Argument from analogy Puns

It derails the entire argument, and is a sidenote anyway - it was used only to show them your line of thinking.

A flawed analogy does not invalidate your point, it was just a bad example!

This happened to me some years ago back when I was getting married. My wife and I wanted to pick out engagement rings, and decided we would pick them out together in store. Oh boy was that a mistake! A bit of advice to my fellow men: Don't ever take your wife out jewelry shopping, buy them gifts. Specifically if its for a wedding/engagement. There are two reasons for this: First the female clerks jump all over the women to try and sell them stuff. Second: Women (not just in this story) but in general, for whatever reason, just become enamored with engagement and marriage in a way men just don't.

Here is the key thing about this story: We are going to purchase these things in cash (well card but whatever.)

This story pisses me off to this day:

So we walk into this jewelry store just to look. We plan on going to three jewelery stores before making a decision. I decide against getting diamonds on my ring as I find them disgusting (ethical reasons, just look it up). My fiancée at the time agrees as we walk into the store. We come in and as soon as these women her my fiancée (now wife) say the words "Engagement ring" every single clerk not working with a client, stops, walks over, and begins more or less complimenting her, and begging her to use them as their representative.

Now I'm as far from a neck beard as it comes but it becomes increasingly clear these women are only interested in getting money out of her, and are total pieces of shit. I mean that was clear from the outset (its a business) but they are playing up her getting engaged.

Now before my "GET THE FUCK OUT" alarms are going off they pull me away from her to look at rings for me. I don't think anything of it: Shes a rational human being.

So we find me a ring, go back over to her and she tells me "Hey! I put this on a loan. What do you think of this ring?" The loan they talked her into is a sleezy, underhanded, third rate, bullshit, cost 2.5 times as much for the item, loan. We aren't rich at this point, but we aren't poor either. Neither of us have credit because we buy in cash or not at all (even our cars and our house.) I look at her "Aren't we...paying in full?"

Fiancee: "Oh well I figured we could build credit this way. We will eventually need it to buy a house."

Me: "You know that loans cost money right? That you have to pay? How much is the loan for?"

Sales clerk: "Its for the exact amount." (A lie, its for double the amount.)

Me: "So the ring costs xxxx and the loan costs e

"Claiming to own a plot of land because you've 'transformed' or 'improved upon it' is the logical equivalent of a surgeon claiming to own the body the patient they've just operated on."

I came up with this a little while ago and wanted to check with other anarchists to see if it holds up before flinging it on a capitalist. I am the only anarchist I know so I felt this would be the best place to take this. Any glaring issues with this analogy as it stands? If this would be better suited to another subreddit please let me know.

This is an argument I came up with, though just so no one gets the wrong idea, I know that realistically there is nothing new under the sun and another person has already come up with a similar argument as I did, but much more eloquently stated. Such is the way of the world. If that is the case, just know I did not consciously steal this argument from anyone, and in fact, I would love to know if another person came up with this idea.

This is a response which I give to the fine-tuning argument, specifically to the claim that the probability of a universe that could support life is so astronomically small that it seems inconceivable that our universe could exist in our current form, without a designer.

First, I ask if you accept the premise that if you played the Powerball tomorrow, your odds of having all the numbers correct and winning the whole pot are astronomically small. Everyone would acknowledge this as true.

So imagine you do this and you actually get all the numbers right and win. There is no way that doesn't feel special, and there is no way you aren't in awe of having won. That would be a natural feeling.

Now, imagine you didn't win. Imagine you turn on the news and see that some guy named Greg in Iowa got all the numbers right and won the whole jackpot. How unlikely and special does that feel? To you, one of the millions who lost, it doesn't. YOUR odds of winning were astronomically low, but the odds of someone winning are not. Someone was going to win, and you can easily accept that.

So, in the same way there were millions of people who might have won the lottery, there are an uncountable universes which could have potentially formed. We, being the "winners" feel special, but to all the universes who didn't "win", our universe would be seen as nothing more than one of infinite possible universes. That there is life would not seem so amazing, because life is only a phenomenon, and infinite other phenomena which could have happened did not.

It is only our consciousness which causes us to separate ourselves from all other phenomena. Without it, life would be no more remarkable than a black hole, or an asteroid orbiting a star. And if we could observe other universes that could have been, we would surely observe other phenomena that we cannot even begin to conceptualize with our limited minds, because everything we can conceptualize is based on the very nature of our universe. It is the nature of our universe which has allowed our minds

First of all, I'm not opposed to the welfare state at all. But there's a little problem with this analogy, the problem is roughly analog to the Maslow's "hierarchy of needs", but applied to the state or society's fundamentals.

Defense, to a good degree, would be at the absolute base of the state's pyramid of fundamental functions, whereas several welfare policies (not all) will be found distributed above and more throughout the entire pyramid, like free higher education. You can't have a generous welfare state and nothing to defend it from being taken over.

One can argue that there's nevertheless excessive or unjustifiable defense expending, that it goes well beyond the strictly necessary for defending a nation, even being counterproductive, and here is where the original analogy should focus. But how much is absolutely necessary is an open question.

I believe a better stress on the more fundamental necessity of defense should avoid the attempts of dismissing the argument as some commie-hippie pipe dream.