“Deserves to be Believed”
24th November 2015
Freeberg fisks Hillary Clinton … and a whole lot more.
After seven or eight years of man-crush on Emperor Obama, an entire generation has figured out a new way of “thinking” and it isn’t healthy. You can’t create anything that will actually help anyone, thinking this way. You can’t grow turnips, or rice, or tomatoes, or slaughter some beef, pork or chicken, thinking this way. “This soil is good for growing grapes! Not only is it good for growing grapes, but it is the best soil for growing grapes on the WHOLE planet! And if you do not agree, unhesitatingly, my friends and I will all get together on Facebook, and mock you!” Just like “survivors of sexual assault deserve to be believed.” As is the case with sophistry, the conclusion has nothing to do with whether the soil is really good for growing grapes, or whether the survivor of a sexual assault really did survive a sexual assault.
…
The sophists of millennia ago who aroused the enmity of Socrates and Plato, would have stopped short of this. There is no “moral virtue” involved, cosmetic or genuine, in claiming to have been named after Sir Edmund Hillary. What there is, is a weird sort of group cred. Just like sophistry, it ignores truth, or rather makes a fair-weather friend out of truth, showing support for truth only when truth happens to take the side of the superior goals. But its goals are unique.