What about a student who excels in some areas but is bad at writing, or has trouble making friends, or doesn't understand much about politics and stuff that goes on in the world (you can probably tell I didn't spend much time in high school, but you get the idea)
Chemistry is something which one can get by not knowing. A lot of other stuff learned at school, not so much.
The only point I've made is that something being addictive and harmful is a reasonable quality to ban something for. This was in response to the user who said "there are plenty of reasons to ban tiktok, but this ain't it" (from memory, but close enough).
This doesn't mean that I think all things which are addictive and harmful should be banned. A total ban on alcohol would probably not be effective, and would lead to more harm than good, so I wouldn't support it.
Your friends sound like they probably believe that admission is a privilege - it's just that they also believe they deserve and have earned that privilege.
Especially true considering that some of these people accused of wrongthink might actually be onto something. It's not a good idea to assume that popular views are certainly the correct ones.
I don't think universities should only be for people who share popular views.
Seventy years ago universities had very different views. If they had had an effective way of screening out students whose views they considered dangerous or harmful, then perhaps we would have a worse society than we do now.
>Personally, a system that generally rewards competency and is based on voluntary transactions to me is trending towards System A because people who amass power in such a system and maintain it generally do so because they are good at getting results through transactions that on the whole are generally voluntary and mutually beneficial.
It's easy to imagine systems which have more freedom and are better at rewarding competency. Like anarcho-syndicalism. If freedom and the rewarding of competency are what you value, why dismiss systems such as this? Throughout history humanity has gone through several systems. I'm not sure your justifications for believing the current one is the best would hold up to scrutiny.
A person or group with immense power can trivially achieve great good.
However, if you consider systems A and B, where system A is a bit better at using immense power for good than system B, you will notice that system A will result in a lot more good than system B. Therefore, if you care even a little bit about good things happening, you will be very keen to have system A instead of system B.
The fact that someone with immense power does something good becomes a lot less reassuring when you consider the opportunity cost of not having someone or some people who are a lot better at achieving good have that immense power.
Wealth gives a person power. The people who get very wealthy (in our current system) are not generally the people who will do the best things with power. This seems like a situation which could be improved on.
[My opinion on trusting DDG] - [Reason for my opinion on trusting DDG].[More information about the reason]
In this case, because I don't use the "personal attack" to reach my conclusion that the person was wrong, I don't think it would be a case of argument ad hominem.
But if someone read it like this:
[One reason for my opinion on trusting DDG] - [Another reason for my opinion on trusting DDG].[More information about the second reason]
Then I am using the "personal attack" to reach my conclusion that the person was wrong, so I think it would be a case of argument ad hominem.
My comment wasn't written very well, and I'll try to write better comments in the future. Not that adding an ad hominem to a valid argument makes it invalid, I guess?. But it's still good to avoid fallacies, and to write one's comments so they're likely to be understood the way one meant them.
I'm talking about situations where no fallacy has actually occurred, not situations where a fallacy has occurred but a correct conclusion has been arrived at anyway.
A common fallacy I see, though I don't know if there's a name for it, is assuming that just because what someone is doing can be described by the name of a fallacy that what the person is doing is fallacious.
In my view, anyone who trusts ddg is a bit silly - founder has a bad track record on user privacy. Founded Names Database[1], a social media website designed to collect user information as aggressively as possible, before selling all the information to classmates.com.
Of course, it's gotten much worse still, since then.