I could have made this an open blog post, but I want to bury it somewhat for doctor(“logic”)’s sake. Google and etc. will not see this. It should be able to be found only from the comment where I mentioned it.
dl, you have been a participant on this blog for a long time. Though we disagree on most things we have discussed here I have thought your contribution was valuable in moving discussion forward between a Christian viewpoint and an atheistic one.
But not everything that happens in a discussion moves it forward. When a comment includes an identifiable falsehood, distortion of the other’s position, or serious error in logic, the discussion must come screeching to a halt to correct that error. These are conversation-stoppers.
They are actually quite effective in fulfilling that role. Often—especially if they are tendentious—they can stop conversation even if they’re part of a longer comment that includes other points worthy of discussion. Of course they are especially problematic when they are central to the comment being made.
I have just gone back and read through your last 51 comments here, doctor(“logic”). It’s not a nice round number; I was going for the last 60 days’ worth but I got tired and stopped early. This goes back to about May 11 or so.
Of those 51 comments, I found about ten that were completely free of what I’m here calling conversation-stoppers.
In at least six of them, however, you committed very basic logical blunders in the form of straw men, red herrings, non sequiturs. Some of them were quite tendentious. One such: “I’ll take that as a yes.” These types of things slow everything down while they’re being corrected.
There were four comments in which it seems clear you missed the point of the original post, which necessitated backing up and starting over again. One of those was, ” Depending on how you define the “ethic of power” either it doesn’t exist, or everything is an example of it.”
Ten of those 51 comments contained a more general kind of illogic. One example was, “Gee, I don’t know. Can you point to anything at all in my argument above that assumes that you assume homosexual practice is wrong?” (I addressed those points of illogic in almost every case, I believe.)
In at least two comments you misused sources, as in the quote-mine here that I corrected in my response to that comment. This one was so blatant it might better belong in the “falsehood” category below.
More than one-third of the 51 comments included an identifiable falsehood. In eleven of those cases you identifiably distorted another person’s position, such as, “And you think the Nazis were leftists because they had the word “Socialist” in their name? Really?!!” Seven times your falsehoods were more blatant yet, for example, “I didn’t say in my comment that Nazis were Christian.”
Now if I haven’t committed any typos, the total of comments described above should be 50. There was one more in which you distorted your own previously stated position.
Your record over the last 51 or so comments comes to this: in only about 20% of your comments was there nothing that required a backing-up and correcting, whether from logical error, falsehood, distortion, misreading what was written, etc.
Note that I only counted one such error in each comment. I think I could re-do the analysis and come up with more than 51 total errors quite easily. I skipped over quite a few informal fallacies you had committed. But that wasn’t the point of this. Rather the point was, “how many of doctor(“logic”)’s comments contain at least one conversation-stopper, and what does that tell us about his contribution to discussion?”
Eighty percent conversation-stoppers is a really high number.
Especially when you consider that in at least a third of these cases, you combined some kind of error as described above with an attitude of picking a fight, such as. “Your argument is that, if you assume your perverse Christian moral realist worldview, then the only things ‘truly’ wrong are things that your primitive, backwater Christian morality says are wrong.” (Other fight-pickings were less blatant, but I take it that every time you distort your opponent’s position you’re guilty of something like this.)
Others have come in on this blog with a contentious attitude. We both know that. I’ve been pushing hard on you for several weeks, for reasons I have stated more than once. What I find to be unique in your comments, doctor(“logic”), is this:
1. Lots of conversation-stoppers of all varieties. Eighty percent is a very high proportion.
2. Very little if any acknowledgment when they are pointed out to you.
3. Lots of contentiousness combined with these kinds of errors (identifiably erroneous contentious statements).
4. No acknowledgement whatsoever when it is pointed out to you.
Holopupenko can be equally contentious as you. When someone mentions it to him, however, even though he doesn’t always agree, he at least acknowledges what’s been said. He even converses about it. If you’ve done that in more than one or two instances in the past six weeks, I’d be hard-pressed to find it. And even though Holopupenko’s default style runs to the pugilistic, he responds (at least for a while!) when he’s called on it. (This last round with olegt on Russian nationalism may be a current exception to that, but I’m still in the game with him on that, and in the end I’m confident some things will be corrected again.)
All of this makes me wonder.
