Quicklink: The Terrible Sea Lion October 10, 2014 tigtog Something about this intrusive sea lion seems awfully familiar. What topics have you noticed summoning up relentlessly ‘civil’ sea lions engaging in pointedly ‘polite’ discourses near you lately?
Another facet of using ‘civil’ insistence that others justify their stance to derail/disrupt certain forms of discourse in the latest xkcd: ETA – as PZ wrote over at Pharyngula: There is a place for academic arguments — but in the real world, we have an obligation to take arguments that harm people seriously, and advocate honestly for what we really believe. If you’re talking about torture, for instance, you do no one any favor by inventing improbable-to-impossible scenarios and then making justifications that will be used in far less justifiable situations.