Category Archives: General discussion

Anything else.

Comparisons

While Charles Krauthammer argues (with some pretty silly comparisons) that we shouldn’t be upset about drunken astronauts:

>Have you ever been to the shuttle launch pad? Have you ever seen that beautiful and preposterous thing the astronauts ride? Imagine it’s you sitting on top of a 12-story winged tube bolted to a gigantic canister filled with 2 million liters of liquid oxygen and liquid hydrogen. Then picture your own buddies — the “closeout crew” — who met you at the pad, fastened your emergency chute, strapped you into your launch seat, sealed the hatch and waved smiling to you through the window. Having left you lashed to what is the largest bomb on planet Earth, they then proceed 200 feet down the elevator and drive not one, not two, but three miles away to watch as the button is pressed that lights the candle that ignites the fuel that blows you into space.

>Three miles! That’s how far they calculate they must go to be beyond the radius of incineration should anything go awry on the launch pad on which, I remind you, these insanely brave people are sitting. Would you not want to be a bit soused? Would you be all aflutter if you discovered that a couple of astronauts — out of dozens — were mildly so? I dare say that if the standards of today’s fussy flight surgeons had been applied to pilots showing up for morning duty in the Battle of Britain, the signs in Piccadilly would today be in German.

And Michael Gerson, warrior of words, argues that the party whose leader promises to veto a bill that would provide insurance to poor children is somehow Christian:

>Romney, however, should not make Kennedy’s mistake and assert that all religious beliefs are unrelated to politics. What Mormonism shares with other religious traditions is a strong commitment to the value and dignity of human beings, including the unborn, the disabled and the poor. This conviction is unavoidably political, because it leads men and women to act in the cause of justice, not in order to impose their religion, but to protect the weak.

E.J. Dionne–liberal columnist I think–explains why the Dailykos.com is just like Rush Limbaugh:

>Perhaps you missed it, but Wednesday was the 19th anniversary of Rush Limbaugh’s radio show. Limbaugh was celebrating his ripe old age, in media years, in the same week that liberal blog fans were trekking to Chicago for the YearlyKos convention. Therein lies one of the most important stories in American politics.

What Krauthammer says is outrageous: we’re not in the Battle of Britain and a drunken astronaut endangers the lives of the rest of the crew, people on the ground (and the billions of dollars invested in the shuttle program). Gerson’s claim about justice rings hollow in light of Romney’s belligerent rhetoric.

Those are the kinds of arguments–dumb ones I mean–that Limbaugh would be making. That is, after all, what Limbaugh does. He makes crappy arguments and spreads untruths. But, according to Dionne’s knuckle-headed article, Limbaugh does so in the service of a partisan goal. So any media figure who (ideologically and pragmatically) advances a partisan agenda (and arouses the ire of the opposition) is just like Limbaugh.

Dionne, of course, thinks Limbaugh is full of it. And, while he is sympathetic to dailykos), you’d never know that by his silly comparison. But then again, Dionne isn’t really interested in the substance of arguments.

Argue for it

Every now and then we point out why we tend to pick on conservatives (which we do). There are lots of reasons. The main reason is not that we’re liberal (which we are); it’s not that we think any particular liberal argument is advanced by pointing out the weaknesses in corresponding conservative arguments (they’re not–but then again the liberal arguments may not fail for the sophistical refutations brought forward by conservatives, that’s different); nor is it that we think that finding fault with conservative arguments and arguers in general advances the cause of liberalism in general.

Rather, the primary reason is that conservative pundits have a marked tendency to state their views in the form of arguments. That is to say, they’ll give a series of reasons for embracing some conclusion or another. Since we like arguments, we like reading them and thinking about them, we find this approach appealing (even if we find it often lacking).

On the liberal side (i.e., among major newspaper pundits–the blogosphere is another matter entirely), on the other hand, you don’t often see the kind of energetic arguing typical of George Will or Charles Krauthammer. This is not an indictment of liberal pundits either. There are lots of ways of stating one’s case. Stating in the form of a persuasive argument is just one. We wish they did it more. But that’s a different matter.

Take E.J.Dionne’s op-ed today as an example of the difference between liberal and conservative pundits. Dionne writes about Ted Strickland, Governor of Ohio. In discussing Strickland’s success (in an otherwise red state), Dionne points out that his positions resonate with the people:

>Strickland’s political skill only partly explains Ohio’s political transformation. A state that voted narrowly for President Bush in 2000 and 2004 not only elected Strickland as governor in 2006 but also sent Sherrod Brown, an economic populist with a far-more liberal public profile, to the U.S. Senate.

>The conversion rate among Ohio voters in just two years was staggering. According to exit polling, 30 percent of Ohioans who voted for Bush in 2004 voted for Strickland in 2006; 20 percent of Bush’s 2004 voters supported Brown.

>Why the big change? Scandals involving former governor Robert Taft and former representative Bob Ney made even loyal Republicans squeamish. Strickland won a fifth of self-identified Republicans and a quarter of conservatives, while holding on to more than 90 percent of liberals and Democrats, and roughly 70 percent of moderates and independents. If national Democrats reached such numbers in 2008, they’d win the presidency decisively.

>The new economy has hit Ohio hard. Industrial cities such as Youngstown and Cleveland have suffered under the lash of globalization. Brown’s tough stand against free trade appealed in a place where the loss of well-paying blue-collar jobs makes the promise of a flat, highly competitive world fall very flat indeed.

>What might Democratic presidential candidates learn from Ohio? As a matter of style, Strickland suggests they must understand that “people are desperately wanting to believe that political leaders understand them and that they are trying to deal with their day-to-day lives.” Memo to overly cautious candidates: Strickland also thinks that “the display of genuine emotion is important.”

>Substantively, Strickland says the economy matters most, although he has been a strong opponent of the Iraq war from the beginning. “The foreclosure problem is huge,” Strickland says. “The people are desperate for jobs.” He sees health care and education as central — they were the key issues in his recent budget. These questions “ought to give Democrats a leg up,” but only if they can “talk about these things in a way that gets people to believe you will do something about them.”

>There’s the rub for Democrats in 2008. Voters want government to work but aren’t sure that it can. They want government to solve problems but worry that it won’t. This creates a strategic paradox: Democrats need to discredit Bush’s government without discrediting government altogether.

All of this may be a fine explanation of Strickland’s success. But it has the air of a trade journal publication for political strategists. Why should it interest a typical voter to read an article in the newspaper about what the typical voter wants? From the point of view of political analysis, on the other hand, Strickland’s story is interesting. But you couldn’t put anything Dionne says here against the conservative pundit who will argue that the voters are wrong.

Sure they voted that way. But why should they vote that way? Whatever his many vices, and they are many, that’s the kind of question George Will would be asking.

Sicko Menage a Trois

I managed somehow to miss the Blitzer-Gupta-Moore festivities last week. Fortunately we live in the era of youtube, so I was able to catch up this morning. Here Here and Here And of course, Here. and here

A couple of things struck me about these performances.

1) Although I am sympathetic to the charge against the “main stream media” that Moore makes, does it have any relevance for the question of whether the representation of “Sicko” on CNN is accurate or not. The implicit argument seems to be a) CNN’s reporting on “Farenheit 9/11” was flawed, therefore its reporting on “Sicko” is likely to be flawed. To make the argument work you probably need to make it plausible that CNN will report on Michael Moore’s movies or movies of their political stripe in a consistent way. Is it ad hominem in the fallacious sense? Well, it seems at least a “fallacy of relevance.”

2) The only criticism of Moore’s use of statistics and facts that seems to have any traction occurs when Gupta tries to suggest that Moore is “cherry-picking the data” by using one estimate of the per capita expenditure on health care for the U.S. and a different source for Cuba. Moore’s response is a little weak in the video (on the website he points out that he was using the most recent data he could find). Larry King tries to get to the question of what an 18% difference matters when we are talking about numbers separated by a factor of 25-30. Moore’s argument would be better served by admitting that these numbers need not be taken as exact in order for the general points that Moore wants to make to stand.

3) Related to this: In Gupta’s original report, the intention seems to be to discredit the film’s data. Gupta argues in the original piece that Moore “fudges the facts.” The report has the pretension of the neutral “fact checker” that is holding Moore’s feet to the fire. It creates the rhetorical impression that Moore is inaccurate on a number of important facts. Moore seems right in saying that Gupta’s evidence does not support such a conclusion. Moore should have stuck to putting the burden on Gupta to defend his somewhat outrageous accusation–or better retracting it altogether.

Update: Just saw this. Looks like CNN did the decent thing.

Or Tolstoy is right

David Brooks writes:

>Many will doubt this, but Bush is a smart and compelling presence in person, and only the whispering voice of Leo Tolstoy holds one back.

>Tolstoy had a very different theory of history. Tolstoy believed great leaders are puffed-up popinjays. They think their public decisions shape history, but really it is the everyday experiences of millions of people which organically and chaotically shape the destiny of nations — from the bottom up.

>According to this view, societies are infinitely complex. They can’t be understood or directed by a group of politicians in the White House or the Green Zone. Societies move and breathe on their own, through the jostling of mentalities and habits. Politics is a thin crust on the surface of culture. Political leaders can only play a tiny role in transforming a people, especially when the integral fabric of society has dissolved.

>If Bush’s theory of history is correct, the right security plan can lead to safety, the right political compromises to stability. But if Tolstoy is right, then the future of Iraq is beyond the reach of global summits, political benchmarks and the understanding of any chief executive.

Again, not so much a false dichotomy as false dichotomizing: considering only two very different possibilities as exhaustive without the further claim that one is evidently false or ridiculous.

Disputatio

Can’t go wrong with little theological disputation on a Saturday morning: Michael Gerson offers up the old saw that morality without Theism is vacuous or unjustifiable. Christopher Hitchens replies by arguing that theism is not a necessary condition of morality.

First Gerson.

>So the dilemma is this: How do we choose between good and bad instincts? Theism, for several millennia, has given one answer: We should cultivate the better angels of our nature because the God we love and respect requires it. While many of us fall tragically short, the ideal remains.

>Atheism provides no answer to this dilemma. It cannot reply: “Obey your evolutionary instincts” because those instincts are conflicted. “Respect your brain chemistry” or “follow your mental wiring” don’t seem very compelling either. It would be perfectly rational for someone to respond: “To hell with my wiring and your socialization, I’m going to do whatever I please.” C.S. Lewis put the argument this way: “When all that says ‘it is good’ has been debunked, what says ‘I want’ remains.”

>Some argue that a careful determination of our long-term interests — a fear of bad consequences — will constrain our selfishness. But this is particularly absurd. Some people are very good at the self-centered exploitation of others. Many get away with it their whole lives. By exercising the will to power, they are maximizing one element of their human nature. In a purely material universe, what possible moral basis could exist to condemn them? Atheists can be good people; they just have no objective way to judge the conduct of those who are not.

1. Human beings have good and bad instincts.
2. Morality requires choosing the good instincts over the bad instincts.
3. Moral choice requires an objective standard for judging desires.
4. Atheists have no objective standard for judging desires.
5. Therefore, Atheists cannot be moral.

That’s one construal of the argument. Gerson seems, however, to vacillate between this and something like

\6. Therefore, Atheists have no reason to be moral.

and something like

\7. Therefore, Atheists have no objective moral standards.

Probably part of the problem lies with the slippery notion of what it means to be “moral.” But, setting that aside, 4 is the crucial claim in any version of the argument. And here, I think, Gerson gets a little simplistic.

>In a purely material universe, what possible moral basis could exist to condemn them?

I’m not sure whether Atheists are committed to a “purely material universe.” Seems as though they could hold to the existence of the mental as well. And whether or not they hold that, there are plenty of plausible accounts of morality that ground moral judgment in the nature of reason. If the evolutionary account of ethics explains the origin of reason in evolution need it thereby undermine its authority? If an evolutionary account of mathematical reasoning were developed, would it remove the authority of mathematical proof?

This is, of course, a superficial response, but this argument and the earlier one from Stanley Fish seem to rest on the either deliberate or ignorant disregard of recent moral philosophy. Both blithely dismiss the possibility of a non-theistic justification of morality with several straw man arguments (“purely material universes”) ignoring great bookshelves full of candidate justifications for morality.

It may turn out that there isn’t a coherent non-theistic justification of morality. But to claim that there isn’t, at this point in time, requires some serious response to numerous alternative positions. Until that happens, there seems little reason to me to accept Gerson’s argument. Nonetheless, it would be desirable if the proponents of this argument in the popular press would spend a little more time justifying the controversial premise.

Second, Hitchens. When we strip his characteristic verve from his column we get essentially.

1. Some theists are not moral.
2. Some moral people are not theists.
3. Therefore, it is not the case that theism is a necessary condition of being moral.

As Hitchens points out, Gerson waffles a bit on his conclusion. Sometimes he suggests that theism is necessary for morality, sometimes that it encourages it, sometimes he even seems to grant Hitchen’s argument, but then hold that theism makes sense of the morality that both theists and non-theists can possess.

“Caution-to-the-wind Principles”

Adding to earlier diagnosis of the ad infantem fallacy: The argument the author over at the WaPo is making seems to me to be that the worry
over climate change is disproportionate to the danger or the likelihood
of the threatened harm. It is an increasingly common reaction to
climate change warnings as the straight-up deniers seem to be
retreating to their Hummers. It rests on a reasonable premise:

  1. Concern should be proportional to risk, where risk is proportional to magnitude of harm and likelihood of occurence.

Then you attack Al Gore for hyping the risk, while presenting a
posture of cool headed calm in opposition to Gore’s climate hysteria
(and benefiting the children as well!). It generally depends on making one of two claims:

  1. the harm will be less severe than Gore predicts.
  2. the harm is less likely than Gore claims .

Arguing these claims would require scientific argument/evidence.
This editorial flails around in the proximity of these claims but
settles on the related claim:

3. we don’t know what the likelihood or severity of the harm is.

The author supports this claim with

  1. an argument about the inability of climatologists to predict the
    weather in August. Therefore it is unlikely that they can predict the
    weather in 2100.
  2. an argument about the “controversies” surrounding whether storms
    are exacerbated by climate change or not. (Committing what we might
    call the fallacy of appeal to a single uncontextualized scientific
    study. Well, to be fair she doesn’t really commit this “fallacy” since
    all she wants to do is suggest that we don’t know.). On this see the
    debate over here or the related discussion here. We can also add that this is not exactly the most significant part of the harms imagined in the IPCC’s 4th report. (In fact it’s barely mentioned). Finally, as pointing out in the first link, contrast her use of this study with the WaPo’s own reportage.

These very weak arguments for 3, then allow the author to suggest
that we shouldn’t be too alarmist about climate change and certainly
not scare the children! Al Gore should be ashamed! Until you are
certain, don’t scare the children.

This sort of editorial probably takes about 5 minutes to write.
Really all that’s going on is

  1.   find some disagreement in the
    scientific literature
  2.   therefore we shouldn’t worry too much.

Somewhere in there is something akin to the appeal to ignorance. It
isn’t quite an appeal to igorance because the conclusion isn’t simply
the negative conclusion:

a) climate change isn’t a risk

but rather, something like:

b) we don’t know whether it is a risk, so we should treat it as though it isn’t a (big) risk.

There’s much more to be said about this latter step, as clearly sometimes it is a perfectly good inference. In environmental ethics we discuss something called the "precautionary principle." Roughly this is a principle that shifts the "burden of proof" to those who advocate a policy that is potentially very dangerous. For example, the advocates of a policy might have to demonstrate that the risk is minimal, or manageable, etc.

The sort of argument that we are analyzing here seem to rest on a "caution to the wind principle" which seems to suggest that in the absence of conclusive demonstration of certain and determinate harms, we shouldn’t worry too much, and we definitely shouldn’t upset the children.

Union made

In the Washington Post one finds two op-ed pieces that concern a piece of legislation before congress concerns the right of workers to organize, one against (George Will) one for (Harold Meyerson).

I don’t have a logical point to make about either of them (this is not an endorsement of either argument). It would be nice, however, if the authors had exchanged their work beforehand. That way the reader would have gotten the sense of an actual discussion, rather than a parallel one.

In Meyerson’s piece, the legislation concerns the right of workers to organize:

>This week, though, the Senate turns to legislation that not only speaks about the economic stagnation of all but the wealthiest Americans but that would actually begin to end it. The goal of the Employee Free Choice Act is simply to give workers the right to join unions without facing the (currently) one-in-five chance of being fired for playing an active role in a campaign to do so.

>Firing employees for endeavoring to form unions has been illegal since 1935 under the National Labor Relations Act, but beginning in the 1970s, employers have preferred to violate the law — the penalties are negligible — rather than have their workers unionize. Today, employer violations rank somewhere between routine and de rigueur. Over half — 51 percent — of employers illegally threaten workers with the specter of plant closings if employees choose to unionize (1 percent actually go through with this threat, according to Cornell University professor Kate Bronfenbrenner). And even when workers vote to unionize, companies can refuse to bargain with them and can drag out the process for years — indeed, forever. The Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service found that when unions win representation elections, 45 percent of the time they then fail to secure contracts from employers.

>This kind of hardball resistance to American workers’ attempts to unionize, combined with the decline of manufacturing, has achieved catastrophic success. Only 7.5 percent of private-sector workers today are unionized, down from one-third during the decades after World War II. And guess what? The middle class has been cut out of the ever-dwindling group of our countrymen who profit from the nation’s economic growth. The EFCA would seek to remedy this by offering workers an alternative path to forming unions — the submission of signed affiliation cards from a majority of employees would trigger union recognition — and by mandating binding arbitration if employers stonewall efforts to win a first contract.

>If we’re really serious about restoring economic security in America and economic vitality to the middle class, the EFCA would work a whole lot better than would a fence on the border.

For Will, on the other hand, it’s a question of hardball tactics used by unions (the only corporate entities he thinks are not persons):

>Democracy is rule by persuasion, but the unpersuasive often try to coerce the unpersuaded. Recent days have provided two illustrations of this tendency, both of them pertaining to labor unions, whose decades of declining membership testify to their waning power to persuade workers that unions add more value to workers’ lives than they subtract.

>Failing unions, like failing industries, turn to government for protection in the form of coercion. Failing industries have traditionally sought corporate welfare in the form of tariffs (coercion of consumers). Unions seek laws to confer what their persuasiveness cannot convince people to consent to.

. . . .

>The WEA’s whiny audacity was not more offensive than the aim organized labor tried to advance with yesterday’s march and rally in the nation’s capital. Unions were demonstrating in support of legislation with the Orwellian title Employee Free Choice Act. It would deny employees the choice of a secret ballot when voting on unionization of their workplace. Instead, union organizers would use the “card check” system, which allows them to pick the voters they want: Once a majority of workers — exposed one at a time to face-to-face pressure from union organizers — sign a union card, the union is automatically certified as the bargaining agent for all the workers.

It’s as if they come from two different worlds.

Specificity

It often happens–every day actually–that people say things I wanted to, only better:

>An annoyance: any discussion of any complex issue in terms of abstract taxonomy at the expense of a careful account of specific people, places, times, motivations, and events. This gives me hives when it pops up in, say, literary criticism, but it really pisses me off in discussions of foreign policy, where the consequences of f***ing up are a lot of dead people.

I would add, of course, specific arguments.

Authenticity

Paul Krugman:

>Here’s a suggestion: Why not evaluate candidates’ policy proposals, rather than their authenticity? And if there are reasons to doubt a candidate’s sincerity, spell them out.

Because:

. . . . [C]onsider the case of Fred Thompson. He spent 18 years working as a highly paid lobbyist, wore well-tailored suits and drove a black Lincoln Continental. When he ran for the Senate, however, his campaign reinvented him as a good old boy: it leased a used red pickup truck for him to drive, dressed up in jeans and a work shirt, with a can of Red Man chewing tobacco on the front seat.

>But Mr. Thompson’s strength, says Lanny Davis in The Hill, is that he’s “authentic.”

And also:

>Oh, and as a candidate George W. Bush was praised as being more authentic than Al Gore. As late as November 2005, MSNBC’s chief political correspondent declared that Mr. Bush’s authenticity was his remaining source of strength. But now The A.P. says that Mr. Bush’s lack of credibility is the reason his would-be successors need to seem, yes, authentic.

Even more ridiculous than the politics of “authenticity” (which only applies to Republicans by the way), is the politics of head and shoulders:

Speaking of Mitt Romney’s performance at the debate the other night, the Politico (that’s some kind of blog) writes:

>FIRST PLACE: Mitt Romney

>Analysis: Strong, clear, gives good soundbite and has shoulders you could land a 737 on. Not only knows how to answer a question, but how to duck one. Asked why he was so late in deciding to oppose abortion, Romney smoothly replied: “I’m not going to apologize for the fact that I became pro-life.”

Before the praise for this man’s shoulders, his hair:

>Romney has chiseled-out-of-granite features, a full, dark head of hair going a distinguished gray at the temples, and a barrel chest. On the morning that he announced for president, I bumped into him in the lounge of the Marriott and up close he is almost overpowering. He radiates vigor.

Now the kicker:

>And he can’t wait to stand next to John McCain on a stage and invite comparison. (McCain, who looks less hearty than Romney, was severely injured while fighting for his country as a Naval aviator. Romney never served in the military, though the band at his announcement played both “Anchors Aweigh” and “The Marines’ Hymn.”)

Philosophy Majors

A former philosophy major writes:

>It’s quite true that would Eli Lake says here is nonsense. That said, BarbinMD at DailyKos takes things too far when she writes: “By the way, did I mention that Lake majored in philosophy in college? Currently writing for the New York Sun, he apparently couldn’t find a job in his chosen field.”

>I majored in philosophy, damnit (so did Spencer Ackerman and Julian Sanchez), and it’s a perfectly good thing for journalists to study. In some ways, I think it’s actually the best thing to study. The job, by its nature, involves trying to quickly learn and write a lot about a wide range of subjects. Under the circumstances, spending your student years trying to master a skill-set that’s completely divorced from knowledge of particular facts is pretty useful. If you’re good at spotting flaws in the arguments constructed by others irrespective of what the topic is, you’ll never lack for things to write about.

Huzzah for the “flaws in arguments” part; whiskey, tango, foxtrot question mark for the “divorced from knowledge of particular facts” part: logic is only one tiny part of philosophy.