Sophistry Fatigue
The McCain campaign is starting to give me an old feeling I experienced back during the Clinton administration...though it's been even more pronounced during some of my on-going relationships with creationists. I think of it as sophistry fatigue. It's gone like this with my creationist acquaintances: they come to me every couple of weeks with some breathless "new proof" that evolution is false. About half of these proofs are so laughable as to be downright pathetic. About half of the remaining half require about five minutes worth of research to refute. The rest might take a bit of thought, and every now and then they'll come 'round with one that's actually a bit puzzling. Thing is, you know that they aren't really trying to get at the truth, and neither are the people who are supplying them with talking points disguised as inquiry. You know that the odds are that this argument will, like all the others, fail in the end. You've already wasted too much time on all this, and you're more than a little ticked off at the barrage of mindless propaganda that aims to alter your beliefs on the basis of lies. So after awhile you--or at least I--just...start...drifting...away. I can't find it in my heart to take them seriously anymore. A better man than I might be able to keep his annoyance in check...but, flawed in the ways that I am, I find myself starting to take the mere fact that these people have asserted that p as something akin to evidence that p is false.
Something similar happened during the Clinton administration. After a long parade of bogus "scandals," it became harder and harder to take GOP criticisms of Clinton seriously.
And the McCain campaign is generating the same type of sophistry fatigue in me now. I want to keep an open mind...but at some point, of course, keeping an open mind becomes irrational. Every campaign basically aims at producing a case for the proposition "our candidate would make the better president." The case the McCain campaign has made for its candidate is, well, a big, stinking pile of sh!t. And that's about the most charitable thing I can think of to say about it. By this point, it seem unlikely that they're going to produce anything else. I'm trying not to dismiss their new assertions too readily...but man, their efforts so far have done little more that to produce in me a fairly serious case of SF.
The McCain campaign is starting to give me an old feeling I experienced back during the Clinton administration...though it's been even more pronounced during some of my on-going relationships with creationists. I think of it as sophistry fatigue. It's gone like this with my creationist acquaintances: they come to me every couple of weeks with some breathless "new proof" that evolution is false. About half of these proofs are so laughable as to be downright pathetic. About half of the remaining half require about five minutes worth of research to refute. The rest might take a bit of thought, and every now and then they'll come 'round with one that's actually a bit puzzling. Thing is, you know that they aren't really trying to get at the truth, and neither are the people who are supplying them with talking points disguised as inquiry. You know that the odds are that this argument will, like all the others, fail in the end. You've already wasted too much time on all this, and you're more than a little ticked off at the barrage of mindless propaganda that aims to alter your beliefs on the basis of lies. So after awhile you--or at least I--just...start...drifting...away. I can't find it in my heart to take them seriously anymore. A better man than I might be able to keep his annoyance in check...but, flawed in the ways that I am, I find myself starting to take the mere fact that these people have asserted that p as something akin to evidence that p is false.
Something similar happened during the Clinton administration. After a long parade of bogus "scandals," it became harder and harder to take GOP criticisms of Clinton seriously.
And the McCain campaign is generating the same type of sophistry fatigue in me now. I want to keep an open mind...but at some point, of course, keeping an open mind becomes irrational. Every campaign basically aims at producing a case for the proposition "our candidate would make the better president." The case the McCain campaign has made for its candidate is, well, a big, stinking pile of sh!t. And that's about the most charitable thing I can think of to say about it. By this point, it seem unlikely that they're going to produce anything else. I'm trying not to dismiss their new assertions too readily...but man, their efforts so far have done little more that to produce in me a fairly serious case of SF.
posted by Winston Smith at
8:51 AM
1 Comments:
WS posts:
A better man than I might be able to keep his annoyance in check...but, flawed in the ways that I am, I find myself starting to take the mere fact that these people have asserted that p as something akin to evidence that p is false.
Why would it be better to keep in check a well-deserved annoyance at those who abuse your trust by speaking in bad faith?
I want to keep an open mind...but at some point, of course, keeping an open mind becomes irrational.
Exactly -- there are occasions when it is irrational to keep an open mind to the contentions of those who have a track record of lying and obfuscation to advance their political agenda.
Also, in an earlier post, WS writes:
[T]he way its system is set up, individual registrars have an incentive to cheat. It infuriates me that anyone would set up a system like this. It's moronic...it's a virtual guarantee that bad forms will be turned in.
I would claim that, analogously, keeping an open mind to the claims of those who are not speaking in good faith is a virtual guarantee that they will continue to put forward every bit of bullshit they can think of.
The solution is to make it quite clear to them that, by lying and obfuscating, they have now closed against them the minds they had hoped to sway. Only then do they have an incentive to speak in good faith and stop bullshitting.
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