Critical thinking: A seminar in the comment section of the South Brunswick Post

It is rare that a lucid and well-structured debate happens in the comment section of any online story, let alone one as hard-edged as Keith Rasmussen’s over-the-top attack on Islam.

Mr. Rasmussen, who I have known for years, is a strong writer with a taste for hyperbole and has a talent for using words as figurative daggers.

His column, which we ran last week, was obviously an unacknowledged response to one I had written a week earlier, and it featured many of the attributes I mention above.

But, and this is key to me, it also offered a powerful example of argument gone awry. It was awash in the kind of logical fallacies that I try to teach my students to avoid. I offered a critique of some of the column in a post last week.

What I want to do now is direct readers to the comment section, in which Mr. Rasmussion and someone calling him/herself Zapped go at it. Zapped is pointed and calls Mr. Rasmussen out for his (deliberately?) faulty logic, for the straw men he props up to knock over and the way he elides the difference between the individual and the group so that he can argue that it was Islam that was responsible for 9/11 and not a small band of radical extremists.

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Author: hankkalet

Hank Kalet is a poet and freelance journalist. He is the economic needs reporter for NJ Spotlight, teaches journalism at Rutgers University and writing at Middlesex County College and Brookdale Community College. He writes a semi-monthly column for the Progressive Populist. He is a lifelong fan of the New York Mets and New York Knicks, drinks too much coffee and attends as many Bruce Springsteen concerts as his meager finances will allow. He lives in South Brunswick with his wife Annie.

One thought on “Critical thinking: A seminar in the comment section of the South Brunswick Post”

  1. Hank,I wish you only the best in your new position. I'd wish you Good Luck as well but you won't need it; as you've demonstrated at The Post, the harder one works, the luckier he gets.With the niceties out of the way, you miss the point of my opinion piece if you believe it's an \”over-the-top attack on Islam\”. Rather, it was a calling to account of those – you among them – who label principled criticism of a Ground Zero mosque as bigotry. How about just one example of \”argument gone awry\” or even one \”logical fallacy\”? I weep for your students if you think foisting this kind of uncritical thinking upon them is somehow enlightening. You squander the opportunity to teach in favor of indoctrination.Moreover, my civil responses to ad hominem ankle biting in your paper's \”Comments\” section elicited no facts, no reasoned debate, nothing at all except feelings and opinion from two commenters that my point of view wasn't merely wrong, but evil.That I wear their scorn (and yours, apparently) as a badge of honor is what I've come to expect from those whose minds are so open, their brains have fallen out. I do, however, plead guilty to your charge of \”using words as figurative daggers\”. I only hope that I'm never called upon to wield real ones because I wouldn't hesitate to do so in the face of Islamic extremism. September 11th was up close and VERY personal for me. Never Again, I say.~ Keith Rasmussen

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