Memphis Gets Sued Over 15,000 Lost Rape Kits. Oopsie-Daisy!

[ismnotwasm]

20. That was number 17

MRA debating tactics

17. Resort to metatheory, essentially committing an argumentum verbosium fallacy (a.k.a., bullshitting your way through an argument with fancy language and advanced but irrelevant concepts). In the case of agentssith, there’s always room to talk about epistemology and Wittgenstein when someone is talking about anthropological research. Why talk about patriarchy as a social and cultural concept in the sciences when you can distract people with some deep-sounding discussion about the use of words and the philosophy of knowledge? It doesn’t matter that your opponent knows that anthropology, as a science, uses an evidentialist, foundational (axiomatic) epistemology, namely the inquiry of scientific method, and that talking about epistemology is, well, totally irrelevant to talking about patriarchy in anthropology (after all, we never distract physicists by asking them to explain the epistemic status of their knowledge after they tell us they discovered the Higgs Boson, do we?). You don’t have to impress or distract her, just impress and distract everyone else so that it looks like you know more than her. Remember, when your buddies say you won because they don’t know any better, you won.

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