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Diverting from the topic matter

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Iowa Representative Steven King reminds us of an important characteristic of ad hominem arguments–viz., calling someone names is not a sufficient condition for an ad hominem.  The matter begins with the following remark concerning granting amnesty to illegal immigrants:

“Some of them are valedictorians — and their parents brought them in. It wasn’t their fault. It’s true in some cases, but they aren’t all valedictorians. They weren’t all brought in by their parents.

“For everyone who’s a valedictorian, there’s another 100 out there who weigh 130 pounds — and they’ve got calves the size of cantaloupes because they’re hauling 75 pounds of marijuana across the desert,” King tells Newsmax. “Those people would be legalized with the same act.” 

Naturally, people were quick to notice that this remark was “wrong” (to use the words of John Boehner, House Republican Majority Leader).  Yet, in an all too common response to criticism such as this, King attempted to turn the tables:

“You know when people attack you—in this business, when you’re in this business, you know that when people attack you, and they call you names, they’re diverting from the topic matter,” King told Breitbart. “You know they’ve lost the debate when they do that. We’ve talked about it for years. Tom Tancredo and I joked about it that that’s the pattern. When people start calling you names, that’s what confirms you’ve won the debate.”

No, that isn’t actually a rule.

This rule only works this way: Person A is wrong about policy X because Person A is an a-hole”.  But this isn’t how it went.  In the present case, we have Person A said something false so Person A is wrong.  It’s an inference to Person A’s character from Person A’s actions, deeds, or words.  This is very different.

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When I was a child, I thought like a child

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A young woman in Texas found a provocative way to make a point about freedom of religion–or freedom from someone else’s religion.  Here it is:

That certainly got people’s attention.  Sadly, her willingness to step into this adult debate has taught her an adult lesson.  She writes:

That’s when people started calling me a “whore.”

I’m going to be honest about what it feels like to be called that as a 14-year-old girl who has never had sex and who doesn’t plan to have sex anytime soon.

I feel disappointed.

It’s hard for me to understand why adults would be calling me this. It’s hard for me to understand why anyone would use this term for a 14-year-old girl.

It’s not anyone’s business, but as I said, I am a virgin, and I don’t plan to have sex until I am an adult.

But none of those facts make me feel any less passionate about fighting for a woman’s right to choose and the separation of church and state in my home state of Texas.

I also don’t think this makes me — or any other 14-year-old girl who agrees with me — a whore.

It simply makes us people. People who believe that abortion should be safe, legal and accessible for women. People who believe women should be in control of their bodies and should not ever have to put their lives at risk so that we don’t go backwards in women’s rights in this country.

The adult lesson here is that people act like children when children expect them to act like adults.  How I hope this brave young woman does not put away childish things.

General discussion

You don’t say

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A Picture of Obviousness

Today I want to borrow something particularly interesting from No More Mister Nice Blog.  Much of our work here, as we head into our ninth year, involves pointing out the flaws in people’s arguments.  I still think that’s an important job after all the years.  But here, thanks to NMMNB, is an instance in which David Brooks, once a favorite target of ours (and kind of an inspiration for this blog with all of his hackery) actually changes his mind on account of an argument.  Here it is:

Obama spoke about Stand Your Ground laws — and, again, I don’t think he was “sympathetic to all sides” (nor should he have been):

And for those who resist that idea that we should think about something like these “stand your ground” laws, I’d just ask people to consider, if Trayvon Martin was of age and armed, could he have stood his ground on that sidewalk? And do we actually think that he would have been justified in shooting Mr. Zimmerman who had followed him in a car because he felt threatened? And if the answer to that question is at least ambiguous, then it seems to me that we might want to examine those kinds of laws.

Hearing this made David Brooks reconsider his position on these laws:

And I have to say, the point on the Stand Your Ground law was actually clarifying for me. I had some sympathy for the laws because as, you know, as Americans, we should be independent, we should be able to defend ourselves, be strong. But the argument he made about, you know, do we really want all sorts of people, do we really want what happened here, people walking around with guns feeling free to shoot off without legal protections, without the normal legal process — now, that’s a compelling argument, which he put very well.

Yes, Brooks actually said he’d never quite thought about the possibility of extending Stand Your Ground to “all sorts of people.” Yes, even those sorts. When you put it that way, Stand Your Ground is kinda scary, hunh, David?
Nice work, Professor Obama.

I’m relieved that Obama was able to penetrate the fog of this guy’s mind.  That’s something, I guess.

General discussion

Old man yells at cloud

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NPR’s “All Things Considered” ran a program on young people who challenge common forms of gender identification.  Here’s a snippet:

ADLER: But some students are going further. At one college that Joy Ladin visited, things were so fluid you could make up a different pronoun for a different event.

LADIN: So you can be she/her at one event and then you go to lunch and you say, OK, now I am he/him. And then one charming young woman told me, oh, yes, today, I’m just using made up pronouns.

Fascinating stuff, of course.  This lead to the usual letters and such, among them was this one:

CORNISH: Amy [Redacted] North Carolina, disagrees with that last line. She writes: How about abused and neglected children? They certainly do not have the luxury of sitting at Oberlin College defining themselves as tractors or determining what gender pronoun they’re going to use at any given moment. Lawton goes on: While I believe that these people have the right to choose whatever pronoun they’d like to refer to themselves, by no means are they the most marginalized members of society. Finally, it seems like there are more pressing issues to address around here than rewriting the gender binary.

This is really terrible criticism.  Not to defend NPR, but a search for the exact string “Child Abuse” produced 400 results on the NPR web page.

Now here’s the question.  I imagine NPR had lots of choice here in selecting among the responses to their story.  Did they have to pick such a cranky and ill-informed one?  It seems like they have an obligation to select strong (that is, relevant and cogently argued) responses.  Here’s another question: is it fair to the cranky letter writer to publish his/her silly letter?  Seems not.

General discussion

Common sense

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Fig 1: “a uniform we all recognize”

I remember a while back, maybe three years ago, Juan Williams, now of Fox News but then of NPR, remarked that people in Muslim-looking garb on planes made him nervous.  That was a silly bit of profiling, of course.  Now in the wake of the Trayvon Martin not guilty verdict, racial profiling is all the rage, at least at the Washington Post.  Both Richard Cohen, who is allegedly a liberal columnist, and Kathleen Parker (a conservative) have penned columns justifying some sort of profiling.  Here is Parker:

This is not to justify what subsequently transpired between Zimmerman and Martin but to cast a dispassionate eye on reality. And no, just because a few black youths caused trouble doesn’t mean all black youths should be viewed suspiciously. This is so obvious a truth that it shouldn’t need saying and yet, if we are honest, we know that human nature includes the accumulation of evolved biases based on experience and survival. In the courtroom, it’s called profiling. In the real world, it’s called common sense.

Oddly, this “dispassionate eye on reality” seems to suggest that racial profilers, such as Zimmerman appears to have been, lack common sense.  For, after all, being suspicious of biases such as these is common sense, common decency, and basic intellectual skill.  Now to be fair, the rest of her piece, by the way, isn’t that bad–or at least not as bad as Richard Cohen’s horrible meditation on hoodies:

Where is the politician who will own up to the painful complexity of the problem and acknowledge the widespread fear of crime committed by young black males? This does not mean that raw racism has disappeared, and some judgments are not the product of invidious stereotyping. It does mean, though, that the public knows young black males commit a disproportionate amount of crime. In New York City, blacks make up a quarter of the population, yet they represent78 percent of all shooting suspects — almost all of them young men. We know them from the nightly news.

Sounds like your uncle at Thanksgiving–for excellent analysis of Cohen’s unpardonably bad piece, see Jamelle Bouie.

TL;DR: this horrible crime (I think) ought at least to provide us an opportunity to reflect on the malfunctioning operation of common sense, or racism, as some call it.

General discussion

Cheating, at logic

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Ouch

I like cycling and it’s Tour de France season, so here’s a cycling related post.  Ted King, a rider for the Cannondale squad, found himself eliminated from the entire race by seven seconds yesterday.  The rule goes like this: all riders must complete the race within 25 percent of the winning time.  King’s time fell outside of that, so he was disqualified.

This certainly sucks for him.  Now perhaps relevant to this story is the fact that King was the victim of a serious crash and was riding on a separated shoulder.  I say “perhaps” because here we have a genuine puzzle of the non fallacious ad misericordiam argument.  It goes like this: surely King, who was riding on an injured shoulder, deserves some leniency.

Questions such as these are very difficult.  The time cut off exists for a reason (though I don’t know what it is).  Regardless, appealing to extenuating circumstances in this case seems reasonable.

What is not reasonable, however, is the following tweet by Garmin Team Director Jonathan Vaughters:

My reasoning was that if we wish to encourage clean cycling, we can’t impose very high minimum speeds. But “c’est le ciclisme!” wins over logic

Sadly, this reminds me of the student who says high standards made him cheat.  Should cheating occur, it’s not the result of the rules.  It’s a result of people failing to deal with the rules fairly.  Raising the prospect of cheating as a consequence of rules you don’t agree with is cheating.  Only it’s cheating at logic.  Besides, the Tour directors, as far as I know, didn’t set the minimum speed, but rather the percentage of the cut off.  The riders set the speed.

General discussion

Never argue with a Sicilian when homosexual sodomy is on the line

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That’s Sicilian

It’s slippery slope week.

Here’s a snippet from Justice Antonin Scalia’s dissent on yesterday’s SCOTUS ruling on gay marriage:

When the Court declared a constitutional right to homosexual sodomy, we were assured that the case had nothing, nothing at all to do with “whether the government must give formal recognition to any relationship that homosexual persons seek to enter.” Id., at  578. Now we are told that DOMA is invalid because it “demeans the couple, whose moral and sexual choices the Constitution protects,” ante, at 23—with an accompanying citation of Lawrence. It takes real cheek for today’s majority to assure us, as it is going out the door, that a constitutional requirement to give formal recognition to same-sex marriage is not at issue here—when what has preceded that assurance is a lecture on how superior the majority’s moral judgment in favor of same-sex marriage is to the Congress’s hateful moral judgment against it. I promise you this: The only thing that will “confine” the Court’s holding is its sense of what it can get away with. 

Justice Scalia may indeed be correct about the alleged inconsistency; The court may have previously held that Lawrence v Texas wouldn’t entail gay marriage, but then in Windsor they use the legality of “homosexual sodomy” to justify not discriminating against gay marriages.  This, he maintains, shows the slippery slope from “homosexual sodomy” to gay marriage.

A few points.  First, since I’m not a legal scholar, I don’t know if the court has to maintain its promises–or whether the court can make promises like this.  The gay marriage case wasn’t before the court at the time, and, as far as I know, the court decides only the cases it has before it.  It would seem completely wrong for them to adjudicate such things in advance.

Second, inconsistencies are not ipso facto signs of dishonesty.  I like to think my current correct views are inconsistent with my past incorrect ones.  I also sincerely hope that my future correct views are inconsistent with my current incorrect ones.

Third, not all slippery slopes are fallacious.  The court has recognized a right to “homosexual sodomy.”  This means that homosexual relationships are not inherently inferior to heterosexual ones.  This does in fact seem to entail that homosexual commitments differ in the same regard: i.e., not at all.

General discussion

Anything goes

Fig 1: The consequences of gay marriage

Some slippery slopes are valid; some are not.  For a slippery slope to work, the consequences have to be very likely.  In fallacious slippery slopes, on the other hand, the consequences are merely scary.

Here’s Ken Cuccinelli with a fallacious slippery slope:

Once the natural limits that inhere in the relationship between a man and a woman can no longer sustain the definition of marriage, the conclusion that follows is that any grouping of adults would have an equal claim to marriage. See, e.g. , Jonathan Turley, One Big, Happy Polygamous Family , NY Times, July 21, 2011, at A27 (“[Polygamists] want to be allowed to create a loving family according to the values of their faith.”).”

Polygamy, or what some call “Traditional Marriage” has already existed as a non-consequence of gay marriage.  This means that polygamy is not a stage along the gay permissiveness continuum.

More importantly, polygamy, whatever it might mean, is significantly different from dual marriage (is that a term?).  The legal relationships are undefined and it does not exist.  Marriage between non-child-producing couples already exists, and differs in no respect from gay marriage–except, perhaps, that gay marriages can result in natural children.

So let’s drop the polygamy business.  Yes, maybe it is scary and weird to you.  But remember, polygamy is what the Bible sometimes advocates (along with concubines!) and, more significantly, it’s got little to do with the rights of two unrelated people.

Let’s try to be more rigorous and more imaginative.  Perhaps Ken Cuccinelli ought to remember that when he opens his mouth to argue, he sets an example for the kids out there.  This is a terrible example.

General discussion

Today x, tomorrow why?

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By nearly any measure–ok, probably by every measure, CEO pay is vastly disproportionate to the pay of the average worker.  Here’s one example (via Bloomberg):

Former fashion jewelry saleswoman Rebecca Gonzales and former Chief Executive Officer Ron Johnson have one thing in common: J.C. Penney Co. (JCP) no longer employs either.

The similarity ends there. Johnson, 54, got a compensation package worth 1,795 times the average wage and benefits of a U.S. department store worker when he was hired in November 2011, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. Gonzales’s hourly wage was $8.30 that year.

Read the rest of the article (charts and all).  In light of this and similar facts, Congress tried to work up something.  Since Congress mostly sucks at lawmaking, they passed a rule that companies need at least to disclose the ratio.

This rule was not long for the world, as the House Financial Services Committee has just voted to repeal that mandate.  One member, Jeb Hensarling, reasoned thusly:

Today, joked House Financial Services chair Jeb Hensarling from Texas, CEO-worker pay disclosure, tomorrow a mandate that companies calculate the ratio of office supplies they get from national big box retailers to the goods they get from locals — or the ratio of healthy to unhealthy drinks in company soda machines.

Yes, when will these burdensome disclosures end?

General discussion

Religious orientation

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Speaking of the Daily Show, here is their version of the Vatican Standoff (discussed here the other day):

Here’s the Vatican’s Bishop Toso making essentially the same argument:

There are many areas where intolerance against Christians can clearly be seen, but two stand out as being particularly relevant at present.

The first is intolerance against Christian speech. In recent years there has been a significant increase in incidents involving Christians who have been arrested and even prosecuted, for speaking on Christian issues. Religious leaders are threatened with police action after preaching about sinful behaviour and some are even sentenced to prison for preaching on the biblical teaching against sexual immorality. Even private conversations between citizens, including expression of opinions on social network, can become the grounds of a criminal complaint, or at least intolerance, in many European countries.

If only Samantha Bee could have interviewed this guy.