| >You are conflating a property of the claim itself (violating the laws of physics) with a straw-man property of the person making the claim. They aren't the same thing - one enables a simple proof by contradiction, the other is ad-hominem. I don't see why you think I haven't considered that. My whole argument is based on the idea that ad-hominens are pefectly fine in some cases. When? For people with a bogus claims record. How? Under the observation that a person making some bogus claims is also likely to make more bogus claims -- and thus the person can be dismissed as a general bogus-claims-maker. Why might lose some good arguments he might make here and there, but life's too short, and dismissing the person completely gives us time to listen to people with a better "claims" track record. In essense, the very basic of filtering, that everybody does (more or less well), and you undoubtly do as well. >I call your "climate change, it's all bogus" claim a straw man, and indicative more of your thinking than of reality, because that's not even a claim that skeptics make. Actually lots of "spectics" make it. Some make a lesser claim, that's its not human-caused, but others also claim it's not happening altogether. There's even a term for that: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climate_change_denial >I get the impression you are just looking for ways to dismiss arguments which make you emotionally uncomfortable. Nope, I'm looking for ways to dismiss arguments which waste my time. |