Someone actually wrote this: Presenting the latest manufactured outrage

In Stand Up, which is apparently a competitor to Everyday Feminism, Steph Farnsworth writes about the word "sapiosexual," which means "a person who finds intelligence sexually attractive or arousing." While I find the word annoying, it seems to unhinge Farnsworth:

Labels are good. Forget all of the dismissive things you’ve earned [sic] about them; labels help give people power. The widening names that we have for different identities can make people feel empowered by finally having words to describe themselves. Labels never go too far, except, perhaps, in one case. Sapiosexual is possibly the worst term ever created.

This is the one and only bad label. It's so bad, in fact, that it's the worst term ever created, certainly worse than all of the bigoted slurs that people have used throughout history.

A sapiosexual is someone who finds intelligence sexually attractive. The whole concept is completely ableist.

Any preference for a potential partner is going to be -ist somehow.

Everyone can have types, but to build a label around it suggests an element of exclusivity when sapiosexuals face no oppression.

You don't get to have any self-description that doesn't get you at least a bronze in the Oppression Olympics.

Sapiosexuals don’t need a label. The fact it’s got a sexuality label and therefore is so similar to bisexuality, homosexuality, asexuality, and pansexuality is risking appropriation of the queer community.

Stop telling me when to be offended, especially by something that is unlikely to happen.

Let’s drop the pretentiousness. Sapiosexuality is the worst label that could have been created.

I'll grant that some people who identify as sapiosexual can be insufferably pretentious, but it's still not the worst label that could have been created. By the way, where is the corresponding outrage over people who prefer less intelligent partners?

Someone actually wrote this: Gay people and gun control

In The Advocate, Kevin Hertzog, cofounder of Gays Against Guns, writes,

On Sunday in Las Vegas, someone with a stockpile of guns and ammunition set out to inflict the maximum amount of damage on the greatest number of people. His motive is much less important than is the fact that there were very few roadblocks in his way. The gun laws in Nevada are among the most lax in our country. We should not be surprised that this happens so often. We should be surprised that it doesn’t happen more often.

Yes, we should be surprised whenever reality departs from the narrative. As for the laxity of Nevada's gun laws, has Mr. Hertzog seen this?

There’s virtually nothing stopping anyone from doing the exact same thing.

Yet most people don't. It's almost as though there were something stopping most people from doing the exact same thing; what could that be?

Gay people are uniquely qualified to attack government inaction, apathy, and complicity because we’ve seen it before and we know the price of silence.

Hey, you big, bad government, we're going to stand up to you by demanding that you take away more of our freedoms. It's not as though gay people had anything to fear from increased government power.

Massacres like the one that just happened get the most media attention, but they are not, in fact, the way that most victims of gun violence die. Suicide is responsible for almost two-thirds of gun deaths.

Bait and switch much? Suicide (what you do to yourself) and mass murder (what you do to lots of other people) are morally different.

We urge you to “come out” as a gun violence prevention advocate. We’ve been bullied into polite silence by the NRA and its trolls for far too long. Many people feel intimidated to argue with those who vehemently advocate for the Second Amendment.

In which alternate universe are LGBT people shy about supporting gun control? Also, how dare anyone advocate for a Constitutional right!

Someone actually wrote this: We need to nationalise Google, Facebook and Amazon.

In The Guardian, Nick Srnicek writes,

Ello’s rapid rise and fall is symptomatic of our contemporary digital world and the monopoly-style power accruing to the 21st century’s new “platform” companies, such as Facebook, Google and Amazon. Their business model lets them siphon off revenues and data at an incredible pace, and consolidate themselves as the new masters of the economy.

That's pretty much what people said about AOL, which has not been called a master of the economy in a while.

Monday brought another giant leap as Amazon raised the prospect of an international grocery price war by slashing prices on its first day in charge of the organic retailer Whole Foods.

No, please, anything but cheaper groceries! The horror! The horror!

None of them focuses on making things in the way that traditional companies once did. Instead, Facebook connects users, advertisers, and developers; Uber, riders and drivers; Amazon, buyers and sellers.

I'm not sure that the author quite gets how Amazon works.

Reaching a critical mass of users is what makes these businesses successful: the more users, the more useful to users – and the more entrenched – they become. Ello’s rapid downfall occurred because it never reached the critical mass of users required to prompt an exodus from Facebook – whose dominance means that even if you’re frustrated by its advertising and tracking of your data, it’s still likely to be your first choice because that’s where everyone is, and that’s the point of a social network.

And that's why we all still use Myspace.

Facebook is a master at using all sorts of behavioural techniques to foster addictions to its service: how many of us scroll absentmindedly through Facebook, barely aware of it?

I don't know; how many people do that?

What’s the answer? We’ve only begun to grasp the problem, but in the past, natural monopolies like utilities and railways that enjoy huge economies of scale and serve the common good have been prime candidates for public ownership. The solution to our newfangled monopoly problem lies in this sort of age-old fix, updated for our digital age.

Yes, let's have government take over such important facilities of information distribution. Given the importance of U.S. companies to this sector of the economy, "government" to a significant extent means the Trump administration. What could possibly go wrong?

It would mean taking back control over the internet and our digital infrastructure, instead of allowing them to be run in the pursuit of profit and power.

Nothing says, "We're not doing this in the pursuit of power" like a government takeover.

Someone actually wrote this: Is Pride Still for Queer People like Me?

In today's New York Times, Krista Burton writes,

Pride was a party, a huge gay party, and I had never been so excited to be invited, or felt so instantly welcome, anywhere.

That’s where Pride succeeds. It gets more inclusive and welcoming every year, and as the queers become less threatening, more straight people come, and more minds are opened to the possibility that we gays might just be regular people, after all. (Albeit with better decorating sense and the sass to pull off chaps that leave little to the imagination.)

Apart from the fact that Ms. Burton parrots outdated stereotypes of gay men, what's the problem?

Having allies is wonderful, but sometimes I wish they could be allies every other day of the year, and let us have a party as gay and naked and radical and un-family-friendly as we queers might like.

Given what she just said, she seems to want to argue with success.

Pride is clearly also for corporations who want to milk as much money as possible from a previously ignored demographic. In the past decade or so, companies have scrambled to prove how O.K. they are with L.G.B.T.Q.I.A.+ folks, and well, it’s embarrassing how transparent the scramble for our money is.

Quite unlike those politicians who "evolve" on our issues when politically expedient. Many people want the former to prove their ideological purity, while the latter get participation trophies.

We see you, Miller Lite, with your oddly wholesome, rainbow-spattered ads. Where were you before it was in your best financial interest to be accepting of queers?

Where were any of these companies when a single corporation standing up for queer rights would have stood out like a lit “Golden Girls” prayer candle in an endless night of straight missionary sex?

Where was Ms. Burton when many businesses were leading indicators of our progress even as politicians were so often lagging indicators? Where was she when businesses went to bat for us against homophobic or transphobic state legislatures? And what is it with those stereotypes of gay men that so fascinate her?

I hate that white, gay, cis men are the only kind of gays with real activist funding behind them.

And I hate that up is down and that the sun rises in the west.

Someone actually wrote this: The Federalist on pornography

In The Federalist, Dustin Murphy writes a screed against pornography that is larded with the usual proofs by assertion. A few passages stand out, though.

According to Murphy, the antisocial effects of pornography include the following:

One of the greatest tragedies of porn’s antisocial effects is that it fuels an anti-child culture. Thinking sex should be open to procreation, or that the two go hand-in-hand, is regarded like VHS tapes: out of style. Some people consider parents with three or more children to be crazy, and children are generally viewed as a burden. Anyone with a large family has probably experienced negative comments in grocery stores or coffee shops.

In addition to the false dichotomy, the cause of the anti-child culture, if such a thing exists, is pornography because Murphy says so.

As for whether one person's use of pornography harms others, Murphy argues,

Recording sex devoid of love violates a couple’s right to share authentic human love and to experience the whole person, not just private parts, during sex.

No, it doesn't. People are still free to do just that. Murphy's argument is just a short stroll from "Freedom is slavery."

He continues that

laws ought to promote the common good, which is to perfect the community.

In addition to being exactly the sort of collectivist reasoning that conservatives at least used to oppose when liberals used it, that argument presupposes that perfecting the community is possible. It is odd that someone who elsewhere expresses a belief in God argues that secular government can perfect the community. Besides, I am not sure that I should want to live in Murphy's perfect community.

Peter Thiel is no true gay Scotsman.

A while back, I wrote about the no-true-Scotsman fallacy and its use to argue away dissent in the LGBT community:

Orthodox queer people also use [the fallacy] to dismiss any viewpoint diversity within the LGBT ranks. People have answered my disagreement with the party line by saying, "Yeah, but you're not really gay."

Now, in The Advocate, Jim Downs writes,

Peter Thiel, the Silicon Valley billionaire who made news this summer for endorsing Donald Trump at the Republican convention, is a man who has sex with other men. But is he gay?

* * *

By the logic of gay liberation, Thiel is an example of a man who has sex with other men, but not a gay man. Because he does not embrace the struggle of people to embrace their distinctive identity.

* * *

The gay liberation movement has left us a powerful legacy, and protecting that legacy requires understanding the meaning of the term "gay" and not using it simply as a synonym for same-sex desire and intimacy.

Regardless of one's views on Thiel's politics, it remains that case that last paragraph, Downs effectively admits to pulling a no-true-Scotsman on Thiel. The good news is that even on a site like The Advocate, the commentariat is overwhelmingly calling shenanigans on Downs's reasoning.

The self-loathing card

Many lazy thinkers love thought-terminating clichés, and lazy thinkers who are gay men often play the self-loathing card. When someone departs from the orthodoxy, and you either cannot refute his argument or just don't feel like doing so, simply accuse him of being a self-loathing LCR. Problem solved.

Tellingly, I never hear the people who play the self-loathing card play it against something to which the evidence suggests that it might apply, namely, the incessant gay male self-flagellation in the LGBT media and LGBT organizations. It is de rigueur in those settings to blame everything on gay men, whether or not the problem being discussed is specific to gay men. Thus, the self-loathing card has to do with wrong-thinker-shaming rather than with situations in which actual self-loathing might apply.

The latest thing to blame on gay men

This article on hookup culture in The Washington Post attributes today's hookup culture to demographics and states that

gender ratios within the LGBT community do affect different-sex dating, oddly enough. According to Gary Gates, a UCLA researcher and a leading expert on LGBT demographics, cities known for being LGBT-friendly (New York, Washington, Miami, etc.) have disproportionate numbers of gay men, but not of lesbians. Consequently, the different-sex dating markets in these cities are worse for women than the overall census numbers imply. DATE-ONOMICS illustrates that Manhattan’s hetero, college-grad, under-30 dating pool has three women for every two men — which, like it or not, is exactly the sort of sexual playground for men portrayed by Vanity Fair.

The argument for causation implicitly presupposes something not in evidence, namely, that the male dating pool is some sort of zero-sum game in which gay men displace straight men.

Someone actually said this: Pure reason as a construction

In case you've wondered what deep thoughts are pondered in humanities departments, as reported by that ne plus ultra of journalistic excellence, The New York Times, I have exciting news for you. The newspaper of record has interviewed John D. Caputo, the Thomas J. Watson professor of religion emeritus at Syracuse University and David R. Cook professor of philosophy emeritus at Villanova University, who shares the following insights:

Postmodern theory tries to interrupt that expression [of referring to "we" with no analysis of who "we" are] at every stop, to put every word in scare quotes, to put our own presuppositions into question, to make us worry about the murderousness of “we,” and so to get in the habit of asking, “we, who?” I think that what modern philosophers call “pure” reason — the Cartesian ego cogito and Kant’s transcendental consciousness — is a white male Euro-Christian construction.

Someone's still appealing to postmodernism? Greetings, time traveler from the nineties. Also, are we sure that it's "pure" reason, not postmodernism, that's "a white male Euro-Christian construction"?

So what is the professor's proof that "pure" reason is a white male Euro-Christian construction?

White is not “neutral.” “Pure” reason is lily white, as if white is not a color or is closest to the purity of the sun, and everything else is “colored.” Purification is a name for terror and deportation, and “white” is a thick, dense, potent cultural signifier that is closely linked to rationalism and colonialism. What is not white is not rational. So white is philosophically relevant and needs to be philosophically critiqued — it affects what we mean by “reason” — and “we” white philosophers cannot ignore it.

What's that thing called again when you postulate what you're trying to prove? It has "reasoning" in its name, but it's not the good kind of reasoning. Also, I suppose that wanting pure anything is now the moral equivalent of ethnic cleansing.

Then there is this:

The trigger-happy practices of the police, not all police, but too many police, on the streets of black America should alert everyone to how profoundly adrift American democracy has become — attacking the poor as freeloaders and criminals, a distorted and grotesque ideological exaggeration of freedom over equality.

Nothing says "ideological exaggeration of freedom" like trigger-happy police.

Someone actually wrote this: Unbiased samples, how do they work?

This article about chubby chasers provides a perfect example of how not to research one's topic, although I suppose that the author is ahead of the game by actually researching, when so many others in the LGBT media are content simply to speculate. He describes his data set and the conclusion that he draws:

I have to admit, it’s rare to find a gay guy who happens to be a Chubby Chaser. But trust me when I say they exist. During my research, I perused Craigslist, Grindr and other social apps, and believe me, Chubby Chasers are alive and well, but what saddens me most about the whole thing is that they feel a need to hide. They’d rather have casual sex so they can satisfy a part of their fantasy, while ridding themselves an opportunity to start a relationship (which is what they really want) out of fear of being judged.

So he "perused Craigslist, Grindr and other social apps," and the guys he finds would "rather have casual sex"? Gosh oh golly, I wonder what those two things could possibly have to do with each other.

See also:

What are gay men up to? How not to find out

What are gay men up to? How not to find out (2)

Someone actually wrote this: Big Tobacco and Big Marijuana

In response to the movement to legalize marijuana, Dr. Samuel Wilkinson writes,

We should not overlook ... valuable lessons from our experience with another legal drug: tobacco.

[parade of horribles about tobacco]

The formula for success in profiting from a legal drug is simple and has been clearly outlined by Big Tobacco: Identify a product with addictive potential, aggressively market it to as large an audience as possible, develop technical innovations to allow for and promote increased consumption, and deny or minimize potential costs to human health. The marijuana industry is poised to copy this formula, with dire consequences.

He offers the following solution:

If we are intent on legalizing marijuana for recreational use, lessons from the tobacco industry and the Dutch marijuana experiment suggest that we do so in a way that does not pit corporate incentives against the interests of public health. Similar to efforts in Uruguay, production and distribution should be done solely by the government so as to ensure that there is no corporate incentive to entice more people to consume marijuana in larger quantities.

In doing so, Dr. Wilkinson commits the nirvana fallacy by comparing the private sector in practice to government as it works only on paper. Anyone who thinks that corporations have incentives to do undesirable things, but that government does not, has to assume away not only the examples of state ABC stores, state lotteries, and state dependence on tobacco revenue, but also just about all of human history. As an aside, people have accused me of attacking a straw man for mocking exactly the argument that Dr. Wilkinson actually makes.

Dr. Wilkinson closes:

While the health effects of marijuana are generally not as severe as those of cigarette smoking, the consequences — including addiction, psychosis and impaired cognitive abilities — are nonetheless real. Notably, these effects are most pronounced in children and adolescents. Claims that marijuana legalization will make it easier to prevent use by minors are not backed by scientific or historical evidence. The most prevalent drugs consumed by teenagers are those that are legal: alcohol and tobacco. This should give us pause to consider the optimal way to legalize marijuana — and indeed whether other states should consider legalization at all.

The concern over "whether other states should consider legalization at all" is the perfect-solution fallacy, as the author's own example of teenage consumption of alcohol and tobacco shows.

Someone actually said this (twofer): Gay libertarian gun nuts

Under the completely objective and not at all inflammatory headline "Meet the Gay Libertarian Gun Nuts," Cecilia D'Anastasio writes,

If you find the “gay libertarian gun enthusiast” identity perplexing, you’re not alone.

Gosh oh golly, yes, that is perplexing. What could individual liberty have to do with itself? The author then gives Shelby Chestnut of the Anti-Violence Project the last word:

"We need to look at the systemic inequalities that are causing people to be victims of violence,” she said. “The solution to that is definitely not creating violence to end violence."

Ms. Chestnut is welcome to ride her "systemic inequalities" unicorn, but some of us think that in the real world, intervening in violence to prevent violence from coming to fruition is enough of a solution.

Someone actually wrote this: China, Mexico, and the soda tax

In The New York Times, Mark Bittman writes,

Say what you will about the Chinese, but they know how to make wholesale changes, and sometimes those changes are inarguably for the good. As noted in an editorial in The Lancet last week, the life span of the average person in China in 1950 was 40 years; by 2011 it was around 76. (The average life span in the United States in 2011 was 79.)

The causes of this near doubling of life span are no secret: China has developed public health programs that have reduced communicable diseases to a manageable level.

Yes, that must be it, since nothing else whatsoever has changed in China in that time period. By the way, his own source does not support his claim of causation. Also, another Lancet article paints a more complicated and less fawning picture of public health in China and includes the minor detail that "Mao killed many more people than his medicine saved."

Having given airtight proof of the success of Chinese public health, Bittman shifts to Mexico and draws the following lesson:

With a staggering 70 percent of our adult population overweight or obese, the United States was until recently the world’s leader in this unenviable race. Recently, Mexico (71.3 percent), took our place. (In China, the combined obesity-overweight rate is hovering at under 30 percent, still frightening.) Yet Mexico, which many Americans and Europeans haughtily consider primitive, was the first major nation in the world to institute significant soda and junk food taxes. That law went into effect early this year, and the results are already positive: Sales of soda are slipping.

I need a decoder ring to determine when tax disincentives work and when they are just a right-wing myth.

If we know how to diminish needless human suffering and mortality, why would we not? As Mexico has shown, it’s the responsibility of government to protect its population from hyper-processed food.

When government intervenes in people's choices over their own bodies, especially "to diminish needless human suffering and mortality," what can possibly go wrong?

In which a Washington Post writer states her conclusion and immediately demolishes it

Washington Post local reporter Julie Zauzmer presents her analysis of data on D.C. traffic accidents, including the following insight:

5. The numbers are in: Men are worse drivers than women.

This goes way beyond refusing to stop for directions. Men were the drivers in about 65 percent of all crashes in the study. There’s no way to tell, for the sake of comparison, exactly how many men and women are on the roads in Washington.

That is, she states her conclusion and then immediately explains why the data do not support it. Her conclusion would make sense if men and women drove the same amount — something that no one admits to believing. She is entitled to her own opinions about the relative driving skills of the sexes, but not to her own rules of statistics.

Someone actually wrote this: Julie Bindel on the Proud Whopper

Julie Bindel, ever eager to enlighten the rest of us on the one correct way to live, rails against business marketing to the LGBT market:

As lesbians and gay men all over the world fight to end oppression, corporations have been piggy backing on our struggles to sell us whatever they can dress up as "gay-friendly". The latest to offer us commercialism masquerading as campaigning is Burger King. It recently introduced the Proud Whopper, just in time for the San Francisco Pride march and festival, with rainbow-coloured wrapper and the inscription: "We are all the same inside".

Companies want to do business with us, and that's terrible.

The gay community used to be defined by politics,

I thought it used to be defined by something else — exactly what something else, I'm not quite sure, but there must be something.

but lesbians and gay men no longer share a political base – only, in some quarters, a social one.

In other words, the big problem with the LGBT community is that it has too little political groupthink.

This deradicalised version of gay life revolves around marriage, babies and mortgages. Many gays have kidded themselves that bigger and richer sponsors for our Pride events and charities means acceptance rather than acquiescence; that it is a sign we are reaching full equality.

You're only kidding yourself if you think that you get to have an opinion on what equality means to you. Only the anointed, like Julie Bindel, have that privilege, and they get to tell you what you should want.

But how can we be liberated when there are still daily attacks on gay people, and when the school playground remains, in many ways, hostile to gay pupils?

If we can't have everything we want, right this second, then nothing is worth pursuing at all.

When I came out in 1977, the GLF had fizzled out, but the gay men and lesbians I met celebrated the counter-culture over the status quo. Many of us lived collectively, raising children as a community or friendship group, rather than in traditional couples. We critiqued monogamy and the privileging of the nuclear family. We have now swapped laughing at marriage for lauding it.

Now? Did the last three decades of political correctness not happen in Ms. Bindel's world?

What would real gay liberation look like? Marriage would be abolished for all in favour of something based on equality and next of kin rights rather than ownership and tax avoidance.

If Ms. Bindel believes in privatizing marriage, I'm all for that, but the general tone of her article suggests that she doesn't.

We have been sold a dream of marriage, babies, and conventionality at a huge cost to our radical potential, and the profits will not go to our freedom and liberation.

Ms. Bindel loves us for our potential.

While lesbians and gay men fork out on marriage, an institution previously eschewed by feminists and anti-capitalists, our brothers and sisters in Russia, India, Uganda and elsewhere are suffering the most grotesque oppression by the state....

That's just it. Not all of us follow what anti-capitalists tell us because some of us know how the story ends.

Today's vocabulary term: appeal to nature

appeal to nature, n. phr. an informal logical fallacy that says that something is good because it is natural or bad because it is unnatural. When I read a letter to the editor saying that nonhuman animals don't do such-and-such, I wonder how often nonhuman animals write letters to the editor.

Someone actually wrote this: Jeremy Rifkin, "The Rise of Anti-Capitalism"

I've previously noted the weirdly popular view that because we are approaching a post-scarcity economy, we should determine our political and economic beliefs accordingly. Now, in this column in The New York Times, Jeremy Rifkin attempts to prove that we are approaching what he calls "a zero-marginal-cost economy." Let's look at some of his examples:

The first inkling of the paradox came in 1999 when Napster, the music service, developed a network enabling millions of people to share music without paying the producers and artists, wreaking havoc on the music industry.

* * *

This phenomenon has even penetrated the manufacturing sector. Thousands of hobbyists are already making their own products using 3-D printers, open-source software and recycled plastic as feedstock, at near zero marginal cost.

So how is this going to work in the rest of the economy? Will we be able to 3D-print everything from cars to electronics in our own homes, or will we just download new ones, as with Napster?

Lest you think that Mr. Rifkin is alone in thinking such things, he informs us, "Industry watchers acknowledge the creeping reality of a zero-marginal-cost economy...." He never identifies those industry watchers, though. As far as he lets on, they could be roadside psychics, and why would I not be surprised?

How dare you notice that what happened happened!

Sometimes, when discussing a subject that someone takes as faith-based — typically religion or either left-wing or right-wing political correctness — I bring up an inconvenient fact that contradicts that person's views. If the offended party cannot show that I am wrong or even that I have cherry-picked the facts, that person may instead shout me down for having had the temerity to point it out. Apparently, I am sometimes not even allowed to point out that a person has said or done the very thing for which that person expects humanity's gratitude. I've seen it happen with a Team-Red-bot on a gaffe by George H. W. Bush, with a radfem on transphobia, and with believers in various religions on many topics.

Richard Cohen continues the straw-man apocalypse.

In a column about Chris Christie and the Tea Party, Richard Cohen wrote,

Today’s GOP is not racist, as Harry Belafonte alleged about the tea party, but it is deeply troubled — about the expansion of government, about immigration, about secularism, about the mainstreaming of what used to be the avant-garde. People with conventional views must repress a gag reflex when considering the mayor-elect of New York — a white man married to a black woman and with two biracial children. (Should I mention that Bill de Blasio’s wife, Chirlane McCray, used to be a lesbian?) This family represents the cultural changes that have enveloped parts — but not all — of America. To cultural conservatives, this doesn’t look like their country at all.

(Emphasis added.) While I have done my fair share of criticizing social conservatives, I try not to say anything about them that is either so breathtakingly clueless or so breathtakingly mendacious.

Cohen has backpedaled:

The column is about Tea Party extremism and I was not expressing my views, I was expressing the views of what I think some people in the Tea Party held.

While the backpedaled version clearly differs from what he originally wrote, it is not much better. By expressing the views that he thinks that some people in the Tea Party hold, he serves his readers idle speculation with a side order of nutpicking.

Also, some progressives have misinterpreted the above-quoted passage of Cohen's column as expressing his own views, which it plainly does not, and have thereby changed the meaning by 180°. Some people appear to spend every waking moment looking for things by which to be offended, no matter what the facts are.

La la la, progressives can't hear you.

Progressives of my acquaintance seem convinced that drug prohibition is solely the fault of the private-prison industry and of small-government types. No amount of logic or evidence to the contrary will sway them; even the glaring contradiction inherent in blaming drug prohibition on small-government types escapes them. Once I said to one of them, "If only our elected officials would step in and do something." He not only thought that I was being serious but even expressed agreement with me.

If I didn't know better, I'd almost start to think that progressives refused to blame government for anything except not doing enough. More generally, I'd almost start to think that they deployed invincible ignorance (a/k/a the "La la la, I can't hear you" fallacy) against any logic or evidence that countered their world view. As I've said before, reality is negotiable; dogma isn't.