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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