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Originally Posted by eschwartz
To be fair, DiapDealer's response was to someone who was actually kinda passing judgment:
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Apparently, you didn't catch this distinction:
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To be fair, you can't reduce his point to a self-cancelling circuit involving impossible standards of objectivity. This was his actual point. . . .
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The key phrase is
self-cancelling circuit.
In saying there's a lot of aggressive support for Amazon on MR, MattW was not suggesting he was magically above being biased. Right or wrong, he was saying he'd noticed a level of bias that seemed excessive.
To suggest he'd claimed to adhere to an impossible standard of objectivity because he mentioned bias at all is a straw man. Virtually any argument can be opposed in a fair way. No reason to stack the deck by inferring that opponents have painted themselves into corners when they haven't.
The go-to defense in children's arguments is "I know you are, but what am I?" In a harmless way, you used that defense by parroting the phrase "to be fair" to answer my post mockingly (since my post began the same way).
The more disheartening attack is the one we often see in partisan politics: The facile attempt to turn others' words around to suggest they're "hypocrites" or "liars," as if mere mechanical reversals were enough to prove character flaws.
When that's done in a debate, it cheapens the content because it substitutes primitive roadblocks for actual arguments and makes the tone less civil.
That's why the phrase
self-cancelling circuit was applied to DiapDealer's characterization of MattW's response: because it was an inaccurate dismissal of the point of the post, not because MattW is or claimed to be bias-free.