The NonSequitur

As I head off to vacation, let us marvel at Newt Ginrich marvelling at God's mysterious ways (courtesy of Media Matters):

newtgingrich As callista and i watched what dc weather says will be 12 to 22 inches of snow i wondered if God was sending a message about copenhagen

newtgingrich After the expanding revelations of dishonesty in climategate having a massive snow storm as obama promises our money to the world is ironic

newtgingrich There is something jimmy carter like about weather service upgrading frrom winter storm to blizzard as global warming conference wants US $ 

But he was not alone.  There was disagreement about the meaning of the snow storm.  Here is Erick Erickson at the not-worth-evaluating Red State blog:

Over at Talking Points Memo, Brian Beutler chronicles the follies of the Democrats and health care.

Joe Lieberman has gone back to Connecticut in advance of the blizzard. This leaves the Democrats needing Republican votes to get back to health care.

At the end of the article, Brian writes, “[D]on’t be surprised to hear a new Republican talking point: Even Mother Nature hates health care reform.”

I hate to correct him, but actually the talking point is that God hates the Democrats’ health care deform. With funding death panels and abortions, of course the Almighty would send a snow storm or, in Brian’s words, a snowpocalypse to shut down Washington.

Oh, and kudos to Tony Perkins and the Family Research Council for organizing the “pray-in.” Looks to be working.

I am tempted to think the second of these is a joke, but the "death panels" remark seems to be serious. 

George Will wouldn't let us down and make it through a column without an awful argument. Last three sentences in a column, that on a cursory reading at least was not that unreasonable. Throughout most of the column, he lambasts Obama for liberal opportunism, cynical budget manipulation, and his lack of qualifications for his job, all of which seems mildly cheap. But then he comes through for us:

One afternoon last week, cable news viewers saw, at the top of their screens, the president launching yet another magnificent intention — the disassembly and rearrangement of the 17 percent of the economy that is health care. The bottom of their screens showed the Dow plunging 281 points. Surely the top of the screen partially explained the bottom. 

I can't say whether there is such a causal relationship between Obama's speech and the Dow Industrial drop, but I worry a bit that Will is confusing MSNBC's immediate feedback stuff with the Dow Industrial Averages.

George Will's been taking a beating lately–His character, his general ignorance of that of which he comments upon, and, our favorite, his logic have all come under increasing attack recently. Today we can give him a pass on his column. Its silliness is not entirely his fault. For some reason he devotes his column to fawning over the relatively uninteresting analogy between past sexual morality and the supposed moralizing about food by one expert in philosophy at the Hoover institute, Nancy Eberhardt who we are told by Will is "intimidatingly intelligent."

The idea seems to be that in the past we moralized sex, but left food to be a mere matter of taste. Now we moralize food, but leave sex to be a mere matter of taste. I think probably both claims are false, though I'm willing to bite that we have stopped moralizing a lot of sex, and some moralize a lot of their choices involving food.

But, then we run into this sort of confusion:

Most important of all, however, is the difference in moral attitude separating Betty and Jennifer on the matter of food. Jennifer feels that there is a right and wrong about these options that transcends her exercise of choice as a consumer. She does not exactly condemn those who believe otherwise, but she doesn’t understand why they do, either. And she certainly thinks the world would be a better place if more people evaluated their food choices as she does. She even proselytizes on occasion when she can. In short, with regard to food, Jennifer falls within Immanuel Kant’s definition of the Categorical Imperative: She acts according to a set of maxims that she wills at the same time to be universal law.

In heavy-handed contrast:

Even without such personal links to food scarcity, though, it makes no sense to Betty that people would feel as strongly as her granddaughter does about something as simple as deciding just what goes into one’s mouth. That is because Betty feels, as Jennifer obviously does not, that opinions about food are simply de gustibus, a matter of individual taste — and only that.

And again:

Most important of all, Betty feels that sex, unlike food, is not de gustibus. She believes to the contrary that there is a right and wrong about these choices that transcends any individual act. She further believes that the world would be a better place, and individual people better off, if others believed as she does. She even proselytizes such on occasion when given the chance.

And to beat the horse within an inch of its life:

Most important, once again, is the difference in moral attitude between the two women on this subject of sex. Betty feels that there is a right and wrong about sexual choices that transcends any individual act, and Jennifer — exceptions noted — does not. It’s not that Jennifer lacks for opinions about sex, any more than Betty does about food. It’s just that, for the most part, they are limited to what she personally does and doesn’t like.

And to make it clearer still:

As noted, this desire to extend their personal opinions in two different areas to an “ought” that they think should be somehow binding — binding, that is, to the idea that others should do the same — is the definition of the Kantian imperative. Once again, note: Betty’s Kantian imperative concerns sex not food, and Jennifer’s concerns food not sex. In just over 50 years, in other words — not for everyone, of course, but for a great many people, and for an especially large portion of sophisticated people — the moral poles of sex and food have been reversed. Betty thinks food is a matter of taste, whereas sex is governed by universal moral law of some kind; and Jennifer thinks exactly the reverse.  

Fortunately she doesn't draw any substantial conclusions from this. With that sort of genial Brooksy, "foibles of the human race exposing, concealed smirk," she contents herself with running this analogy to its exhaustion while ignoring relevant points of disanalogy, and doing little more than pointing out this curious social change, which perhaps seems to be neither curious, nor a social change, with closer scrutiny. But she closes with this whopper of a post hoc propter hoc fallacy wrapped in a bacony strip of psychoanalyzing explanation and deep-fried in a vat of greasy rhetorical questions:

The rise of a recognizably Kantian, morally universalizable code concerning food — beginning with the international vegetarian movement of the last century and proceeding with increasing moral fervor into our own times via macrobiotics, veganism/vegetarianism, and European codes of terroir — has paralleled exactly the waning of a universally accepted sexual code in the Western world during these same years. 

Who can doubt that the two trends are related? Unable or unwilling (or both) to impose rules on sex at a time when it is easier to pursue it than ever before, yet equally unwilling to dispense altogether with a universal moral code that he would have bind society against the problems created by exactly that pursuit, modern man (and woman) has apparently performed his own act of transubstantiation. He has taken longstanding morality about sex, and substituted it onto food. The all-you-can-eat buffet is now stigmatized; the sexual smorgasbord is not. 

In the end, it is hard to avoid the conclusion that the rules being drawn around food receive some force from the fact that people are uncomfortable with how far the sexual revolution has gone — and not knowing what to do about it, they turn for increasing consolation to mining morality out of what they eat. 

Perhaps it's just me, but I find it surprisingly easy to avoid this conclusion. 

On the whole this site concerns itself with top-shelf newspaper punditry primarily because as one descends into syndication things get pretty bad.  So bad, at times, one wonders whether it's even fair to bring our very undergraduate skills of logical analysis to bear.  But sometimes, however, it's just entertaining.  If anything, Bill Maher's Religulous shows us that.  Someone could do the same thing for the poltical world.  Here's one place to start:

An e-mail: "OK, I'll say it…I believe today's massive decline was, in part (and maybe a big "in part"), in fear that the debate tonight won't go well for McCain and the implications that will have for an Obama victory. The likelihood of a recession has been talked about and, probably, factored in to a lot of folks' thinking already… …if tonight's debate tracks well for McCain, you'll see a positive response tomorrow; if it doesn't, hold on; it won't be pretty. Call it: 'Flight to Safety (from Socialism).'"

That's an email an editor at William F.Buckley's National Review thought important enough to repost online–without howls of laughter or at least notes of compassion for the person's diminished intellectual capacity.  So here's the problem, if one were to do a Religulous of politics, where would one begin?

In a meritocracy, people earn their way upwards.  So foundational is the notion of merit to a meritocracy, that for some, such as myself for instance, it has a broader application.  In a meritocracy democracy, such as ours would like to be, people advance their position on the strength of their arguments.  If your argument has no merit because it rests on made up facts–or lies as some call them–you ought to realize it does not deserve to be made not to mention win.  Well, would that Jonah Goldberg thought this way,  He writes:

I have no idea whatsoever if there's merit to this, and if there is how much merit, but lots of email like this:

When are people going to start talking about the REAL reason the markets are down – Obama up in polls. If I was McCain, I'd start telling people, "If you want to lose more money, vote Obama."

A person such as Goldberg could perhaps be bothered to check to see whether there is any merit to his obviously contentious, to say the least, claim.  His readers could be forgiven, after all, they read him.  

Thanks to Glenn Greenwald for the tip.

If we still wonder why our children isn't learning, we might also ask some why well-educated and rich adults can't seem to learn either.  On that point, once again, George Will has found the root cause of educational success in the American inner city.  What might it be?  If you guessed, eliminate the teachers unions, you'd be right:

CRJHS can have its work program, its entirely college preparatory courses ("the old, dead white man's curriculum," says an English teacher cheerfully), its zero tolerance of disorder (from gang symbols down to chewing gum), its enforcement of decorum (couples dancing suggestively are told to "leave some space there for the Holy Spirit") and its requirement that every family pay something, if only as little as $25 a month. It can have all this because it is not shackled by bureaucracy or unions, as public schools are. 

Cristo Rey can have all of this because it is a private, Catholic, school that can pick and choose its students.  The ones not chosen end up somewhere else.  Where do they go?  Who will educate them?  I think it's clear at this point that if you asked George Will he'd say: who cares.

Here's what looks like a causal argument–or a causal inference at least–wrapped up in another causal  explanatory inference.  The second one is an ad hominem, the first likely a causal fallacy.  Robert Kagan, of hawkish foreign policy fame writes.

Judged on its own terms, the war on terror has been by far Bush's greatest success. [1] No serious observer imagined after September 11 that seven years would go by without a single additional terrorist attack on U.S. soil. [2] Only naked partisanship and a justifiable fear of tempting fate have prevented the Bush administration from getting or taking credit for what most would have regarded seven years ago as a near miracle. Much of the Bush administration's success, moreover, has been due to extensive international cooperation, especially with the European powers in the areas of intelligence sharing, law enforcement, and homeland security. Whatever else the Bush administration has failed to do, it has not failed to protect Americans from another attack on the homeland. The next administration will be fortunate to be able to say the same — and will be contrasted quite unfavorably with the Bush administration if it cannot."[numbers inserted]

While there thankfully hasn't been another attack (aside from the Anthrax attacks) on U.S. soil, there have been numerous terrorist attacks on U.S. allies (Britain, Spain, Bali, etc.) and U.S. interests (Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iraq, Jordan, and so on).  Aside from the unsettling progress in Afghanistan and Iraq, one might suggest (as many terrorism experts have) that no terrorist attack was planned or attempted on U.S.soil.  So Kagan might be claiming credit for nothing.  In light of such observations, Kagan can hardly claim that "naked partisanship" (and fear of jinxing it) have prevented the Bush administration from taking credit.

So the second claim assumes only the weakest objections to credit-mongering (which, by the way, the Bush administration has not been shy of pointing out), when a person of Kagan's calibre ought to know better.  Given the existence of such views, Kagan ought to be far more circumspect when it comes to definitive causal assertions of the sort that the Bush Administration is responsible for stopping or otherwise preventing attacks on US soil–their mere absence is not evidence for its success.  Besides, given its unique ability to thwart terrorism here, our Allies might wonder why we can't be more helpful to them in this regard.

In fairness to Kagan, there's much more to the argument than cited here.  But then again, a silly argument is a silly argument.

A reader (hurray for readers) wondered if I might have something to say about this column on same-sex marriage.  I might.  I'd say the author hasn't even really tried.  Luckily, however, he italicizes his points so even I can see where to look.  His points are three in number.  And three is the number of his points, not four, not two.  He writes:

It is not the business of judges to make public policy.

Reasonable men and women can disagree on whether same-sex unions should be granted legal recognition, or whether such recognition should rise to the level of marriage. The place to work out those disagreements is the democratic arena, not the courtroom.

Well, the court, which decides matters such as these, is an institution in our democracy–a fundamental one, some might not implausibly suggest.  Its decisions necessarily have to do with public policy.  This argument–judicial activism!–really ought to be retired: they're little question-begging argumentative stand-ins.  Make a legal argument against the legal argument.  

Point number two:

The radical transformation of marriage won't end with same-sex weddings.

Another well-worn anti gay marriage argument.  Where will it end?  Well, the slope begins with actual marriage, so one can only conclude that the existence of marriage between a "straight" couple will lead to all sorts of weird marriages.  Besides, the problem with this particular variation of the slippery slope argument, it tacitly admits there's nothing wrong with gay marriage–the problem is rather with all of the other crazy marriages that will follow in its wake.  Of course, if there's a problem with those marriages, you can just make arguments against them for what they are (marriage between three), rather than something else they're not (marriage between two consenting adults).

Point number three:

Society has a vested interest in promoting only traditional marriage.

Which is the argument of the gay marriage advocates–they want a traditional marriage too–its legitimacy and legal benefits.  Like the one Britney had–the first one or the second, take your pick.  What's really silly about this claim is that it supposes gay marriage would be some kind of competitor or threat for "traditional" marriage.  This doesn't seem to be the case at all.  If history is any guide, gay couples have existed (with diminished or nonexistent legal status of course) for a very long time.  Their existence hasn't done much to undermine traditional marriage.  Not as much as, say, divorce, infidelity, sports, weight loss or gain, age, youth, or failure to put the toilet seat down. 

The only thing that makes George Will madder (and more incoherent) than "global warming" are teachers' unions.  Just as teachers' unions have singularly (without any interference from any other causal factor) been able to destroy public education and all that's good in America, environmentalists aim to destroy the economy for their Marxist political agenda.  I wish I were kidding:

What Friedrich Hayek called the "fatal conceit" — the idea that government can know the future's possibilities and can and should control the future's unfolding — is the left's agenda. The left exists to enlarge the state's supervision of life, narrowing individual choices in the name of collective goods. Hence the left's hostility to markets. And to automobiles — people going wherever they want whenever they want.

Today's "green left" is the old "red left" revised. Marx, a short-term pessimist but a long-term optimist, prophesied deepening class conflict but thought that history's violent dialectic would culminate in a revolution that would usher in material abundance and such spontaneous cooperation that the state would wither away.

The green left preaches pessimism: Ineluctable scarcities (of energy, food, animal habitat, humans' living space) will require a perpetual regime of comprehensive rationing. The green left understands that the direct route to government control of almost everything is to stigmatize, as a planetary menace, something involved in almost everything — carbon.

He gets to this astoundingly moronic conclusion (that global warming is a myth perpetrated by "the left") by two main arguments.  First, he uncritically accepts of the word of a poorly qualified climate change deniers and climate change danger skeptics.  This time it's not Michael Crichton, science fiction author, but Nigel Lawson (that's Nigella's father), former British Cabinet member.  I can't determine what his specific expertise is here.  But it's obvious that he doesn't deny the fact of global warming–something which Will seems to do here.  He merely denies that it's a bad thing.  He writes (Will's quote):

"Over the past two-and-a-half-million years, a period during which the planet's climate fluctuated substantially, remarkably few of the earth's millions of plant and animal species became extinct. This applies not least, incidentally, to polar bears, which have been around for millennia, during which there is ample evidence that polar temperatures have varied considerably."

According to him at least, the climate is changing.  To be fair, of course, he'll probably deny that the cause is the presence of unabsorbed carbon in the atmosphere.  But that's a different claim from the one he's making above.  Scientists would agree of course that the earth's temperature has changed considerably over the years.  But not so drastically.  And not, at least not recently, because of carbon in the atmosphere. 

Will's second argument is inconsistent with this first one.  He writes

Want to build a power plant in Arizona? A building in Florida? Do you want to drive an SUV? Or leave your cellphone charger plugged in overnight? Some judge might construe federal policy as proscribing these activities. Kempthorne says such uses of the act, unintended by those who wrote it in 1973, would be "wholly inappropriate." But in 1973, climate Cassandras were saying that "the world's climatologists are agreed" that we must "prepare for the next ice age" (Science Digest, February 1973).

This one holds that the climate is probably not changing, or that climatologists should not be believed, because in the 70s there was concern (in the popular media) about "a new ice age."  In other words, Will suggests there is some kind of inconsistency in the arguments of current climatologists because an article or two (and he always cites specific articles on this point–good for him!) claimed the opposite of what they now claim.  This, of course, hardly makes them inconsistent.  Besides, reports from the 70s popular media ought not be held up against the work of actual scientists.  You might hold it up against the current disaster-media complex, but that would be something else entirely.

In one final bit of craziness, he concludes the above paragraph with the following warning:

And no authors of the Constitution or the 14th Amendment intended to create a "fundamental" right to abortion, but there it is.

Lest you think we won't slide down the slippery slope to less autonomy of personal choices, just look at what happened with Roe v. Wade.   

Don't you love genetic determinism?  Michael Medved does.  He writes:

The idea of a distinctive, unifying, risk-taking American DNA might also help to explain our most persistent and painful racial divide – between the progeny of every immigrant nationality that chose to come here, and the one significant group that exercised no choice in making their journey to the U.S. Nothing in the horrific ordeal of African slaves, seized from their homes against their will, reflected a genetic predisposition to risk-taking, or any sort of self-selection based on personality traits. Among contemporary African-Americans, however, this very different historical background exerts a less decisive influence, because of vast waves of post-slavery black immigration. Some three million black immigrants from Africa and the Caribbean arrived since 1980 alone and in big cities like New York, Boston and Miami close to half of the African-American population consists of immigrants, their children or grandchildren. The entrepreneurial energy of these newcomer communities indicates that their members display the same adventurous instincts associated with American DNA.

No comment necessary.

*h/t Crooks and Liars.