The piece could also be entitled “The Five Stages Of Liberal\u00a0Argumentation”.<\/p>\n
I’ve observed for a long time now that liberals, especially in liberal hotbeds like the Twin Cities, are really, really bad debaters. \u00a0My thesis is that liberals in liberal hotbeds never really need to learn how to debate; they are indoctrinated in a school system that teaches “progressive” values as the baseline, they are And let’s be honest; there are conservatives out there who live down to that stereotype.<\/p>\n But when they run into an argument that beats them on the facts, the rules and the logic – and that is very, very often, especially in the battle between the left and rights’ media and alt-media – I’ve observed a bit of a pattern:<\/p>\n Stage One: Unearned Smugness<\/strong>. \u00a0Most liberals are good for about one round of “facts” in a given argument. \u00a0These, they deliver as if they were carved on stone tablets by a lightning bolt from on high, whether they came from empirical research (rare) or chanting points straight from the leftymedia chain of command (from “Media Matters” all the way down to “Minnesota Progressive Project”).<\/p>\n This round of facts, or factoids, generally falls after one round of actual enquiry. \u00a0The collapse of the round of facts, or “facts”, leads to:<\/p>\n Stage Two: \u00a0Logical Fallacy<\/strong>. \u00a0When confronted with the collapse of their first and only round of factoids and chanting points, most liberal bloggers and activists will fall back on the lessons they learned from the oracle from which most of them learned all they will ever know about debate – Stephen Colbert. \u00a0 Thrown off-balance by a substantive counterattack, they’ll fall back one of several common logical fallacies to try to negate an argument they can’t attack. \u00a0These include:<\/p>\neducated<\/del> schooled in a university system that actively squelches dissent, and they are politically spawned in a party and movement whose entire internal message is coordinated top-down groupthink. They never have <\/em>to learn to think of conservative arguments as anything but something lesser people do.<\/p>\n\n