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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Win Smith who wrote (153186)	12/2/2004 3:51:32 PM
From: TimF	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

Oh dear. This particular line of discussion started with Neocon's summary dismissal of the Pentagon report: Not exactly. There was no summary dismissal of the report. He dismissed the authors of the reports as people who have some special authority or expertise in "Islamic Studies, the Middle East, Foreign Policy, Terrorism...". In other words he dismissed the argument that the report is correct because of the authority of its source. That isn't the same thing as saying the report is not or can not be correct, its just a statement that the report shouldn't be assumed to be correct. He was arguing against what he saw as an implied appeal to authority. You eventually replied - "Many unknown people get presented as "authorities" here by various war cheerleaders. The warblogger phenomenon has its own local cult." That reply implied that there was an appeal to the supposed authority of "warbloggers". I have seen no such appeal. Its possible that neither Sun Tzu (the poster Neo originally replied to) nor Tom Regan (the author of the article that Sun Tzu quoted) was trying to make an appeal to authority, but even if that is true that wouldn't turn Neo's post in to a "summary dismissal of the report". Tim