Keenan's picture

Well said, gRet. Some thoughts...

How about identifying fallacies (straw man arguments, ad hominems, baseless or gratuitous GBA (guilt by association), appeal to authority, appeal to emotion, etc.) in peoples' logic and refusing to tolerate continuous patterns of fallacies and deceptive arguments by people who have been warned to stop using those tactics?

In my experience, I have found a very close correlation between disinformation agents and the use of purposely deceptive reasoning. Of course not everybody who utilizes these tactics are agents of disinformation, but it seems like just about all agents of disinformation make liberal use of these tactics, and those who may not be agents should not be resorting to those fallacies anyway. If someone can't seem to argue their points without resorting to fallacies and deceptive discourse, then people are less likely to consider that that person has any valid points, and for good reason. A good example is willyloman. He can't seem to write a single comment that does not contain some sort of misrepresentation of someone's arguments. Whenever people attempt to correct his misrepresentation, he simply responds with new misrepresentations, and round and round it goes, to the point where one must really question if willy isn't just trying to waste peoples' time.

So, setting a high standard for rules and etiquette in regards to deceptive/fallacious discourse, such as expecting people to provide an honest and reasonable basis for any accusations against people, rather than bald assertions, for example, and requiring arguments to be sound and logical, in general, will go a long way towards keeping discussions more civil and with less tendency for discussions to degenerate into personal attacks, while at the same time countering the effects of cognitive infiltration.

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