Add new comment

Anyone who loudly asserts that they are a "free thinker" who is entirely driven by reason and facts is likely to be just as dogmatic as anyone else, if not more so. Such claims are the product of arrogance, not honest self-analysis and as such lead to an insufferable, demeaning attitude. Such people can not distinguish between their opinion and fact because they have deluded themselves into thinking that they are soooooo smart and sooooo worldly and soooooo logical that their every belief is unassailable truth. Therefor, if someone disagrees with them it MUST be because the other person is ignorant and irrational.
This is exactly the issue with Cameron and his post is the perfect demonstration. He claims to be driven by facts, yet belittles someone for having a differing point of view and writing a "screed"... and then launches into a long, angry rant. What Cameron wrote is not insightful, it is not fact driven, it is not the product of deliberative thought. It is a partisan outburst of anger whereby the author reflexively takes the most extreme opposite position in order to avoid granting the the other person even the slightest degree of legitimacy.
As for the argument itself, the huge logical failing with what he wrote is that when a team does terribly, then obviously a lot of bad decisions were made (this is why not mentioning the good decisions isn't a problem; if the team had a lot of things work out then it wouldn't have been so awful). But merely listing the bad decisions doesn't explain WHY those decisions were made, and simply stating the the team was the "worst run baseball operations department" isn't an answer. So not a single word in that "screed" actually supports the central claim which is that the "Mariners failures over the last 10 years have absolutely nothing to do with desire to win". Such an incredibly strong assertion would require a completely different line of argument and body of evidence than that proffered. It would also require an enormous amount of inference which is inherently subjective and limited which makes it even tougher to support such an absolute claim.