Rhetorical Strategies of the Right Wing

Posted on September 4, 2006 by | 1 Comment

They are certainly familiar to anyone who has ever had a Creationist troll, a global-warming denialist troll, AIDS-HIV connection denialist troll, AR troll, DDT-is-banned troll, etc….
(Hat-tip: Bitch PhD)

This entry was posted in Politics. Bookmark the permalink.

One response to “Rhetorical Strategies of the Right Wing”

  1. quitter | September 5, 2006 at 3:28 am |

    Man, you and I are on the same wavelength on this one. I’ve just been commenting on Orac’s and MarkCC’s sites about just this problem.
    It’s seems like so much effort to go through all the work of debunking a denialist argument every single time. It seems like you guys should develop a shorthand, like ad hominem or Godwin’s law to deal with these problems. That link is dead on, you encounter the same poor arguments every single time, it takes an incredible amount of work to refute arguments they pull out of the freaking ether, and ultimately there is no convincing the denialists to change their minds.
    We can argue about the utility of having a venue to challenge their bad arguments for the sake of the unconvinced, but it seems as though you guys shouldn’t have to reinvent the wheel every time these terrible arguments come up. We should have a law, we can just cite it and say, “hey, you’re just a denialist, you’ve violated ‘X’ law and don’t have a real argument, come back when you have real data or a peer-reviewed paper.”
    We can call it “quitter’s law.” Ha! Ok, that’s arrogant, and I’m sure I’m not the first to think of this. But really, you guys should develop a shorthand to rapidly dismiss this sloppy thinking without all this hard work.
    Alternatively you can do what talk origins does and just have a central repository of denialist debunking on every conceivable topic. A lot of work, but ultimately a time-saver.