The SFWA’s Damien Walter has produced a novel excuse for not being able to defend his beliefs in public:
You’re only as intelligent as the cretin you’re arguing with on the
internet. Remember that the next time you’re tempted to debate Vox Day.
@damiengwalter
His excuse makes no sense at all. If one is arguing with a cretin, it is very, very easy to demonstrate that he is a cretin and to point out the flaws in his arguments. And it is even easier for unbiased third parties to not only observe whose arguments are better, but which of the two interlocutors is more intelligent.
This ease of observation, in fact, is why most people, including more than a few who are not terribly well-disposed towards me, readily acknowledge that I am extremely intelligent. Not so much because I can successfully defend my own positions, but because I am usually able to demonstrate that I understand my opponent’s position much better than he does himself. That’s one of the things that has rendered the inflation/deflation debate so interesting in comparison with past debates; both my opponent and I are reasonably well-versed in most of the arguments on both sides.
People like John Scalzi and PZ Myers don’t run away from public debates with me because I am insufficiently intelligent, but because they know, on the basis of their past encounters with me, that I can easily shoot down their arguments while they cannot even scratch mine. Such individuals are intellectually careless and their positions are largely emotion-based, which makes it very easy for any logically-minded individual to detect the flaws in their argument and exploit them.
Remember, it was only last week that I publicly humiliated PZ in his very own field of biology, and moreover, did it in passing. Although I have to admit, that was a surprise to me. As as low as my opinion is of the man, it never occurred to me that anyone with a PhD in biology could possibly fail to recognize that “human” and “homo sapiens sapiens” are not perfect synonyms.
The “crackpot” excuse doesn’t hold up well in the eyes of anyone who has read my blog for more than a week. And, of course, the “platform” excuse rings increasingly hollow because my own platform is already considerably larger than most of my critics. So it’s interesting to see this has resulted in new and increasingly nonsensical excuses being produced by the likes of Walter.
Notice that for all the posturing and shrieking of the crowd that Mike Resnick described as “screamers”, not a single individual, not a single white knight, has dare to even attempt to defend their equalitarian position or substantively address my inequalitarian one. They have a growing panoply of absurd excuses, but the real reason is they don’t because they know they can’t do it successfully.
UPDATE: It’s amusing how the Left is so convinced that their views must be the popular perspective that they retreat to delusional positions rather than admit the obvious: “I think a half decent data analyst could also prove that most of VDs followers are sock-puppets as well.”
He most certainly could not. First, I have no followers, I have readers. Second, none of them are sock-puppets. Unlike numerous lefties, I have no need to sock-puppet because a fair number of people enjoy reading my opinions, and some of them, over time, come to agree with a few of them. But neither my readership nor my wife are fictitious. Just deal with it. Denial only makes one look insane.