On Wed, 8 Oct 2008 05:47:35 -0700 (PDT), "shag" <shag at cleandraws.com> wrote:
> A criticism of your rhetoric as moralizing isn't a criticism of you.
This is getting sillier and sillier. Perhaps some logic 101 is in order, since discussing me or the bailout is now out.
He did not criticize or even mention any specific "rhetoric." He is criticizing me for making moralistic arguments.
For instance if I argued that we couldn't escape from a jail-cell by painting a window on the wall and jumping through it, because escaping would be morally wrong. One could argue that a) morals are irrelevant to whether or not we should escape, or b) that the moral case I was making was itself questionable at escaping was the moral thing to do.
However if my argument is that we can escape from a jail-cell by painting a window on the wall and jumping through it because a painted window is not a real window and thus can not be jumped through, and the response was simply "You use all this moralistic language. You sound like St. Augustine discussing the false allure of wordly concupiscence" -- without actually explaining which argument I have made that depends on morals, then that is simply an attempt to characterize me: "you use all this...", rather that "as part of your premise you have claimed...". This the point is to claim that I am the //kind of person// that uses morals in place of logic and thus my arguments must be wrong. Failing to reference any premise, argument or conclusion I have made, has committed an ad hominem fallacy.
But in any case, It's obvious how you will respond: "you are absolutely so totally wrong and anyway we all completely in every way knew that already, but we are still right and you are still wrong. And your stupid logic is so very boring compared to my superstar hip innuendo, dummy"
In any case shag, I don't think we really make good natural enemies, we just got off on the wrong foot. Can we put this to rest now?
And by the way, any similarity between the bailout and a window painted on a jail cell is so totally coincidental, just forget it. Jump!
-- Dmytri Kleiner editing text files since 1981
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