{"id":10586,"date":"2007-04-22T09:00:39","date_gmt":"2007-04-22T13:00:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thecarpetbaggerreport.com\/archives\/10586.html"},"modified":"2007-04-22T09:00:39","modified_gmt":"2007-04-22T13:00:39","slug":"sunday-discussion-group-96","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/sunday-discussion-group-96\/","title":{"rendered":"Sunday Discussion Group"},"content":{"rendered":"

About a week ago, Kevin Drum had a post<\/a> about comparisons between health care in the U.S. and other major world powers. He noted a lazy policy argument that immediately sends up red flags for him.<\/p>\n

[H]ere’s a handy rule of thumb: any time a healthcare article starts nattering on about hip replacement waiting times in Canada, just stop reading. The authors are cherry picking so egregiously it’s a wonder their fingers haven’t fallen off.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I call these “conversation enders.” The moment you see them, you know that writer\/speaker is either clueless or intellectually dishonest. Either way, the moment you hear a “conversation ender,” you pretty much stop listening to everything else the person has to say. “If they’re willing to say that<\/i>,” the voice in your head tells you, “then the rest is probably nonsense.”<\/p>\n

It’s a non-traditional Sunday Discussion Group topic, but what are your “conversation enders”? I have a handful:<\/p>\n

* “Tax cuts are fiscally responsible because they pay for themselves.”<\/p>\n

* “MoveOn.org did an ad comparing Bush to Hitler.”<\/p>\n

* “Evolution is just a theory.”<\/p>\n

* “Hillary Clinton’s health care plan in 1993 was socialized medicine.”<\/p>\n

* “The media isn’t reporting the good news in Iraq.”<\/p>\n

* “Global warming can’t be real because it’s cold outside.”<\/p>\n

The moment I hear any of these — and, regrettably, I hear them quite a bit — I immediately know that I’m not listening to a person who deserves to be taken seriously.<\/p>\n

Does everyone have “conversation enders”? What are some of yours?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

About a week ago, Kevin Drum had a post about comparisons between health care in the U.S. and other major world powers. He noted a lazy policy argument that immediately sends up red flags for him. [H]ere’s a handy rule of thumb: any time a healthcare article starts nattering on about hip replacement waiting times […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[617],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10586","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10586","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10586"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10586\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10586"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10586"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10586"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}