3 thoughts on “BoJo’s Government”

  1. I don’t understand this admiration of a “fisking” style rebuttal, where strawman points are lifted piecemeal from their context to be interspersed with smarmy, smart-Aleck-y, snarky responses.

    This self-congratulatory literary style is popular among the Climate Change-believing, Trump-hating, total virus lockdown-insisting self-appointed experts-on-everything lurking on Slashdot and other places. I really hate it and avoid reading anything that intersperses “point/counterpoint” in this way. I don’t want to bother reading such a thing, even in service of a cause I support.

    The rebuttal/author’s response in the peer review process would lend itself to this style — repeat each of the reviewer’s knocks on your paper and intersperse your explication of the reviewer’s ignorance and malice.

    As best I am able to, I really try to avoid writing a peer-review response in this style. Maybe it is not to insult the gatekeepers who still have to come around to my point of view, but this style in a way is insulting the intelligence of the reader, that the reader cannot follow a reasoned narrative supporting the alternative points of view.

    Give me Mr. Trump’s concise tweets rather than this.

    1. IMO, the main drawback is that they become too long and lose focus as rebutting points leads to tangents.

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