Vociferous
Valued Senior Member
Cute. An ad hominem to try shaming people from calling obvious ad hominems in lieu of actual, substantive argument.
Must be projection.
The Mueller investigation.
- Thread starter Quantum Quack
- Start date
No argument at all appears in that post - much less one directed "to the person" rather than to the merits of somebody else's argument or assertion.
The boneyard illiterate plural form - ad hominems* (https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/96333/latin-plurals-when-talking-about-fallacies-) is particularly striking. It implies referral to multiple different arguments if interpreted as the contraction, multiple different target arguers if taken straight, and I have yet to see it refer to even one even once. It apparently always refers to insults, pejoratives, denigrations, and the like.
The term "ad hominem" has a meaning in English. It is short for "argumentum ad hominem". You can look it up in a dictionary, consult a usage manual that deals with the common confusions, etc. (This is one of the few terms the American Heritage 3rd whiffs on - but my other go-to, Garner's "Modern American Usage", is clear if brief. And there's always the internet, if you have the time - anything called "Webster" must be avoided, various other nonprescriptive listmaking travesties discarded, but definition and usage can be found).
It is not a synonym for insult, pejorative, denigration, etc. An ad hominem argument can be based on a compliment - that's rare, but possible.
The only shame is in willful ignorance and unnecessary illiteracy. It's like finding out one has been badly and publicly mispronouncing some word for years - no big deal, we all did that
(a couple of mine: "shortlived" has a long "i", as in "life", not a short one as in "live". The word "dour" rhymes with "pour", not "sour". )
unless and until one insists on mispronouncing it from then on as some kind of adolescent fuckyou.
Which is another obvious possibility for the persistence of the term's misuse among the American "conservative" or "traditional" or rightwing political crowd. The fuckyou reaction is another of their characteristics.
Just to bring things around, that reaction seems to be a significant factor in the all but universal refusal of Republicans to read the Mueller report - even in its carefully redacted Trump-protecting public edition.
* argumenta ad hominem, arguments ad hominem, or if defiant slang is your thing: ads hominem - at least that would make logical sense in some vague way.
Schmelzer
Valued Senior Member
But this is a point I have cared about, and have seen several sources telling that the report did not contain anything new about this.
This may be sufficient for propagandists like you or propaganda victims. For everybody else, this is simply laughable.
In other words, you openly admit that you don't even plan to give any arguments. At least some sort of honesty. Thanks.
That does not change the circular character of your defamations.
You have not read the report. You have taken the likes of Barr as sources of information about it.
So you don't know what's in it, or what's not in it. And you never will.
It's sufficient for all those who reality check their sources, who get their information from physical evidence and physical events.
Apparently, you think everyone follows your claimed practice of balancing various media feeds treated as equivalent propaganda - never reality checking anything, living in world constructed from assumed propaganda feeds.
They don't.
Not to counter propaganda.
I am happy to provide arguments and links in discussions with those posting likewise - I do that frequently.
Again: I support your willingness to recognize that accurate and true descriptions of some people and events read as defamations. There is hope for anyone willing to acknowledge something like that.
Schmelzer
Valued Senior Member
In this case I have taken your words as sources of information about it. You have not claimed that the report did report anything new in this regard too. (Well knowing that I would ask you what is the new part, and then check this.) You use me as a source of information about Rep propaganda (not a good idea, I read at best the part of it which manages to be repeated by foreign observers, but that's your problem), but I use you as a source too, namely about what is possibly wrong with those sources I use. Once there are no counterarguments at all (once the "this is Rep propaganda" appeared to be a tautology) it follows the sources are fine.
You continue to misrepresent my method completely. The only correct part is that I treat all sources (most of them are not "media feeds") as propaganda. But certainly not as equivalent propaganda, and I certainly don't balance them. I classify their direction (as an indication on which side they are likely to "err") and for important sources classify their bias (for example, the pro-Syrian site https://www.almasdarnews.com/article/category/syria/ tends to "panic", that means, to distribute unchecked information from the other side, SOHR counts jihadists which are not Syrian army deserters as "civilian", but beyond this the numbers are plausible, and they also give "women and children among them" which allows approximating killed jihadists by the formula "civilians" - "children" - 2*"women"). Then I distinguish different types of information regarding how easy it would be to identify lies. Information where this is almost impossible ("civil" victims) I will usually ignore, information, where lies become obvious after a few days (like the frontline), will be classified as much more useful. Then, information which is not in favor or even openly harmful for the side of the source is, similar to admissions of criminals, valued very high. Instead, information which favors the side of the source is considered doubtful from the start. Where do you see a balancing in these techniques?
Then, I do reality checking. Say, two days ago as the Turks, as the Kurds have claimed full control of Ras al Ayn. Both claims did not survive the reality check.
Once you classify my postings (by your own admission) automatically as Rep propaganda, you plan not to provide any arguments in discussions with me. If there is an argument at all, (like, say, the explanations why some Dems not supporting the Iraq war have de facto voted for the Iraq war) this is probably only by error.
No, you have not.
I posted no words about that.
That's the only part there is. So I am 100% correct. It was easy - I simply believed your posted description, and reposted it back to you.
Not about anything I know. You may be reality checking the stuff I can't evaluate, dunno - the stuff I can evaluate, you can't tell propaganda from ground facts.
You can't reality check when you have no information about reality. That's a penalty you pay for treating all media feeds as propaganda.
You don't. You can't.
It is almost impossible for you to identify lies when you don't know any facts, in any source.
Not automatically, and not all your posting. You sometimes consider matters in which there is no Rep propaganda.
Arguments don't work against propaganda - other tactics have a better chance.
You mean "de jure".
No argument - just information, take it or leave it. The Iraq War was a Republican endeavor. It was not a bipartisan War. And it was bigger and more corrupt and worse in atrocities by itself than all the Dem wars since Vietnam put together.
So was the cooperation with the Russian election meddling - all Republican. You can read about some of it in the Mueller report.
Wrong.
Unless you are referring to our inability to read the parts redacted by Barr, to protect the reputations of certain people Barr refuses to name. And that isn't just the plebes - that's everybody Trump thinks Barr should refuse the report, including those the law says Barr "shall" provide it to on demand, immediately.
The House Intelligence Commiottee entitled to the entire unredacted report (and its supporting documentation) is closer to getting it, though. Especially as various judges and lawyers have ruled implying the obvious - Barr is in violation of the law and his civil responsibilities of office, and can be arrested for his behavior as well as lying under oath. The House has the means of enforcement - Schiff can physically as well as by law have Barr handcuffed and thrown into the House jail without his belt and shoelaces the next time he tries to get cute or even shows his face in a hearing room.
Meanwhile, there's plenty to read about - at least ten separate instances of obstruction of justice by Trump, for example. Russian meddling with several different aspects and pieces of the 2016 elections countrywide. Etc. And that's jsut the Mueller report - there are also tapes of whistleblown phone calls, Trump's various admissions on TV and during press conferences, the incoming train of Trump's tax returns in the the New York Courts, the obstructions of justice and witness tamperings recently committed by Trump in response to the impeachment inquiry, and so forth.
No shortage of reading material. What do you find "curious" about any of this?
Schmelzer
Valued Senior Member
Indeed, you only posted in the next posting the following: "Russian meddling with several different aspects and pieces of the 2016 elections countrywide." No claim about anything new. My (I think reasonable) guess is that you know that adding "new" would be wrong. The main claims (the indictment against the 13 bots who tried to sell advertising and the DNC leak) I have seen.
No. Read your own claim again: "you think everyone follows your claimed practice of balancing various media feeds treated as equivalent propaganda - never reality checking anything, ...".
Maybe you don't even recognize it yourself if you defame other people without any base? Or is this your inability to extract information from propaganda sources, following the simple scheme for small children "propaganda sources" (everything bad) vs. "reliable sources" (everything true) which leads people completely lost if they have no reliable sources, so that they have stupid ideas about "balancing" them?
You know nothing. You obviously don't know the standard methods to extract information from propaganda, once you associate this with stupid ideas about "balancing", so you don't know also anything about reality checks which can be done using the internet today.
That your "evaluation" (which seems to consist of reading sources you accept as "reliable" or so, given that you cannot extract information from propaganda sources) gives different results than my own checks is clear and has to be expected because we evaluate sources differently. To claim that you see "facts on the ground" and I don't even check, based on my disagreement with you, is simply nonsense.
But once there may be, at least in principle, Rep propaganda (and in everything about the US there will be some) it happens automatically.
No, "de jure" your excuse works. "De jure" one can believe even the most stupid lie of W, once it was made, and therefore "de jure" they can claim not to have voted for the war. De facto this was the vote about the war because it was clear that this is all W needs to start the war whenever he likes.
[#ExecutivePrivilege | #misconduct]
The summary from Geoff Bennett↱ of NBC News:
NEWS: Correspondence between Fiona Hill's lawyers and White House Deputy Counsel Michael Purpura obtained by @JoshNBCNews show that the White House tried to limit what Fiona Hill could say today to Congress by raising the issue of executive privilege.
The WH did not try to block her from testifying, but told Hill's lawyers that 4 areas potentially fall under exec. privilege:
Hill's lawyers wrote back to the White House, making a legal argument that executive privilege disappears when there's reason to believe there was government misconduct. - @JoshNBCNews
The WH did not try to block her from testifying, but told Hill's lawyers that 4 areas potentially fall under exec. privilege:
Direct communications with the president
Diplomatic communications
Meetings with other heads of state
Staffing POTUS on calls with foreign heads of state
Diplomatic communications
Meetings with other heads of state
Staffing POTUS on calls with foreign heads of state
Hill's lawyers wrote back to the White House, making a legal argument that executive privilege disappears when there's reason to believe there was government misconduct. - @JoshNBCNews
It actually gets a little stickier than that; Bennett is piecing together Josh Lederman's↱ tweets, and it is worth noting that Purpura pretends Congressional prerogative somehow belongs to the White House, declaring, "there is no valid impeachment inquiry underway". The White House Deputy Counsel is a lawyer; that's a dangerous statement when trying to influence a witness to withhold information from Congress.
____________________
Notes:
@GeoffRBennett. "NEWS: Correspondence between Fiona Hill's lawyers and White House Deputy Counsel Michael Purpura obtained by @JoshNBCNews show that the White House tried to limit what Fiona Hill could say today to Congress by raising the issue of executive privilege." Twitter. 14 October 2019. Twitter.com. 14 October 2019. http://bit.ly/32imm4C
@JoshNBCNews. "White House deputy counsel generally disagreed in letter sent this AM, said 'there is no valid impeachment inquiry underway.' White House reminded Hill not to reveal anything classified or covered by executive privilege, per letters obtained by @NBCNews". Twitter. 14 October 2019. Twitter.com. 14 October 2019. http://bit.ly/35zb7af
In the Republican media feed, sure. In the reality based world, facts are kind of important. And lies are lies, not "interpretations".
- - - - -
You used "de facto" when referring to a "de jure" situation. It's just another illiteracy, nothing more - but you tend to depend on these confusions to back your bs. So I'm forestalling - or at least highlighting, whenever you jump that shark.
Your guesses are always wrong, because you have no information. "New" is a Republican propaganda term here, and you are now treating it as some kind of key factor.
You haven't read the Mueller report. So a lot of it will be new to you, if you ever read it. That doesn't make it new to informed people. Its claims are documented now, is the central point - nailed down by time and date and person and circumstance and address and IP and phone number and email and so forth and so on. Mueller was thorough, within his limits.
Irrelevant. I base nothing on your bubble world of hypothetical futures. The Rep propaganda you parrot is all over the US media, often word for word, always error for error and falsehood for falsehood (that's what identifies it).
I agree it's a stupid idea - it's not my idea: it's yours. It's how you end up parroting Republican propaganda, complete with the errors, the obsessions, even the exact wording.
Your problem is that you can't extract information from propaganda, by any method, because you can't tell the difference. You end up extracting propaganda from information, guided by US marketing professionals.
That's how you got the direction of political pressure on American climate science so comically backwards, for example. To this day you have no idea how idiotic that was.
It's not based on any disagreement with me (something you have posted many falsehoods about, verifying your willingness to post without information). It's a plain and obvious fact of your posting; you don't know that, because you don't reality check anything.
You described your process of evaluation (no reality check involved), and your factual ignorance is obvious to the point of being startling. If I didn't work and live with Trump voters - Americans who get their views from the same sources as you, and dwell in the same ignorance of fact - I would never believe someone could have so many firm and public opinions with so little idea of what they are talking about.
The only real question about your posting is whether you are pretending to be ignorant, rather than genuinely as uninformed as your posts display. I have decided to take you at face value, as if you sincerely mean what you post. But the argument for other interpretations is not far-fetched.
And the Mueller report is some kind of classic example. The list of people who refuse to read it, but insist on telling people what it says, is long and partisan.
I know that's true for many republicans. Karl Rove summarized that sentiment well:
============================
Guys like me [reporters] were 'in what we call the reality-based community,' which he defined as people who 'believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.' 'That's not the way the world really works anymore,' he continued. 'We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors...and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do'.
============================
All of us left in the reality based community will just have to plod along, I guess. We don't have the 'moral flexibility' to create truthiness.
Schmelzer
Valued Senior Member
Let's see what remains if one removes the usual "you are stupi" bs:
I have not read Hustler at all, so a lot there will be new to me too. If I ever start to read it. Thanks for admitting that the report contains nothing new (this is, btw, not new to me). I'm not interested in the IP and phone numbers of whatever US criminals.
LOL. It was obviously successful to show the logical consequences of iceaura's admission of how he identifies "Rep propaganda". Now he takes back this admission. But this will not help, we now know that there is no base for these claims.
No. I have never used the word "balancing" to describe any part of my techniques of extracting information from propaganda, you used it. So it is clearly and obviously your idea, and it is, moreover, defamatory to attribute such nonsense to me.
Except that I have never made a statement about the political pressure on American climate science. (Feel free to find one and to quote it, with link.)
I simply ask you for some hints what could be interesting for me. You don't give any. Here you have admitted there is nothing new beyond IP addresses and similar nonsense which may be relevant for somebody else but certainly not for me.
There are facts, then.
Not just interpretations, as the Republican media feed tries to hide behind - because by nature and conscious tactic it lies, and deceives, and screws up, and so the facts have too much of a liberal bias.
The rise of fascism is, after all, like any totalitarian invitation, a rise into a dreamworld - and that on a nation scale requires a systematic, effective, and calculated revision of officially acknowledged physical reality.
- - - -
I'm not interested.
You haven't read the Mueller report, and so you don't know what's in it or what isn't in it. I'm interested in reminding your audience of that fact every time you post about the Mueller report.
When you post falsehoods and propaganda and bs about what's in Hustler, the fact that you haven't read it will become relevant to a thread about you.
This thread is about the Mueller report.
The report contains much that you don't know, including some stuff you have claimed it does not contain. The "new" language is of course familiar to me from Republican propaganda sources - thanks for confirming it was back in play.
And you want me to waste more time finding links and quotes to "interest" you in the facts behind your claims - as I did on that topic (handing you the name, bio, and political allegiances of the chairman of the Congressional committee in charge of funding AGW research among other indicative facts).
You don't even remember your own posting.
Schmelzer
Valued Senior Member
combined with
means that you are not interested in distributing information which is on-topic in this thread, but all you are interested in is to distribute personal attacks.
I don't post at all about that piece of pornography with phone numbers of some criminals inside, except in replies to your boring "you have not read the Hustler report" posts.
In principle possible, but given the reality of your postings, it is certainly defamation. Else you would quote my claim, and then quote what that Hustler report writes about it, proving me being wrong. You are not interested in this? Sounds like sour grapes.
I remember them good enough to be sure that you have once again lied with your "you got the direction of political pressure on American climate science so comically backwards". It is your burden of proof once it is your claim.
But, ok, you have been often enough identified as a liar by refusing to provide evidence for you lies that one time more or less does not matter for you.
You claimed climate researchers - especially younger and more vulnerable ones - were under political and economic pressure to align their research and reports with the alarmists and other proponents of AGW as significant and likely disastrous.
I spent some time digging up various facts and circumstances and events to show you the pressure was in the other direction, exactly opposite your claims - to downplay AGW, present it as a minor factor that could be handled fairly easily and would even provide benefits proportional to its harms, present the science as preliminary and uncertain and dubious, exaggerate the cost of dealing with the CO2 that is driving the warming, etc.
The comedy began when you doubled down on your flagrant error, and insisted on some kind of deep State or "globalist" pressure to exaggerate AGW for the benefit of the "globalists". Your tendency to double down when cornered in error has seldom been more obvious, or sillier.
And then, apparently, you forgot all about your posting on the matter. You don't even remember your own posts, let alone anything you could have learned from mine.
Mind, this is not the first time - your memory is as convenient as your eyesight, in providing you with what you present as evidence - generally something you invented or assumed, like the unreported but presumably common beneficial organisms whose range would be spreading under AGW.
As I have put it before, you tend to believe what you have typed - which is natural given your lack of factual knowledge to correct yourself with, in matters like US politics and society or AGW*
You can't expect people to stop posting factual realities because you find them defamatory.
One way to avoid being defamed by simple postings of factual reality would be to stop making claims in ignorance, or at least accept correction when they go haywire - which they will, inevitably: the chances of your assumptions and imaginary worldviews matching physical realities you know nothing about are small; the chance that the US propagandists you get your views from will deal in factual reality is zero - they are paid to manipulate and deceive, not educate.
Another would be to obtain factual information of your own, and base your claims on it. You could (for example) read the field research reports relevant to AGW, noting their funding sources and institutional support, and tracking their agreement with subsequent events. You could read reliable purveyors of information and sound analysis in economics - such as Piketty, or Stiglitz.
You could read the Mueller report.
(Just spending some time considering why it is that no more than a couple of US Republican Congressmen have read the Mueller report - not even the Republicans on the committees directly involved have read it - can enlighten; especially someone in your position, trapped in the bubble.)
*(What you are doing to yourself seems to have been inculcated by the US rightwing authoritarian media feeds you source from, btw - they modeled their techniques, such as dogged repetition of falsehood, partly on the startlingly effective "brainwashing" techniques used by the North Koreans and Chinese on American pilots during the Korean War. )
Schmelzer
Valued Senior Member
They are under the same structural pressure as all scientists who have extreme job uncertainty (better, certainty that they have to look for a new grant in a very short time) and who live in a "publish or perish" competitive environment. It means, they have to follow the mainstream of their science. The international one. There is no need for some particular pressure at all. It is the structure, the way modern science is organized, which creates this automatically enforced conformism.
The direction of this structural pressure is clear and obvious, it is the position of the mainstream (whatever it is) in that particular science. In the case of climate science, it is quite plausible that the mainstream position of climate scientists is presented in a sufficiently accurate way by what the IPCC writes. So, there is no need to study which firms with which evil aim pay for particular grants. The pressure is not by those who pay for the actual grant, it is created by the necessity to find a job after this and therefore forces them to follow the mainstream even if the particular firm giving the grant does not like the mainstream.
What external players - politicians as well as firms - can do is therefore not that much. Note, even controlling the grants for the science of a whole state does not give that much, the mainstream of a particular science is international. Paying for particular grants gives essentially nothing, given that those who get this grant have to care about getting another one after this, thus, they need reputation in the same international mainstream.
You see, the argument is economic, and the direction of pressure is not defined by politics or those who pay for particular research, but by the mainstream. The position of the mainstream you can find out reading review articles of prestigious journals, but in climate science, the writings of the IPCC will be a good approximation (even if there are objections that those in IPCC power positions are politicians instead of scientific experts). If you like to trust those 97% claims, then it is the direction of what those 97% think which is the direction of pressure.
This is a point you have obviously not understood. Instead, you distort it into the direction of some conspiracy theory, or the theory that scientists simply produce the results they have been asked for by those who have paid for that grant. It is not, it is a simple economic theory.
If the pressure to follow the mainstream is disastrous or not depends on other circumstances. It is most of the time harmless, given that the scientific method is established enough and accepted by the mainstream, experimental results matter, and the only harm done is that alternative explanations are not researched as they would have to be in a more reasonable scientific organization. It is disastrous in fundamental physics, because fundamental physics beyond the standard model does not have any guidance by observation, and is therefore completely speculative. The result is that only very few of thousands of reasonable speculations are studied at all, strings, LQG, supersymmetry, that's all.
I have seen this, and do not question the results of your digging, but it is based on a completely different theory about how science reacts to external influences. It is the quite simple theory that who pays the grant for a particular study is the person who can decide about the results. Science as being in no way different from journalism. But science is organized differently. (Not that such things would be completely impossible in science. I would expect them in medicine, where the results of some very particular scientific studies about a particular new medicine have a very high material value for the pharma firm which wants to produce it. So we have a high incentive to bribe, and low costs given that the extremal job insecurity of scientists makes it very cheap to buy them. But this is a very different situation too.)
This is about something very different and completely unrelated, namely, it is not about science but about the mass media. Here, the globalists have control. This is not at all a doubling down, it is about another question.
No, I remember them and have answered them. Feel free to find a contradiction with what I wrote now.
There is the zero-hypothesis: Beneficial organisms will follow similar patterns as harmful ones. Simply because of the temperature range and precipitation range where they can live does not correlate with the harmfulness of the organisms. Those who claim a correlation have to give the evidence. I claim that beneficial organisms have an advantage, namely that humans are interested in them, and can and will help them to distribute. I have seen no argument in the other direction. Only a lot of considerations that some particular harmful animals will spread. This is something the media like to report because it is negative.
No. I type things which I believe are true because I have arguments in favor of them. Once no counterarguments are presented, there is no base for me to change my beliefs. You obviously believe Dr. Goebbels insight that one has to repeat a lie sufficiently often to make the people believe it. You cannot present counterarguments given that you have none.
and not one of them would be stupid enough to commit career suicide by standing up and telling the world the "end is nigh". I don't think you appreciate exactly what it would take for a climate scientist to state such a thing, a thing that is normally reserved for nut jobs standing on street corners.