example of using logic to arrive at an absurdity—with “deceptively logical seeming.”
Of course, to a formalist, the whole syllogism could be perfectly logical in the strong sense you’re using, since we could construct an axiom system in which 1⁄0 is well defined.