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Politics : A US National Health Care System?
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To: Lane3 who wrote (2821)11/12/2007 10:48:32 AM
From: TimF  Read Replies (1) of 42652
 
A motivation to use iffy indicators when nothing else is available in this specific situation, is that liberal stories from the WSJ's news reports are sometimes used to support liberal arguments with "see even the conservative Wall Street Journal says xxxx...".

But then arguing that the WSJ is liberal isn't the only response. Another one is to point out that "see even the conservative Wall Street Journal says xxxx..." isn't really a valid argument. Even if the WSJ's news reports where conservatively biased on the whole it doesn't mean that every story will be biased in that way. That form of argument might be considered a genetic fallacy, and a special form of ad-hominem, sort of a reverse ad-hominem because it isn't saying some argument is wrong because of the faults of the arguer, but rather that it must be right because of the characteristics of the arguer. Its also a sort of appeal to authority, but a bizarre one because the person making it doesn't really respect the source that he's using as an authority in this situation.

This is in some ways a better response, it applies more generally to that form of argument not just to some specific application, and it doesn't caused the conversation to get bogged down in the irrelevant point of whether one source or another is liberal or conservative. OTOH it might not be as effective as a matter of pure rhetoric.
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