If you’re the villain of an 80’s action movie, and you’re fighting the hero in the climactic showdown, there’s a good chance that you’ll try to throw sand (or dust, or powder) in the eyes of the hero to try to blind him. After all, he can’t fight if he can’t see, right? Obscuring the conflict should be great way to overcome your own lack of skill. It won’t work, unfortunately – the hero, though blinded, will still defeat you, making his victory and your defeat all the sweeter.

In real life, however, kicking up some dust is a great way to win, or at least to avoid losing. And just like in the movies, it’s a dirty trick that only villains use.

I am, of course, talking about arguments. Again. Specifically, I’m talking about kicking up dust by making things more complex than they need to be. Once any counter arguments become impossible to predict, impossible to check or impossible to know, you don’t have to worry about discarding your assumption – since you can’t prove it wrong, it must be right!

Example:
Woman: You should quit smoking, it’s bad for you.
Man: The studies that show that were all performed in the sixties with an extremely flawed methodology – they may have even been forged.
Woman: What? Why would you think that?
Man: You can’t be sure they WEREN’T forged, and the issue has become so politically charged that any current studies are suspect. People think it’s bad, and so they’ll try to interpret the evidence to show that it’s bad. The same thing happened with the concept of nuclear winter.
Woman: Yes, but…
Man: And there’s plenty of examples of conventional wisdom about medicine being way off base – look at all the hoopla about low fat diets. The human body is amazingly complex and we’re really not very good at teasing cause and effect relationships out of it.
Woman: Well…
Man: Besides, anything’s bad for you if you have too much of it, and its not clear how much you have to smoke before any alleged health problems start to show up. The science surrounding smoking is murky at best.
Woman: I want a divorce.

~fin

This sort of “it’s complicated, therefore it’s probably wrong, therefore I’m probably right” chicanery can be done for almost anything that can’t be directly verified. Much like arguing against basic principles, fog like this is difficult to penetrate. And also like arguing against basic principles, using this strategy makes you a dick.