Sunday, August 13, 2006

DJEB as Rumpelstiltskin

This is the third in series of posts inspired by a commentary thread at the Terrorism News blog.

This segment, as with the previous installment, will address comments posted by DJEB, one of the four listed contributors to Terrorism News.

The earlier installment concluded with DJEB unclear as to where he had committed a straw man fallacy in describing Frank's (Frank touched off the discussion with a somewhat off-topic comment) supposed logic. I posted the reply from DJEB that indicated his failure to understand that his desciption of Frank's logic was distorted in that earlier post; here now is the reply I posted in the commentary thread.
DJEB,
You really can't figure out where you invented the straw man?
How did you figure out that Frank's religious sensibilities were offended? Was that part of his "syllogism" or did you invent that for him?

Let's just call it a premise until he presents his argument formally, m-kay?
And maybe give him a chance to present his own premise instead of inventing one for him.
My reply pointed out the fact that Frank's original reply indicated nothing about his "religious sensibilities" (by that or any other similar phrase) were offended.

So, what's a great technique to use when you've got no evidence in your favor?
Bryan, scroll up. He was clearly making his comments because of his religious position relating to an article looking at the religious right. If that's not it, I couldn't see it. No copyright infringement there.
DJEB's "copyright infringement" remark refers to an earlier claim he made to the effect that political conservatives MOL own the straw man fallacy; earlier I'd been confused as to what he was talking about when he later used that phrase in a play at cleverness.
DJEB's reply doesn't answer my questions. Instead, he takes the implicit position that Frank's post self-evidently supports his position, which is a very simple method commonly used to shift the burden of proof. Through this technique, DJEB would hope to save himself the trouble of demonstrating the similarity between Frank's argument and the argument that DJEB created for Frank, despite the fact that Frank mentioned absolutely nothing about his religious sensibilities being offended.
Here's Frank's comment, for review:
I'm sorry that you chose to include this article in your "Terrorism-news" blog. This does nothing but show your bias. Because of this, I sadly cannot take anything on your blog seriously. I was hoping to find useful, scholarly information about terrorism, but .... oh well.
Obviously, his religious sensibilities were offended, eh?

DJEB did include a bit of a caveat, saying "If that's not it, I couldn't see it." Apparently he guessed at Frank's reason for finding the article indicative of bias respecting terrorism and felt sufficiently comfortable with his guesswork that he used his assumption about Frank to flesh out a syllogism supposedly representing Frank's logic.

_H_, the primary contributer to the Terrorism News blog, had been interspersing his own comments throughout, and DJEB's final comment to me seems to rely on _H_'s commentary for context, though obviously it seeks to answer my charge that DJEB committed a straw man fallacy:
Global warming is not a terrorist, either, yet no one ever said "Boo!" about the global warming stories we posted not having enough to do with terrorism.

Next, two suggestions. First, get ahold of T. Edward Damer's book Attacking Faulty Reasoning and find out that I am not guilty of copyright infringement. Second, make your next post an on topic post or watch your post disappear. _H_ has responded to this one and out of courtesy I'll leave it up, but your next off-topic post gets deleted. If it's 99% on topic and 1% off, it gets deleted. Simple enough. You just keep repeating yourself over and over here wasting our time. It stops now.
A great way to get away with a fallacy of shifting the burden of proof, needless to say, would be to count the other guy as being off-topic if he insists that you haven't addressed your burden of proof properly and begin deleting his posts as a result. It's also convenient being able to count your own posts as on-topic regardless of content while accusing the other guy of going off-topic. Think of it as a "last word guarantee."

Again, the folks at TN can run their site as they see fit (with my blessing on that freedom)--but they can't make themselves immune from outside criticism.
Case in point with the reference to Damer's book. DJEB seeks to refute the charge that he is guilty of presenting a corrupted version of Frank's argumentation by making reference to nothing specific. It is simply assumed that Damer's account frees him from the charge, and it is apparently my burden of proof to seek out the covert argument and refute it--in other words, the burden of proof is on me to show that Frank didn't say that his religious sensibilities were offended, and I need to do more to prove it than to cite Frank's comments (which contain nothing at all about Frank's religious sensibilities being offended).

The impression one receives, under the assumption that DJEB is familiar with the contents of Damer's book, is that DJEB failed to acquire a substantial understanding of the work.
The reference to Damer's book is apparently supposed to turn the straw man into a golden argument. Shades of Rumpelstiltskin.

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