Ethics

Badass Quote of the Day

By Ed Brayton

A commenter left this quote from CS Lewis that is the perfect retort to a whole range of arguments. It's very common in political debate for people to dismiss another's argument based on some vague accusation of why they're saying X without ever bothering to show that X is false. The example that prompted it was the silly claim that criticism of Sarah Palin or Michele Bachmann (or anyone else, for that matter) is motivated by fear - "You liberals are obviously afraid of [fill in the blank] or you wouldn't be criticizing them so much."

But there are many other forms of this argument as well. The one that comes immediately to mind is the accusation of bias. In political debate, this usually is phrased as a rejection of some source based on ideology - "Well of course that conservative rag would say that, they're biased" - without ever bothering to look at the source and critique its conclusions.

Full post as published by Dispatches from the Culture Wars on December 14, 2009 (boomark / email).