Removed by mod

Removed by mod

Just to add: I know his methodology is flawed and the data is poor. Because I read his fucking papers. That is what allows me to talk intelligently about it, and then go on to explain that he is likely motivated by ideological reasons. This is far more effective.

See that’s a real argument though.

“The methodology is flawed in these ways which invalidate the conclusions.”

Not ad hominem.

Ad hominem on the other hand: It’s persuasive some of the time, but it leaves you with nothing if the source is anyone but Zenz. Also it’s still fallacious. I mean, I find Zenz fucking abhorrent and am highly confident that his wacko religious views motivate his work, but if I tried to argue that in any kind of intellectually serious sphere I’d be laughed out of the room, and rightly so.

Everyone loves ad hominem, it’s fucking fun to use. Doesn’t make it a valid argument.

These argument approaches sometimes work, for sure. But if the public consensus is anything to go by, there’s limited fucking reach for them. Sure they’ll work socially, but no institution is going to amplify those messages, and it fails whenever you encounter someone who knows to be rightly skeptical of ad hominem arguments.

Unless you can demonstrate how his work is flawed I don’t find it persuasive.

He can believe all these things and still have a correct methodology with accurate data.

Yes it’s an ad hominem. You’re saying he’s an untrustworthy source without examining any of his arguments, that the definition of ad hominem. And it’s lazy.

Your example is a non sequitur, not ad hominem.

You don’t have to prove a negative, just demonstrate that the evidence for the affirmative is insufficient. But that means reading so it’s hard I guess.

Did you address the content of the argument, or did you say the source is untrustworthy? The latter is ad hominem and it’s fallacious. Talk about why he’s wrong. People can be circumstantially correct even if they’re creeps. These arguments are only persuasive to people who either don’t know the weaknesses of them or are already on your team. Besides, there are other sources on China besides Zenz. If all you know how to do is tell me Zenz is bad you’re going to fall on your face in every other scenario. Which is exactly what is see happen in the wild.

See I don’t find any of those arguments persuasive, and if someone is genuinely looking for rigorous critique they shouldn’t either.

The existence or non-existence of a refugee crisis is probably the strongest argument, but is easily challenged. “China’s control is just that powerful”, “The genocide is through authoritarian control and only limited state violence. So refugees aren’t necessarily present.”

As for the Muslim countries claim, there’s a lot of weird assumptions there. Primarily that state actors would give a shit about human rights abuses when it goes against their national interests to complain.

And finally, Zenz is a creep. Yeah some folks will find this persuasive, but it’s still a bad argument. A fallacy is a fallacy, if you’re talking to someone who cares about the weight of evidence they (and I) won’t give a shit about who he is unless you can demonstrate how his others beliefs affect how he interprets his research.

Every argument about the uyghurs.

“Adrian ZoopZoop bad”

Ad hominem, and not persuasive. Of course you don’t like your political opponents, why would anyone ever be convinced by you criticizing him for his weird evangelism when you say little about his actual academic work.

“Nitpicking over definitions of genocide”

Obviously dumb.

Just read the fucking papers. They’re not complicated, find the evidence backing up the claims they’re making and figure out how it poorly supports the claims made. Same thing with the organ harvesting stuff. When you actually read the original stuff you can readily take apart the arguments being used there.

I saw someone link an article they claimed was about Chinese troll farms to support a claim about Reddit being astroturfed. One of you fuckers probably just called him a CIA asset as if that’s not the exact same stupid argument but this time without a supporting source. All you had to do was read the abstract of it to learn that the actual conclusions of the paper were that there weren’t any actual “farms”, just people posting after work to Chinese social media, not reddit or any western social media. It was literally the easiest dunk in the world but they couldn’t be bothered to read anything that isn’t 100+ Year old pamphlets. I used to be much more critical of China, but I shifted on it by reading the sources supporting the critical claims and finding them worthless. Meanwhile most tankie China posts are just masturbatory bad faith in-group circlejerks. The western propaganda is not hard to dismantle if you’d just fucking try. But no, just use fallacious arguments for the 1,000,000th time and enjoy trolling the libs.

As if almost all public transportation isn’t expressly kitted for disabled accessibility.

We’re not getting rid of busses you fucking idiot.

“Has Clarke ever lived in Africa?”

“I don’t see how that’s relevant.”

Appreciate the rundown, I’m largely tech illiterate.

My only sometimes desire for the kobo is a larger screen for PDFs, but you trade off with reduced portability. The UI is quite functional, even if there are a few issues with organization if you have a large number of documents.

That’s fair, particularly if you’re comfortable loading up a new operating system. If I ever acquired a kindle that’s what I’d likely do. I considered changing out the kobo software, but it’s unintrusive enough that I’ve never felt the need. Are there significant advantages to the reader you linked in your other comment?

I use a kobo Clara and it works well. Any e-ink screen takes a little time to get used to navigating, and if it’s PDFs you’ll want the larger model to make visibility easier. I think it’s a bit more expensive than the kindle, but you’re also escaping amazon.

Corporations have rich inner lives. So coercing them is an abject cruelty, unlike employees who are 1-dimensional cut-out people put on this earth to be min maxed.

Particularly if you discount the relative suffering of the slave based on the hypothetical sub-par happiness they would receive if free. We established these metrics by asking a bunch of white europeans if they would enjoy traditional lifestyles of their slaves and they said no.

no it's funny because I'm satirizing the general right-wing obsession with their desire to say the n-word and the convolutions they undergo to justify it

Mods pls destroy my transgression, no banerino