{"id":5341,"date":"2017-09-08T11:59:01","date_gmt":"2017-09-08T16:59:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/?p=5341"},"modified":"2017-09-08T11:59:01","modified_gmt":"2017-09-08T16:59:01","slug":"losers-say-what","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/?p=5341","title":{"rendered":"Losers say ‘what?’"},"content":{"rendered":"

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It was a dumb game in junior high — you mutter, “loser says what?” and your buddy says, “What?”, because you muttered it and he couldn’t hear it properly. Then you say, “Ha ha, you’re a loser.”\u00c2\u00a0 A great way to make and keep friends.<\/p>\n

David Harsanyi has a little move like that in politics, and he runs it in his recent article, “Democrats are Increasingly Comfortable with Religious Tests”<\/a> over at NRO.\u00c2\u00a0 Here’s the setup.\u00c2\u00a0 Because a standard liberal line is that religiously-inspired law and jurisprudence is a threat to religious liberty, vetting judges in terms of how significantly their religious commitments influence how they vote is important.\u00c2\u00a0 But this test is not a religious<\/em> test, it’s a zealotry<\/em> test.\u00c2\u00a0 And, again, we keep the religious nutcases from making and deciding law for the sake of religious freedom<\/em> — because religious nutcases make law only for their religion.<\/p>\n

Well, you can see where this is going.\u00c2\u00a0 With Amy Coney Barrett’s nomination for the Federal Appeals Court, Harsanyi takes every question about whether and to what extent her religious views influence her policy decisions to be a religious test,\u00c2\u00a0 not a zealotry test.<\/p>\n

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It is irksome, no doubt, that Barrett\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s faith informs her views. Our backgrounds and beliefs always color our opinions. This is not yet an illegal act. But these lines of questioning, which are becoming increasingly prevalent in political discourse, are an attempt to create the impression that faithful Christians whose beliefs are at odds with newly sanctified cultural mores are incapable of doing their job. They are guilty of another kind of apostasy.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

But the some <\/em>of these colorings that Harsanyi thinks are inevitable are different from the very <\/em>or extreme<\/em> colorings that these lines of questioning are out to determine.\u00c2\u00a0 Once we see it through Haryani’s lens, though, it’s all a form of religious discrimination by the Left.\u00c2\u00a0 His middleschool trap, then, is roughly something along the lines of saying, “Leftist anti-religious bigots say ‘What’s the role of religion in your policy decisions?’… and he waits for them to say it.\u00c2\u00a0 But it’s a confusion of what the purpose of the question is.<\/p>\n

Of course, when there are occasions for clarification of what the purpose of the questions, Harsanyi won’t hear it, because he can’t take anything the folks on the other side says seriously.\u00c2\u00a0 Here’s the height of it, recounting Al Franken’s exchange with Barrett:<\/p>\n

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\u00e2\u20ac\u0153I question your judgment,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d the former star of Stuart Saves His Family<\/em> lectured the mother of seven.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Of course you can’t hear a reasonable thing come out of someone’s mouth if you keep bringing up the dumbest things they’ve ever done.\u00c2\u00a0 Maybe we should go drag up some of Harsanyi’s early essays or attempts at painting or standup comedy or his performance in a sophomore year poetry slam to see how well they hold up…<\/p>\n

To the Fallacy Analysis point, this is a peculiar case.\u00c2\u00a0 I’m inclined to think it’s a special kind of straw man<\/em> — you interpret the questions along some totally uncharitable line, and then you criticize it for being the bad thing you took it to be.\u00c2\u00a0 And you avoid the main line of critical questioning, which is about the proper role religious commitment has in making policy for a society committed to religious liberty.\u00c2\u00a0 Surely a reflective person can see the issue, right?\u00c2\u00a0 But what arises out of this distortion of the point <\/em>of the questions is a further issue, one that seems to make it so that the other side just can’t<\/em> make good or decent points.\u00c2\u00a0 Once you see their track record through such a lens, they can seem to be little more than those who make awful noises and act on the basest of instincts.\u00c2\u00a0 And so, straw man arguments extended over time make for consistent well poisoning.\u00c2\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

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It was a dumb game in junior high — you mutter, “loser says what?” and your buddy says, “What?”, because you muttered it and he couldn’t hear it properly. Then you say, “Ha ha, you’re a loser.”\u00c2\u00a0 A great way to make and keep friends. David Harsanyi has a little move like that in politics, … Continue reading Losers say ‘what?’<\/span> →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[36,10,12],"tags":[346,1964,2221],"class_list":["post-5341","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-circumstantial","category-ignoratio-elenchi","category-straw-man","tag-ad-hominem-circumstantial","tag-straw-man","tag-well-poisoning"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5341","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5341"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5341\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5343,"href":"https:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5341\/revisions\/5343"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5341"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5341"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5341"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}