JayUtah
Penultimate Amazing
This is his overall schtick. It's how he keeps the semblance of debate going literally for years as nothing more than a shell game. When Jabba says that the Texas sharpshooter fallacy is the weakest link in his argument, what he wants you to believe by that is that the rest of his argument is otherwise strong. It isn't. The Texas sharpshooter fallacy is only one of about a dozen of specific, largely distinct errors we have identified in his argument. Each one of them is a individual show-stopper. But he will only discuss one at a time, so that at each step in the argument he can say, "Okay, I admit this thing we're talking about now is a weak point, but it's the only one." He couches this limitation as a tenet of his principles of "effective debate," of which he claims to be a guru.
Last summer I tried to bust the shell game. You know how to bust up a shell game. You make the operator turn over all the shells at the same time after picking your shell, to prove there's a pea under one of them even if it wasn't the one you chose. I told Jabba he should sketch out, in one or two sentences, how his argument would handle each of the fatal flaws. And he had to do it all at once, not strung out in his usually evasive way. That's why I limited the responses for that purpose to something he could write briefly without needing to supply a lengthy argument or evidence for any of them. Otherwise experience has shown that he'd just evade differently by saying "I don't have time to do what you ask; it's too big a task."
See, shell-game operators are smart. They know you suspect it's a scam, so they go through a pretense of showing you the pea behaves normally -- but they do so only one shell at a time. "See, here's the pea under this one shell I've turned over." Shuffle, shuffle, shuffle. "See, here's the pea again where you thought it should be, under the one shell I've turned over." Shuffle, shuffle, shuffle. "Now where's the pea?" Of course the guess will be wrong, because sleight of hand ensures the pea will never be under the selected shell when the selection actually counts. But if the player selects a shell, and then all the shells are turned over to reveal no pea under any of them, the jig is up. (Ideally the operator has to open his hands too, but you see where the analogy is going.)
Jabba promised he would address all the fatal flaws, but only if he could be allowed to address them one at a time, in his longstanding fashion. That is, only if he could be allowed to shuffle the shells between examinations as he's been doing hitherto. When we tried to change the game in a way that required him to ensure fairness, he admitted he couldn't do it. Or wouldn't do it; no real difference. I'll let you draw your own conclusions from that data regarding whether Jabba's approach is an effective means of determining whether his proof is valid.
