Breaking News - President Biden called a reporter a SOB! 😀

This is what we are dealing with folks from the right on this board and off this board.

These Bad Faith Actors have no interest in a real discussion.  They just throw comments or accusations out there and if you should ask specific questions or for facts to back up what they are claiming they get defensive or scurry away.

I know I use to think there could be a real discussion but I’m beginning to think it’s a lost cause because I believe when they post something they aren’t interested in a real discussion.

from the article…

“A Field Guide to Bad Faith Arguments”. link

Once you recognize these weak tactics in your mentions, you can easily outwit them

Credit: JakeOlimb/DigitalVision Vectors/Getty Images

From the article….

“Bad faith arguments are common in politics. And while they’ve always been part of political culture, they’re much more rampant on social media. It’s easy to fall prey to bad faith arguments and waste time engaging someone on points that obscure rather than shed light on how we’re all affected by policy and politics.

So with that in mind, here’s a field guide for spotting and responding to bad faith arguments and staying focused on the real-world issues that matter.
What’s a bad faith argument?

The hallmark of a bad-faith argument is that it disguises the core point of a debate rather than addressing issues, beliefs, and values head-on.

Bad faith arguments aren’t “real” positions; they’re proxy positions people take for rhetorical purposes. In some cases, a bad faith position can be intentional. For instance, Sen. Mitch McConnell made up a “Biden rule” to justify stealing a Supreme Court seat. Instead of arguing about the merits of refusing to hold a vote on President Barack Obama’s justice nominee Merrick Garland, McConnell made a proxy argument about Democrats being hypocrites for complaining about his power grab. And indeed, many Republicans and independents came to believe that the “Biden rule” was real and that McConnell was simply playing hardball politics just like the Democrats.

But most bad faith arguments aren’t from wily, professional politicians like McConnell. They simply come from a place of not wanting to confront the actual arguments someone else is making.

For instance, climate policy advocates point to scientific evidence that burning fossil fuels and increasing the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is causing seas to rise, more wildfires, and disruptions to rainfall patterns on which we rely. They argue these risks are severe enough to warrant dramatically reducing fossil fuel use and switching to clean energy.

But anti-climate-action groups will often say the science is not certain enough to justify action. Climate advocates will respond by citing more and more scientific evidence demonstrating climate risks. But there’s a problem: The advocates are responding to a bad faith argument because anti-climate action groups never say what level of scientific certainty would be necessary to justify climate policy.
Indeed, if you ask them to name the level of certainty they need or the type of evidence that would win them over, they’ll never do it. Although their argument is premised on the idea that more science could justify climate action, they can’t actually define a world where that’s true. Instead, they tend to oppose climate policy for ideological reasons—including an ideological commitment to exploiting fossil fuels—but they choose to fight policy in bad faith on scientific grounds.

Similarly, many anti-climate action groups have evolved from outright climate denial to acknowledging that climate change is real and a problem but say they’re against “climate alarmism” and don’t believe in “catastrophic global warming.” But what do these terms mean? Again, they never say. If I think business as usual means the Earth is going to warm 4 degrees Fahrenheit by the end of the century, am I an alarmist? How about 10 degrees?

Don’t waste time responding to these arguments on their own merits — they have none.

Their actual operating definition is that “catastrophic global warming” is the precise amount needed to justify policy action, and, by definition, we will always fall short of it. An alarmist, meanwhile, is anyone who says we need to act on climate change.

There’s an important distinction between types of bad faith arguments worth making here: Not all anti-climate action advocates are making these arguments intentionally. They’re not consciously thinking, “I’m going to pretend to say one thing but really mean another.” Indeed, many sincerely believe that climate alarmism is terrible and must be combatted even though they have not bothered to form a coherent definition of what the term means.

In this case, these bad faith arguments are often best described as a form of “agnotology,” a term historian Robert Proctor has popularized to describe the cultivation of ignorance. Proctor studied how tobacco companies spread doubt about the link between smoking and cancer. Rather than directly criticizing the science, they spread messages about uncertainty and doubt to cloud policymakers’ judgment. They say maybe something else was causing the cancer… or maybe the scientific links were there but weren’t, uh, direct enough… or maybe people who are more likely to get cancer are actually more likely to smoke.

Agnotology—and the popularization of political ignorance—cuts across a variety of issues, not just scientific ones. Indeed, I’ve come to see it as the most common form of bad faith argument in political debates.

For instance, why are NFL players taking a knee? To protest police violence. They’ve been absolutely clear about this for years. But here’s Fox News telling its millions of viewers that no one knows why they’re protesting.

With that in mind, here are some other types of bad faith arguments we run into every day online and in public policy debates. Don’t waste time responding to these arguments on their own merits — they have none. They exist to distract from core policy issues and the actual effect they have on our lives, our rights, and our planet.”