In bad faith 

I love this article on saving advice about sex as a way to save money. I don’t love it for the article itself, but for one comment below the article, written by “faith”:

Anyone that has no moral compass and would sleep with a prostitute should never be allowed to give advice to others. It is disgusting that you are allowed to write for this blog.

Sex is not a way to save money. It is a way for a good Christian couple to raise a family. This is the worst financial article I have ever read.

There are several fallacies here:

  1. Thinking that to have sex with a prostitute means you have no moral compass. Having sex with a stranger for money is only bizarre in the USA. It’s not immoral, nor is it amoral. It doesn’t increase suffering, and it is both a consensual act and a business transaction.
  2. It doesn’t make someone’s advice invalid on any subject. Being someone who doesn’t know about a subject (like say, morality) makes for bad advice.
  3. Because one person doesn’t like it doesn’t mean that a person should never give advice. A lot of people think this is a valid form of argument. You can’t state an opinion forcefully and have it magically become fact. That’s not how things work.
  4. It is not disgusting that this person is allowed to write for the blog. This again is opinion stated as fact, another thing I can’t stand from this segment of the population.
  5. The author pointed out the ways that sex has saved money for him. To say it doesn’t save money is a flat-out contradiction of this. Of course, paying for sex doesn’t save money, but this isn’t what he’s talking about.
  6. Sex is not only for Christians. It’s for people of all faiths or lack of faith.
  7. Sex is not a tool used only to start a family. It is both useful for reproduction and recreation. Again, stating opinion as some sort of fact.
  8. The worst advice I can imagine would be something like: Buy contractualized debt obligations. Not this.

Yet another example of one culture thinking it’s the only culture and training people to spark moral outrage at the slightest offense. It’s embarrassing that we have to see this sort of thing in the 21st century.