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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   20770 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 14, 2024

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The later, as part of a counter-argument by negation by demonstrating the heuristic is not a rebuttal when it can simply be reversed to press to the opposite conclusion.

I've read this sentence several times and I admit I am still not sure what you're trying to say here. My best stab at it is: people generally claim American electoral politics is (relatively) free of corruption and therefore we should assume any given election was free of corruption unless provided with extraordinary evidence of said corruption, and @ymeshkout is leaning on that as the "heuristic" that we should dismiss claims of the 2020 election being fraudulent. Is that... close? I swear I am not trying to be flippant or cute here, you're just constructing such an abstruse argument here that I literally cannot parse it.

I would disagree, as the structural argument is broader motte and bailey. The claim is not a specific instance of Hlynka, but a broader position.

Well, maybe you think that @ymeskhout generally claims his opponents are "hallucinating liars" (I do not actually recall him saying this, though as I noted above, you do both tend to throw accusations of dishonesty rather freely), but this was a specific instance of @HlynkaCG claiming he said something which he claims he did not.

Speaking more plainly is what has gotten mod action in the past

I am not trying to trick you into saying something I will mod you for. Directly calling someone a liar usually does result in mod action, yes, but I'd rather you directly say "I think this claim is false and here's why" and even "And I think you know it's false" (which is pretty close to calling someone a liar, but at least leaves room for the possibility that you're mistaken) than write long paragraphs which read a lot like "You're a big fat liar and I'm trying to use enough words to avoid being modded for calling you a liar."

FWIW, how you put it in the subsequent paragraphs (listing all the ways that you think @ymeskhout is arguing in bad faith and being dishonest) are acceptable IMO. Not saying I agree with you, and he is certainly entitled to rebut it, but I consider saying concretely "This is what I accuse you of saying/doing in the past and I think that constitutes lying" is within bounds.

I'd rather you directly say "I think this claim is false and here's why" and even "And I think you know it's false"

I would love it if this happened! Specifics are so much better than riddles

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