#rhtrcs

[neverendingaudit]

What is the point of this hand-waving? It’s a tu quoque argument without the quoque.

Nick Stokes, making me smile.

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How to Win Any Ball Game

[Doug McNeall's second instalment hits the right spot.]

/7. Be heard

Demand that your opponent reads everything that you ever wrote, on any subject. If they haven’t, or they won’t, chide them for being ignorant or narrow minded as appropriate.

/8. Victim Bully

Victim bully. Use claims that your opponent has wronged you to gain leverage over them. This works especially well if you have harried or frustrated them into being robust with their language.

/9. Flat out hypocrisy

Accuse your opponent of the very thing that you are doing right now to gain advantage over them. It doesn’t matter what it is.

Hold your opponent responsible for the actions of their entire group, or culture. Demand that they show penance by calling out every example of the behaviour you don’t like. Be sure to gleefully point these out.

/11. Demand answers

It doesn’t matter if your questions are relevant, interesting, or important. Keep demanding. Proclaim loudly that your opponent won’t answer your questions, and that, really, the answers to the questions are the important thing.

/12. Be disappointed

Make it clear to your opponent, you are disappointed in them. Look, you expect a higher standard of behaviour and/or argument from them, and really, they’ve let you down, they’ve let their family down, but mostly, they’ve let themselves down.

/13. Change the subject

If all else fails, and you’re still losing your argument, you can always LOOK: A SQUIRREL!!!!

[neverendingaudit]

Whataboutism Level

Another interesting metric would be to measure the lack of critical response regarding just about any newsy that may lukewarmly help promote contrarian talking points. Another one would be to measure the distance taken to present these newsies. We could call its conjunct the whataboutism level.

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How Covert Agents Infiltrate the Internet to Manipulate, Deceive, and Destroy Reputations

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> [W]e should look upon speech and action in a human being as persuasive, as expressive, as being used in the light of the orator, rhetorician, propagandist, etc. wishes them to be seen.

Rom Harré, quoted in Arguing and Thinking by Michael Billig, a guy who takes Protagoras so seriously as to make the contradictory process the root of human thought.

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Managing Memes with Musashi

Maybe

I thought it was “maybe, just maybe,” Danny. Interestingly, “maybe, just maybe” sounds less maybe than “maybe”.

You know, I got to thank you for making me think about how we need to commit to memes. Memes are double edge swords. Musashi’s saying might apply here, at the very least it refers to a kingdom Cap’n likes to game:

Whatever you do, you must drive the enemy together, as if tying a line of fishes, and when they are seen to be piled up, cut them down strongly without giving them room to move.

What you say applies to dilemmas, where no good choice is available. The M meme is one example of that. It doesn’t apply to the authority memes: it is possible for Denizens to decide if they play the man, or not. They simply can’t do both, notwithstanding gems like yours yesterday:

I don’t care for strictly appeals to authority, but having said that, I don’t reject them out of hand.

You, Danny, need to choose if you care for authority, or if you don’t. I say you should care for authority, since all points out to the fact that you do. What you should say, then is that you don’t care for the authority of those you distrust.

So much the worse for Judy’s bottom line that “rather than invoking authority, they’d be well advised to stick to careful argument.” But then, if we ditch Judy’s meme, does it mean we disregard her authority regarding authority?

Food for thought.

Most obliged.

W

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Lobby Horse

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The Existential Trick

> I’m just guessing but I suspect the ‘strange’ sophistry of the warms could be along the lines of the leader saying there is no pause but here is an explanation anyway. I’m not sure how to reconcile this interpretation with “there has been a strange sophistry from some of the ‘warm’ regulars.” The “regulars” seems to target me among others. I don’t recall using a claim that would be “structurally similar” (to borrow a buzzword) to a Moore sentence:

Moore’s paradox concerns the apparent absurdity involved in asserting a first-person present-tense sentence such as, “It’s raining, but I don’t believe that it is raining” or “It’s raining but I believe that it is not raining.”

“How can the pause be false” can be translated to: how can you claim A is still related to t? While “caused by something” can be translated to: A is also related to X, Y, and Z. I hope the abstract case makes clear that you can claim that A is related to X, Y and Z without claiming that A is not related to t.

http://variable-variability.blogspot.com/2015/03/how-can-pause-be-both-false-and-caused.html Second, because Judy’s trick would always work were it not for that old refutation:

Kant goes on to write, “‘being’ is evidently not a real predicate” and cannot be part of the concept of something. He proposes that **existence is not a predicate**, or quality. This is because existence does not add to the essence of a being, but merely indicates its occurrence in reality. He states that by taking the subject of God with all its predicates and then asserting that God exists, “I add no new predicate to the conception of God”. He argues that **the ontological argument works only if existence is a predicate**; if this is not so, then it is conceivable for a completely perfect being to not exist, thus defeating the ontological argument

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ontological_argument Just imagine if Judy’s implicit argument is right: _it would be impossible to rule out or explain anything away for the simple reason that we’d have to refer to it_! As soon as you’d say something like “God does not exist” you’d be locked in: how can you say this and not refer to a God? *** Mike’s paradoxical way to talk about the pause can be solved using one description : there is no pause; _what is being referred to as “the pause” can be explained by […]_ We could also solve it using alternative pleading, which is “structurally similar” to Gorgias’ proof that nothing exists, but that’s far from being necessary. Perhaps another way to solve that would be to show some structural similarity between Judy’s trick question and Inhofe’s cheeseburgers, but I would need to think about this newly acquired meme.