You might have noticed a shift over the past few years in how I address apologists, propagandists, kooks, and various disinformation scoundrels, toward laying out not just that they are wrong (their facts are bogus; their logic is hosed), but the underlying methodologies they are using that guarantee they’ll be wrong, methods distinctive only to cranks, liars, and trolls, and quite contrary to the methods of legitimate critical thinkers. You’ll find prominent examples of my doing this all across the spectrum of issues, from Debating the Authenticity of Daniel to A Vital Primer on Media Literacy, and many more of late. Even in my evaluations of what professional historians are still doing wrong, from How to Successfully Argue Jesus Existed (or Anything Else in the World) to The Korean “Comfort Women” Dust-Up and the Function of Peer Review in History, and so on.

One category of method I’ve found to be common among the delusional or the dishonest, or the otherwise catastrophically wrong, does not fall neatly into the subject of “logical fallacies” because it is more of a tactic than a logic. The Gish Gallop is probably the most famous example: not really an argument for anything as shuch, it is designed rather to score a technical win (the “appearance” of winning an argument) by bombarding someone with so many bogus claims and fallacious arguments in so short a span that they will never find time to rebut them (or even keep track of them), allowing you to (falsely) claim “they had no answer,” when really, you are just “abusing clock,” since it takes twice as much time to explain why a claim is mistaken than to merely make the claim. (See my article Tips for Debate: How to Be More Effective Engaging with Demagogues & Dogmatists.)

I have written on another prominent example of this category of “argument,” the Motte & Bailey, whereby a certain strategy of rhetoric, again more a behavior than an argument, is employed to avoid having to actually state or defend one’s reasoning, yet with the intention of hoping for the same effect as having done so (see Disarming the Motte and Bailey in Cultural Discourse). It isn’t itself a fallacy, so much as a trick to create the feeling that an argument has been made or won, that never has. Which feeling may satisfy the delusional ranter using this tactic (thus escaping the pressing pain of cognitive dissonance), or fool uncritical audiences.

The Motte & Bailey tactic is a subcategory of what’s often called a Whack-a-Mole strategy. The general Whack-a-Mole tactic is when losing argument after argument, you keep switching to different arguments, until everyone forgets which ones were already refuted, then you circle back to those, and when refuted again, you retreat once again to the other arguments, over and over again, in an endless cycle, so that it “seems” like you still have unrefuted arguments, even when in fact all your arguments have been refuted. This strategy relies on people’s (or your own) short memories to create the impression that an effective argument has been made, when none actually has. The specific implementation of this strategy called the Motte & Bailey uses the more particular device of making an absurd claim, then when it becomes clear that can’t survive the withering weight of criticism, you retreat to a more defensible “softer” version of the claim, and pretend that’s what you had been arguing all along, until your critics go away; then you jump right back to the absurd argument, as if you’d been defending it all along.

For example, someone might start with “the Chinese government engineered the latest coronavirus to destabilize the American economy,” and when the absurdity of that claim is collapsing under the weight of evidence and logic, they might retreat to, “well, all I was really saying was that a Chinese lab that was studying a natural coronavirus might have accidentally released it due to poor compliance with safety protocols,” whereby they’ve retreated to a far more plausible theory, and switched to the subjunctive form of the verb, going from “did” to “might have done.” Then, when their critic acknowledges that’s possible (emphasis on “that” and “possible”), they declare victory…and in two hours time they are back to insisting “the Chinese government engineered the latest coronavirus to destabilize the American economy,” and now claim even their staunchest critics admitted they couldn’t refute them. This isn’t so much a fallacy of logic, as an evasion of logic altogether; it employs a trick to create the false impression that their case has been made. It’s a bamboozle, not an argument. And the tactic is the same, whether they are using it to bamboozle themselves (as when they are delusional) or to bamboozle others (as when they are a liar).

And now, I have accumulated enough evidence to add three more “tricks” to this quiver of strategies, each of which is, similarly, not so much a fallacy of logic as a behavior designed to evade logic altogether, and instead create the appearance or feeling or impression that an argument has been made, when none has. They are designed to avoid ever having to face any refutation of their intended position or effect, while still getting to defend that position or create that effect. And as with the bamboozle of any Mott & Bailey or Whack-a-Mole strategy, in each of these three cases, the exact same tactic is being used whether the one using it is sincere (and merely delusional) or not (and actively seeking to disinform).

Three common types of people you’ll encounter all these strategies from are as the title says: cranks, liars, and trolls. Cranks might also be liars, but often they are just insane, so lost in some crazy delusion that they can never escape it, as their brain has deployed all these and other strategies to immunize themselves from any falsifying evidence or argument. They are, in effect, lying to themselves. By contrast, some cranks, and many other disingenuous operatives, are outright lying to everyone else, and know they are; whether for money, attention, influence, or to recruit people to help them effect some social or political program or objective. A third common category are trolls, people who actually don’t even believe in what they are arguing, but are attempting to create outrage or trip people up either merely for the lulz or to convert the result into usable rhetoric (and as such, are not anyone you can ever engage rationally). For example, to catch someone in the appearance of a contradiction, or making a mistake (often trivial), or reacting emotionally, so they can use that to discredit them (by subsequently taking it out of context). This is like the schoolyard bully who beats you until you punch back and then immediately calls in the proctors and accuses you of assault. The strategy is the same.

JAQing Off

First of the three strategies I’ll be cataloging today is JAQing Off; in other words, “Just Asking Questions.” And no, I didn’t make its moniker up. The idea here is to present evidence or state questions, but not make an explicit argument from them, even though the implicit argument is self-evident, and when the odious or ridiculous nature of the implied argument is called out, to then act offended and insist you were “Just Asking Questions,” and not really advancing that obviously implied argument. The tactic serves two functions at once: it allows an argument to be made that you never have to defend (thus rather than a fallacy of logic, it is a means to avoid logic); and it allows an unsavory or shameful position to be affirmed while providing the means to pretend it wasn’t and thus avoid any moral or epistemic criticism. One can even use this to “turn tables” on a critic and insist they are the one crossing the line by even suggesting they implied what they obviously did, thus distracting everyone, including even the one using this trick, from what really just happened. It thus creates the appearance that one argument has been made (more like a motte: “I didn’t really argue what I just did”), when in fact, secretly, a completely different argument has been made (the actual bailey: whatever ridiculous or odious opinion the user of this tactic wants to spread among their audience).

For a good and timely example of this strategy, see Shaun’s Jimmy Dore’s Anti-Vaccine Lies, where Shaun shows us numerous occasions of motte & bailey rhetoric from popular YouTube dunce/comedian Jimmy Dore, including explicit examples of JAQing off. For instance, in one instance, Dore lets clips of an out-of-context news report run, merely displaying his own facial reactions alongside, and never actually himself asserting anything—all engineered to create the impression that he’s proved some point about the inefficacy of vaccines, while allowing him to simultaneously deny he ever even argued such a thing. He was “Just Asking Questions.”

In that case the rationale was obvious: in order to continue making money off the anti-vaxx market, Dore can’t explicitly violate YouTube’s policy on disinformation, so he has to frame his disinformation campaign with a “behavior” that allows him to deny he’s even doing it. But JAQing Off can serve all manner of purposes, not just that one. Again, it can be a device by which the delusional delude themselves, or a device for demagugues to try and create social and political effects in their audience, which can be direct (e.g. to recruit more fencesitters and rubes to a transphobic point of view, thus increasing the popular reach and power of the transphobe’s own views) or indirect (e.g. to disarm opposition to the tobacco and oil and gun industries, or stoke opposition to any political policies, or the teaching evolution or the history of slavery in schools, or anything at all, by confusing the public into thinking the science or evidence is “controversial” or “isn’t clear” or “remains in dispute”). Many other tactics are used to these ends; but JAQing Off is prominent.

RationalWiki has a good breakdown of this strategy with numerous examples, covering both the strategy itself, and the counter-strategy (also common) of falsely accusing someone of using the strategy, and how to tell the difference (e.g. between a legitimate line of questioning, and a disingenuous one). But an astute and link-worthy discussion is “Questions of Mass Destruction: Just Asking Questions vs. Radical Curiosity” by Fraser Newton at Clio Labs. Newton succinctly puts it like this:

At best, questions without explicit intent leave room for wrong assumptions, miscommunications, and misunderstandings. At worst, questions can be deliberately used as weapons. Just Asking Questions is the use of questions to make wild accusations, influence, manipulate, and sow FUD [i.e. Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt] while avoiding accountability and shifting the burden of proof to others. Questions used this way are sometimes obvious (see Betteridge’s law of headlines: Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no), but they are often more insidious and can be used in organized misinformation campaigns. For example, with questions like: where is Barack Obama’s birth certificate?

I highly recommend reading the whole thing. One takeaway from both RationalWiki and Newton is that JAQing Off depends on two things: the question is actually one that should have been asked, and then the answer competently sought, by the questioner long before ever asking it publicly; and it’s a question whose answer is actually irrelevant, or so well established and readily available to be learned that asking it again is a noticeable waste of everyone’s time. In the first case, questions like “where is Obama’s birth certificate” can easily be answered on one’s own time, and conclusively, such that there can never be a legitimate reason to raise it in public (like, say, on a bulletin board on the internet; or in a political speech; or on a news program). In the seond case, by asking a question that has already been soundly answered, the person asking it is signaling quite clearly that they want you to think the question has no answer, or that the established answer is false (otherwise, why ask the question at all?). The question itself is therefore an implied argument.

Someone using this tactic will exploit the ambiguity between asking oneself a question and then researching the answer (“How do we actually know the Earth is a sphere?”), and asking a question in public so as to influence people and have an audience-mediated effect. The latter is propaganda; it’s rhetoric; it’s a trick. Bullshit, in common parlance. But by pretending that this is no different than sincerely investigating something you don’t know the answer to (which actually would happen before barfing your questions all over the internet or a congressional committee or any other audience), you can accuse anyone calling you out on it of trying to “silence” skepticism and stifle inquiry. But anyone of sense knows that’s a disingenuous charge. Trying to expose the public to your “questions” is a rhetorical behavior, not an investigative one. Real investigation happens prior to and outside the context of blurting ideas to any general audience. So when we see you skipping that step, we’ve caught you at your game.

This point is briefly explained by George Georgovassilis in his article “Just Asking Questions,” reflecting on Sam Harris’s own analysis of the tactic, which focuses on the dishonesty of JAQers concealing the real motivations behind their questions, which means they are essentially outright lying when they claim “all” they are doing is “just” asking questions. As Georgovassilis puts it, when savvy folk catch the trick being pulled and immediately suspect the questioner’s intentions:

The interrogator will then dismiss accusations of hidden motives by pointing out they want to learn the truth [and] further public discourse and that they are assuming a neutral position by “just asking questions”. This is an indirect, albeit not very covert way of influencing opinion: if I asked whether you’d like an apple from a biological farm or whether worms gross you out then I just planted the idea in your mind that biological farming might be infected by pests even though I made no such statement.

This is dirty pool. Anyone deploying this tactic is quite simply lying. They are lying about what their intentions are. They are lying about what their goals are. And they are lying by omission and commission, by implying, by merely asking it, that the question actually hasn’t already been or can’t be answered, and that the answer isn’t already well known (or known to be irrelevant).

It’s even more dishonest when a question is asked in a way that obfuscates what is even being asked. For example, “How can a trans woman be a woman and still have a penis?” isn’t really asking that question; it’s really asking whether gender is defined by sex and whether sex is defined by genitalia. The answer to both questions is, quite scientifically, no. But the important point is that this is easily found out (see Attack of the Lycanthropic Transsexuals!). There can therefore be no legitimate reason to ask this question in public. You should have asked and answered it on your own, well before posing it to any public venue. What you are really doing instead is trying to “argue” that gender is defined by genitalia, by disguising your argument as a question, thereby not having to even present an argument (much less defend one), and certainly not having to engage any effort to listen to anyone and thus learn anything.

JAQing Off isn’t new. Atheists have been eyerolling at the tactic from creationists for decades (and that never ends: see Steve Novella’s “Just Asking Questions—Creation Edition”). It’s a tactic typical of flat-earthers, anti-vaxxers, election conspiracists. It’s easily mocked. Yet it’s dangerously common, because it’s oddly effective. Don’t fall for it. Learn how to discern when it’s happening, and never let them get away with it.

Whataboutism

The second example of this kind of thing is more commonly recognized in disingenuous political discourse, yet you will find it in fact everywhere, from creation-evolution and flat-earth debates to just about any issue or social justice argument on either side of anything. It’s called “Whataboutism.” It uses the same rhetorical trick of JAQing Off to deploy a fallacy of Tu Quoque (“You Do It Too”), but, by adapting the JAQing tactic, it avoids actually making an argument, and thus “technically” avoids the fallacy. It thus becomes another behavior rather than an argument, and thus a rhetorical trick rather than an explicit error of logic. Thus, instead of deploying the explicitly fallacious argument, “You did x too, therefore your criticism of my doing x is invalid or unsound,” you “Just Ask the Question,” i.e. “What about when you did x?” This only implies the fallacy, allowing you to change the subject (thus avoiding the actual pertinent debate) and emotionally manipulate the audience into “feeling” like you have made a valid point and defended your position or behavior.

Wikipedia has a detailed article on the tactic, well supplemented at RationalWiki. Dictionary.com explores the origin of the idea in Russian propaganda during the Cold War (though it also notes the concept was evoked even before that to describe the rhetoric between camps during the Irish Troubles; and now of course, we’ve come full circle with the Trumpist cooption of the original Russian propaganda technique). One example Dictionary.com describes is useful to analyze:

Critics who claim “All Lives Matter” and “Blue Lives Matter” in response to the Black Lives Matter movement are engaging in whataboutism. They deflect attention from the original issue (Black people are almost three times as likely to be killed by police, for example) to another issue without addressing the first. Bringing reverse racism (or the rights of non-marginalized groups) into the conversation is basically whataboutism distracting from the original issue and grievances.

Of course it’s even worse than that, insofar as responding to Black Lives Matter with Blue Lives Matter is in effect saying Black Lives Don’t Matter, by insisting Blue Lives matter more. But the token phrase allows the one who asserts it to pretend they are saying something inoccuous and uncontroversial: that the lives of people in law enforcement matter (i.e. we all care about their welfare and reducing the dangers they face). But that isn’t really what they are saying. It’s what they want to appear to be saying (to their own conscience, and all the other people they are thereby virtue signaling to); and what they want people to think BLM advocates are denying (when they aren’t). And indeed, if they had said that in any other context, it would be what they were really saying. But by saying it specifically in the context of having been presented wth the argument (sloganed as BLM) that police, across the United States, are not treating black lives with the same care as white lives (that they are, in fact, more casually and readily resorting to violence with black suspects, whereas they treat white suspects with remarkable “benefit of a doubt,” on which see Actually, Fryer Proved Systemic Racism in American Policing and Intersectionality: A Guide for the Perplexed). It essentially signals the retort that…police should treat black lives with less care, because black people “are” a danger to police and police “should” get to kill anyone who scares them. But you can’t actually say that. Because that would immediately out you as a racist. Which even your own conscience cannot admit to—unless you are self-admittedly a white supremacist; but most racists aren’t.

Most racists, through cognitive dissonance, don’t believe they are; and they fly Blue Lives Matter flags, a “Let’s Go Brandon” way of saying “Fuck Black People and All Their Complaints.” In truth, Blue Lives Matter flags advertise to everyone your real belief that every black person beaten or murdered by police deserved it—so everyone should shut up about it already. Because (the implied logic goes) “cops’ lives matter, therefore they should get to defend themselves,” which is all straightforwardly true, but misses the point of BLM: that cops are too casually deciding when “they get to defend themselves” when a suspect is black. If they were treating white people that way (and letting black people skate, or treating them with kid gloves), there’d be hell to pay. Which is precisely the problem. Whataboutism is thus a very ingenious rhetorical tactic, designed to derail any argument that makes you uncomfortable, by trying (through some logical legerdemain) to change the subject to something else, something that supposedly can’t be denied. In this case, it’s “But what about the cops who are getting killed?” Which is not relevant to the original complaint. But it does effectively dodge that complaint (while simultanously virtue signaling your “safe” racism).

As described by Mordecai Gordon for the CT Post, “Whataboutism is the practice of responding to an accusation or difficult question by charging one’s accusers with hypocrisy without directly refuting their argument,” which means, in other words, “the practice of whataboutism is an attempt to discredit an opponent’s position without disproving their argument” (emphasis mine). The tactic thus typically signals the absence of any actual rebuttal—you have no argument, so you have to pretend you do. After all, if you had a real argument, you’d have used that instead. In the context of the “BLM vs. BLM” debate, the Blue Lives stance (as well as the related All Lives Matter pose) de facto accuses the Black Lives stance of hypocritically denying the value of other lives (white people and cops, particularly). In this case it’s a patently false charge. But it allows pretending you’ve said something substantive against the Black Lives Matter position.

And not all Whataboutism relies on false accusations of hypocrisy; it can also deploy on true ones. “What about all the reckless spending of the DNC?” is a nifty way to deflect from the argument that the GOP has consistentlty and catastrophically raised the U.S. national debt and outspent revenues more than the DNC in any administration in the last fifty years. Even if this was bad, pointing out that “the DNC does it too” is not a relevant argument against it being bad. That response effectively ignores the entire argument. Of course, here the accusation is still a little disingenuous because the DNC always tries to get revenue to balance, but the GOP always opposes every such effort; and so really, even DNC additions to the debt are the GOP’s fault. Which is intentional: the last thing the GOP wants is to let the DNC claim it balanced the budget (the DNC only got away with that under Clinton; and Bush immediately reversed it). Likewise, the principal argument the GOP always deploys against DNC policies is that they are too expensive—never mind the absurd scale of expenditures the GOP entails on corporate welfare, a bloated military, and pointless—and pretty consistently failed—wars. Things are only “too expensive” when the GOP doesn’t want them. But Whataboutism is a behavioral tactic designed to trigger an emotional rather than a rational response to this, and thus can successfully “change the subject,” rather than actually argue for what they are being criticized for doing.

Hence this tactic works even when its premise isn’t disingenuous. In the context of politicians with rampant histories of sexual harassment, for example, “What about Cuomo?” does not play on any false characterization. Indeed, Cuomo’s abuses in office are demonstrably worse than any like behavior from Trump while he was in office (I suspect Trump was too busy buried under legitimate work and other scandals, too much a deer in headlights playing desperate catch-up on everything, and too much under blinding scrutiny on this very issue, to even contemplate any like shenanigans in office). But “Cuomo did it too” is not even a response to the accusations surrounding Trump’s earlier behavior. You can debate whether and to what extent what Trump’s been accused of is true, or well-evidenced, or even “bad” (arguments often indeed attempted in exactly his case); but “What about Cuomo?” isn’t even engaging a debate at all—least of all as Cuomo didn’t get away with it (so the analogy should be, neither should Trump); but the same point would stand even if he did. Whataboutism is thus a behavioral tactic—a way to avoid making arguments, rather than an explicitly illogical “argument.”

Gordon breaks down three epistemic immoralities common to Whataboutism. The first is that it often relies on not just an implied Tu Quoque fallacy, but as I just noted, also an implied Fallacy of False Equivalence. As when Republicans in the U.S. try to evade criticism for their beliefs and policies regarding election integrity with the logically irrelevant retort, “What about when Democrats contested elections?” The retort is logically irrelevant even if this were a legit comparison. But it’s all the worse that it isn’t even a legitmate comparison. As Gordon notes, “the two situations were very different, since in 2016 there were no Democratic senators who contested the results when Congress met to certify them” (and even the few members of Congress who did, did so in full compliance with the law) and “there was no violent mob that stormed the Capitol to interrupt the counting of the electoral votes after Trump won the election in 2016.” One could extend the point all the way back to 2000, when there was a legitimate case to be made that Bush stole the election from Gore (through a suspect Supreme Court decision actually shutting down a proper recount of votes), and yet even then Gore conceded—thus demonstrating the greater concern for rule of law and peaceful succession of power that the Republicans are now being criticized for abandoning. No one stormed the capitol in 2001. Nor did anyone try subverting the U.S. Constitution in any other way (like suggesting the VP simply “not certify” the vote).

The other two immoralities of Whataboutism are its use to evade taking responsibility for one’s own errors or misdeeds, and its use to openly abandon any role for the truth to play in political discourse. And the same can operate in any other arena of discourse, as well-noted by Neil Carter at Patheos. “What about Hitler?” is a false-premise variant attempt to evade any actual debate over whether atheism is nevertheless true. It’s thus irrelevant that Hitler was actually a theist (indeed, a believing Christian). Hence “What about Stalin?” is still a true-premise variant of the same bogus tactic. On the other hand, “What about women in Iran?” as a response to women complaining about sexist mistreatment and prejudice in America is an example of true-premise Whataboutism; whereas “What about the fact that most Muslims are peaceful?” is not Whataboutism, but a valid point.

As Claire Fallon notes for the Huffington Post, “The problem with whataboutism is that hypocrisy is a durable problem (humans being flawed and inconsistent), but it is not the only problem.” By diverting every discussion into arguiong over who is the bigger hypocrite, we avoid actually acknowledging, much less fixing, any errors or failures or defects of character. Pointing out that conservative Christians are just as guilty of violence and bigotry and criminality in the name of God as conservative Muslims, by contrast, calls attention to Fallon’s point, rather than evading it. Our criticism of Islam should be the same as our criticism of Christianity. This does not entail ignoring Islam as a problem, any more than it entails the same for Christianity. There are plenty of hypocrites in both faiths to criticize. Hence the point to take away here is that hypocrisy is a problem to be discussed on its own; but it is not a valid excuse to avoid discussing the other problems we face. Actual Whataboutism is societally destructive; and fundamentally evasive. So whenever this tactic is deployed…keep pointing that out. Don’t let anyone get away with it.

Infinite Goal Posts

I’ll close with today’s third example of what are more “behavioral” tactics than logical fallacies common among apologists, cranks, liars, propagandists, and trolls: the strategy of Infinite Goal Posts, which is related again to the aforementioned Gish Gallop, but remains sufficiently distinct in practice to discuss on its own. While “moving the goal posts” is a well-recognized fallacy, when the fallacy is endlessly repeated, it becomes a behavior, not an argument. And I’ve run into this countless times, from cranks of all varieties (well-known examples range from Joseph Atwill to the Israel Only crowd): as soon as you have refuted all their best arguments, they advance a dozen more arguments and insist you have to rebut them all; and when you do, they advance two dozen more arguments, and insist you have to rebut all those. The procedure will never end, because that’s the point: they get to claim their position remains unrefuted as long as they can keep inventing new stupid reasons to believe it, or more and more examples that are increasingly weaker than the ones already rebutted, or both.

This is how we end up with lunatic word-walls, hundreds of thousands of words long, escalating from a thousand word tirade, to ten thousand, then thirty…it never ends. Until you call this tactic out for what it is, and shut that shit down. It is actually a distinctive and often identifying characteristic of cranks that they have thousands of pages of arguments to show you, for some conclusion that should really have been adequately provable by means of only a handful (at least to a standard of researching it further). Quantity instead of quality is their methodology. “If I can see a thousand weak examples, I don’t need any good ones,” they think, rather than asking whether any examples hold up enough to even warrant looking for more. Cranks, liars, and demagugues are all equally disinterested in even so much as formulating, much less actually passing, honest falsification conditions (on which see my Advice on Probabilistic Reasoning).

As I wrote in Atwill’s Cranked-up Jesus:

I do not expect a theory to be proven on one case, but I must start with one case, for the same reason psychical researchers do not waste money setting up experiments to test a psychic who has already failed one good test, and yet these same researchers don’t assume the psychic’s powers can be proven by passing that one test. One must pass several tests in sequence, each test justifying the labor and expense of setting up and conducting the next; but as soon as tests start failing, further inquiry is not warranted. So, too, here: I need one good case that is not ambiguous or flawed and that hints at something significant along the lines of your thesis. Once I confirm that one case, then I can look at the next best case, etc. However, if even your best case fails to convince, then I know I need not waste time on any others. [This is] just a requirement of economy.

And here, again:

I do not mean by “good” example an example that alone proves your case. I merely mean an example that is peculiar enough that it generates a reasonable suspicion that you may be on to something. I think your best examples should be even more impressive than that, but if your very best example merely rises to the level of being what I just defined as a “good” example, then start with that. Otherwise, if you lack even a single “good” example, I am afraid to say you can only have [an unproven speculation on your hands—and that’s at best].

A typical crank “never has any defensible examples, rarely knows what he is talking about, gets a lot wrong, makes stuff up, never admits an error, and is generally” a “frustrating delusional fanatic.” Hence one of their signature behaviors is to ignore any request to “keep it one example at a time, concise, clear facts and logic,” with citation and page number to whatever scholarship they are relying on or (supposedly) summarizing. No. They have to bombard you with dozens, even hundreds of “claims.” And when you insist they pick just a few of the best, they “complain” that that’s unfair. But only a crank thinks that’s unfair (just as only a disingenuous rhetorician would “claim” it’s unfair). Honest investigators never think or claim that. That’s how we can tell the difference.

Hence as I said when responding to the Israel Only cranks:

Like all crankery, IO is defended with gigantic, massive word walls of endless, rambling, convoluted claims that would take a lifetime to vet. But all we need, really, is to see if what even they claim are their best moves hold up or fall down as unsustainably erroneous and naive. If it’s the latter, then at that point we know we needn’t waste any time culling the rest. Their attempt to harass us with thousands of claims will fall flat as just more evidence of their crank methodology.

Hence as I concluded there:

I can predict the IO response to all this (and just watch: it will happen in comments below [and yep, it totally did–ed.), because I have dealt with cranks like this for decades. Circular argument, possibiliter fallacies, false facts we can expect for sure. But the standard crank response to being refuted is to throw up a gigantic word wall filled with hundreds or thousands of dubious claims, and then “insist” that if you can’t address and refute every single one of them, you’ve “lost,” and they are right and can go on haughtily pronouncing their crank nonsense. This is hopelessly irrational. The very attempt to respond that way proves they are cranks. We do not have to respond to every single one of their thousands and thousands of bullshit claims. [Once w]e’ve caught them out in enough errors … [we] know anything else they say is simply not worth our time—being, quite probably, outright false, or not capable of proving their thesis even when correct.

Thus, once again, when anyone pulls this strategy on you, call them out on it: honest, competent inquirers don’t pull shit like this; only cranks and liars do. So don’t let them get away with it. Lay down the law: they must pick their top one to three examples or arguments, and make the best case for them, concisely (without any convoluted word-walls or digressions), with properly cited sources. And if these don’t pass critical muster, you can politely tell them to fuck off.

Finally, in “Moving the Goal Posts” Jonathan Maloney at Intelligent Speculation shows how the strategem of Infinite Goal Posts works in both directions, used not merely to argue for a position, but also to reject arguments against a position, by simply refusing to accept any evidence against your position. You can be presented with infinite good examples of your being wrong and still you declare the evidence insufficient. Infinite Goal Posts. It’s a behavior only the hopelessly irrational or dishonest will engage in. And you needn’t waste your time with such people. (And waste it is what you would do; they are immune to any falsification, so you will never change their mind.)

Conclusion

I hope this article will serve as a useful reference when you need to identify or deal with these three behavioral tactics in any argument or debate. Infinite Goal Posts is a sign of pseudoscholarship. Whataboutism is a sign of lacking any honest rebuttal. And JAQing Off only advertises one’s disingenuous—and thus dishonest—approach to engagement. Only honest, sincere people have any business engaging with real scholars or critical thinkers. Everyone else can fuck the hell off. We know your game. And you should be ashamed to have even tried it.

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