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The Progressive ideology exposed

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Al Swearegen:
I give you Dinesh D'Soza





Progressivism is Cultural Marxism. It is complete bullshit. The worms of Progressivism have dined well in the Liberal Left and now we, Liberals, are obliged to pander and scrape to the Progressives OR risk being called a bigot AT BEST or a Nazi/Alt-Right/Far Right/unintellectual/immoral dullard.

It is all bullshit.

odeon:
I give you a rather devastating criticism of Mr D'Souza's debating style:


--- Quote from: https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Dinesh_D%27Souza#Debating_tactics ---D'Souza has an aggressive and rhetorical speaking and debating style, which makes him sound forceful and convincing. He uses the Gish Gallop frequently and effectively, rebuffing his opponent for not addressing every point he makes.
He frequently employs caricatures and strawmen of atheist positions. He presents these positions so as to make them sound whimsical or silly, while presenting his own statements with an air of utmost gravity, no matter how lunatic or far-fetched they may be.
Every time Dinesh attempts to speak for, quote, or misquote his opponent, he adopts a buffoonish, mocking tone. It is a very unsubtle ad hominem attack fused into his prose.
He is a big fan of quote mining. Not content with simply taking his opponent's statements out of context, he will take a quote about a topic completely unrelated to the one under discussion and re-frame it to make it sound as if his opponent is uninformed or delusional.
A main weapon in his debating arsenal is the emotional appeal, where he paints his opponent's position as false because some of its implications may be distasteful to certain members of the audience.
He enjoys painting his opponents as vicious critics of innocuous policies and events, and himself as a paragon of intellectual virtue. While not going as far as character assassination (at least not in a face-to-face debate), he does subtly attack the character of his opponent.
He often says that an assertion by his opponent, or even the opponent's entire position, is invalid because it is not intuitively or obviously true. He paints this as a "common sense" argument, where he calls upon the audience to evaluate an assertion using their own intuition. In reality, this is a denial of the obvious fact that many things are counterintuitive and require expertise beyond the experience of the average person (but don't take our word for it; ask your neighbor about quantum mechanics or the economics of sub-Saharan Africa). This is a particularly effective tactic, as it shifts audience opinion to his side.
Thanks to his wide repertoire of tactics, he rarely is forced to allow a point by his opponent to pass unchallenged. This projects the illusion of competence, whereas most of his rebuttals are intellectually dishonest and completely invalid.
When all else fails, he will spout outright lies and half truths, pulling facts and statistics out of thin air to give his argument some credibility. This amounts to an argument from authority, which he seems to derive from his public "reputation" as a political commentator, academic and writer.
Lately, he appears to carry around a sizable library of books to debates, frequently flashing them at his opponent and at the audience, while stating that they completely prove his own, or disprove his opponent's, points. These are usually self-published works by fringe lunatics (which are not worth the paper they're printed on). This is argument from authority on steroids, since no one except him has read the book. Therefore, his opponent cannot call him out on it, and is forced to let the point go without comment.

--- End quote ---

Calandale:
Looks like an objective wiki page. Especially since it begins with "Dinesh D'Souza (born 1961) is a domestically violent mall ninja

odeon:
It is on par with the Youtube page, which is sort of my point.

Al Swearegen:

--- Quote from: Calandale on December 25, 2017, 05:47:57 AM ---Looks like an objective wiki page. Especially since it begins with "Dinesh D'Souza (born 1961) is a domestically violent mall ninja

--- End quote ---

This would sell it for me.

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