Matt McNeil is a talk show host, of sorts, on AM950, the Twin Cities putative “progressive” talk station. [1]
Now, McNeil has a habit of blocking everyone on social media that can beat him in an open debate on logic, reasoning and facts – which is, to be fair, pretty much everyone.
He was, in fact, one of the people (in a large field, to be honest) who gave me the original impetus to the formulation of Berg’s Sixteenth Law. (“The percentage of “progressives” outside of academia who can make it to the second round of a debate without running out of “facts” and having to switch to deflection, ad hominem and straw man arguments is within the statistical margin of error”).
Anyway – in a move that isn’t a sign of insecurity, no way, no how, McNeil tweeted this the other day:
Not sure if this qualifies as “gaslighting”, or is a strawman, or if McNeil doth protest too much, but I’m pretty sure nobody who matters has ever said McNeil is “terrified” of “rightos” [2] like me.
To be clear, all I say is that McNeil does not pack the gear, either intellectually or as a talk host, to do much of anything but chant into an echo chamber over which he has complete control, and that if I were as bad at forming a coherent argument as he is, I would block all dissent as well.
I’m not – perhaps I am a legend in my own mind and should but, but I’m not – so I don’t. I block almost nobody. When I do, it’s not because they’re too good at debate, but are in fact so subject to Berg’s 16h Law as to deserve life in my rhetorical SuperMax.
[1] I’m as surprsied as you are that AM950 still exists. I check in every couple years or so to see if there’s still a signal there, much
[2] What he lacks in fact and intellectual rigor, he also seems to lack in the key talk radio skill of coming up with breezy terms to describe complex groups. But “bloom where you are planted”, I always say…
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