Blake Lively

What you are describing is a textbook strawman argument. The seletive process is also critical thinking. When one person misrepresents themselves and the other person does everything they can to clear their name that's not being selective that's being discerning. Baldoni contacted a PR Crisis team, why would he need to do that. Well if someone basically extorted you, got you fired from your agency, got your friends fired and you now have this blackmail letter hanging around yeah I think you would need to get help with that. But your position is but what if we don't look at facts and use common sense.


The bad things being what exactly? If someone has a track record of doing the same thing over and over again your argument is well that doesn't mean that this case is the same as all those other times this person has done these constant terrible things. The basis of this case is two fold. the idea that company smeared Blake Lively and that Blake Lively took over this film. Truth is not a smear, reputation and character matters.


Anything can be reasoned or also not existent. It could be reasoned that you are a human turnip hybrid. The point of the blind items is similar to the legal value in claims. Part of the point of that page is to document and catalogue these rumors. If Billy is rumored to kill Mr Whiskers 10 years ago, and then Billy is rumored to kill Mr Fluffy five years, and now Myrtle comes out and says Mr Fuzzy is missing, I have Billy on tape in my backyard. Billy then comes forward and says well Myrtle actually took my cat. In your pretzel logic brain you think I'll just ignore these documented cases because I can and we have no way of telling what happened to Fuzzy so oh well.

You don't offer evidence though, as a matter of fact often times you've refused to accept evidence because...you don't want to. As a point of fact you've said it's worse to have opinions on evidence or facts because...some reasons. But because I'm a person of substance and knowledge and not some naval gazing pontificator...here's Blake confessing to doing the thing she's accused of doing in a Women's Power Summit retreat.



Which you will decide isn't valid...for some nonsense.

Er, no it isn't. If it's anything it's an ad hominem fallacy, though thankfully none of my arguments rest on it, so it's just an observation about the blatantly inconsistent standards at play.

Like when they create fake people? I would think pretending to be other people would be, like, the most basic example of misrepresenting yourself.

A couple of times now you've thrown out some principle like this, which you claim to believe because you feel it describes Lively, without realizing that it describes Baldoni, too. Here's another example: you said "nothing says innocent person like controlling information," not realizing how obviously and blatantly this rebounds on him, since he was quite literally trying to control information (and not by merely exposing the truth, but by deliberately lying about the source and frequency).

What this proves is that these are not real principles of yours which you actually use to judge truth (at least, not as presented), because if they were they'd be applied consistently. Nevermind having the good sense not to say things that can be so easily turned on you, regardless.

"Everything they can"? So it's your position that if Lively is trying to "control" his film, anything he does in response is just him being "discerning"?

Please point me to the post where I said it was suspicious or damning that he "contacted a PR crisis team." I'm confident enough to ask this for two reasons: first, because you seem allergic to checking anything (still waiting for some kind of acknowledgement on the misquotes from earlier, BTW), and second, because no such thing was ever said. Because it's not "contacting a PR crisis team" that's so objectionable, it's what they did after: trying to fake a public backlash.

And why do you say "contacted" rather than "hired"? Is that a clumsy attempt to make it seem like he did less than he did? Because if so, it's very obvious. It was also obvious when you described something as "confirmed" that, when I actually read the article, turns out only to have been claimed. I honestly don't know if you even realize you're doing this, but you should know it's incredibly transparent.

Nope, this is not my argument. My argument is that whatever she did, it does not mean he didn't do the things he's accused of. Her being bad does not make him good. Even accepting every single rumor and conclusion you've offered, you'd still be confusing "better" with "innocent.

If anything, her being awful may make his stuff more likely, because if she's as diabolical as you think, that would be a pretty good motive to retaliate in really extreme ways.

Right, but then I'd ask you to back that up, and you'd have nothing. This is why I'm always going on about follow-up questions and the constant failure to answer them. Because, as you have just so helpfully (accidentally?) demonstrated, anybody can just say something. The real truth or logic of it is tested in the cross-examination. Actual people of substance understand that those questions are the real proving ground.

You are still confused, so I'll say it for what I'm fairly certain is at least the fourth time:

The argument is not that Blake Lively is a good person, and it's not that she did none of the things she's accused of, either. This has been said over and over. I can point you to specific examples of it, but I suspect if I do, you'll memory hole this part of the conversation and move on to something else. So rather than do more legwork that you'll ignore, I'll make you an offer: assure me you'll respond and acknowledge the evidence when I post it, and politely admit the misunderstanding, and I'll do it. If you're in the right, there would be zero reason to say no to this. Deal?

Nope, in every case I've explained why it's either trying to prove something not under dispute (IE: Blake Lively is not good to work with!), or not relevant to the claim in question (ditto).

Every reply I've given you in response to supposed "evidence," I have clearly and succinctly explained one of the above, if not both. If you think that's unreasonable, then you should be able to respond in the same manner, where you quote something specific, and explain how or why it fails. The fact that you don't do this, but instead offer non-specific broadsides, is extremely telling.

Anybody can just say "you do this." Actually explaining the flaw in an argument is, well, what arguments are. That's how arguments work. They're not just two people taking turns monologuing, because that makes it too easy to ignore the tougher questions and points. Which is what's been happening throughout this discussion, and in many prior.

Quote me. Do it, and we'll see if a reason was provided or not, instead of you just not understanding it, or forgetting it, and then lazily implying there must not have been one.

Leaving aside that "taking control" is broad to the point of uselessness, my response is quite simple: what thing have I said that is contradicted by Lively "taking control" of the film?

Show me. Show me something I said that is predicated on the idea she didn't "take control." Go ahead.

You boys sure know how to ruin a juicy scandal;, that reveals the machinations of the Hollywood elite with this debate bro stuff

Also, I'm going to preempt what usually happens--where I ask something specific and it gets conveniently ignored--by pulling out three specific requests in that previous post. All three of them are you either misremembering, misunderstanding, or misrepresenting something. They're all functionally accusations, and I've challenged you, the self-described person of "substance," to provide that substance with actual quotes:

I'm doing this because this is exactly the kind of stuff that always gets ignored and then never mentioned again. That's not gonna fly any more. You actually have to back up your accusations once in awhile. If you can't or won't do this, then you're simply unserious.

I wish this even occasionally resembled a "debate."

I'm starting to think there is a pretty strong correlation between not knowing how arguments work, and having consistently terrible opinions.

When the basis of your argument is something doesn't exist but it could exist in which case you are wrong. That is a strawman argument. Rather than have any facts to support your position you are arguing the nature of said facts.


So in your mind you think Baldoni releasing evidence is the same as Blake Lively's actions here. We're speaking about a woman who organized Baldoni to be removed from his podcast, fired him from his agency, had a coordinated attack with the New York Times set to release to smear this guy. But in your brain that is the same as getting help and releasing as much raw evidence as possible. And now it's been reported that Lively's camp is trying to pull down videos. Degree and damages matter. What information has Baldoni specifically manipulated or suppressed.

Well I'm so glad that you feel like you have an authority to declare what are or are not principles.

You are literally fighting the first part of your statement with the second part. You are saying I didn't specifically say hiring a PR firm but then a paragraph later I'm going to make the same argument. And then you turn around and say this...

Your argument is it's possible he did bad things. Talk about your heavy lifting here...he did it...or he hired someone else to do something and that something being to tell people what she did. This might come as a shock to you but everyone does "bad things". You have refused to stick to the facts of the case rather leaning on high minded pablum.

You keep pulling this junk...you don't get to complain about your arguments being misrepresented when you engage in hyperbolic rhetoric and speculation. Now you are arguing that well even if she did these horrible things (I would say criminal) well that would cause someone to do...well I'm not sure I understand what you think Baldoni did if he didn't employ a PR firm to smear her. As a point of fact I'm not sure I can recall you making any sort of substantive post or point. I don't know what he's said that isn't easily provable but you seem hell bent on being obtuse and ignoring all the facts of the case to make some sort of moral grandstanding.

You wish for me to prove a supposition, while this might fly in a philosophical debate this is an actual court case where things happened. And you have done seemingly everything in your power to avoid addressing the facts of the case. Is this an ego thing for you because it's starting to feel like an ego thing.

I don't know why you wish to continue with churlish comments about my motivations. But now you are arguing everything that happened clearly happened but also it's possible that other things happened as well and we have no way of knowing what said things are. I'm not sure I could point to a single thing of substance you've said in this entire conversation. And yes I will edit your diatribes because that seems to be the basis of your position.

So this is an argument to you, funny because to me this js a discussion. Also I really don't know what tough questions I've avoided. Throughout this entire conversation I don't think I can point to a single fact based point that you've made rather you've leaned on the rhetoric.

It's also a little rich where now that she's confessed to what she does on set that you now what to split hairs.

I suppose the irony is completely lost on you that you want a specific quote and yet you can't seem to articulate just what Baldoni did. You are upset about an argument being misrepresented and yet you fail to actually make one of any sort of substance. You wish yourself to be Yoda but you are in fact part of the empire because you favor emotion over reason.


And while I am...tickled that so many of you seem to support your immoderate moderator and yet none of you wish to actually discuss the facts of the case rather you seem more interested in me.

We don't know all of the facts yet. We do know a man has been credibly accused of sexual harassment and also that for some strange reason you seem unusually interested in defending said man.

Have none of you realized, stupidity never dies. It's immortal.


Just look at those last two completely befuddled posts. He keeps complaining that 'no facts are being presented', when the problem is instead the foundation being used to prop up the supposed 'facts' already in play. Any reasonable person would see there is no reason to keep building upon what has already stupidly been said because there is a ****ing San Andreas fault line laying in clear view beneath the conversation. But here we are, the guy who is getting completely owned raising his arms in victory, and he doesn't even know what ****ing game he's playing.


It's like watching two people have a clock building competition, and one party is calling out the others already completed clock because it hasn't been wound yet. Meanwhile, this dink is sitting with a pile of disassembled pieces laying in front of him weeks later, and when anyone points out that what he keeps fumbling around with aren't even actual clock pieces, and are instead half eaten bagels and dog turds and old candy bar wrappers, he just keeps self contentedly patting himself on the back that his is the best clock anyone has ever seen, no matter how much everyone else is laughing at him.


I pray to God he's twelve. Then maybe this would be excusable. Maybe

A strawman argument is arguing with a different or false version of someone's argument without noting the distinction, usually done to imply a contradiction where none has taken place. Which, incidentally, is exactly what's happening when you keep trying to win the argument "Blake Lively did bad things" without producing any quote of anyone disputing that idea.

What you're describing--and what I was using--is called a counterfactual. And if you search on that word you'll see me using it many times, because it's a pretty important concept, and it's necessary to discuss these kinds of situations.

Nope. And this is why I keep asking for quotes, because your summaries of my position are (see above) straw men, conveniently changing or dropping key words or distinctions, usually the important parts. Here it is again:

A couple of times now you've thrown out some principle like this, which you claim to believe because you feel it describes Lively, without realizing that it describes Baldoni, too.

I suppose the idea is that broad principles sound truer than complicated or nuanced ones. So it sounds good to suggest that only dishonest people misrepresent themselves, even though Baldoni literally did exactly that. And it sounds good to sarcastically say "nothing says innocent person like controlling information," even though that's exactly what he did, provably. And when it's called out, suddenly it's "well, it's not the same because of this and this." But if it's not the same, then stop pretending these principles are actually guiding your search for truth, rather than being used as mere rhetoric.

Arguing with lists like this is kind of a waste of time because you refuse to honestly discuss the difference between claims and facts. Here's me asking you to differentiate between established facts and claims, very early on. No response. Later you said something had been "revealed" which I immediately noticed had only been claimed. No response then, either.

You've been caught doing this many times, and you simply act like it never happened, move on, and then do it again later. It's a pattern, and it's a problem, and it's completely dissonant with the stuff about being the patron saint of caring about facts.

Your position is that hiring people to create false identities to spur a fake public backlash is fairly described as "releasing as much raw evidence as possible"? This is like the third time you've tried to pretend this public backlash stunt is equivalent to issuing a press release.

See, if I used your, eh, more malleable standards of truth here, I could just list everything Lively claims he's done, since you seem perfectly content to just list Baldoni's claims as if they were handed down on stone tablets and have them entered into the record as fact. But I'm not going to do that, because that's ridiculous. Which means we have both sides making dozens of claims of currently dubious accuracy, which will come out on discovery if things continue far enough. You obviously made up your mind immediately about all of it and now have a major emotional interest in pretending all of it will be completely proven so you can be personally validated, I guess. I have no such emotional interest because I have not, and will not, take the position that Lively is innocent of everything she's being accused of. In fact I went out of my way to say I assume some of it is true (I wonder if you noticed?).

SO, the reasonable thing to do is to focus on the things that are actually confirmed. And the biggest confirmed fact, to me, is the very first thing I mentioned in this thread: that he hired a PR firm to make people up to create a fake cultural backlash. That's a really sneaky thing to do. It is not, as you somehow claimed with a straight face, just a releasing of "raw evidence." And it is not accurately described as "hiring a PR firm" or what have you. Nobody is mad that he hired PR people, they're mad about the specific things those PR people did at his behest.

But there really can't be any confusion now. The paragraph above is extremely straightforward, so I hope there'll be no more feigning confusion or evasion where you try to pretend that the issue is just hiring PR people. It was never that, and it was made clear it was never that, and only something approaching willful misunderstanding could've concluded otherwise at any point.

It's not me, it's simple logic: if you say you believe something because of X, but you don't always believe things because of X, then it's not a real principle. It's just a bumper sticker: it's something people say because it's nice and pithy, but it's not really how they decide what to believe.

I just addressed this above, but I'll spell it out again: you can "hire a PR crisis team" to do a thousand things. They may issue a press release. They may offer advice about which things to emphasize. They may help you prepare for the kinds of attacks that could be coming. All of that fits under the description "hiring a PR crisis team" and all of it is reasonable. But they can also do really shady, underhanded things, like plant stories, or make up people on social media to try to create a fake public backlash. That also fits under "hiring a PR crisis team," and that is what's objectionable. Not the mere hiring of a PR crisis team, but the specific one hired to do the specific things they did.

If you continue to try to pretend that the opposition is to just hiring PR people, full stop, then I'll have no choice but to conclude that the misunderstanding is deliberate and/or a smokescreen, because it's been explained in excruciating detail.

Also, please answer the actual question, because it's still applicable to what you said either way:

"Everything they can"? So it's your position that if Lively is trying to "control" his film, anything he does in response is just him being "discerning"?

Yes or no? If your answer is yes, we can wrap this up because it's manifestly absurd. If it's no, then this is another clear example of the "not real principles" thing I mentioned that you're apparently offended by.

This is an obviously false equivalence and I called it out like 10 posts ago, and more since. "Tell people what she did" is a ridiculous description of what happened. They made up people up to try to create a fake sense of culture shift. This, too, was addressed very early on:

Yeah, every time I feel someone's being unfair to me, I argue with them by paying a PR firm to pretend to be a bunch of people to talk about them. I mean, how else are you gonna defend yourself?

It never got a response. As I said, this is a pattern.

Ya' got me. My position is entirely predicated on a denial of the existence of sin. My argument lies in ruins. Nothing beside remains.

Pretty churlish.

Why would that preclude me from complaining about being misrepresented? If I'm doing those things, quote me directly and show me where I'm doing that.

Are you under the impression people don't have to prove suppositions in court?

What you're sensing (and confusing for ego) is my admitted lack of patience with people who are really argumentative despite not knowing how arguments work, and/or not even making a good faith effort to substantively reply to other people. People who think it's like pro wrestling, where you just find a mic and start monologuing, and then get all huffy or insulted when you notice they're not responding to things.

I do think there's ego at play, though. And I think we can demonstrate it with a few simple questions:

Have you been wrong about anything in this exchange? Have you admitted any misdeed on Baldoni's part, at all? Have you rejected a single claim about Lively as being unproven or implausible? And if the answer to every single one of these questions is "no," doesn't that strike you as implausible?

No, I'm arguing that some of these things may have happened, that neither of us knows which (outside of a few confirmed things), and that it's weird for you to pretend not only that you know, but that it's obvious. And that the thought process involved is obviously wrong and inconsistent, whatever the reality turns out to be.

I believe you. But I think that's because you don't really read the things you're responding to.

All arguments are discussions, but not all discussions are arguments.

Literally in the very next post I produced three of them, and you didn't answer any, instead talking about "irony."

Yes, this is a hallmark of people who don't understand argument: any time you seem to catch a contradiction or ask a question they don't have an answer to...it must have been a trick of some kind. It has to be, because the alternative is being wrong, or even being right but saying it the wrong way. And that can't be true, so it's a trick/rhetoric.

So my follow-up is always: okay, quote me. Show me where the trick is. Come up on stage, inspect the rabbit and the hat and the table. Show me the hole, show me where I've employed rhetoric instead of (has to be instead of) logic or reason. Show me the exact part where I use the wrong word or jump to an unsupported conclusion. Show me literally anything other than "nah uh" or vague, disparaging summaries of my position that omit all those pesky details that actual arguments are supposed to be made of.

I'm glad you brought that up, because I also wanted to ask: did you actually watch the video you posted, before posting it? Answer honestly, please.

So...you're refusing to produce any evidence? Meaning, you're accusing me of saying and doing things, and when I say "prove it," you're just not substantiating it at all?

Cute. This is kind of a silly exercise, but okay, I'll play along: I think it's more like I'm Yoda and you're Luke, refusing to listen as I explain basic philosophical concepts. And the longer it goes on the closer I get to just vanishing. To think, I could've been eating sweet-ass space wafers this whole time.

They were interested in the facts. If you go back and re-read (ha, just kidding, I know you weirdly refuse to ever do that) the early posts several people try to talk to you about facts, and you just brush past it and keep monologuing.

So yes, in every one of these discussions, when people have tried and failed to have a normal, fact-based discussion with you, eventually they have no choice but to start speculating at to why you can't or won't carry on such an exchange. And then, apparently, you blame them for it.

I haven't really dipped into this thread and I don't know if I agree with you or not, but the pile-on support for Yoda is ugly.

NOTE: Don't piss the bartender off too much, I like the cut of your jib.

For my part, I try not to meaningfully encourage cheerleading or pile-ons. But I don't think this has a lot to do with me; it has more to do with the fact that this is something like the fifth time this cycle has played out, and a few others in this thread have been on the receiving end of it previously.

The fact that it's happened with several different people--but always in the same manner--is one of the more significant facts at play, too, since none of this can be put down to a clash of specific personalities.

My posts responding to his were largely ignored.

Yep. His past behavior and pattern of arguing in the above manner is what has made his reputation what it is. Yeah, people are piling on but that’s not Yoda’s fault.

You should see Siddons posts during HOF watches. If it was a movie he liked he actively gave you a hard time iver it in his reviews. If you didn’t give a long enough review of his nominated movie he responded like he was owed more.
It was ridiculous.

After this and The Holdover’s script issue he has displayed similar arguments.

I think that this is a situation that is just on pause until an actual trial happens and we start getting some facts and background.

When it all unfolded, it was interesting to talk about the ways that it did or did not fit in with other recent cases of on-set misconduct and shenanigans. Certainly some of the released items (like the rider, the communication between Baldoni's PR people) were very interesting to discuss.

But now we're to the point where some specific questions need to be asked (I keep saying it, I know, but someone just needs to ask one of the intimacy coordinators if they were or were not on-set before the now-infamous rider---easy peasy!) to give key context to the allegations from both sides.

If people are strongly taking one side or the other, I'm not sure what productive conversation there is to have at this point, because about 90% of the allegations are the kind of stuff you can argue based on your bias. (Is asking a post-partum woman about her weight just being safety conscious, or is it a creepy power-play move?)

Does anyone actually want to discuss Blake Lively as an actor or her films? I think she is a good actor. I've seen 9 of her films (and every episode of Gossip Girl) and even when the film she is in isn't great, she does a good job.