Eminent Psychologist Calls Lillie A Whore

It seems that a number of people have taken exception to Lillie's article about men and why they go to prostitutes. It's weird, all of this controversy over an article that basically boils down to "Show appreciation for what he does and don't use sex as a weapon."

I don't know how anyone can argue with that. I wonder if they've even read my assertion that blow jobs are useful relationship preservers? That'd really get them going.

They also seem to have problems with the word "training", probably because it's an ego issue, but we train children, we train people for their jobs, we train each other all the time. This is just raising the awareness that you could also be inadvertently training men to respond in ways we don't want.

Evidently, some psychologist got his nickers in a twist and posted a blog post about it calling Lillie a whore - on his professional blog. Yes, he definitely looks pretty professional after that.

Let's look at his argument's against Lillie's article. His argument against her has many holes, all of them common logical fallacies. A logical fallacy is an argument that commits various fundamental reasoning mistakes.

Perhaps his inability to form a coherent argument is why he is writing on a blog instead of doing meaningful psych research. That kid's is an example of an ad hominem attack or a genetic fallacy, the same sort of fallacy that Dr. Grohol uses when calling Lillie a whore. I called the argument into question, by disparaging the person giving the argument.

Using a disparaging term to call into question your opponent's judgment is a tried and true tactic of people with little behind their own argument. That dear readers was an example of a sweeping generalization, similar to his assertions that her observations must be flawed because of the nature of SecondLife.

If he had anything to his argument, he'd have better proof, that is a moralistic fallacy, stating how things should be and using that to convince people, like he does with his appeal about how men and women should be acting and appreciating each other, thereby she must be false, because as we know people always act out of selflessness and honesty.

Finally, we get to the meat of his argument, a list of papers and research, purportedly backing up what he says. That is an appeal to popularity as well as an appeal to authority. By giving a series of articles that he knows no one is going to go read and refer to, he is giving a false sense of authority. I have no idea what those papers state or if they even exist. He could be making them up or they could already be discredited in the psychology community.

By throwing a bunch of various theories around, he's trying to muddy the waters a bit to show that all of those other ones are more credible, more likely, etc. Rather than addressing the question, he is saying that since those other arguments are possibly true, Lillie must be wrong. That's actually a rather interesting fallacy, sort of a, "We already have enough theories, we're all full up here and don't need any more. There's no room for your argument."

He ends up with more moralistic babbling about how things ought to be.

His entire argument is a false dilemma, though, he is saying, "You can either believe Lillie or you can believe me, and only one of us can be correct". Hold your horses, there are only two options? No "door number three"? No compromise? No synthesis of the two?

Finally, my own argument here is entirely a fallacist's fallacy, I'm stating that his conclusions must be wrong because his argument is wrong. In reality, all I'm really trying to point out is that we have no idea if his assertion is true because he provided no credible evidence to support it.

Try again.

I bet you didn't know I was a Master Debater ;)