Apologia pro vita sua

What Hacker News says

1. geofftAug 2020
   Right, there are, what, hundreds of millions of worshippers of Guanyin in the world?

   Meanwhile, the author has multiple peer-reviewed publications about John Henry Newman and fasting. Speaking as someone who worships at Anglican churches, has a copy of Apologia pro Vita Sua, and makes something of an attempt to follow Anglican traditions around fasting (the ones that would have been familiar to Newman), I can assure you (with some sadness) that there are nowhere near a hundred million people today who care about Anglican fasting practices in general, and that the tradition is almost certainly about to die out. (Perhaps it's unfair of me to pick on the author - but I think it's also unfair for the author to have picked on other academics in his field, when he could have said, "After spending years writing about Newman's fasting practices, I realized I'd have more impact on society by joining libertarian think tanks, and that's a problem for academia," and it would have been a much more convincing argument.)

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2. escherplexSep 2018
   As in Newman's Apologia Pro Vita Sua (L: A defence of one's own life)
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3. geofftMay 2017
   I really don't think this is a new / Internet phenomenon, by any means.

   I've been re-reading John Henry Newman's Apologia pro Vita Sua, published in 1864, describing the author's conversion from the Church of England (where he was one of the most visible clergymen of the time) to Roman Catholicism. It was written in response to another clergyman making accusations that, not only was Newman being dishonest, that dishonesty was an inherent characteristic of Catholics, and that (based on an uncharitable reading of Alphonsus Liguori) it was Catholic doctrine that Catholics could lie about anything to preserve their faith, and therefore Newman had been a Catholic sleeper agent his whole life, tricking his fellow conservative Anglicans into adopting papist positions until he was ready to reveal himself as a Catholic to convince others to jump ship.

   He sets out his response in the introduction, and in it he introduces the term "poisoning the well" to name a logical fallacy: he asserts that his ideological opponent has made it impossible for him to say anything in self-defense, and hopes his readers will recognize it.

   This all strikes me as extremely reminiscent of Internet arguments. The uncharitable clergyman is very tribal, and defecting from the Anglican tribe to the Roman Catholic one is an unforgivable offense. And Newman responds by saying, look, you have used a logical fallacy against me. They'd fit so well on Slashdot! But it was over 100 years before the Internet.

   (On a side note, the phrase "imaginary Internet points" to describe upvotes strikes me as a thought-killing meme jab itself. The descriptor "imaginary" makes no sense: what would real Internet points look like?)

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