John Hardly "There's also a very good device, honed razor sharp by radio talk show hosts like Limbaugh and Combs..."

That's one of the tricks I referred to before.
Appeal To Authority.
An attack technique is to immediately launch an attack on the Authority - assuming that your opponent HAS made an appeal to authority.

The only authority in the case of remembered personal matters, is of course the person making the statement to you, so what this really is, is a disguised form of the "ad hominem" or "against the person" attack.

So you see, KNOWING about the tricks helps.

So if you were put on the spot by these clowns, you would distinctly disrupt their flow by pointing this out. They probably do not even recognise their technique as this - only that it works and is effective in creating "entertainment". Of course, if you did this, you would want to be pretty confident of your ability to also detect and deflect all of the other cute little tricks...


"Now it is replaced with a distrust of the sources cited, such as, "oh -- they're owned by the moonies, etc." "

This is an attack on the appeal to authority.

Of course, it can be a valid technique. In the days of the rise of the Nazis, they produced breathing propaganda - THEY were the auhtority that was believed by many people, who often did not recognise that they had been misled untill after hostilities ceased, some of them perhaps never recognised this. Some people believe this propaganda to this day, even violently so.


Wolfgang's ""Thanks for the correction"" - of course doesn't work on those with a fixed agenda - it may be politically incorrect to say even a mental attitude problem...

Mickey 191 - about spelling & typos: sometimes the typo/spelling is trivial - the menaing is obvious - at other times it may lead to confusion. I have a good friend who is aphasic (gets the wrong word) - occassionally we end up in the wrong place intellectually cause I dod not catch the fault, but now I usually know what the real word is, and don't have to interrupt the flow to check the wrod.


Spot the Dog "because you are better at argument does not make you right".
As someone who had a decade or more of life and career trashed because of a paranoid schizophrenic boss "helping" me, I couldn;t agree more!

and

McGrath "The fact that an adversary might be talking nonsense is no guarantee that we are right in what we are saying."

is the other side of the coin!


Grab's "you don't (CAN'T) understand because you are not a XXX"
is tricky. It may be relevant - but then again it may just be a tactic. The only response is "So now tell me exactly WHY I can't understand because I do not have your _particular_ experiences, but I do have _relevant_ ones" which unfortunately requires the dispelling of emotions in order to work...

Mcgrath phrased it well: "If you are arguing that the moon is made of green cheese, and I am arguing that it is made of yellow cheese, I might win the argument, since it does looks a lot more yellow than it does green. But that doesn't mean I'm in any way right about the moon."

There is a serious point to be made here. Two situations..

a) Two 7 years olds at the point of fisticuffs over the colour of the sky.

b) Two nuclear nations with their fingers on the launch buttons, over an alleged terroritorial dispute.

In one case, rationality, truth, etc doesn't matter much, they may be both wrong... in the other case, they may be both wrong too, but things are a little more serious...

Robin