Tag Archives: Lying

How To Shift The Goalposts With Dean Obeidallah

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If you ever need a guide stick by which to measure the integrity of someone’s arguments, you could do a lot worse than familiarise yourself with the most common logical fallacies. These enable you to separate the hack from the journalist and the scholar from the apologist.

Dean Obeidallah and Sam Harris have clashed before, and it’s clear that Dean is committed to the idea that Harris is motivated solely by bigotry. Unfortunately for Dean however, he’s having a terrible time trying to demonstrate as much. Finally, in what must have seemed like the dream ‘gotcha’ moment, Dean took to the internet to accuse Harris of ‘teaming up’ with an ‘anti-Muslim hate group’ in a series of Tweets. The excitement here is palpable:

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PZ Myers Is Still A Liar

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At the start of January, I caught PZ Myers in a blatant lie about the stated views of the late Christopher Hitchens. In short, he accused Christopher Hitchens of ‘proposing genocide’ and being in favour of ‘wholesale execution of the population of the Moslem world’’. What was particularly useful about Myers’ claims was the fact that he named the time, place and precise moment Hitchens was alleged to have expressed these views. Unfortunately for Myers, this precise moment in time was also documented on video for all to see. The footage conclusively reveals that Hitchens neither said, implied or hinted at any such thing. Not to mention such views are antithesis to the solidarity Hitchens so vocally expressed for Muslim dissidents throughout his career.

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