If there's one thing the Internet has taught us, it's that some first-pass filtering is necessary to function in the modern world of unfettered information acce

If there's one thing the Internet has taught us, it's that some first-pass filtering is necessary to function in the modern world of unfettered information access. It doesn't take much looking into the person running the site to know the site's going to be well-researched (in the sense that it dives deeply on one viewpoint and disregards others) well-crafted (in the sense it possesses some modicum of capability wielding the English language, a property some confuse for a correct argument) one-sided content that will mislead a reader who takes it as fact. The ad hominem attack was a fallacy(1) in the days where debate was a nice, orderly thing among an intellectual elite in a salon. In the modern world, it's necessary to defend the listener against a gish-gallop attack of people who try and craft reality by volume. (1) technically, it should also be noted that the purpose of the formal rules of argumentation was to teach its students how to win arguments, not seek truth. In that regard, of course excluding the fact your opponent is arguing for, in the case of James Lindsay, white genocide is beneficial because it gives one a chance at winning the argument where none should be given.