Hate Mail - "Cherry Picking" and The Rhetoric of Thugs

I get at least one comment every fortnight or more often that I'm "cherry picking" what Darwin or someone else said in making my arguments.   Which is a stupid thing to say because whenever anyone, in any field, is citing the words and ideas of someone they don't choose the ones that aren't relevant and they don't choose the weakest possible citations to support their arguments.  Everyone picks the quotes they use to choose the most useful ones.  In my experience, in an overwhelming majority of cases, the ones who cry "cherry picking" are science-oriented atheists who, perhaps, don't understand how citation of that kind works, or, perhaps, they just don't realize that they do it all the time.  The man on whose behalf that accusation is made, in order to pretend he didn't say what he said, Darwin, did that kind of citation all the time in his books that are the basis of his fame and adulation and deification by such atheists.   And, as I've pointed out, he didn't always do so honestly or completely.

I wasn't aware of the commonly held view that all someone had to do to overcome quotation and citation was to yell,  "cherry picking" just like the same idiots yell "Godwin's law" or, even more stupidly, "the courtier's reply" and that was supposed to clinch the argument, making the quotation and citation go away.   Which is a sure sign of a failed intelligentsia which practices that or allows it to become the common misunderstanding of how thinking works.

The only way to overcome a citation is to cite a fuller quotation and the context in which that fits into the wider thinking of a writer or speaker.  Only the words of a Darwin or a Jefferson or a Lincoln can be used to overcome other of their words.  That is when it is the thinking of that person which is in question.  When it comes to the use which other, generally infamous, people make of someones' words, that's a whole other ball game because in that case, it was their understanding of those words which are at issue.  

Some of us came up in the old school of quotation and citation and thinking in which those were the rules.  I think they work better to convince people of what they aren't already convinced of, which is all the new school of ersatz rhetorical discourse seems to consist of.  The major force behind that new school is derision and coercion not reason.  It's the rhetoric of thugs.  Go look at how the popular atheist bloggers operate for a good example of how it works.   The conversion that such practices bring about might be a yard wide but it's a centimeter deep.  All it takes is for the person so convinced is to see through the dishonesty of it and that's often not very hard to do, that and them realizing they don't need the kind of hierarchical substitute for respect that clique membership is based on.   People often grow out of that, reasoned argument is more durable.