I need a hero

Chris Hayes, avowedly liberal commentator and host at MSNBC, a network which has opinion shows hosted by two or three more such people, made the following sensible, but sadly daring remark on the occasion of Memorial Day:

I think it's interesting because I think it is very difficult to talk about the war dead and the fallen without invoking valor, without invoking the words "heroes." Why do I feel so [uncomfortable] about the word "hero"? I feel comfortable — uncomfortable — about the word because it seems to me that it is so rhetorically proximate to justifications for more war. Um, and, I don't want to obviously desecrate or disrespect memory of anyone that's fallen, and obviously there are individual circumstances in which there is genuine, tremendous heroism: hail of gunfire, rescuing fellow soldiers and things like that. But it seems to me that we marshal this word in a way that is problematic. But maybe I'm wrong about that.

Maybe he is wrong, but the Military seems to agree.  They don't call every one a hero except rhetorically.  This provoked the following completely predictable reaction:

“Chris Hayes’ recent remarks on MSNBC regarding our fallen service members are reprehensible and disgusting,” VFW National Commander Richard DeNoyer said in a statement to FoxNews.com. “His words reflect his obvious disregard for the service and sacrifice of the men and women who have paid the ultimate price while defending our nation. His insipid statement is particularly callous because it comes at a time when our entire nation pauses to reflect and honor the memory of our nations’ fallen heroes.”

He continued: “It is especially devastating to the many broken-hearted children, spouses and parents, left behind to grieve for a loved one. Such an ignorant and uncaring and blatant disregard for people’s deep feelings are indefensible, and that is why the Veterans of Foreign Wars of the United States demand that Mr. Hayes and MSNBC provides an immediate and unequivocal apology.”  

Sadly, Hayes apologized.  You'd have to be completely high to interpret Hayes to be saying or implying any of this.

Last night I rewatched "Flags of our Fathers," a movie which made the same exact point as Hayes.  I don't remember the VFW objecting, protesting, or requiring an apology from Clint Eastwood.  But maybe I'm wrong about that.

via Washington Monthly.

 

Gay demons

This argument reminds me of another, more famous one, about demons and possibility:

"Ultimately history will be decided by God, who is the judge of all mankind," Klingenschmit says. "People who side with homosexual sin will be judged by God for promoting that sin, including our own president, Barack Obama."

He then goes on to note what he perceives as the ultimate difference between racial minorities and the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) community. "When it comes to morality, that is different than race," Klingenschmit says "It is not a sin, obviously, to be created as a black person or as a woman. I think Jesus would restore full equality based on the way a person was born…the problem is, nobody is born a homosexual."

As to how a person "becomes" a homosexual after being born straight, he adds, "People are recruited, people are deceived, and people make a choice. They have a free will, moral choice….The marketing of homosexuality has an agenda, and that is to repopulate their population by recruiting the children of heterosexuals."

When asked by Pakman, "What about in the 4,000 other species that have homosexuality? As far as I know they don't have TV, they don't have advertising… how is it that humans are gay sometimes because of marketing but for 4,000 other species, is it something else?"

Klingenschmitt responded, "It is possible for demons or the devil to inhabit or invade animals in just the same way they invade humans and that causes a sin of lust." 

And it's equally silly.

Things that are not equivalent at all, part MMXXI

Someone at Real Clear Politics has weighed in on the Naomi Schaefer Riley firing (talked about by us here and here–see links).  Part of her defense, not the worst part sadly, involved the following equivalence:

Yet most left-of-center commentators who have weighed in — such as Atlantic editor and blogger Ta-Nehisi Coates and Center for American Progress fellow Eric Alterman — have condemned Riley and defended her firing. Their argument is that, while Riley has a right to her opinions and criticism of black studies is not racist, her post was so "lazy," "sloppy" and "ignorant" that such "know-nothing hackery" has no place on the blog of an academic publication. That's because Riley freely admits she did not read the dissertations she lampooned but relied on The Chronicle's summaries (not, as some have mistakenly claimed, the titles alone).

Is this a sloppy approach for a 520-word blogpost? First, let's turn the political tables. Suppose a left-wing academic blogger had poked fun at stupid Ph.D. dissertations from conservative Christian colleges arguing that homosexuality can be cured or that teaching evolution undermines students' morals — and based her post on a magazine's summary of the thesis topics. Would those tut-tutting at Riley's laziness demand actual perusal of such works?

Does one need to point out that there is a major difference between right-wing quackery about curing gays and the immorality of evolution and the entire academic field of Black Studies?  Apparently so.  Well, there's a difference.

What is it?  Homosexuality is not a disease and evolution is a well-established scientific theory. 

Also, black people exist.

*Bonus for reading the comments to the post at RCP: liberals apparently are the real Nazis, like Rachel Maddow.

via Washington Monthly.

Invisible man

Over lunch at La Unica, a friend of mine (also philosophy professor) thought he would try his hand at fallacy schematization.  Inspired by the super-hero theme of the "-man" fallacies–the marvel comics collection of straw, weak, hollow, and iron man, he thought that there ought also to be "invisible man"–if only for the sake of symmetry.

And sure enough it didn't take long to come up with it.  Normally the fallacy name is invented after the phenomenon is identified; in this case, the name was identified and we went in search of the phenomenon.

Here it is:  

One alleges, falsely, that one's argument is strengthened by the fact that people ignore it; their not critiquing your argument is evidence of their inability to critique it.

Thus, you have an invisible man.

Classic example, I think, would the be fringe blogger who complains that the no addresses his super salient points because they are afraid, and therefore he is right.  No real life examples at the moment.  I'll look for them.

One will notice close affinities with the argument from ignorance (the argumentum ad ignorantiam) wherein one argues that the absence of evidence for/against p is sufficient to prove p (when it isn't of course).  

My friend came up with another one.  Maybe tomorrow.

Changing the definition of bigotry

I did not think arguments against same-sex marriage could get any worse, but alas, I was wrong.  Here is Pastor Aaron Fruh, of Knollwood Church in Mobile, Ala, writing (inexplicably) in the Chicago Tribune:

If I were counseling a married couple who were about to break their marriage vows by agreeing to an open marriage, I would tell them that adultery is a bad idea. Adultery erodes marital trust, splinters the lives of the outside partners, results often in divorce and shatters the lives of children in the families involved.

In the same way, I can say to a teenager who is considering having premarital sex that it is a bad idea. The emotional scars that sex before marriage and abortion leave cannot be measured.

In the same way, it is not discriminatory hate speech to say to gay couples that same-sex marriage is a bad idea. Here’s why: Proponents of same-sex marriage want to change the meaning of marriage. To them, marriage is any romantic relationship between people. They believe the state should regulate and recognize same-sex marriage because it has an interest in stable romantic partnerships.

Again with the pseudo-Platonism on the meaning of concepts.  Pastor Fruh alleges that he’s not a homophobe or a bigot for denying, without good reason, gay people rights he enjoys.  But that’s the very definition of those terms–“homophobe” and “bigot.” Why does he want to change the meaning of those terms?

In all seriousness, someone ought to have pointed out that the Pastor’s argument against gay marriage uses as premises the consequences of non-marital unions.  I imagine that a proponent of same-sex marriage would likely agree with Pastor Fruh.  “Yes, non-marital romantic relations of type x or y are inadvisable and bad–that’s why I want to get married.”  But this person’s desire to get married will be frustrated, won’t it, by Pastor Fruh’s bigotry.

The rest of the article is the usual compendium of slippery slopes (why not polygamy?  I don’t know why not, ask King F—ing David or Abraham), bogus empirical claims, insinuations that same-sex marriage will replace “traditional” marriage and thus doom our society which no longer merit refutation.

When the Mob Attacks!

If you haven't had enough…

The kerfuffle surrounding the recent canning of CHE blogger Naomi Schaefer Riley has once again made obvious the inherent racism deeply entrenched in our public discourse. Just because you don't mean to be racist does not mean that you aren't. On the other hand, if someone points out that you are a racist, that does not then ipso facto make them an apparatchik for the PC police. These points should be obvious, but we find people repeatedly failing to understand them and continuing to advance poor arguments that rest on racist assumptions. Riley should be fired because what she wrote was racist. What she wrote was also stupid, and that is another legitimate reason to fire her. But to deny that what she wrote indicates her racially motivated biases is dumb.

Unfortunately many people (on the right, of course!) have argued that the reason for NSR's firing was due to the outcry from the liberal PC academic mob rather than her racist comments. Here are a few examples:

This is plainly a politically correct response to a thug's veto and should be owned up to as such. (Reason)

All those hoodie-wearing academics exercising their veto powers.

The reason they gave Naomi the boot wasn’t because of anything she wrote, but rather the effect her writing had on their readers, who generally reacted as though they were suffering from a case of the vapors. (Weekly Standard)

I wonder if they have fainting couches in those ivory towers?

Ms. Riley wasn’t fired because her argument lacked sufficient intellectual vigor. She was fired because a sufficient number of people had their feelings hurt and deemed her ouster — as opposed to a rebuttal of her arguments — the more reasonable course of action. (FrontPage)

Yes, exactly! Her argument had no intellectual rigor. Hence, no rebuttal. Except for all the rebuttals.

And finally, the money shot:

The great irony, of course, is that the whining and gnashing of teeth from the “Black Studies” crowd only reinforces Naomi’s point about the “discipline.” You’d never see chemists or physicists or mathematicians worked into a hysterical mob by a critical blog post. Because they study actual fields of knowledge—and don't simply tend the garden of their own feelings. (Weekly Standard)

You would never see these folks worked into a hysterical mob because there are no critical blog posts attacking the legitimacy of their very existence. The irony.

Now, this is a point that people fail to grasp whenever they accuse someone of demanding racial justice Politcal Correctness: Sometimes people have hurt feelings because an injustice was done. And sometimes the correct response to injustice is to work yourself up into a hysterical mob and…write a petition.

Follow up

Last week I commented on the ironically sad critical skills of Naomi Schaeffer Riley, nunc quondam blogger for the Chronicle of Higher Education.  "Quondam" because they canned her.  One should never, or rarely, take pleasure in someone's loss of a job, paid or not, but in this case it was obvious that Schaeffer Riley had no business writing anything that would be published.

Here's what the Chronicle said:

When we published Naomi Schaefer Riley’s blog posting on Brainstorm last week (“The Most Persuasive Case for Eliminating Black Studies? Just Read the Dissertations”), several thousand of you spoke out in outrage and disappointment that The Chronicle had published an article that did not conform to the journalistic standards and civil tone that you expect from us.

We’ve heard you, and we have taken to heart what you said.

We now agree that Ms. Riley’s blog posting did not meet The Chronicle’s basic editorial standards for reporting and fairness in opinion articles. As a result, we have asked Ms. Riley to leave the Brainstorm blog.

I suppose kudos are in order for now agreeing, better late than never I suppose.  Seems like it might have been obvious from the very start that this person had no argument worth reading.

As pointed out on Leiter (here and now here), some segments of the right have gone into full victimization mode.  Go to the link, but in case you don't, it's all wrong of course.  When I read it, the commenters had fully made the point the editorial completely failed to grasp.

Of course, now that someone has had her argument trashed, enter the Iron-Manners:

But Chester Finn Jr., an education analyst and aide to Ronald Reagan, said that Riley was dismissed for expressing unpopular views. "Vibrancy, it seems, has been replaced by political correctness and intimidation," he wrote.

Vibrancy?  Via Leiter, this has to be the most iron of all iron men.  This person describes Schaefer Riley (is it just Riley?) as a "major critic of black studies":

Noting that there were legitimate problems to address about the plight facing the black community today, Riley argued that they were not being addressed in black studies departments. Instead, she argued, all they wanted to do is engage in arguments that blame everything on the white man.

Argued?  For Pete's sake.  This was nothing like the post.  Maybe these are good arguments.  Maybe they're not.  But they are not the arguments at issue.  What's at issue here are the very crappy arguments that Schaefer Riley actually made, you can still read them if you want.  Changing the subject doesn't make her crappy arguments any less crappy.

Bad company

People do a lot of things–eat, sleep, exercise, believe in proposition p or q, and so on.  Sometimes those things overlap with the activities of serial killers, Nazis, and terrorists.  This overlap may or may not be significant.  If the activity is morally abhorrent, like, say, genocide, then comparisons are made.  If the activity is innocuous, then well, nothing.  Everyone eats, the Nazis eat, ergo ipso fatso. 

Eating doesn't make people Nazis.  Nor does speaking German.  Or being German.  Or believing in the capacity of government to do some things, like provide highways, ports, police, or health care.  These things don't make anyone a Nazi because those beliefs do not just belong to Nazis. 

So, for instance, the Nazis embraced euthanasia.  They advanced all sorts of eugenic arguments for it.  They also embraced a healthy lifestyle, and traditional marriage (sometimes)–and they advanced all sorts of eugenic arguments for these things as well.  This does not mean traditional marriage is inherently Nazi.

This is something like the argument of a recent op-ed in the Vatican Observer (L'osservatore romano) on the occasion of the publishing of Nazi tract on euthanasia.  Here's a taste:

Binding and Hoche, in fact, maintain that life cannot be considered life in the full sense of those who, because of diseases, are exposed to a painful and hopeless agony, or the life of incurable idiots whose existence drags with no purpose or usefulness, imposing on the community a heavy and pointless burden. With regard to these people, the two scholars invented a new definition which was to enjoy great success even after the defeat of Nazism: “lives unworthy of being lived”. A definition which paved the way to the elimination of the sick and the unfit, permitting these homicides to be justified with a morally appreciable motivation: they in fact spoke of “charitable death” (Gnadentod). These are the same words that recur today recur in the writings of many contemporary bioethicists, and of many politicians who support legislative proposals of a euthanasic type. As the editors write in the introduction, “the notion of life as a good that deserves protection is henceforth cast off from the anchor of any metaphysical postulation, any doctrine of natural law, and is led towards a semantics of concreteness and immanence: life has value as long as it procures pleasure and is free from pain”. We therefore see that this book, precisely because of its grimly up to date characters, must strongly embarrass those who champion euthanasia in the belief that it has nothing to do with Nazism.

And we have the full Godwin here: the only person who should be strongly embarassed is the author of this very sad excuse of an objection to euthanasia.  To the extent that I am aware, no one is currently advocating that any state embrace Nazi eugenic policies regarding euthanasia; and no one is using those arguments to make the case for euthanasia.

You know what the Nazis also believed?  Probably global warming.  On that, see here.

The debacle of higher education

Yesterday the entire academic blogosphere blew up in a rage over a poorly reasoned post on the Chronicle of Higher Education's blog by Naomi Schaefer Riley.  She wrote in favor of the elimination of African-American Studies PhD programs.  I say "wrote in favor of" because to say "argued" would have given even fallacious arguments a bad name.  Here's a taste:

You’ll have to forgive the lateness but I just got around to reading The Chronicle’s recent piece on the young guns of black studies. If ever there were a case for eliminating the discipline, the sidebar explaining some of the dissertations being offered by the best and the brightest of black-studies graduate students has made it. What a collection of left-wing victimization claptrap. The best that can be said of these topics is that they’re so irrelevant no one will ever look at them.

The post was entitled "The Most Persuasive Case for Eliminating Black Studies?  Just Read the Dissertations."  Sadly, the author didn't read any dissertations, abstracts or extracts.  She read synopses of works in progress.  Her objections are then almost pure speculation:

But topping the list in terms of sheer political partisanship and liberal hackery is La TaSha B. Levy. According to the Chronicle, “Ms. Levy is interested in examining the long tradition of black Republicanism, especially the rightward ideological shift it took in the 1980s after the election of Ronald Reagan. Ms. Levy’s dissertation argues that conservatives like Thomas Sowell, Clarence Thomas, John McWhorter, and others have ‘played one of the most-significant roles in the assault on the civil-rights legacy that benefited them.’” The assault on civil rights? Because they don’t favor affirmative action they are assaulting civil rights? Because they believe there are some fundamental problems in black culture that cannot be blamed on white people they are assaulting civil rights? 

I'd point out that affirmative action and civil rights are not coextensive terms (and besides, is that even the argument of the dissertation?).  Anyway, in addition to embarassing herself hugely by not reading the unwritten dissertations she claims are evidence of shoddy thinking and then criticizing them, she only picked out three examples, as if these three dissertations were sufficiently representative of all of the work in African American Studies.

Thankfully, the students reply here.

Garbage such as this does not belong in the first draft of an undergraduate paper.  Somehow, however, it found itself in Chronicle of Higher Education.  So here's how the editors defend themselves:

Many of you have asked The Chronicle to take down Naomi Schaefer Riley’s recent posting, “The Most Persuasive Case for Eliminating Black Studies? Just Read the Dissertations.” I urge readers instead to view this posting as an opportunity—to debate Riley’s views, challenge her, set things straight as you see fit. Take a moment to read The Chronicle’s front-page story about the future of black studies, written by Chronicle reporter Stacey Patton and weigh in.

If this is the justification for posting Schaefer Riley's piece, then it's appears the Editors of the Chronicle have no standards at all.  Making matters worse, Schaefer Riley defends herself (post here), writing:

Finally, since this is a blog about academia and not journalism, I’ll forgive the commenters for not understanding that it is not my job to read entire dissertations before I write a 500-word piece about them. I read some academic publications (as they relate to other research I do), but there are not enough hours in the day or money in the world to get me to read a dissertation on historical black midwifery. In fact, I’d venture to say that fewer than 20 people in the whole world will read it. And the same holds true for the others that are mentioned in the piece. 

She will forgive the commenters who do not understand that she can invoke evidence she has not seen to criticize arguments that haven't been made and advocate the elimination of academic programs she knows nothing about.

And there is enough money to get *someone *to read a dissertation on black midwifery: it's likely to be the salary of an Assitant Professor.

Final Exam

It's final exam day here in my world–Critical Thinking is the course.  A friend on Face Book posted this article about being a Republican who believed climate change to be a real thing.  Actually, the article is about understanding what the claim about climate change entails, in particular the difference between climate and weather.  This difference being somehow more difficult to grasp than Fermat's Last Theorem. 

Some grafs:

Climate science shows that over a long period of time, the statistics have changed. Things that used to happen a lot, like consistent winter snow cover, are happening less reliably. Things that happened every now and then, like droughts and wildfires, are happening more reliably. And things that almost never happened — such as the 15,000 new U.S. temperature records in March — sometimes now do occur. And they can’t be explained with purely meteorological reasoning.

The changes we’re seeing, far more than I can list here, seem like an accumulation of coincidences. Pieced together, reveal the full puzzle: There’s more heat and moisture in the atmosphere, and our emissions are largely responsible for keeping it there.

The millennium’s first decade was the warmest on record and included nine of the 10 hottest years. Greenhouse gas levels are at their highest in 800,000 years. Less heat is escaping the top of the atmosphere in the wavelengths of greenhouse gases. For the first time, scientists have recorded both hemispheres are warming – and the global temperature spike can’t be linked to an astronomical trigger, such as solar variability. Great Lakes peak ice has seen a 71 percent drop since 1973. Winters are shorter. Lakes melt earlier. Plants are moving north.

Worldwide, 95% of land-based glaciers are losing mass. September Arctic sea ice has lost 10 percent of its area every decade. Sea levels are rising. Oceans are 30 percent more acidic. Flooding and extreme storms are spiking in frequency and intensity. Last winter was the 4th warmest on record, despite the cooling influence of a La Nina phase in the Pacific.

Extremes are becoming more extreme. And none of it has anything to do with Al Gore.

Very sciency stuff here.  Anyway, the fun begins with the commenters.  A couple of samples.

Here's one disconnected from fact:

But because of the politics of the Obama Administration, all funding for Hydrogen research was cut to the bone in 2009. If you want to look for politics interfering with technological solutions to CO2 pollution — don't look at the Republicans…we tried!  

Here's one that thinks a work of fiction is a rebuttal (in the commenter's defense, George Will thought the same thing):

Did you read Michael Crichton's STATE OF FEAR? It really helps you understand that GLOBAL WARMING, renamed "climate change" is a 100% sham.

Here's your classic straw man:

Oh, no!!

Drowning polar bears???

Polar ice caps falling into the sea???

Despair, despair!!!

Hey, kids!! It's Kool-Aid time!!!

And now the tu quoque featuring Al Gore:

Well, at least Gore sets a good eexample by not flying private jets.

What? What do you mean he flies private jets? Isn't that a mega-polluter?

Well, at least he doesn't own a McMansion.

What? He owns one of those too?

I try to do what I can to reduce CO2, but Gore is single-handedly burning the planet up.

And this is just the top few of them.