I apologize for the snideness of my reply, since there is precedent for talk of politics being discouraged even though it's always open season on religion. It had slipped my mind.
However, re-reading Eliezer's original post, I interpret it as advice, not as a prohibition: "I'm not saying that I think Overcoming Bias should be apolitical, or even that we should adopt Wikipedia's ideal of the Neutral Point of View. But try to resist getting in those good, solid digs if you can possibly avoid it." I think my use of a political example here falls within those guidelines, particularly since I'm not a Republican or an Obama-basher and therefore conclude that I'm not trying to jab anybody other than the irrational.
As to the Wiki saying we have a gentleman's agreement not to discuss politics, I don't recall agreeing to that. I could easily have missed it; or this may be a case of wikiocracy (government by whomever edited the wiki last).
My interepretation is that "politics is the mind-killer" it's up to the discretion of the poster to post, and up to the discretion of everyone else to vote up or down. In this case, I wouldn't have posted at all if I were required to reframe everything to not refer to political events. I don't think the question of repayments to unemployed oil workers is a political flashpoint, and I don't know what you mean about spending a significant amount of the article on the political predicates.
I apologize for the snideness of my reply, since there is precedent for talk of politics being discouraged even though it's always open season on religion. It had slipped my mind.
I removed my earlier vote on the grandparent. I objected to the 'snideness + implications I don't think hit the mark' combination and certainly not for condemning general injunctions on topics. Some politics doesn't seem to damage the site as a whole and the thought of people getting to arbitrarily reject topics is seriously 'Ugh'.
In this case I do actually think that some mind...
The White House says there will be a temporary ban on new deep-water drilling, and BP will have to pay the salaries of oilmen who have no work during that ban. I scratched my head trying to figure out the logic behind this. This was my first attempt:
This logic works equally well in this case:
But "everyone" would agree that the second example is fallacious. Are people so angry at BP that they can't think at all?
Then I came up with this second argument. ("At fault" is legalese for "caused by an immoral or illegal action.")
Applied to Rachel Carson:
Both these chains of reasoning are still faulty, but they're more similar to the reactions of most people. They are faulty because they're not specific about the connection between the fault and the injured party, or about what an "injury" is. In the second case, there is no injury to the workers; the company simply stopped employing them, and could only be held morally responsible for this under something like feudalism. In the BP case, you could argue that non-BP oilmen were injured, because they want to work and their (non-BP) employers want to hire them, but outside forces prevented them.
However, being at fault for the oil spill is not the same as being at fault for (causing by immoral action) the ban on drilling. The word "cause" is too vague for moral responsibility to be transitive over it; and "X caused Z" does not preclude "Y caused Z". The ban on drilling is not a ban only on drilling by BP; this means that the powers that be decided the ban on drilling is good for the country, not a punishment of BP. It is a decision that the expected cost of further drilling outweighs the expected benefits. There is no moral failing and no one at fault, and either the government should pay them, or the oilmen should bite it the way any workers do when their industry has a downturn and rely on existing safety nets such as unemployment insurance. (This is completely different from the case of fishermen put out of work directly by the oil spill; I believe it makes sense for BP to pay them.)
Figuring out how moral responsibility propagates through a chain of events is complicated. I propose that people are using the "sin-based" model of cause and effect. This model says that all bad outcomes are caused by moral failings. (On the radio yesterday, I heard a woman being interviewed whose house had been destroyed by a landslide. The first question the interviewer asked was, "Whose fault was this?")
In the sin-based model, when you enumerate a chain of events that is causally linked, and some events are bad outcomes, all you need to do is transfer blame for the bad outcomes to the moral failings preceding them in the chain. Oilmen are out of work; you construct a chain of events leading to them being out of work, identify the closest preceding moral failure in the chain, and pin the blame on that moral failing. No need for painful thinking!