re: #95 stabby

Careful argument is hard and tedious as is trying to find a reasonable position in a hard situation.

I think none of us want to take the time right now, I have to get up, make breakfast and get ready for a doctor’s appointment.

The fact is that this blog is in a war with paranoids, and that was my argument for years - beating down the nuts. BUT but, it’s better to do that by asking for a nuanced reaction to reality than to do it by trying to deny the problematic facts.

It’s better that people can debate the painful facts out loud and that reactions be kept reasonable by argument than that we keep the peace by not ever saying the things that set off the paranoids and idiots.

You’re not making a careful argument. You’re engaged in a giant special pleading in which the worst actors of Islam become syndoches of the religion, and a separate special pleading where specific quotations somehow embody the whole religion’s to-the-foundation flawed ethics. It’s been fallacies since word one. Your reaction to people provided counter-examples shows that you really have no argument except “this time, it’s different.”

Basically, you’re dumb, and don’t know you’re dumb, and thus think your argument is clever and valid. But really all you’ve done is say “but Islam is different, therefore my prejudice is valid” in long form. What you’ve written is trite, much repeated by people dwelling in Gellar/Spencer’s sphere, and fundamentally unsound as logic.

You’re getting pushback because of what you’re trying to pass off as “reasonable” and “logical” when its neither. It’s a fallacy hash.

You’re also ignorant, which leads you to a different kind of special pleading, wherein excerpted bits of text that are “violent” can be used to characterize a whole religion—and in turn, the vast population of adherents are suspect.

With each post you’re situating yourself more and more in comfortable mythology in which you’re intellectually daring and we’re stymieing you, so I doubt any of this will sink in. Epistemic closure plus smugness is pretty much the death knell of critical thinking.