StrawMika

A longstanding way to think of straw man argumentation is to misinterpret or misrepresent what people said or what their arguments were.  That’s a version of the representational straw man. John and I have also identified the selectional version of the straw man, or the weak man.  That’s a case of finding a member of the opposition that has a badly stated version of the view or a poorly constructed version of their argument and go after that.

There’s nothing wrong with criticizing a bad argument, but what gets communicated with it is that you, in investing time and energy in replying to that bad argument, you’re not spending time on the better ones.  That would be bad use of your time, so if you’re doing the work of criticizing the bad arguments, they must be as good as they get.

Another weak man instance is that you take imperfectly phrased versions of an opponent’s posiiton and interpret them mercilously.  When we’re speaking off the cuff, extemporaneously, we may not say everything just right.  And so we, except when in full-attack mode, give each other some slack.  That’s a difference between spoken and written communication.  And to interpret your interlocutor in the worst lights when they are speaking informally (and so, imprecisely) is a kind of selectional straw man.

Well, so here’s what happened. Mika Brzezinski said on Morning Joe today that the media’s “job” is to “actually control exactly what people think.”  Here’s the clip:

Now, the context is that Brzezinski’s line is a contrastive — that Trump is trying to control what people think by pushing out the media.  By “speaking directly to the people,” as we’d seen in a previous post.

So conservative media has gone straight up bonkers about the line.  Tyler Durden says she’s “let slip the awesome unspoken truth” about what the media thinks they should be doing.  The folks at Breitbart have made it a front page story, with the implication that the imperfect wording is really a Freudian slip.

Real Clear Politics has a follow-up to it, and Brzezinski has gone into Twitter cleanup mode

It’s pretty clear that when folks have what Walton calls “dark side interpretation” already cued, they’ll take something like this as evidence of letting a mask slip instead of a poorly phrased bit of intellectual pushback.  So this makes it an interesting case of a mix between selectional and representational straw man — it’s selectional, since they go after what she’s said, but it’s representational, since we need an interpretive attitude to take this as seriously a representation of her sincere position.

So, in a way, a lesson about straw manning.  If your picture of the opposition, after interpretation, fits the worst kind of picture you may have of them, you may be a straw-manner.

4 thoughts on “StrawMika”

  1. Great stuff.

    Especially interesting, to me, is the idea that the slip of the tongue reveals the double-secret view and thus licenses the interpretation. It’s as if the author of the weak man is aware that it’s a dick move, and so justifies it. I wonder if this is some kind of tell with weak men–some remark or phrase that justifies the selection of just this argument in just this way.

  2. Hi John, I like the expression ‘double secret view’. But in a way, that’s a kind of background assumption that a good deal of the deep political disagreements have in the background, isn’t it? There are the arguments that your opponents give, and then there are their unacknowledged motivations and prejudices. You can address the former, because they are stated explicitly, but you never get a chance to see the latter, except in those fleeting moments. The trouble is that the ‘gotcha’ temptation gets out of control!

  3. As if on cue:

    http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/columnists/kass/ct-trump-journalism-kass-0223-20170222-column.html

    On the popular MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” program, co-host Mika Brzezinski responded to whether Trump’s attacks on the status quo were the fulfillment of campaign promises.

    “Well, and I think that the dangerous, you know, edges here are that he is trying to undermine the media,” Brzezinski said, “trying to make up his own facts. And it could be that while unemployment and the economy worsens, he could have undermined the messaging so much that he can actually control exactly what people think. And that is the — that is our job.”

    Later, she tweeted out that her comments were purposely misinterpreted, but I listened to it again and again and it was quite clear to me.

    Controlling what people think isn’t a mere job. It’s a mission.

    And now it’s been renewed.”

    Just a thought, but if I offer you reasons for thinking differently, I’m trying to control what you think. That’s how it works.

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