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shelterit comments on The noncentral fallacy - the worst argument in the world? - Less Wrong
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I've got a brother-in-law who has used this argument often. We live in Australia, and unless you've been paying attention to the politics of refugees, immigrants and asylum in this country, this won't make much sense.
About 10 years ago, the Liberal Party (conservatives, ironically) put in place a policy (sending boat refugees to off-shore handling places to demotivate people to choose this route) and a directive (the navy to make sure boats never reached Australian shores, often by towing them out of Australian waters). Immigration by boat hence dropped dramatically, but the reason for that dropped was put on the introduction of the policy, treating the policy and the directive as the same category of "policy."
This lumping of various policies and directives into one encompassing category has had the unfortunate effect of showing all Australians that "the policy" was successful in demotivating people to hop into boats, when the reality was very, very different (and we don't know how many boats have sunk and how many people have died from this outside of Australian waters because of this; the Australian navy don't report on what happens outside their areas).
Hmm. My understanding is that the liberal parties are rather often, let us say, closer to the conservative side of the spectrum. The reason this appears strange to especially citizens of the USA is that, for convoluted historical reasons, they use the term "liberal" to refer to the progressive side of the spectrum, whereupon their liberal party needs to be called "libertarian". (And it's not particularly progressive, either.)
(nods) U.S. political discourse does strange things to the word "conservative" as well.
I don't find it surprising it is that "conservative" comes to mean different things. It's always struck me as an odd term: someone who hadn't heard the term before would think a "conservative" party would just be a "status quo bias" party.
If you have two different countries, with different political histories, you would expect labels to mean different things. We currently view libertarians as closer to conservatives than to liberals, yet libertarians regularly seem closely aligned to 19th century writers such as Bastiat, who were described as Liberal. One could imagine an alternative history where the 19th Century Liberal tradition moved towards a typical conservative position (e.g. as a response to a Labour party).
(I can't say whether this is what happened in Australia, because I don't know the necessary history)
Liberals in Australia are basically culturally conservatives and fiscal liberal.
I'm not sure I follow where this ties into Yvain's "worst argument in the world".
It ties in where I say "This lumping of various policies and directives into one encompassing category"; it's the inverse effects of the argument at play.