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Comment by wisty | Hacker News Reader

> His proposed solution is to get John, a man who has publicly stated that he speaks in bad faith, together with the people he attacked for a “conversation”.

I feel like "bad faith" is now a thought-terminating cliche. As long as people can suggest someone is acting in "bad faith" (maybe doing a "Gish Gallop", a "false equivalence" or even just "motivated reasoning") then they can instantly ignore everything they've said.

The purpose of logical fallacies (as a topic to learn about) isn't so we can just shout out "FALLACY" whenever we think we see one, it's so it's easier to find a tool to refute them (if they are indeed fallacies).

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thought-terminating_clich%C3%A...

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I would agree with you in theory, but in this case it does not seems to hold. Not knowing anything about the people involved I got looking around on the twitter discussions mentioned to form my own opinion.

Here I found the following message from John S. :

I've said a lot of "odd" things on Twitter recently.

Why? Because this, my friends, is how you deal with SJWs. You troll the hell out of them and they have no weapon they can use against you.

Stop fighting them with logic. Just say inflammatory, illogical things to them.

(not linking the exact tweet, I don't want to encourage brigading)

Whatever your stance is on the issue, John has explicitly stated that he is ready to speak in bad faith here. So no in this case it does not seems like a cliche or a logical fallacy to me.

It seems like suggesting someone else is acting in bad faith is different from pointing out that someone has openly acknowledged that behavior in themselves.

> I feel like "bad faith" is now a thought-terminating cliche. As long as people can suggest someone is acting in "bad faith" (maybe doing a "Gish Gallop", a "false equivalence" or even just "motivated reasoning") then they can instantly ignore everything they've said.

The problem is that many people do argue in bad faith. Sure, in some cases it can be difficult to prove—although not in this particular case—and recognizing that fact prevents you from wasting your time in pointless discussions. Even if you have unlimited time to spend arguing with people on the internet, surely you'd want to spend that time having an honest conversation, right?

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