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Notes -
I made a factual claim that was immediately verified by the link in the comment. No further argument was necessary, that's just how verification works.
It's not a "favorable assumption" to observe someone say that an article changed their mind on something and then infer that the thing that it changed their mind on was probably something related to the topic of the article. That's just called having the most rudimentary possible theory of mind.
The two statements were not equivalent. I first said I presumed it was something relevant to the topic of the article without saying what that relevant thing would be. Then you asked which specific parts would be relevant, and I kindly speculated about that for you, which speculation was not entailed by what I had said before. Or if it was, then you'll have to give some (presently lacking) proof of that fact, which would confirm that your further question was pointless and thus you were being even more disingenuous than in your initial question. So which is it?
OK, so as I suspected, you were being disingenuous and asking in bad faith. Thanks for confirming. I don't plan to entertain such overtures from you in the future.
I don't need to assume that, it's already been demonstrated. I agreed with the whole article, McFaul said he agreed with a part, a fortiori there is some section on which he agrees with me. QED
I didn't assert anything that McFaul himself omitted to say, so that's impossible. Quote me anything in the initial comment that wasn't a direct paraphrase of something McFaul said, explain why, and try again.
But I don't care whether the original argument had sufficient evidence or not, I care whether its conclusion is correct, and I'd be happy to evaluate all the outside evidence necessary to decisively establish that either way. And what's being argued over in this thread is the conclusion of the argument, not its construction. (Or, at least, if you read my comments, you'll see that that's what I'm concerned to argue about, and I don't really care if others aren't.) This isn't debate club, there are no technical rules about what evidence you're allowed to invoke here. Most of the rest of your post is otiose in light of this fact. Sorry you wasted your time on it.
Well, you come off quite poorly in this exchange, so I hope so.
And if I really cared about the thread formatting, then I could just pin every top-level comment besides the one above to force it to the bottom of the thread. But I don’t, so I’m not going to.
I said that you were wasting my time with your indirect approach to the issue, not that the whole conversation about that issue was a waste of time. In fact, I think it's a fine use of my time (that the all-important future readers may see, of course!) to tell you off for being disingenuous and inform you that you look incredibly silly. And maybe that will help you to do a bit better going forward, so my natural altruism pulls me to give you a hand in that regard as well.
Good thing I didn't do that then.
Probably strengthened both, to be honest. You look extremely paranoid here, desperately trying to do damage control against an argument that wasn't even being made, on the basis of Kabbalah-level eisegesis over a single sentence. I think that I come off pretty well by comparison.
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