@orenwolf we’re gonna need a bigger boat!
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I find a common tactic of the self-congratulatory right wing is to make up some arbitrary criteria so that they can declare themselves the victors. Of course not without reason–it’s a rhetorical tactic to draw one’s opponent into a debate on one’s own terms, and make them argue within your own rubric.
It’s also total crap.
Regards,
AAR.
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That’s interesting. Gorka being a Hungarian family name (I almost said surname, but of course they come at the beginning!), supports an old theory that I heard a couple times when I was in Budapest. Basically, it’s well established the Magyars came from the region of the Volga and the Urals, but the theory is if you go back to some original Finno-Ugric people, that they are Himalayan. And when I look at that link about the Gurkhas, what tribe does it include? One called the Magars. Some googling tells me I’m not the first to notice the similarity in the names, but it must be said that there’s a lot of weird speculative Hungarian prehistory that scholars aren’t too sure about.
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Not if examining an individual’s credentials proves that individual to be a lier on a grand scale. I could address Gorka’s ideas as well, but that’s not what this article was about.
I’m sure you can agree that if someone like Gorka wins, humanity has lost.
tgp
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Other fun fact. Super badass warrior peoples. According to a snarky Englishmen I know, “We couldn’t kill them, so we hired them.”
Super cool to see them working private security at my hotel on my last trip to India.
That’s a pretty stupid rule of thumb, especially since no one has stopped critically examining his so-called ideas.
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TheGreatParis11m
Willis_Eschenbach:
sorry, folks, but Señor Gorka wins this round,
You replied
Not if examining an individual’s credentials proves that individual to be a lier on a grand scale.
So if a “lier [sic] on a grand scale” says that E=MC2, there’s no need to discuss the ideas … just attack his honesty.
You guys don’t get it. Truth is truth, no matter who says it. I’m still waiting for the first person to tell us what Gorka actually SAID that has all your panties in such a twist …
w.
I can’t say I ever ran into any arrow-wielding hordes, but yeah. 
L_Mariachi
Willis_Eschenbach:
My rule of thumb is that when your opponents stop debating your ideas and start attacking your credentials, it means you’ve won the debate
You replied
That’s a pretty stupid rule of thumb, especially since no one has stopped critically examining his so-called ideas.
That’s a pretty stupid way to avoid discussing his actual ideas. Did you think I wouldn’t notice the lack of content in your claims?
w.
Seriously, guys, whining about someone’s claimed lack of education, honesty, or good breeding are all meaningless ad hominem attacks.
For those who are unaware of the term, it means an attack against the PERSON himself instead of attacking the person’s IDEAS.
This whole thread has been a steaming pile of ad hominem nonsense. I’m still waiting for the first person to actually quote something Gorka said and explain why it is wrong.
w.
Personally, I have better things to do with my time. I don’t bother debating flat-earthers or evolution-deniers either, since there are other people willing to do that heavy lifting.
Stop sea-lioning.
ETA: Personal attacks are not synonymous with ad-hominems, they’re just personal attacks. An ad-hominem is when you say that someone’s idea is invalid because he’s uneducated or a liar or poorly bred.
EATA:
Then why don’t you do some research?
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I’ll assume you agree with me that the attack on Gorka’s credentials (not an ad hominem, by the way, but a legitimate critique) is more of an attack on the administration of the grifter who promised to appoint only the best people than one on Gorka himself. A thoughtful fellow like yourself would certainly agree that hiring someone with such problematic credentials is not exactly delivering on the promise of only appointing the best people to critical advisory positions.
Now let’s follow the moving goalposts and head on to people talking about his ideas. Start with his work product, by which I meant his thesis paper. Such a paper, as you probably know, is intended to present a convincing, coherent and evidence-based case for a given idea: a thesis. This is the places where credentials and ideas meet for most scholars in graduate programmes. You can read about the quality of his thesis and its reflection on his scholarship here.
His actual ideas are nothing unique: a dumbed-down and machismo-infused version of standard neoconservative pants-pissing about “Islamofascists” (he’s actually used this term, one which basically flags the speaker as someone who doesn’t know what he’s talking about). He hasn’t been shy about presenting them in venues beyond his academic work: speaking engagements, cable news and, frighteningly, in the White House for the past few months.
This summary from his Wikipedia bio article (footnote marks removed for readability but available within the link, key phrases bolded) sums up the negative responses from actual experts in the fields of security, anti-terrorism and foreign-policy studies toward his ideas and scholarship (!= credentials):
Gorka has been characterized as a fringe figure in academic and policy-making circles. Business Insider has described Gorka as being “widely disdained within his own field,” while a number of academics and policy-makers question Gorka’s knowledge of foreign policy issues, his academic credentials and his professional behavior. The journal Terrorism and Political Violence has never used him as a reviewer because, according to the associate editor, he "is not considered a terrorism expert by the academic or policy community.”
[…]
According to the Washington Post, “Most counterterrorism experts dismiss Gorka’s ideas as a dangerous oversimplification that could alienate Muslim allies and boost support for terrorist groups… Religious scholars are equally withering.” According to the Washington Post, Gorka’s views “signal a radical break” from the discourse “defined by the city’s Republican and Democratic foreign policy elite” of the last 16 years. For Gorka, "the terrorism problem has nothing to do with repression, alienation, torture, tribalism, poverty, or America’s foreign policy blunders and a messy and complex Middle East", but is rooted in Islam and the teachings of the Koran.
Daniel Benjamin and Steven Simon take issue with Gorka’s claim that the Obama and Bush 43 administrations failed to understand the importance of ideology and they give a number of examples of how government analysts “going back nearly 40 years have examined ideology’s role in Islamic militancy.” They argue that by jettisoning the role of “poor governance, repression, poverty and war” and failing to realize that “religious doctrine is not their sole or even primary driver,” Gorka has adopted an Islamophobic approach of finding “Islam as the problem, rather than the uses to which Islam has been put by violent extremists.
In fairness, his ideas are not universally derided. He’s supported by the kinds of neoconservative-leaning think tanks (e.g. the Heritage Foundation), magazines (e.g. the National Review), some of Prince Bush’s appointees and a handful of generals. I suppose if one thinks that the Iraq War and not withdrawing from Afghanistan were both great ideas one would probably find his ideas worthwhile, too.
So now you have some quotes to start. It’s going to take you a bit of time to go deeper into the links and the footnoted articles that critique (and sometimes demolish) his ideas and his presentations thereof, so take your time before you respond.
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You may enjoy reading about the concept of “weighting”:
i.e. one’s background working as a shorthand for how informed their opinions are on a topic, and how seriously to take them. Yes, it’s a cognitive shortcut people take, to separate signal from noise. My cursory reading of your internet presence suggests that this is why nobody takes you seriously on climate change, so I assume you’re familiar with the principle.
As far as his views… They’ve been covered:
You tell me what you’re OK with among those articles.
Regards,
AAR.
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ActuallyARegular
Willis_Eschenbach:
Truth is truth, no matter who says it.
You say:
You may enjoy reading about the concept of “weighting”:
Oh, you mean like all the physicists who said Einstein was wrong because he was just a patent clerk? That kind of weighting?
Or you mean all the folks who said George Washington Carver couldn’t be a valuable scientist because he was black … that kind of weighting?
You truly don’t get it. Either Gorka’s claims are right, or they are wrong, REGARDLESS OF HIS EDUCATION
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TheGreatParis
Willis_Eschenbach:
w.
I will not rise to your bait. If you wish to defend his accedemic record, please do so.
Otherwise stop driving trollies.
I am NOT defending his accedemic [sic] record. I am saying his academic record is immaterial to the truth content of his claims. Either what he says is true and valid, or it is not, regardless of his education, his IQ, his skin color, his sex, or any other personal attribute.
Is this so hard to understand?
w.
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I don’t know anyone with a PhD who insists on being called “Dr.” (or, for that matter, appending “PhD” to their name) in everyday usage - they consider it mockably self-important, and where it’s relevant, it’s understood they have one.
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[responding although it seems others have flagged you away]
So Gorka’s crime is that he said that
Not his “crime”, his idea; his flawed, oversimplified idea that excludes other contributing factors to terrorism, and (since you bring up centuries’ worth of history) limits practises like sex slavery to Islamic “warriors.” As others have mentioned, Gorka seems completely ignorant of the dark history of Christianity in that regard over those centuries, just to use one example.
By the way, all violent authoritarian movements, religious and otherwise, engage in barbaric acts (sometimes including sex slavery) as part of their struggles against those who they perceive, correctly or not, as their oppressors. Any student of history turns these up again and again, long before Islam existed.
Also, you can’t have it both ways. If Gorka had limited himself to being a scholar of the history of Islamic militancy going back hundreds of years it would be one thing, but he’s also advising the President of the United States on modern Islamic terrorism and national security responses. That absolutely requires taking into account the other factors that led to its modern late-20th and early-21st-century incarnation – factors that he (and apparently you) would prefer to hand-wave away to everyone’s peril.
And no, since you obviously didn’t bother to review the links and find out the details of what actual experts are saying about his ideas, I’m not going to read the analysis of some rando on the Internet who seems to understand nothing of scholarship and its distinction from credentials and its relationship to proving support for the “truth content” in a claim.
And since you accuse me of continuing to whinge about his education despite the fact that I delivered a summary of criticisms of his ideas with plenty of citations, I’m going to also assume you’re arguing in bad faith. As such your oily “regards” and any follow-ups are worthless and will be ignored.
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That’s not what’s going on though - at all. Gorka was always considered particularly ignorant by those in his field, and people who had read his thesis wondered how he was awarded his PhD, it’s so bad. They thought he legitimately had a degree at that point, and still considered him a joke. More than that, his work was so weak it couldn’t stand on its own, causing him to rely on constantly referring to his degree in an attempt to lend it - and himself - legitimacy. The fact that he himself makes a big deal out of a degree - an Appeal to Authority - that, it turns out, he didn’t earn, is worthy of scorn all by itself.
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