Well, peacefully appealing to the moral sentiments of the ruling aristocracy who have made America a systematically racist shithole clearly isn't going to work. How to effectively apply other forms of pressure is an extremely difficult question. But I agree looters should be shot. Let's start with the political and financial establishment who loot the country daily both morally and materially.

:clap: :flower:

, even when the rules are selectively applied. — NOS4A2

We must be racist against stupid people. Now shut up and get on with the Trump brown-nosing.

If you were any more full of shit, we could give you an enema and stick you in a matchbox.



Damn right you needed to apologize. Don't try to pull that crap again.

It's a fact that minorities have been affected more by COVID. And being affected by COVID has nothing to do with others' expectations of you. It's not a moral failing. Now stop trolling. If the new Trump line is to accuse anyone who supports mail-in voting of being racist, it's not going to fly here.

You don't really need agent provacateurs when the racist-in-chief is threatening to shoot protesters.

:lol:

It's been admitted the arrest was wrong you silly people.

"Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz has apologized for the "totally unacceptable" arrest of a CNN journalist and his crew who were covering protests over the death of George Floyd."

https://www.newsweek.com/minnesota-gov-tim-walz-apologizes-cnn-teams-unacceptable-arrest-journalists-released-1507326

They identified themselves. ... Watch now as the liberty freaks embrace authoritarianism and abuse of first amendment rights while even the governor has apologized.

... And another Trump turd gets flushed away.

Libertarian: I believe in free speech and will always defend it.
Non-libertarian: Addendum: Bullshit.
Libertarian: Shut him down!!!

Libertarian: I believe in free speech and will always defend it.
Non-libertarian: Bullshit.
Libertarian: Shut him down!!!

In the post in question, you appealed to the authority of this organization in support of the idea that the lockdown causes more harm than good. There was nothing in your post except that appeal. Your appeal didn't work because your source was demonstrated to lack credibility. That means you're left with no evidence and your post (containing nothing else) can be dismissed. If you want to make the argument that lockdown causes more harm then good, (an open question), you'll need to provide evidence from a credible source.

By the way, not only have this organization promoted the idea that HIV doesn't cause AIDS, other pet causes include anti-vaccination, climate change denialism and the idea that abortion causes breast cancer*. All pseudoscience, all politically motivated. I don't know how to put this any simpler than your "authority" is absolute garbage. Considering their record, no reasonable interlocutor would consider their statements as evidence for anything (amusingly, they're against evidence-based medicine anyway, so they probably wouldn't care.)

"AAPS .... [pushes] fringe views that most mainstream conservatives do not endorse, such as the belief that mandatory vaccination is “equivalent to human experimentation” and that Medicare is “evil.” ... It’s the most curious of medical organizations: a doctors’ interest group that seems more invested in the interests of doctors, rather than public health."

https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2020/02/aaps-make-health-care-great-again/607015/
https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/the-journal-of-american-physicians-and-surgeons-ideology-trumps-science-based-medicine/

Edit: Dismissal here is like "So what?" directed at the empty appeal to authority in your post. You tried to lend the organization weight by pointing out they are "doctors". I undermined that weight by pointing out they are a politically orientated group that promote pseudoscience. So, we're back to square one. Refutation would be me claiming to have proved you wrong about the lockdown. I didn't do that. I've given plenty of previous evidence why I think the original lockdown was effective, but the degree of further effectiveness is debatable seeing as the population is "trained" in social distancing already. If you want to take part in that debate, you'll need to come up with evidence from a credible source.

I've said all I'm going to say on this by the way. If you don't get it now, so be it.

No! A belief is not a metal state slate. — Banno

Fixed it. :up:

:clap:

Good points. Thanks.

e.g. suppose I claim carbon dating is completely unreliable, and support this claim by linking to articles on the website of the Institute for Creation Research). But suspicion alone is not enough - you would need to dig into the basis for the claims. — Relativist

I think I've more or less dealt with this, justified suspicion is not enough to refute the claim, but it is enough to dismiss the appeal to authority and if that is all the claim is based on, the claim itself as anything other than bare assertion. In other words, you're back to square one, how do we settle the claim? In the absence of direct methods to do this (in the case of scientific claims), more reliable authorities will need to be sought.

Yes, I think you missed something.
It is generally appropriate to appeal to authority to support one's position - it's a reasonable starting point. — Relativist

Sure, and I don't want to get hung up on fallacies one way or the other. But if all you have is an appeal to an authority and the authority is compromised, unreliable, or inappropriate in some obvious way then you have nothing.

On the positive side, some interesting conversation here. On the negative side, Hanny is probably ecstatic we've spent so much time on his brain fart. :lol:

A bad call on one illness undermined other advice on another illness. — unenlightened

It wasn't just one bad call, the dudes are a nutty right-wing cult pontificating on a political issue that largely breaks down on right vs left-wing lines. Their position is as predictable as it is worthless.

I'm not calling out the hyperbole here, but making a serious point. The state of society is parlous because trust has been too often betrayed. Authority is institutional, and if the institutions are not trustworthy, there is no context in which they become trustworthy.

If a group of doctors who think homosexuality is an illness say chips make you fat, I say that's an excellent reason to eat more chips. Yes, no, maybe? — unenlightened

The part you quoted wasn't just hyperbole, it was, as I've explained twice already, a joke. The answer is obviously, no. Justified scepticism of the source of position A is not evidence of opposing position Z. As for the rest, black and white thinking again. Authorities are trustworthy by degrees and trust is never absolute, but there's a certain point (e.g. when 99% of climate scientists say global warming is real) when objections are either tiresome posturing or irrational or both.

Yeah, thanks, probably the main take away here is just that accusations of an ad hom fallacy (or even, conversely, an argument from authority fallacy) should not be get-out-of-jail-free cards for lazy thinkers. But further to that, yes, they are concepts that should probably be used in far more limited circumstances than they are as they are too often set up as roadblocks rather than routes to reason.

We will all live with the consequences. — Frank Apisa

Well, I guess I could live with senile creepy Yoda as long as he is given constant access to a teleprompter and stays away from my sister. Anyhow, Trump is getting worse daily, that's inarguable. And not just him but his whole shitty family.

Since your standard of what constitutes a successful argument is only held to skeptics of lockdowns, there is little to no incentive to do the work. So I’ll pass. — NOS4A2

Many of us on both sides of the argument, including me, @benkei, @fdrake, @Isaac and more have been using data and evidence since the beginning. Go look at the posts. We don't always get it right, but there's a respect for reality and facts that Trumpists, for example, disdain, presumably because they are so regularly on the wrong side of them.

On the positive side, we're only arguing over who/what constitutes a legitimate authority here and have got past the "You questioned the legitimacy of my authority, therefore ad hom!" silliness.

Or.. creepy Yoda... ?

So, Trump is Darth Vadar and Biden is what? A senile Yoda??

Must be a black and white cat.

Without a legitimate appeal to authority or any reliable data or stats that meaningfully compare the damage that an immediate release of the lockdown would do to the damage keeping it going would, you're left with nothing here. Of course, the lockdown does damage (we all know that) and, of course, the virus does damage (we all know that). In order to make a successful argument that an immediate end to the lockdown would do more damage than continuing it would, you need to attempt some sort of analysis based on the evidence available. Go for it if you like. You won't find it in the Fox article that's for sure.

So on the basis of a long long history of officially sanctioned invented mental illnesses, (hysteria, Drapetomania, homosexuality, etc etc, along with a whole range of frankly sadistic and obviously highly damaging "treatments", no medical professionals can be regarded as deriving any authority at all from their professional qualifications. Do I have that about right? — unenlightened

I've asked my doctor and he denies all knowledge of inventing Drapetomania, whatever the fuck that is. Of course, he might be one of the lizard people, in which case, he would, wouldn't he? :razz:

We can continue to argue about the reliability of the source but it doesn't make what I said an ad hom either way because I'm not claiming the argument is false based on the source, I'm arguing that an appeal to authority can't legitimately be made using it because its unreliable. Look, just go read the OP I wrote. If you have something to say about it, say it there.

Anyway, this is off topic, if you want to argue about sources, do it here: https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/8368/ad-hom-vs-appeal-to-authority

Only one article by one doctor was skeptical of the idea that HIV caused AIDS. — NOS4A2

Who says? Source?

And consider this paradox:

Wikipedia is not a reliable source. — NOS4A2

By your own logic, questioning Wikipedia's reliability is an ad hom. So, how do you escape the contradiction you've trapped yourself in?

Lastly, you quoted the only part of my posts that I already said was a humorous flourish. I've made clear that you can't prove the opposite of a claim by demonstrating the unreliability of the source.

Sometimes attacking the source is warranted.

Sometimes appealing to authority is appropriate. — frank

Yep.

Yes, get well soon both of you.

Yeah fuck it, I'll put this in an OP and stick it in resources.

Another simple way of putting this is that you were attempting an argument from authority, which can't work unless the authority is reliable.

"An argument from authority (argumentum ab auctoritate), also called an appeal to authority, or argumentum ad verecundiam, is a form of defeasible argument in which the opinion of an authority on a topic is used as evidence to support an argument. It is well known as a fallacy, though some consider that it is used in a cogent form when all sides of a discussion agree on the reliability of the authority in the given context."

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_from_authority

Pointing to the unreliability of the authority as per the above is not an ad hom. I should put this in resources as it keeps coming up despite the fact it should be obvious.

When you present a claim as credible based on an authority, you implicitly make the claim that the authority is credible. If the authority is found not to be credible, you need to find another way to add credibility to the claim. Remember, you made no argument but simply presented a claim attached to a supposedly credible source.

The world does not become flat because Hitler said it's round. — Hanover

Yes, but nobody would present Hitler as an authority on this issue nor would it be resolved by appeal to the flat earth society.

If I believed that HIV did not cause AIDS but I did believe that we needed to more diligently quarantine to protect ourselves from the coronavirus, would you discount my beliefs about the coronavirus? — Hanover

You are not an authority on medicine, so nobody is going to present you as an authoritative source for that claim. But, say, you presented me with a claim by pseudoscientists that we should quarantine more diligently, I would discount that as evidence even if I believed that we should. Actually, I'm open to evidence in both directions as long as the source of evidence is credible.

So, it's pretty simple, the claim of these doctors carries no special authority on the issue of reopening because due to their propagation of pseudoscience they are not a credible source. That doesn't make the claim necessarily true or false, it's simply as irrelevant as a claim by flat earthers that the world isn't round. We need to look elsewhere for evidence.

I'm pretty sure @Hanover knows quoting an organization who are known to spread psuedoscience to advance their political objectives disqualifies them from being considered neutral sources of medical advice in the political shutdown debate.

Lol! It's a matter of credibility not logical argumentation. Any doctor who advises that HIV doesn't cause AIDS should not be considered a reliable font of medical advice. But I suppose when we ban people here for pseudoscience we're ad homming them? (Of course because a discredited authority says something is true, it doesn't mean the opposite is necessarily true. That was a humorous rhetorical flourish on my part).

Couple of more snippets about these wingnuts.

"AAPS is generally recognized as politically conservative or ultra-conservative, and its positions are unorthodox and at wide variance with federal health policy.

... It opposed the Social Security Act of 1965 which established Medicare and Medicaid and encouraged member physicians to boycott Medicare and Medicaid...

AAPS opposes mandated evidence-based medicine and practice guidelines, opposes abortion and over-the-counter access to emergency contraception and opposes electronic medical records."

:lol:

If a group of doctors who think HIV doesn't cause AIDS say we should end the shutdown, I say that's an excellent reason to keep it going. Thanks @Hanover.