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General discussion

Gay demons

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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.

specious comparisons

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.

Argument Schemes

Invisible man

2 Comments

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.

General discussion

Changing the definition of bigotry

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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.

General discussion

Follow up

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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.

undistributed middle

Bad company

6 Comments

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.

Hasty Generalization, hollow man, Straw Man

The debacle of higher education

3 Comments

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.

General discussion, Straw Man

Final Exam

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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. 
 

 

 

General discussion

A conventional understanding of facts

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Sorry it's been a long time since I rapped at ya, but things around here are crazy.  To get back into the swing of things, here's an article, cowritten by a fellow at the conservative American Enterprise Institute,* that claims that the source of rancor and animosity in Washington is, you guessed it, ultra-right wing Republican intransigence.

Some sample grafs:

Rep. Allen West, a Florida Republican, was recently captured on video asserting that there are “78 to 81” Democrats in Congress who are members of the Communist Party. Of course, it’s not unusual for some renegade lawmaker from either side of the aisle to say something outrageous. What made West’s comment — right out of the McCarthyite playbook of the 1950s — so striking was the almost complete lack of condemnation from Republican congressional leaders or other major party figures, including the remaining presidential candidates.

It’s not that the GOP leadership agrees with West; it is that such extreme remarks and views are now taken for granted.

We have been studying Washington politics and Congress for more than 40 years, and never have we seen them this dysfunctional. In our past writings, we have criticized both parties when we believed it was warranted. Today, however, we have no choice but to acknowledge that the core of the problem lies with the Republican Party.

The GOP has become an insurgent outlier in American politics. It is ideologically extreme; scornful of compromise; unmoved by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition.

No kidding.  Sadly, the authors go on to claim that the Democrats have "moved to the left" as well.  I think this is false.  My argument is as follows: Obamacare was copied from Mitt Romney, the current Republican candidate.  Republicans call this Heritage foundation idea "socialism."

*Update: the original said Norm Ornstein was a fellow at the "Heritage Institute," which doesn't exist.  But if it did, it would be called the "Heritage Foundation."  But that's not where Ornstein is a fellow.  He's a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, still a conservative think tank.  I got that much right, at least.

General discussion, Iron man, Tony Perkins

L’uomo di sasso*

5 Comments

Tony Perkins, of Focus on the Family fame, shows the uninitiated how to iron man.  For those playing along at home, an iron man is a kind of reverse straw man.  Instead of weakening an argument so as more easily to defeat it, an iron man strengthens an argument so as to make it more difficult to defeat.  Both violate the dialectical principle of fidelity, and so are wrong.

Today we have Perkins doing the iron-manning (rather than being iron-manned, as would be more common in his case).  Here he is speaking on the subject of the President's Birth Certificate (via Think Progress):

PERKINS: [The media] have attempted to marginalize anyone who challenges this administration on those principles and that driving ideology. You know, it goes back to what they did to those that questioned the issue of his birth certificate. Look, I don’t know about all that, but I will tell you this, it’s a legitimate issue from the standpoint of what the Constitution says.

And I think what we’ve done is we’ve done great harm to foundation of our government by marginalizing and attacking anyone who brings up a legitimate issue.

Holy Batman is that awful.  Now, to be fair, whether a candidate for President is born in the USA is a constitutional issue.  An iron man view of Perkin's awful argument would stop there (as does his iron-man view of birtherism).  

But Perkins is saying more than that.  He saying it is still an open question in this circumstance–i.e., Obama may not have been born in the USA.  But that matter has been settled on all reasonable accounts, and those who continue to believe that it's false or questionable do not have good, sound constitutional points to make.  They have factual points to make–namely in this case the President was not born in the USA. 

This is of course false a thousand times over. 

Calling them loony-toons is precisely what is called for.  

*"the stone man," as in Il Commendatore.