his article sighting a few of the constant lies and misrepresentations of statistics by Bill O'Reilly, a conservative talk show host in the US is worth a look.  I've never seen the show, but apparently O'Reilly is a more-telegenic Rush Limbaugh, one who is better at toning down the right-wing ravings, which gets him a spot on network television, instead of just AM radio, where Limbaugh has been dismissed to, since his few years of fame back in the early 90's.

O'Reilly seems to practice the typical loudmouth TV commentator style of debate, which is to shout over his strawman opponents and cite inaccurate statistics to back up his pre-existing opinions, while never admitting to any mistakes whatsoever.  He's amusingly-lampooned in a TMW cartoon.

I tend to not agree with conservative PoVs very often, but depending on how they are presented, any opinion can be worth a look or read, to see what another person thinks about an issue.  The problem as I see it is that most holders of extreme opinions tend to lack any objectivity about the events.  So you see articles decrying the Israelis as butchers and oppressors, or you see articles about the savage baby-detonating suicide-bombing Palestinians.  But seldom anything with any balance of PoV.  Some TMW cartoons have done about the best job of it that I've seen, in capsule form.  Here or here.

Another style of argument or debate that's becoming popular on the Internet is to ridicule everything about a a person making an argument you don't agree with.  This certainly isn't anything new, ad hominem attacks have been around as long as there has been politics, and it was frequently much worse in the olden days, at least in the US, the only country I'm qualified to comment about the tenor of public debate in.  Watch any of the excellent history programs on PBS, such as American Experience, and they'll always show political cartoons of the time, about Abe Lincoln, or Ulysses Grant, or even cartoons during WW2, and they are just vicious and unfair.  Drawing public figures as drunks and hideously-ugly skirt chasers, crude caricatures of blacks as animals or savages, etc.  Things that you just don't see today, at least not very often.

Yet another vile criticism tactic, one less vicious but perhaps more effective, is to quote the few parts of an article that you can really stick a fork in, while ignoring the rest of the piece.  I've seen some otherwise good writers do this, and intentionally quote out of context or mis-represent the article they are disemboweling, all the better to make their point.

The generally-excellent Lileks perpetrates prime examples of this technique on a semi-regular basis.  He's intelligent and writes well, and the humor sections on his site are generally hysterical, and his newspaper column is usually pretty amusing also. But politically, he's a bore.  It's not that I always disagree with his rabidly pro-American points, but he usually makes them in the form of repeated cheap shots and out of context comments.  A prime example he posted Monday can be seen here.  He never even links to the article, nor does he quote it more than a line or two at a time of, a debate style designed to give the reader absolutely no way to make up their own mind about things.

The article is here, I hunted it up with the aid of Google. It's a very short report on an event held at the University of Pittsburgh.

...a "Dialogue for Democracy" on April 29. The event, organized by the Pittsburgh-based activist organization Zi, filled the David Lawrence Hall Auditorium with hundreds of supporters.

The main speaker, at least as the article presents things, was Dr. Patch Adams.  Yes, he's a real person, a doctor who is also a clown, and uses humor as part of his practice.  The 1998 Robin Williams movie was based on his life.  I never saw the movie, and have no idea how close to reality it was in any event.

The article is too short.  Admittedly, there's not much more to it than the parts Lileks blows a gasket over, but my first criticism would be of the article itself.  It's far too brief and incomplete for a reader to gain any insight at all into the context of the speaker's remarks.  Not that that stops Lileks from going off, and he makes no mention of the brevity and fragmentary nature of the article that's the source of the quotes he so viciously tears into.

If you read the article, Dr. Adams has some very liberal/anti-war opinions about things, but I'd also assume he spoke for more than 2 or 3 minutes, which is how long it would take to say the few quotes attributed to him in the article. Likely he talked for 30 or 45 or 60 minutes, and the student journalist who slapped together the article didn't take a lot of notes, or had to compress them greatly to fit into the allowed space in the newspaper, and therefore only posted the most controversial statements, omitting all of the supporting comments and context.

“I am literally comparing Bush and his cronies to Hitler,” Adams said, “only Hitler had a smaller vision.”

That's obviously an outrageous comment, but again, without the context he said it in, it's essential pointless.  Obviously it's out of context; it's the very definition of "out of context", presented in this fashion.  Which doesn't mean you can't disagree or agree or whatever with it, but given that he made the comment in a presentation in America, in front of a large audience, and there was zero controversy about it or disagreement at the scene, it seems safe to say that he had some reasonably-convincing supporting comments and evidence, eh?  Just because none of it is presented in the flawed article doesn't mean there wasn't any.

Lileks' rant about the article it spends at least half the page going on and on about how stupid it is for a doctor to be a clown or do anything funny.  How stupid is it for a humor columnist to weigh his semi-informed opinion in on how a famous doctor practices?

The rest of Lileks' rant quotes a line or two from the article, after which he makes outrageous and insulting joking comments, in his effort to disagree with each and every word Adams is quoted as saying.  The article about the conference has a few other choice remarks by other speakers at the conference, including a concluding note that the audience was in complete agreement with the speakers.  Which indicates to me that there was probably some reasonable stuff said, and that it had some explanation and context that's missing from the article.  Not that Lileks makes any comment or speculation about that.  No, he obsesses over the remarks that disagree with his world view of America the Great, and by making snide remarks and absurd comparative remarks, he attempts to dismiss entirely all opinions that differ from his own.

Adams complains about the way capitalism rewards socially-valueless talents like basketball but doesn't pay teachers well.  Does anyone disagree with this?  How about actors getting $20m to stand around and read words other people wrote? In a perfect world vapid actors would make enough to live on for their mindless contributions to entertainment, while teachers, who can inspire and educate the future, would be paid very well for their valuable work. Lileks, rather than granting that perhaps the way capitalism rewards certain jobs and not others isn't exactly leading to a perfect world, makes more snarky remarks about clowns.

My point here is not that Patch Adams has any brilliant political theories.  In fact he seems pretty wacky and to be making comments intended to shock and surprise, or at least those are the ones he's quoted on.  Which is more or less the exact same thing that Lileks' critique of the article does.

My point? That arguing against Adams' quotes the way Lileks does undermines Lileks' PoV, by making him seem as extreme and inflexible as he'd like us to think Adams and the other speakers quoted in the article are.

It's much easier to quote parts of an article you disagree with and make smart remarks about them than it is to actually discuss it with any level of intelligence, and admit that perhaps the person you are trying to dismember has a point here or there.  Lileks does this in most every one of his aptly-named screeds, and while often I'm in at least partial agreement with his rebuttals, the way he presents them, so carefully-structured to avoid any possible ambiguity or "think for yourself" elements, and his rampant dogmatism, tends to invalidate any valid points he might make in the process.

I suspect (fear) that this isn't true for the majority though, and that most people would prefer to just have someone tell them how to think about something, and to regard the world in black and white, without interjecting any troubling ambiguities or details into the equations.