Pickpocket wrote:I was on goodreads last night and I had a book recommended to me called The Tyranny of Clichés: How Liberals Cheat in the War of Ideas. Nice provocative title, so I clicked it and then went to the other books the same guy wrote. He wrote another called Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left from Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning. I then went to read the reviews just to see what people thought and if it was worth my time. You know what the highest rated review was? A gif of a guy rolling his eyes and saying basically "I can't even." This is how liberals and SJW argue. They have no points to make because they are ruled by emotion. This is how they argue:
Right. The main thing to notice is whether the argument is dialectical or rhetorical in nature, and to respond in kind. Too often, people make the mistake of responding to liberal/SJW rhetorical arguments with dialectics, which never works.
If that's not immediately clear, consider this topic as an example. A dialectical argument would have been "I consider there to be strong evidence in favor of anthropogenic global warming because the temperature variations in the last eight years are within the bounds of IPCC model #32 predicted in 2007, an improvement over previous models because of..."
If you notice, Suture Self and hellboy, despite seemingly countless posts stretching on for pages, have yet to make a single dialectical argument.
Instead, their arguments are all purely rhetorical. hellboy; "But think of what a calamity it would be if the AGW alarmists are actually correct! We have to do something!" Suture; "It's all some evil conspiracy that I can't provide any evidence for...and I will conveniently ignore the actual Climategate scandal of 2009 where e-mails admitted data was doctored!"
Again, these are all rhetorical arguments. They don't present any ideas or even touch upon the science.
Now, responding to these rhetorical arguments with a discussion of the science, a dialectical argument, would be absolutely useless. Especially since hellboy and Suture have both made clear they don't give a damn about the science, and know nothing about atmospheric science to begin with.
So one has to respond to their rhetorical arguments with rhetorical arguments of one's own. Obviously, one won't convince them, since they're both SJW/liberal True Believers, and like all religious zealots, will instantly reject any heresy. But it does make them look foolish to more neutral readers of the topic.