Ambrya wrote:
The personal ad only ever gets brought up when Virus goes off bragging about what a stud he supposedly is, or gets into one of his tirades about homosexuality and the wrongness of gay marriage (an argument which almost always, in Virus's case, boils down to some nonsense about the how the government shouldn't sanction immoral behavior.) If he is, in fact, lying about his sexual orientation, then his argument on the subject becomes invalid, because it comes from a place of hypocrisy.
Are you saying that someone cannot believe that something they themselves secretly engage in is immoral? So if I'm a drug addict, and I say that drugs are bad and you shouldn't use them, I'm wrong because what I'm saying is hypocritical? Or if I'm a priest who molests my altar boys and I say that child molestation is bad, I'm wrong because I'm being hypocritical?
You asked if the personal credibility had relevance to someone's position on an issue. I said that baring specific cases where we're simply asked to take someone's word on something, that no, it doesn't. We should decide whether or not drugs are bad for us based on an assessment of the affects of drugs on us, not whether or not the person saying that is a drug addict.
In the exact same way, Varus' sexual orientation has absolutely zero bearing on the validity of his arguments about gay marriage or homosexuality in general. It's utterly irrelevant. Those arguments should be judged on their own merits, and the position as a whole should be judged and debated based on the
best arguments on each side. Doing anything else leads us to false conclusions.
I'm making no judgment about Varus here. I don't know why you seem so stuck on that aspect of it. All I'm doing is commenting on the usefulness or lack thereof of the attempt to use Varus' "credibility" in this case for anything other than humor (and to observe that it's gotten a bit stale there as well).
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I pointed out your less-than-sincere, theatrically outraged finger-waggling and head-shaking was wrong by asserting that highlighting a hypocritical position in a debate is perfectly valid.
A point I disagree with. It's a technique that is used all the time in public debate. Largely because the bulk of the audience doesn't realize that it's a fallacious approach, so it works. You can't be faulted for that assumption though, since odds are your only actual experience with debate is from what you see on TV.
In real debate, the personal positions and actions of the debater are irrelevant. In fact, you're trained to debate by taking positions that are randomly assigned. What you believe or do is irrelevant. You're supposed to find evidence to support the position you are given and use good solid arguments to make that evidence "prove" your position. You're judged on how well you do this without resorting to fallacious techniques. Attacking the person instead of the argument is usually going to get you a failing grade.
Of course, public debate is completely different. We can blame TV and large volumes of ignorance for that...
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Then you attempted to dismiss the possibility that any of us may genuinely believe that Virus is being a hypocrite by asking if we HONESTLY felt he might be gay. I then took the wind out of your sails on that one by HONESTLY asserting that Virus is, at the very least, being dishonest about his sexuality, and supporting that belief with facts.
THEN you derided my having given you the honest and thorough answer you requested as being a ridiculous waste of time.
I derided you because you fell into exactly the sort of stereotypical assumptive joke response I asked you not to. You tossed out the "anyone who is that opposed to homosexuality must be a closet homosexual" bit. Of course, that makes your entire argument circular, doesn't it? Think about it...
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I then brought it back to my original point--one which you seem to have conveniently forgotten you had challenged--that hypocrisy goes to credibility.
Yes. But neither says anything about being right or wrong about a position that is held. Which was the point I was making.
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So now you're trying to make some ridiculous claim that credibility doesn't matter, when it patently DOES...
It matters only if we're considering an issue where we have to take someone's word for something. If Varus claims that he saw Obama smoking crack in his back yard last week, we could correctly judge him to be BSing us due to a history of telling tall tales. But if Varus claims that the Earth revolves around the Sun, we should not resort to such methods, but should rather find out if there is evidence to support that claim.
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...and I'm sorry but I'm not going to let you get away with it. You've gotten caught out on every point you've tried to raise since making a stink about the personal ad, and each time you have been, you attempt to shift the subject to some other cause for outrage. Accept it, and stay on topic. Don't keep trying to obfuscate and twist things around until you feel you're "right" again.
I have addressed your issue with credibility head on. I disagree with you. I thought I was clear about that in my previous post.
I stated two things:
1. That the humor factor of the whole "man seeking man" bit was wearing thin.
2. That whether Varus is homosexual really doesn't have any bearing at all on the rightness or wrongness of any position he holds with regard to homosexuality.
EDIT: And technically a third point: That unfortunately, far too many people do make choices based on perceived credibility rather than the facts of the issue before them. Worse, some people specifically attack the credibility of someone holding an opposing position in order to get people to support their side. It's a bad idea to agree with someone because you think they've been right about other things in the past. It's absolutely moronic to agree with someone because the you think the guy arguing against him has been wrong about other things in the past.
I have not spun those statements. I have not shied away from discussing them. We may be progressing from different assumptions, but that doesn't mean that we're not both still debating the same topic.
Edited, Jan 14th 2010 1:08am by gbaji
