According to historical accounts, foot binding appeared in China during the Sung Dynasty (960-1276 AD).
The process of foot binding usually started between the ages of four and seven. Feet were soaked in a blood and herb mixture. Toes were broken. Then the arch was broken. There was extreme pain since no pain relief was used. It is estimated that in a thousand years about two billion women went through the process.
What would you do for beauty?
The Manchu leaders of the Qing Dynasty (1644 to 1911) tried with little success to stop foot binding, and Manchu women did not bind their feet. Mostly Han (the majority in China) women continued the practice.
In 1928, the Nationalist government announced plans to do away with foot binding. This attempt to end foot binding met with mixed success. In rural areas, large feet were still considered unattractive and unacceptable and the practice continued.
While working in China for National Geographic on a three part Marco Polo series, Michael Yamashita, a veteran photographer, went in search of women who had bound feet. He found them living in remote urban villages.
In most of China, social and sexual customs resist rapid change. For millions of women, the practice would continue until 1949 when the Communists came into power.
Then the popularity of foot binding to enhance a woman’s beauty ended.
______________
Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of The Concubine Saga. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too. This is the love story Sir Robert Hart did not want the world to discover.
Subscribe to “iLook China” Sign up for an E-mail Subscription at the top of this page.
The dates the Britannica throws out are the Enlightenment, a European intellectual movement of the 17th and 18th centuries and the 1848 Seneca Falls Convention, which called for full legal equality with men.
Merriam-Webster’s definition is “the theory of the political, economic, and social equality of the sexes” and “organized activity on behalf of women’s rights and interests.”
In fact, for centuries, Western women had been treated as chattel—the property of men.
After watching the video and reading the entry in Britannica and the definition in Merriam-Webster, it’s obvious that feminism was alive and well in China more than a thousand years ago during the Tang Dynasty.
In fact, Emperor Wu Zetian (625 to 705 AD) was a very early feminist that ruled the Tang Dynasty as an emperor and was China’s only woman emperor.
The Tang Dynasty was a time of relative freedom for women. Women did not bind their feet (for a few more centuries) or lead submissive lives. It was a time in which a number of exceptional women contributed in the areas of culture and politics. Source: Women in World History
Wu Zetian demanded the right of an emperor and kept male concubines. She also challenged Confucian beliefs against rule by women and started a campaign to elevate the position of women.
______________
Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of The Concubine Saga. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too. This is the love story Sir Robert Hart did not want the world to discover.
Subscribe to “iLook China” Sign up for an E-mail Subscription at the top of this page.
On January 1, 2012 at 21:01, in Part One of the China-India Comparison with Lots of Facts, Sid said in a comment, “How can one engage in an ad hominem attack by asking questions? I’m simply trying to get the root of your ideology. What, besides being delusional, would cause someone to come to such conclusions? There had to be an event. If it’s not Vietnam or something to do with teaching (i.e. a lack of respect), it’s got to be something. Something regarding racism, perhaps?“
These are loaded questions that achieve a similar goal that ad hominem does but more subtly, and as we’ve learned, they are often used rhetorically, which is a question asked merely for effect with no answer expected, serving the questioner’s agenda.
In fact, rhetorical questions rarely appear in academic discourse because they are logical fallacies.
In these loaded questions, Sid infers that because I do not agree with his opinions of China, there has to be something wrong with me, but as we have learned from Professor deLaplante, this is not the case.
Then the next day on January 2, 2012 at 22:03, Sid launched a series of ad hominem attacks against my character. He said, “You’re a mythomaniac, a propagandist, and endorser of one of the most repressive regimes in the world. And your website is a series of disconnected nonsense decorated by retarded videos. You can’t construct an argument to save your life, and the sycophants who show up here saying, ‘Yes, Lloyd, I agree with you,’ belong in Sgt. McGillicuty’s Travelling Nutbar Show.
“Your ideas are an advertisement for how whacky you are, and you’re so whacky, you don’t even realize it. Ever wonder why no one except other crazies post comments here? I’ll tell you: those thousands of viewers read your posts and think, ‘Good god!’
“Not all the bold font on Earth can make you make sense Lloyd. This China business is a lost cause. I suggest you give it up and get some help.”
After having been slandered once again by Sid, I was curious about his character, since he was so fixated on mine.
I then spent a few days thinking about what makes Sid tick and did some research. I went over his comments and use of logical fallacies, examined how he often diverted the topic when he couldn’t hold up his end of the argument, and on January 14, 2012 at 13:00 in a comment in Part 2 of The Economic Health of BRICS, I suggested that Sid may suffer from “Obsessive-compulsive Personality Disorder” and provided one of those “retarded videos” that explained what this disorder was in addition to information from the U.S. National Library of Medicine – The World’s Largest Medical Library.
Sid’s last response arrived at 20:19 on the same date. “You’re an imbecile Lloyd, a soft headed moron,” which caused me to reconsider thatSid might suffer from “Narcissistic Personality Disorder” instead of “Obsessive-compulsive Personality Disorder” or possibly a combination of both.
“People with narcissistic personality disorder are typically described as arrogant, conceited, self-centered and haughty… Despite this exaggerated self-image, they are reliant on constant praise and attention to reinforce their self-esteem. As a result, those with narcissistic personality disorder are usually very sensitive to criticism, which is often viewed as a personal attack.” Source: Narcissistic Personality Disorder – Psychology.about.com
Professor deLaplante was right when he said in one of his videos that it was a waste of time debating people such as Sid, which, as you know, isn’t his real name. In fact, SID is an acronym for “Studying Intellectual Dishonesty”.
For more information on Professor deLaplante and logical fallacies, I suggest reading the two-part interview of him on Psych Central’s World of Psychology.
Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of The Concubine Saga. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too. This is the love story Sir Robert Hart did not want the world to discover.
Subscribe to “iLook China” Sign up for an E-mail Subscription at the top of this page.
An intellectually honest debate/argument follows a similar process avoiding logical fallacies such as Ad Hominem, Red Herrings, Straw Figures, Cognitive Biases, Cultural Bias, Confirmation Bias, Weasel Words, Begging the Question, Appeal to Authority, and Appeal to Ridicule, etc.
Then there is the Fallacy of Many Questions (complex question, fallacy of presupposition, loaded question, plurium interrogationum) – someone asks a question that presupposes something that has not been proven or accepted by all the people involved.
The loaded question fallacy is often used rhetorically, so that the question limits direct replies to those that serve the questioner’s agenda.
In the twenty-three comments that followed the first question of the debate, which was comparing the cultural practice of piety in Taiwan with China, Sid diverted the topic using Red Herrings and Loaded Questions a number of times. This would be a tactic that Sid would use again.
Instead of spending hours showing you, I invite you to enter the debate with the first question. If you have read this far in the Discovering Intellectual Dishonesty series and have watched Professor deLaplanet’s videos, you should have few problems recognizing Sid’s use of logical fallacies to divert attention away from topics he could not present an argument against.
Professor deLaplante says, “What if you don’t know HOW to respond to the best objections? Answer: Maybe you should reconsider your position, or at least suspend judgment on it.”
When faced with this choice, Sid often resorted to the use of logical fallacies (especially red herrings, ad hominem and loaded questions).
In fact, Sid didn’t follow his own advice. In an Amazon reader review, he wrote of “Red Capitalism” he says, “There are too many interrogatives; sometimes they come in bunches, and it’s not always easy, or at least for a layperson like me, to know if they’re rhetorical or not… ‘Never form an argument from questions,’ and ‘Avoid asking the reader questions,’ are fundamentals a professor would tell a first-year student.”
An example of Sid ignoring his own advice may be found in a comment he left for The Ignorance Factor of Bias. In addition, in Part 5 of this series, there was a short video that touched on the topic of loaded questions.
Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of The Concubine Saga. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too. This is the love story Sir Robert Hart did not want the world to discover.
Subscribe to “iLook China” Sign up for an E-mail Subscription at the top of this page.
Professor deLaplante says, “While logic and argumentation are essential components of critical thinking, they are not sufficient—not by a long shot. What’s missing is the importance of background knowledge.
“Background knowledge informs critical thinking at multiple levels… but you cannot learn this in a critical thinking class or from a textbook. One of the most important elements of critical thinking cannot be taught—at least not in the way you can teach formal logic and fallacies.
“Background knowledge comes from living in the world and paying attention to what is going on.
“Mastering this component of critical thinking requires a dedication to life-long learning, a genuine openness to different points of view and a certain humility in the face of all that we don’t know. This isn’t a set of skills you can master with worksheets and work examples. This is a philosophy, a lifestyle choice. Textbooks don’t talk about this or at last as much as they should.”
“The ability to evaluate the premise of an argument cannot be taught in a critical thinking class,” Professor deLaplante says. “The reason is obvious. This is a question of background knowledge. Lack of background knowledge causes one to believe in a hoax. All the logic in the world won’t make up for ignorance.… The easy way is to set out looking for weaknesses in an argument. The danger here is the desire to refute another position than to understand it. This is the wrong motive, which is a desire to win an argument.”
In fact, Sid was only interested in winning the argument or making it appear that he had won, and he took advantage of my ignorance of logical fallacies in his attempt to achieve this goal.
Sid did not consider that lifelong learning was more important than my ignorance of logical fallacies. Lifelong learning never ends unless you shut your mind to it. Even now, I may not know as much about logical fallacies as Sid, since he appears so skilled at using them, but I know more now than when I started the debate.”
Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of The Concubine Saga. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too. This is the love story Sir Robert Hart did not want the world to discover.
Subscribe to “iLook China” Sign up for an E-mail Subscription at the top of this page.
In Part One of this series, I said, “Before this series concludes, you will discover that Sid knew about logical fallacies and may have taken advantage of my ignorance.”
In part four of the debate, Sid said, “In addition to directing the reader toward a particular conclusion, begging-the-question language assumes a premise has already been established.”
However, “Sometimes people use the phrase ‘beg the question’ as a sort of general criticism of arguments, to mean that an arguer hasn’t given very good reasons for a conclusion…”
If Sid was aware of the complicated logical fallacy known as ‘begging the question’, we may conclude that he knew what he was doing throughout the entire debate, which may explain why he didn’t answer my question of how many books he had read on logical fallacies and why he avoided answering questions other’s asked.
Then there is this pull quote from a comment of Sid’s I deleted on January 11, 2012 at 12:22. “There is no red herring argument here. A red herring occurs when you divert from the main issue to a side issue. But if a side issue has been introduced (i.e. the boiling of water), you introduced it.”
However, Sid was wrong. I was not the one that introduced the Red Herring that changed the topic. Sid did that when he said how contaminated China’s rivers were, which had nothing to do with the topic of that post. The topic of the post was which country was doing a better job supplying water to its people—India, a democracy, or China with its one party republic. The only mistake I made was to swallow the bait of Sid’s Red Herring. After all, the goal of a Red Herring is to divert attention away from a topic that is difficult or impossible to prove wrong.
The Writing Center at UNC says of a Red Herring that “Partway through an argument, the arguer goes off on a tangent, raising a side issue that distracts the audience from what’s really at stake. Often, the arguer never returns to the original issue.”
At 14:17, Sid said, “You can quote or copy-and-paste all the fallacy definitions you wish, but you’ll never be able to employ them in argument or rebuttal. You lack the wherewithal.“
However, why would I want to employ logical fallacies in an argument or rebuttal when such tricks are intellectually dishonest? It would appear that Sid meant I could not match his skills using logical fallacies to decieve people. At least, that seems to be what he implies.
At 19:21, Sid said, “I don’t give a shit what those dictionaries say. It’s not called weasal words. It’s called begging the question language, or begging the question reasoning… You might want to learn what those newfound logical fallacies mean before you copy and paste Lloyd.“
In the four previous examples, Sid revealed that he knew exactly what he was doing, and Professor deLaplante, in Part One‘s video, was right when he said, “A fallacy is a bad argument. What makes it bad is certain GENERAL FEATURES that characterize arguments of this TYPE, and arguments of this type can often be MISTAKEN for GOOD argument,” which is what Sid was counting on.
Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of The Concubine Saga. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too. This is the love story Sir Robert Hart did not want the world to discover.
Subscribe to “iLook China” Sign up for an E-mail Subscription at the top of this page.
Professor deLaplante says, “The Straw Figure Fallacy involved criticizing a distorted, exaggerated or otherwise misrepresented version of an argument and claiming to have refuted the original argument. It often involves knowing or willful deception and a refusal to ‘play by the rules’.”
“When someone is willing to knowingly misrepresent an argument,” Professor deLaplante says, “they are no longer playing by the rules. They are more concerned with the appearance of winning than with argumentation itself. When you see this going on, you should correct the misrepresentation and get the discussion back on track. If it is an honest mistake and the arguer is willing to correct their misunderstanding, that is great. But if you catch them doing this again and again, then there is probably no point in engaging argumentatively with this person, because they have shown you that they are unwilling to play by the rules.”
This post compared India and China and what each country was doing to supply water to its people. I asked this question, “Is freedom of expression and of religion more important than water?”
Logically, the answer would be ‘water’ was more important than freedom of expression and of religious choice, because we die within a few days without water but can live a full life without the two abstract freedoms of expression and choice of religion. The post provided evidence that China was doing more than India to supply water to its people, and closed with, “What happens to life when there is no water?”
The logical answer was that we will die quickly without water, but will not die due to limits on freedom of political expression or from a limited choice of religions.
However, the first comment from Sid introduced another Red Herring into the conversation and changed the topic. Sid’s first sentence said, “An estimated 75 percent of China’s river water is not safe for drinking or fishing, according to Rob Gifford, author of China Road.”
Sid says, “Hmmm. Interesting stuff. Hundreds of millions of Chinese people without access to safe water or santitation; a dire warning from the world bank…”
Again, this was not the topic of the post and was misleading. In fact, this was when Sid introduced the Straw Figure Fallacy distorting the argument, as Professor deLaplante says, “with willful deception and a refusal to play by the rules.”
In my reply, I attempted bringing the topic back to the original premise by pointing out that unsafe water was not the issue, because the Chinese boiled their water before drinking it, which common sense says to do with contaminated water.
Sid then claimed that was not the reason why Chinese people drank warm water and then introduced several more topics in rapid succession without evidence to support them, which had nothing to do with which country was doing a better job planning ahead to provide water for its people—contaminated or not.
My next reply said Sid’s comment was a logical fallacy, a Red Herring. Sid then changed the topic again with another Red Herring leading to a series of Straw Figure Fallacies and ended by asking if I had ever read any books on argumentative logic, which had nothing to do with which country was doing a better job of bringing water to its people.
I replied by asking Sid to answer the same question on how many books he had read on argumentative logic, which he ignored in all of his subsequent comments, which I then deleted (a total of eighteen between January 11 – 14). Some quotes from a few of those comments have been used as examples of logical fallacies in this series of posts.
Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of The Concubine Saga. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too. This is the love story Sir Robert Hart did not want the world to discover.
Subscribe to “iLook China” Sign up for an E-mail Subscription at the top of this page.
The Red Herring is anything that distracts you from following the trail (topic) of the original argument and is distracting enough to make the audience want to follow the new trail (topic), which is an irrelevant distraction away from the original argument and main issue.
For example, when Sid, in our debate, introduced something that changed the subject, which raised a new issue that wasn’t relevant to the previous line of discussion, the fallacy occurred when Sid concluded something from this different issue or presumed that some conclusion has been established.
“In this respect,” Professor deLaplante says, “the fallacy is very much like a Straw Figure fallacy in that you are mistakenly or misleadingly say you won the argument or refuted the argument”, which was when Sid avoided engaging with the original argument.
However, the Red Herring is different from the Straw Figure fallacy in that a Straw Figure involves distorting or misrepresenting some original argument and then knocking down the distorted argument.
Straw Figure: Arguer misrepresents an opponent’s position.
Red Herring: Arguer tries to distract the attention of the audience by raising an irrelevant issue.
There are many examples of Sid introducing Red Herrings into the argument where he ignored the original argument and changed the subject. In Part 2 of the debate, I asked, “How would you describe the differences you observed between how piety is practiced in mainland China and Taiwan?”
Sidimmediately introduced a Red Herring with “First, as the term pertains to Taiwan, there is no such thing as mainland China. There is China, and there is Taiwan. The word ‘mainland’ denotes a connection, but there isn’t one and never really has been.”
Sid’s response had nothing to do with piety, and if I had not been ignorant of logical fallacies, I would have been aware of what he was doing and challenged it.
Then Sid asked his first of many loaded questions when he said, “Approximately 90 percent of Taiwanese want nothing to do with China, and why would they?”
What does this have to do with piety? In fact, there was no evidence with a link to support the claim that 90 percent of Taiwanese want nothing to do with China, which was often the case with Sid’sRed Herrings throughout the debate. Unfortunately, my response was to spend hours researching and writing replies.
The recent results in Taiwan’s presidential election indicate that a majority of Taiwanese may favor reunification with China or at least closer ties. On January 14, 2012, Fox News.com reported, Taiwan’s China-friendly president wins re-election with 51.6 percent of the total against 45.6 percent for Tsai Ingwen of the main opposition Democratic Progressive Party.
Fox News said, “Ma’s Nationalist Party also retained control of the 113-seat legislature, though with a reduced majority. Speaking before thousands of jubilant supporters in downtown Taipei, Ma said his China policies had resonated with voters. ‘They gave us support for our policy to put aside differences with the mainland. To search for peace and turn it into business opportunities.’”
In addition, Sid introduced so many Red Herrings, that I couldn’t respond to all of them, which is why I decided to write comments and new posts and spend more time with these new topics. When I did respond to some of Sid’s Red Herrings, he often ignored what I wrote while posting more Red Herrings that I often scrambled to respond to, which was my mistake.
Sid’s alleged contempt for me appeared to increase as evidenced by his numerous ad hominem attacks after I started to ban his logical fallacies. In addition, his use of Judgmental language – insulting or pejorative language, may have been intended to influence my judgment. Examples: “You’re an imbecile Lloyd, a soft headed moron,” and “You lack the intelligence to argue, so you ban.”
Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of The Concubine Saga. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too. This is the love story Sir Robert Hart did not want the world to discover.
Subscribe to “iLook China” Sign up for an E-mail Subscription at the top of this page.
In Part Three’s video, Associate Professor of Philosophy Kevin deLaplante talked about the abusive Ad Hominem fallacy. This is the fallacy of rejecting a claim or an argument given by someone because we don’t like something about the person, and we mistake criticism of a person for criticism of his or her claim or argument.
Professor deLapante’s most blatant example was, “Your argument is bad because YOU SUCKI!” — The problem isn’t with criticism or praise, it is with confusing the judging of a person with the judging of an argument.
Several examples of Ad Hominem attacks that Sid used on this Blog are listed here. However, you may discover that Sid did not use the Ad Hominem fallacy during the debate, which ended on December 8, 2011. The reason may be because he was getting away with his intellectual dishonesty since no one was stopping him. Sid’s use of the Ad Hominem fallacy comes afterwards.
On January 2, 2012, Sid said, “You’re a mythomaniac, a propagandist, and endorser of one of the most repressive regimes in the world. And your website is a series of disconnected nonsense decorated by retarded videos. You can’t construct an argument to save your life, and the sycophants who show up here saying, ‘Yes, Lloyd, I agree with you,’ belong in Sgt. McGillicuty’s Travelling Nutbar Show.
“Your ideas are an advertisement for how whacky you are, and you’re so whacky, you don’t even realize it. Ever wonder why no one except other crazies post comments here? I’ll tell you: those thousands of viewers read your posts and think, ‘Good god!’“
Note – I should have started deleting Sid’s comments when his use of Ad Hominem occurred.
However, I started deleting them on January 11, 2012
Here are a few examples of Sid’s ad hominem fallacies from the Deleted Comment File –
On January 11 at 14:17, Sid said, “There is no such thing as weasal [Note: proper spelling is weasel] words. Again, that’s teenagese [Note: no such word]. You could never use the term weasal words in academic discourse, just like you could never use dude, LMAO, bittersweet, etc. There are proper – adult – terms for such things. That you used the phrase weasal words underscores a dearth of knowledge, juvenility, or both.
“You can quote or copy-and-paste all the fallacy definitions you wish, but you’ll never be able to employ them in argument or rebuttal. You lack the wherewithal.”
On January 11 at 19:21, Sid said, “You lack the intelligence to argue, so you ban. What do all those books you’ve discovered say about that?” [Note: This was after he claimed there were no books on the topic, and I proved him wrong.]
On January 12 at 09:21, Sid said, “You delete the posts because you’re a propagandist and by extension a censor. You don’t have the intellectual wherewithall to debate, so you ban.”
On January 12 at 09:24, Sid said, “Banning my comments only makes you look like a bad sport. You can’t argue – you don’t know how – so you delete.”
On January 12 at 17:22, Sid said, “You just don’t know how to debate, so you cheat by deleting your opponents’ remarks.”
On January 14 at 20:19, Sid said, “You’re an imbecile Lloyd, a soft headed moron.”
In the Ad Hominem video in Part 3, Professor deLaplante says an argument is a collection of claims linked by relations of logical entailment or support. The plausibility or implausibility of those claims and their validity or invalidity of the argument given isn’t determined by facts about the moral character of the person asserting the argument… Facts about someone’s moral character by themselves don’t make it anymore less likely that their arguments are good or bad.
Ad hominem arguments rely on the following types of premises:
(Almost) any claim that P makes about X is (probably) false, because of some feature of P. Meaning, (Almost) any claim Lloyd makes about China or the Chinese is (probably) false, because of some feature of Lloyd’s moral character as defined by Sid.
or
(Almost) any argument that P gives about X is (probably bad, because of some feature of P. Meaning, (Almost) any argument that Lloyd gives about China and the Chinese is (probably) bad, because of some feature of Lloyd’s moral character as defined by Sid.
Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of The Concubine Saga. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too. This is the love story Sir Robert Hart did not want the world to discover.
Subscribe to “iLook China” Sign up for an E-mail Subscription at the top of this page.
The goal of this series of posts is to help others learn how to recognize faulty reasoning and the use of misinformation designed to mislead. The key word here is “help” because this isn’t a class. However, there will be embedded videos with links to sites and books that may better educate about intellectual dishonesty.
The book description of Crimes Against Logic by Jamie Whyte [formerly a lecturer in Philosophy at Cambridge University where he earned a Ph.D. in philosophy], says, “In the daily battle for our hearts and minds–not to mention our hard-earned cash—the truth is usually the first casualty. It’s time we learned how to see through the rhetoric, faulty reasoning, and misinformation that we’re subjected to from morning to night by talk-radio hosts, op-ed columnists, advertisers, self-help gurus, business ‘thinkers,’ and, of course, politicians.”
If you watched the embedded video in Part One, “Introduction of Fallacies” by Kevin deLaplante, the Chair of the Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies at Iowa State University, you may remember that he talked about what a fallacy was and provided more than one example. He said, “A fallacy is a bad argument. What makes it bad is certain GENERAL FEATURES that characterize arguments of this TYPE, and arguments of this type can often be MISTAKEN for GOOD arguments.” He then used the following example.
1. Computers are products of intelligent design.
2. The human brain is a computer
Therefore, the human brain is a product of intelligent design.
However, because a computer is designed by an intelligent designer, that does not mean the human brain is the product of intelligent design. In the Part 1 video, Professor deLaplante teaches how this logic is a fallacy, provides examples and says people need to be trained to recognize these fallacies.
When Sid said, “You can bar me from commenting. All hopeless CCP apologists are censors. It’s inevitable that you would try something like that. You lack the intelligence to argue, so you ban.” Source: in the comment posted January 13, 2012 at 09:02
Sid’s opinion is an example of the same logical fallacy that Professor deLaplante warns us about in “Introduction to Fallacies” in Part 1.
If we break down the logical fallacy in Sid’s reasoning, you will discover a similar pattern.
A. Lloyd censored Sid from commenting on this Blog.
B. People that censor lack intelligence to argue.
C. All hopeless CCP apologists are censors.
A + B + C = D
D.Therefore, Lloyd is is a hopeless CCP apologist that lacks intelligence to argue, which is why he banned Sid from commenting on this Blog.
However, that is not the reason why some of Sid’s comments have been deleted from this Blog — it has to do with Sid’s use of logical fallacies and his intellectual dishonesty during and after the debate as you shall discover.
In addition, I have never apologized for anything Mao or the CCP may have done since 1949. Anyone that knows the difference between an explanation supported with valid evidence from reliable sources and the definition of an apology would know this isn’t the case.
Another way to discover Sid’s intellectual dishonesty is to compare what he writes to other arguments. To start, I suggest reading the Letters section of Foreign Policy magazine and compare the style of those arguments with Sid’s alleged intellectual dishonesty.
In fact, if Sid had avoided using logical fallacies to support his argument, some of his comments wouldn’t have been deleted.
Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of The Concubine Saga. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too. This is the love story Sir Robert Hart did not want the world to discover.
Subscribe to “iLook China” Sign up for an E-mail Subscription at the top of this page.
Posted by Lloyd Lofthouse 
