Quote Originally Posted by a500lbgorilla View Post
Just to jump over the conversation to share two things:

On Netflix, Best of Enemies is a great documentary about the Robert F Buckley Jr / Gore Vidal televised debates that forever changed how the news media covered politics.

Buckley was a masterful debater who was pushing a new form of combative conservatism via his publication The National Review and Vidal was a brilliant author who had just published a satire about the sexual exploration and exploits of an MTF transexual. They were both on the cutting edge of what both ends of the political spectrum would later become.

Through 10 televised debates shown after news coverage of the R/D conventions, they had forever changed how the news media would cover politics - no longer centrists who merely cemented the truth, the News would become the argumentative punditry we all know and love today.

On top of that, Cruz has an interview on NPR this morning where he argues against the science of climate change. If you want to see why I love this guy so much, just listen to him stand a bit taller than reality itself. (I'll link it later when NPR publishes it online).

If ever you needed two reasons why I constantly say that argument is fundamentally empty, look no further than these.
well, there is merit to arguing "against" climate change. ive noticed positions are much more nuanced that is the narrative. geophysicists do use hard science to show why the earth may be warming and the statistics suggest a level of probability that it is, but then they jump to wild conclusions about where it's going based on that. the other side sees the wild conclusions for the baseless they are, but then make the mistake of denying much probability of climate change being real.

argument is empty the same way that a description of gravity is empty. the description is not the thing itself. but a description of gravity can be evaluated on the merits, just like any argument. argument can't be invalid because if it were that would mean that there's no way to describe validity. unless ofc you want to accept that premise, at which point the argument against argument is self-defeated and pointless.