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NancyLebovitz comments on Is altruistic deception really necessary? Social activism and the free market - Less Wrong Discussion
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I fail to see how men having only recently gotten the vote is a good argument against women getting the vote.
You neglected to include a good argument in favor of slavery.
If you look at my earlier post, and my examples in this post, you'll see that "altruistic deception" is when you present something that is false and unworkable in order to motivate people to do work that you hope will contribute to a real solution. Your objection amounts to saying that we can't say that anything is false, or even that one X is more false than another X.
Let's test your idea that "There are no good arguments for X" is simply how having a successful social taboo against X feels from inside:
"There are no good arguments for the phlogiston theory of chemistry" is simply how having a successful social taboo against the phlogiston theory of chemistry feels from inside.
"There are no good arguments for Ptolemaic astronomy" is simply how having a successful social taboo against Ptolemaic astronomy feels from inside.
"There are no good arguments for Aristotelian physics" is simply how having a successful social taboo against Aristotelian physics feels from inside.
Marxism is less able to make correct predictions, and more thoroughly empirically refuted, than any of those theories. It is a false theory. It is a not-even-wrong theory. If you ask a Marxist to predict whether a corn blight will make the price of corn go up or down, he can only say, "Markets are a tool of the bourgeois, and their prices are commodity fetishization." Marx deliberately removed the concept of market price from the Marxist ontology, so Marxists can't be tempted to make quantitative predictions and be proven wrong.
Christianity, my other example, is also bad at making predictions. I object to your implication that we cannot say that the theory of Christianity is less probable than the theory of evolution.
Do you think the early Marxists were lying? I'm inclined to think they were telling the truth as they saw it. Later Marxists--after it was clear that Marxism was leading to poverty rather than prosperity-- are a different story.
It doesn't matter to me whether they were lying deliberately or not. The abstract question I'm trying to ask is whether a need to tell untruths is strong evidence against the worthiness of a cause. Whether the person telling the untruths knows they're untrue is irrelevant.
Define "worthiness".
If you'll check the original post, you'll see I phrased it in terms of the separate valuations of the individuals deciding whether to mislead people, and the individuals deciding whether to follow such people. It does not posit an objective "worthiness". That was shorthand to try to avoid spending my life writing paragraphs like this re-writing the details of my post every time I reply to a comment about it.