Robwbright, Esq. continues to discover that the lawyer’s approach of attempting to poison the well isn’t the wisest tactic when dealing with a superintelligence:
Is human superintelligence armed with facts & logic a legitimate source of authority?
Before
you answer, allow me to appeal to another authority – higher than
either of us… Note that God answers the above question “No”: He
catches the wise in their own craftiness”; and again, “The LORD knows
the thoughts of the wise, that they are futile.” and “Therefore let no
one boast in men.”A wise (and pretty intelligent) man once said: “But
may I never boast about anything except the cross of our Lord Jesus,
the Messiah, by which the world has been crucified to me, and I to the
world!It is interesting that you always call out someone when
they appeal to their own authority, but you CONSTANTLY appeal to and
boast about your own superintelligence and consider that acceptable
behavior.Will you directly answer the question “Yes” or “No”. It should be a simple question for a superintelligence to answer.
It most certainly is a simple question. Is “human superintelligence armed with facts and logic” a legitimate source of authority? No, of course not. Neither are royal bloodlines, academic credentials, or guild licenses. None of these things are conclusively determinative of the truth. But what robwbright quite amusingly reveals in his attempt to impugn my credibility here is that he doesn’t even know what an appeal to authority is.
This is readily apparent due to his claim that I “CONSTANTLY” appeal to the authority of my own superintelligence. This is absolutely and totally false. I will go so far as to assert that I have never once appealed to the authority of my intelligence in the 11-year history of my WND column or the 9-year history of this blog. I should welcome the citation of any evidence that purports to prove otherwise.
Now, it is certainly true that I rub the oft-demonstrated fact of my superior intelligence in the face of my critics, for the reason I have often explained. Both the political Left and the militant atheists regularly resort to the logical fallacy of appealing to the authority of intelligence; in fact, atheists even utilize it in a bizarre and illogical argument against the existence of God. My overt assertion and subsequent demonstration of an even higher degree of intelligence than most of them can muster thereby removes one of their favorite intellectual weapons from their arsenal and tends to make them look foolish when they attempt to use it to dismiss me in the manner that they dismiss so many others they attack.
This is why you will often see them theorizing that I must be crazy, because they are so attached to their logical fallacy that they literally cannot grasp that someone can be more intelligent than they are and nevertheless reject their left-liberal ideology or their godless scientism… even though it has been statistically demonstrated that there are more high IQ theists than atheists. IQ-flaunting is a useful rhetorical device that trumps a common rhetorical argument, nothing more. And it is obviously an effective one, as most of my critics eventually get around to complaining about it sooner or later.
What robwbright tried to do here is the clever legal tactic known as “I know you are but what am I?”. This is the second time he has unsuccessfully tried to attack my intellectual credibility in defending the legal system against my charges of corruption, while repeatedly engaging in the logical fallacy of appealing to his own experience. Because lawyers are hierarchical credentialists prone to thinking they are more intelligent than everyone else, they are particularly susceptible to the same rhetorical baiting that so easily discombobulates the leftists and the atheists.
No one who is truly intelligent ever appeals to that intelligence because he knows that there is always someone smarter out there, and because he is confident that he can make his logical case based on the relevant facts. I’ve already shown how logic dictates robwbright’s claim that legislative law always trumps interpretive rulings MUST be incorrect, given that a) there is a long and sordid history of interpretive rulings trumping legislative law, and, b) the obvious distinction between “an interpretive ruling based on legislative law” and “an interpretive ruling that the judge pretends to have been based on legislative law”.
Finally, I have two return questions for robwbright. First, are you an Officer of the Court? Second, when you are in the courtroom, is the law what the presiding judge declares it to be?