I didn’t even know he made one. Sorry.
I did. And you are still full of shit.
Then apparently you don’t know what a tu quoque fallacy is, because I never engaged in one. If you still think I did, please explain exactky how.
This won’t make me popular but whatever. I don’t know if the accusations against Holder are accurate; if they were they wouldn’t be discussed much around here. Let’s pretend they are. If so, then I think Sam makes a valid point: DOJs (and Holder is an example) aren’t as independent as we’d like.
I assume (hope?) that, while this may be true, that Sam would agree that the Trump administration took it to a whole new level. In that light some pushback is warranted. If Sam thinks Barr and Holder are comparible then…no.
With all that, Barr did show some independence. For example, he completely ignored Trump’s demands that he arrest Trump’s opponents. A small thing, perhaps, but it could have been worse.
My point was simply that the judicial branch has never been particularly jndependent. John F. Kennedy appointed his own brother as Attorney General. That is all I was responding to.
My point was then ignored in favor of the usual suspects coming out and sniggering at my ‘tu quoque’, which just made them look silly. You can argue which attorney general was the most biased in favor of the president. I already mentioned John Ashcroft, who the ‘tu quoque’ clowns have seemingly forgotten was a constant source of derision on this board for being a Bush stooge.
Maybe some people in the pit didn’t see the original post I was responding to, because some asshole decided that my comment was just so awful that he had to move the discussion to the pit so I could be abused for saying it, thus causing the context to be lost and a bunch of other people to show their asses who might not have if they had kkown the context. But maybe not.
Let it go, let it gooooo… it’s been days now, of endless “Yeah, but you were mean to me when all I meant was…” I really hope that people who act like that here aren’t stuck in a loop like this in real life.
“Honey, wake up. I want to repeat what I said during that discussion we had back in February.”
The post I quoted in this thread was 100%, undeniably, a tu quoque.
You may have wanted to make the point that the justice department was never independent, but you did not.
You may have wanted to mention John Ashcroft, RFK, or other attorneys general, but you did not.
You said something to the effect of, “Eric Holder did it too.”
It’s as straightforward a tu quoque as there ever was.
The attorney general is part of the executive branch. Same as in Canada. You should get the very basics straight before you start lecturing us.
I suppose it’s a toss-up whether you don’t actually understand what a tu quoque is, or are trying to weasel and misrepresent what you did, but either way you are full of shit.
I don’t see what you’re talking about.
The original comment quite explicitly introduced the comparison.
The idea of the Justice Department “going back” to being independent is a direct assertion that it used to be independent, and now no longer is. The comparison is right there in the statement.
@Sam_Stone then attacked that explicit comparison to how things used to be, by bringing up evidence of the previous administration. I wouldn’t actually call the evidence then cited very good. It would have been better to cite multiple administrations, as he later did.
If the original comment had been: “I hope the Justice Department under the next administration isn’t total subservient shit like it’s been under Trump”, then that’s a different comment, not making any explicit reference to the quality of any previous administration.
I think Sam_Stone’s comment would have been a tu quoque in that case, given my understanding of the term.
But if a comment of “Things used to be better, and I hope they will be again” is answered with “Things did not used to be better”, then I don’t see at all how that is supposed to fit the fallacy. Not remotely. This is true regardless of the quality of the evidence provided about things not having been better.
That’s not what he said. It’s what he’s now claiming that he meant to say, but I took issue with what he actually posted, and what he actually posted is a very straightforward, cut and dried, tu quoque.
If the original statement had made explicit reference to the Obama administration being when things were “better,” sure. But the post didn’t set a time frame for when things were “better.” Sam Stone could have replied “Things were never better, every president does this,” but instead he specifically brought up Holder and Obama. That’s not arguing, “Everyone does it,” that’s arguing “Your guy does it, so it’s okay if my guy does it.”
That he later backpedaled by bringing up a wider range of examples doesn’t stop that first response from being a logical fallacy.
Thank you.
I brought up the example of Holder because he was the AG before Trump. I later added some Republicans and other Democrats to clarify the point and make it non-partisan. But even if I hadn’t, the single example of Holder still addresses the claim that previous AGs were independent. At no point did this ever come close to a tu quoque, because I was directly responding to a claim with an example that refutes it.
Now, you could have taken issue with whether Holder really was independent, or asked for a better example, or tried to identify which AGs in the past acted with the least bias and used that to attempt to show that my example was wrong or cherry-picked and not representative of the norm, which we could then have debated.
But the tu quoque complaint was just wrong.
False.
Obviously so.
Try harder chicken fucker.
Of course you can show where I ever said that this behavior was okay, right? If not, you can retract that baseless claim. And bringing up a specific, recent example of the same AG behaviour pre-Trump is directly on point. You may not like it or believe it, and that’s a debate we could have, but it would appear that it’s more fun to just accuse me of all kinds of character and intellectual flaws whenever the thinnest justification pops up or can be manufactured.
Clarifying is not ‘backpedalling’. I never withdrew my point about Holder, or attempted to change the argument. I simply added more examples to strengthen the point and to clarify that it wasn’t partisan.
Let’s shorten up what happened. A poster claimed that before Trump it was the norm that the Judiciary was independent. I replied essentially, “Oh yeah? How about Eric Holder? He’s an example of the same thing.” I then followed up with further examples from the right and left.
And you think that’s a logical fallacy? Can I have some of what you are smoking?
Really, this is debate 101. You guys keep flinging yourselves at the wall, and I’ll be over here looking on with bemusement.
You know, I may have been too hard on you, thinking that the only way someone could misunderstand this is if they are being intentionally obtuse.
But now I realize you may just not have the intellectual capacity to understand the difference. I will make allowances for that in the future.
I think it’s adorable that you believe this would get under my skin. I showed your response to the Stone family, and we all got a good laugh out of it.
The last time I received such a devastating response was, I believe in grade 4 when Joey Kittering called me ‘a stupid smartypants’. But then he had an excuse - he was in grade four.
Only someone religiously wedded to the insistence that Democrats are always just as bad as Republicans, no matter what Republicans do, could possibly think that Holder’s DoJ is in any way comparable to Barr’s in terms of independence. Holder never tried to put the DoJ in charge of defending Obama in a rape lawsuit, just for one of many egregious examples.
Congrats to iiandyiii for being the first one to understand what an actual on-point response to my assertion looks like.
In response to that, I’ll just say that if you don’t like the Holder comparison, how about John Ashcroft?
Remember, my point wasn’t to blame Democrats, but to refute the assertion that the norm for the justice department and the AG is for them to be impartial and unbiased. I don’t think Holder was, but we also have John Ashcroft, Bill Barr the first time around with Bush, Ed Meese came under fire from Democrats, as did Alberto Gonzalez. Of course, I already mentioned John Kennedy appointing his own brother as attorney general.
Would anyone like to defend the assertion that it was the norm for the Justice Department and AG to be apolitical or unbiased before Trump? Because that’s the actual assertion I was reponding to.
No it was not. It was such a classic example of a tu quoque, I may present it to my class as an example.
Haha.
Don’t flatter yourself. I post to amuse myself. I don’t care about your feelings . At all.