zlacker

And the rejection of common sense is often used to defend ideas so bad that one has to put serious intellectual effort to create arguments for them.

A lot more "intellectuals" defended Pol Pot and Milosevic compared to ordinary chums. The denial of the Cambodian genocide was known as the "Standard Total Academic View on Cambodia".

>>userna+(OP)
There's some truth to that, but I'm not sure it's an argument for the phrase 'common sense'.

I can't think of a position on anything that someone couldn't twist into an appeal to 'common sense'

There are different cheap rhetorical devices that some intellectuals use. I don't like that either.