tom sarbeck

Simon, we are all responsible for spreading misinformation, not just arbitrary groups. I would highly recommend taking a break from obsessively worrying about “left and right” or even “liberal and conservative”. They are useful for classification and vague generalisations which can launch to something more useful, but at some point they totally…[Read more]

Next thing you know, the French-Yakuza mafia will be appropriating ancient traditional British chicken byriani!

Always with the ad hominems.

You don’t seen to understand what ad hominems are. I highly recommend familiarising yourself with fallacies before quoting them.

Nor do you seem to understand insults. Telling someone they are being ridiculous is not an insult. Calling them a fucking idiot is (which I have not done). When someone is obsessed with an…[Read more]

toxic behaviour doesn’t get anyone anywhere

…and yet Simon, you don’t seem to realise that overgeneralising about people, obsessively going on about cancel culture and “leftist bullying” and other moral panics is toxic.

Cancel culture is authoritarian

Ugh…again you have responded to Autumn’s well thought out reply with babble. “Cancel culture” is a label applied to people who don’t like being called out for bullshit that they have gotten away with for too long. Yes, sometimes people face an overly harsh backlash to things that may not even have been meant as…[Read more]

Only if you don’t like the Left being criticised.  Don’t cancel me now.

Groan

You don’t know what someone is going to say until they say it.

Yes Unseen, that is tautologically true. That still doesn’t convince me that inviting someone whose expertise on a topic is as menial as yours or mine is, at an ACADEMIC event makes any bloody sense.

but over time people’s views can change or be more nuanced than you’ve been led to be…

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But are you denying that the Left has an authoritarian element?

Simon, your overgeneralisations are getting bloody tedious.

The reason to host a speaker outside the context of a course has to be because they are of interest to the audience. That the speaker’s views are not of interest to the organizers should be irrelevant. That the speaker is being banned because the hosts disagree with them is among the worst reasons not to provide a forum for them. Particularly t…

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Very good news unseen!

Sorry for the negativity there. I plan to overcome it, in spite of pervasive negativity. Back to the topic, regarding CDC, yes, they have major weaknesses. But the Trump era nastiness and revolt against trusting in federal agencies and against unifying states’ effectiveness in fighting the pandemic did not help, either. Science even became the bad…[Read more]

Unseen wrote:
Some people respond in the spirit of the OP, some argue dishonestly with ad hominems and beside-the-point distractions.

In this case, I agree, Maher’s being a prick. In a land full of pricks now, accelerated by an incompetent prick that was in the White House, and political pricks around the country (and the world, even in Canada)…[Read more]