METADEBATE!: Noam Chomsky vs. J.Kenyon

My opponent seems to be someone mistaken about the resolution of this debate. It was, "If Noam Chomsky were to join DDO and face J.Kenyon in a debate about a topic in economics, Noam Chomsky would win the debate," and not, "All of Noam Chomsky's views are 100% correct, and if my opponent provides one statement by Chomsky that is unreasonable then I will concede defeat." Despite my opponent's allegation that I did not argue, I have repeatedly expressed my reasons for not wasting my time debating that paragraph about the Internet. It is completely off topic to go into a debate about the Internet, and I don't believe Chomsky was correct in making that statement. My opponent wanted to focus the debate entirely around one topic to make it appear as though Chomsky knows nothing because he exaggerated a single claim. However, one paragraph is not a body of work and you cannot hope to prove that Chomsky's views on a whole are not credible on the basis of one statement. I will admit to one mistake: my opponent is so rude and ridiculous in his exaggerations that I could not tell that he was being sarcastic in making the statement that highways are not based off of Indian trails. However, I still don't think this is analogous to saying that the effort the Fed put into developing the Internet has no impact on the Internet today. The main point about my opponent's quote from Chomsky, however, is that the fact that he made one hyperbolic statement does not discredit his entire body of work. My opponent's constant complains about appeals to authority show a severe lacking in how we understand knowledge and incorporate it in to our world view. Why do we value a statement made by a respected scientist over a random blogger? Because some people have the credentials that lead us to believe that they know what they're talking about. I have never been to Alabama, but I am justified in believing it is a real because of sources that tell me. Is trusting a map an appeal to authority? Noam Chomsky was the most cited living person in the world in academic papers from 1980 to 1992 and the 8th most cited person of all time (1). I suppose it is a ridiculous appeal to authority to wonder if my opponent is really such a better judge of Chomsky's knowledge than the thousands of scholars who use his work. Perhaps we should believe in that radical notion that it is often better to defer to people who know more than you about something. Screaming "appeal to authority" and "logical fallacy" over and over won't work, especially when I'm only arguing that Chomsky knows what he's talking about and not that he's right about specific statements (then it would be a logical fallacy, yes). Chomsky's economic views are not the topic of this debate. The resolution was not that my opponent could pick any related topic. We know that Chomsky and Kenyon both have fairly extreme views that are similar in that they are libertarian but on opposite ends of the "left-right" scale. Even an anarcho-capitalist should not take the argument "Chomsky's whole economic viewpoint is wrong, and therefore he would lose the debate" seriously. It's one thing to disagree with someone, but it's foolhardy to think that your view is so superior that you cannot lose a debate. I doubt anyone rationally believes this. My opponent has not really criticized Chomsky's economic position as a whole anyway, he provided us with one paragraph (which include !/a single sentence/! that he actually challenged) which he argued was false and asked us to conclude that Chomsky is wrong about everything else, too. Well, I'm sure if Chomsky were challenged and that position he could defend it but I'm not going to turn this into a debate about the history of the Internet because no one's credibility rests on one claim. I find it very ironic that my opponent accused me of copy-pasting my arguments (which, obviously, I didn't) when he literally copy-pasted statements within the same round. I rewrote much of the same thing because my opponent doesn't understand the difference between an appeal to authority (Statement X is true because Person Y says so) and and using credentials as evidence (Person Y is awesome because he has achieved such and such). I am doing that second of the two. Arguing that someone would win a debate because they have the most impressive collection of scholarly awards of any living person is not a "logical fallacy," it's practically common sense. I would like to remind voters that my opponent has made no constructive case yet. Kenyon is coherent and a good debater, but his opinions are just as radical as Chomsky's. He is not more reasonable. Compared Kenyon to Chomsky: he is far less experienced, far less educated, has no comparable accomplishments, has less demonstrated knowledge, and has an inferior demonstrated writing ability. Kenyon is a smart 18 year old college student who is a strong debater. Chomsky is an 82 year old scientist and philosopher who revolutionized his field, and I would hazard to say that Chomsky has more honorary degrees awarded that Kenyon has credit hours earned. A debate between these two would be completely one-sided in favor of Chomsky. Furthermore, I will mention again that my opponent ignored my stipulation that the first round would not be used for debating in order to get an extra round. I think he should bow out of the next round so we will have had an equal number of opportunities to argue. If he chooses to ignore this request, I strongly urge that voters make him lose the conduct vote, as he intentionally ignored a request I made in Round One in order to gain an advantage. Conclusion: My opponent does not understand what an appeal to authority really is in a logical sense, and he cares more about crying foul at "logical fallacies" than using common sense. While this may impress some voters, dogmatic adherence to the perceived rules of argument does not trump a well reasoned conclusion. In terms of substance, his case is seriously lacking. He is trying to demolish Chomsky's credibility on the basis of one paragraph, from which he calls one sentence into question. The fact that Chomsky has exaggerated an example to make his point is not grounds to dismiss his entire body of work and claim that he's too ignorant to win a debate. To say that Noam Chomsky is ignorant and that an 18 year old college student would beat him in a debate is practically delusional. Kenyon himself argued that Santa existed and crushed his opponent, and there are people who could do similar things to him. On a fair, or even slightly unfair topic, Chomsky would win commandingly. My opponent has absolutely no affirmative case an never made one statement about why Kenyon would win the debate, he just expected us to infer that Chomsky would lose from the absurd claim that he doesn't know what he's talking about. He has also been consistently rude and sarcastic even though I did nothing to provoke this behavior, and he ignored the rules I outlined in Round One in order to gain an advantage. His sources amount to one quote from Chomsky's website and a link to information about computers that has nothing to do with the actual debate. My opponent's unsubstantial diatribe against Chomsky does nothing to prove his side of the resolution and little to hurt mine. Sources: (1) http://web.mit.edu...