re: #11 jaunte

I’m more annoyed by this stuff than usual tonight, having discovered that my aged parent bought Ben Shapiro’s idiotic pamphlet on debating liberals.

he tries to turn people into mini rush limbaughs, teaching them to:

- pose straw man arguments about ‘what liberals believe’
(” prepare yourself for the standard liberal argument, which is that we don’t need guns at all”)

- impose ludicrous “framing”
(“Discussing gun control with liberal CNN host Piers Morgan on live TV in January 2013, Shapiro scored a near knockout in the first few seconds of the debate by framing his opponent. He accused Morgan of standing on the graves of murdered children to further his anti-gun agenda.”)

- postulate false dichotomies (plus straw men)
(“They claim they want marriage equality, but at the same time they want to force churches to endorse an irreligious practice; they want universal government-sponsored health care, but they do not support forcing people to become doctors, which would be necessarily to support such a massive program.”, and ” If they are pro-gay marriage, ask them which parent is less vital to a family: the mother or the father. Chances are, they’ll have to concede that a family is better with a mother and a father, not just one or the other”)

nothing we haven’t heard over and over again

ktth.com