| This is very confusing. I believe you've entirely misread the bit of my post you quoted here and taken it to be about your mentioning Chomsky. Particularly at issue is to whom "their" refers. I took your accusing me of caricaturing you (where?) based on your quoting Chomsky to mean you thought I thought you were a leftist (phew). I'm still not sure what else that accusation could be taken to mean. As for the matter at hand, you seem to think (wrote that) the position the students were asked to defend qualifies as indefensible and defending it represents "iron manning" (I know it as steel-manning but that probably just means we read different things) and that the value it has is (roughly) comparable to any other exercise in iron-manning. It's not at all clear to me that this is the case and I'm pretty sure the value of the exercise is, in a sense, well past that issue. I think its use in an evaluation is precisely in the layers it presents—a student who gets hung up on steel-manning the position, especially if they've mis-read the prompt as stating things about the prime minister, government, and situation which it does not and so has read them as harder to defend per se than they actually are, hasn't even noticed the difficult part of the prompt, nor what actually might be indefensible about it, which is the political position the prime minister is in—and defending that well would be very unlike steel-manning an argument one disagrees with. It is a good exercise, but it is not a steel-manning exercise. > But please, again, don't let facts and reality get in the way of the narrative you are creating with your powers of assumption and strawmanning. I'm probably just unable to grasp your position since according to you I'm ignorant. But... well, heh. Ignorance is one of those words that's very risky to use narrowly or precisely, that's for sure. I almost avoided it for that reason. Assumptions can lead to mistakes, it's true. |
2- Your fundamental position from the beginning was: agree with you or I'm ignorant. This is not only arrogant, but extremely ironic in a series of posts where you are arguing that people should be more open minded to what they don't like and more self aware of the limitations of their perspective.
3- You are correct, the term I meant to use was Steel-manning. I used ironmanning incorrectly and was wrong for using the wrong words. I always feel anything less than a direct first person acknowledgement shows an appalling lack of intellectual honesty (especially doing things like using 3rd person language to distance myself from my own shortcomings). I'll add also that I was not educated in English and grew up in a non-English speaking culture, so please bear with me on these types of mistakes.
4- Indefensible is a relative position. There are people who defend every conceivable position. So I should have used a more apt choice of words such as 'generally revolting', which more accurately depicts general feelings held by most people toward the army killing civilians on American soil. I thank you for highlighting this as it will allow me to more accurately communicate.