If you’ve ever tried to engage a liberal in a debate, you know what a frustrating experience it can be. When you’re debating a rational person, there’s a certain logical progression: points and counter-points are offered, concessions made, etc. But with liberals it’s an entirely different experience. They slip and slide all over the place, change the subject, and let loose emotional outbursts. The problem, of course, is that liberals don’t form opinions based on reason and facts; they rely entirely on emotions. Debating, however, involves the application of logic to support a position, and that’s where the wheels come off when a liberal is involved. The liberal can’t defend his position with reason and facts because those weren’t among the ingredients when the cake was baked. Consider the following blog exchange I recently had with a liberal on the subject of Climategate.
He had started off with a point that I’ve heard other liberals make about the East Anglia emails:
” A cheating scandal at Annapolisdidn’t discredit electrical engineering.”
So here we have Liberal Debating Device #1: The Irrelevant Analogy. This one’s easy to pull off. Just pick two things and pretend they relate to each other in the same way as two other things. In this case, you can say that “student is to test as scientist is to scientific result.” If you’re a liberal, you can disregard the fact that the student’s output (the test exam) is a throw-away; whereas the scientist’s output is being used by world leaders to make policy decisions that will dramatically affect our standard of living for decades to come. You can pretend that a climate laboratory’s output is as inconsequential as a student’s EE exam (note: do NOT attempt this technique if you are not a liberal).
I pointed out that the liberals’ claim that “the emails don’t change the fact that the earth is warming” is like an insurance fraudster telling his insurer, “The fact that you discovered that I lied about my car being stolen didn’t help me get my car back.” In other words, they’re pretending that admission of fraud in making an assertion (like “the Earth is warming”) doesn’t negate the assertion itself.
Well, that just blew out the wiring in my adversary’s liberal head. So he immediately reached for that trusty six-shooter — Liberal Debating Device #2: The Ad-Hominem Attack
“In addition to being in Georgia, you must have started out in grade school there, too.”
Now, even though I live in Georgia, I didn’t grow up here. Nevertheless, there are many excellent elementary schools in Georgia and many fine, well-educated Georgians. Of course, I didn’t engage on that level, but a comment or two later came this gem:
“You, along with the fringe right, are struggling with trying to convince the rest of the world that falsified research at a university none of you heard of before the current ‘controversy’ equates to a massive cover-up of climatology ‘fraud’.”
This is a laboratory specimen of Liberal Debating Device #3 The False Implication: With this dismissive comment, the liberal is clearly implying that, because most people haven’t heard of East Anglia University, the things that happened there must be of little consequence and the participants of little influence. However, rational people know this isn’t the case. Obscure people in obscure places can do bad things that have far-reaching consequences. Few people had heard of Long Term Capital Management before its failure nearly brought down the world’s financial system. Likewise, Phil Jones (former head of the Climatic Research Unit at East Anglia) and his colleagues are very influential in the world of climate science. The fact that most people haven’t heard of East Anglia is irrelevant (unless you’re a liberal).
When I offered to the readers that, really all conservatives would like to see is more transparency in the science that is informing such important policy decisions, our liberal came out swinging with a real humdinger, Liberal Debating Device #4: The Hyperbolic Corrolary. Here’s how you assemble it: If someone asserts X, simply take the corrolary of X and exaggerate its effects in an attempt to discredit X. I said that science should be transparent and scientists should comply with legal requirements to disclose data and methods. So one could say it naturally follows that there should be some sort of sanction for not doing this, or as the liberal put it:
“You want climate research to be open and transparent. And if the scientists manipulate or destroy data (which they do all of the time), you want them thrown in jail.”
Understand, of course, that no mention of jail or any legal sanction of any sort had been mentioned up to this point. But as my liberal friend later pointed out, breaking laws leads to jail, which means having people hauled off in handcuffs. Ergo, I was calling for scientists to be hauled off in handcuffs and thrown in jail. We’re deep in the jungle that is the liberal thought process now. Only glimpes of sunlight make it through the thick canopy. The trees all look the same and there are no discernable landmarks. It’s easy to get disoriented…
Several comments later, the liberal reached for the pump-action shotgun of liberal discourse, Liberal Debating Device #5: The Bush Doctrine. When things are getting a bit rough, call in Bush and Cheney. Hell, call in Rumsfeld, Rice, and Halliburton, too, if things are really getting hairy. If you’re lucky, you can divert the entire debate to the center of your comfort-zone universe, the Iraq war. Here’s how to employ the Bush Doctrine for maximum effect:
“Sounds like you have climatologists confused with military analysts during the Bush Administration, looking for WMD’s in Iraq.”
Now, at this point, you’re probably wondering, “Why are you continuing to waste your time with this guy?” It’s a fair question. I guess, at this point, it had become a bit of a study in psychology. I was amazed by the evasive twists and turns he was taking to avoid simply debating the facts. Where would he go next? How exactly does this fascinating contraption we call the liberal mind work? I had my lab coat on and I was scribbling notes. Later, he gave us a sample of Liberal Debating Device #6: The False Choice. To employ this one, you postulate that, among A and B, only A or B can be true, as in:
“The leaked e-mails are an IT security problem, not one of scientific integrity.”
But wait — aren’t the leaked emails both an IT security problem AND a scientific integrity problem? Imagine that you were wrongly convicted of a crime and languishing in jail, when suddenly, someone hacks into the email system of the DA that convicted you, and uncovers emails discussing the suppression of evidence that would have exonerated you. Would you accept the DA’s assertion that this is nothing more than an IT security issue that has nothing to do with your guilt or innocence? These liberal neurons are fascinating things!
Just when I thought it couldn’t get any stranger, a second liberal jumped in with this Liberal Debating Device #7: The Spontaneous Fact. If you’re a liberal, use this when you want to construct an argument, but you’re missing a key fact to support the logical framework. A Spontaneous Fact can be substituted for a real fact, as in the following example.
“we know, regardless of the blather, that CO2 is a greenhouse gas, and, yes, the planet does go through heating and cooling with the heating usually because something has cause stored CO2 to be released.”
Here, he’s making the assertion that CO2 is in fact the cause of climate change though the millenia, as it is today, because back in pre-historic times, “something” caused stored CO2 to be released, which in turn caused global warming. Voila! He didn’t have any facts or even a plausible theory as to what that “something” might have been, but that’s where the spontaneous fact comes into play. Rather than explain the mysterious force that caused CO2 to be released from storage so it could cause global warming and then stuffed back into storage so the planet could cool again, call it “something” and then proceed to build the rest of your argument on top of it. Like this:
[something] -> CO2 released -> global warming The science is settled!
I pointed out that there may in fact be a natural process that causes CO2 to be released from storage, and it’s called “climate change”. I explained that CO2, as a relatively heavy gas, tends to settle to the surface, where it is absorbed by the land and oceans. As the planet warms, more of this stored CO2 is released into the atmosphere, since we know that water is less gas-soluble at higher temperatures than at lower. This would explain why studies have shown that fluctuations in CO2 levels through the years have lagged, rather than led, variations in temperature. I said that it’s just a theory, but it’s plausible and if he has a better one I’d like to hear it. Liberal #2 never responded.
Yet another liberal wandered into the debate with a link to a sympathetic article that contained a sample of Liberal Debating Device #8: The Given “Given”. We’ve all constructed arguments along the lines of, “Given the fact that the Earth is round, ….” or, “Given that humans require oxygen…” In any climate change debate with a liberal, there is one immutable “given”: that humans are causing global warming through CO2 emissions. All arguments descend from this Truth, which they hold to be self-evident. Therefore, they can pose hypothetical scenarios like this (from the article):
“I’m not going to let my daughter have chemotherapy to treat her leukemia. That will make her feel nauseous, and she’ll lose her hair.”
The obvious point here is that people don’t want to make hard choices in pursuit of the greater good for fear of the short term consequences. But wait, I said, what if you discovered that the lab that ran the tests on your daughter was routinely falsifying test results (perhaps because of a manpower shortage)? In other words, what if the “given” — that your daughter has leukemia — isn’t a given after all? Would you still dive headlong into chemo (which can have bad long-term consequences of its own), or would you insist on another round of lab tests before subjecting your daughter to that? Likewise, if we’ve discovered that the climate science that informs public policy has been compromised, shouldn’t we break out the flashlights and have a look in the crawlspace before we subject the entire world to economically punishing limits on energy consumption? Again, no response from liberal #3.
About that time, liberal #1 came back around with Liberal Debating Device #9, the Context Switch. With this device, the liberal attempts to run you all over town like a Manhattan cab driver with diversions that involve some of the same elements of the topic at hand, but are actually different topics altogether. Rather than go through the blog commentary verbatim, I’ll just net it out: the liberal switched from claiming that “CO2 is the cause of global warming” to “CO2 is unsafe to humans”. When I countered that CO2 is not only safe to humans, it is essential to life on the planet, he went into a dissertation of the ills that can be caused by overexposure to CO2, such as acidosis and suffocation. Did he realize that not even Al Gore Himself is claiming that atmospheric CO2 levels will rise to the level of human toxicity? That, well over 100 years into the industrial age, CO2 concentrations are less than 400 parts per million, whereas 10,000 parts per million is the threshold of toxicity? We’ll never know for sure. All we can surmise is that he visited Wikipedia, found something about CO2 toxicity, molded that into his liberal CO2-is-evil narrative and then popped out a blog comment. Incredibly, he even pointed out that CO2 in a frozen state can cause cold burns, thus capping his argument that CO2 is harmful to humans and should be mitigated at all possible cost.
So arguing with liberals is exhausting, yet fascinating. Trying to nail them down with logic and facts can be like trying to catch a darty little fish in an aquarium. They’re quick and unpredictable, and they’ll dash behind the rock or under the treasure chest before you can scoop them up with your net. Don’t argue with a liberal if you don’t have a lot of time, or if you’re taking medication for low idiot tolerance, as this could lead to an unsafe rise in blood pressure. Seek immediate medical attention if you experience a debate with a liberal lasting more than four hours.
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