Re: Has the US gone communist yet? It\'s hard to tell.
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You cannot logically dismiss an argument/position based on the prior history of the source.
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You're misapplying the idea. It holds when it comes to the question of whether or not a statement (He's paid by Exxon to dismiss anthropogenic global warming, therefore his argument is wrong.) is, in itself, logically sound. It does not hold when it comes to the question of whether, given a source's background, history, known allegiances, etc., you can reasonably safely dismiss that source's argument. That is, given such information, you can sometimes know there is only the tiniest chance a source's argument will be valid. To use a blatant example, if someone tells me his two-year-old of average intelligence came up with an argument to show that global warming is in no way human-caused, I can safely dismiss it.
The Exxon-funded climate change dismissers are much like that two-year-old. And just as it's pretty safe to dismiss the tobacco-hired scientist's (or a two-year-old's) argument that smoking is safe, it's pretty safe to dismiss the arguments of scientists hired by Exxon to dismiss anthropogenic global warming, particularly as long as they're not doing peer reviewed research of their own (a part of their background).
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