Anything else.
In Plato's cave, this is actually illegal:
Dangerous Gun Drawing of the Day: A Kitchener, Ontario man was arrested at his child’s school, dragged to a police station in handcuffs, and strip-searched — all over a drawing of a gun his four-year-old daughter made in class.
It gets worse: The gun in the drawing turned out to be toy.
True story. Via The Daily What.
*Also, "IRL" is Internet for "in real life."
According to Rick Santorum, Obama is a snob (looking down on you, white man) for wanting people to go to college. Talking Points Memo reports:
"Not all folks are gifted the same way. Some people have incredible gifts with their hands," Santorum began. "Some people have incredible gifts and want to work out there making things."
Then he went after the president's call for making college easier for Americans to attend.
President Obama wants everybody in America to go to college. What a snob," Santorum said as the crowd howled with laughter and applause. "There are good, decent men and women who work hard every day and put their skills to the test that aren't taught by some liberal college professor."
Santorum said he knows the real reason Obama wants more Americans on college campuses.
"That's why he wants you to go to college. He wants to remake you in his image," Santorum said to more applause. "I want to create jobs so people can remake their children into their image, not his."
I doubt Obama's view is "everyone must go to college indocrination." It's more like: "everyone should have access to college if they want it."
Nonetheless, this is a kind of brilliantly evil move on Santorum's part: expecting his view to make any sense is a form of snobbery.
Chris Christie, governor of New Jersey, is the latest in a line of Repubicans to offer the following fallacious argument on tax increases. Speaking of Warren Buffett, tax-increase supporter, he argues:
MORGAN: You know where I’m going at with that. Warren Buffett keeps screaming to be taxed more.
CHRISTIE: Yeah, well he should just write a check and shut up. Really. And just contribute. The fact of the matter is that I’m tired of hearing about it. If he wants to give the government more money, he’s got the ability to write a check. Go ahead and write it.
The natural implication is that Buffett's argument is crap, as he isn't just going to write a check to the Treasury. So Buffett is a hypocrite.
This implication is just garbage, however. Buffett's argument is that everyone of income bracket x ought to pay a higher tax rate. His failure voluntarily to do so is not relevant to the claim that everyone ought to.
I'm afraid to look, but I bet this one is making the rounds through the guts of the internet like so much cryptosporidium.
I shouldn't feel like I'm nutpicking when I talk about the views of the Republican frontrunner of the week. Nonetheless, I do. That's because it's Rick Santorum. Here's his take on environmentalism (via TPM):
When you have a worldview that elevates the Earth above man and says that we can’t take those resources because we’re going to harm the Earth; by things that frankly are just not scientifically proven, for example, the politicization of the whole global warming debate — this is all an attempt to, you know, to centralize power and to give more power to the government,” Santorum said.
The "no scientific proof stuff" is standard fare for the climate-change-denier wing of the Republican party. But Santorum mixes this "I'm not convinced by the science" perspective with Biblical imperatives about who rules what (answer: man rules the earth). Who rules what, however, is a political question. So isn't Santorum politicizing the global warming debate by invoking the claims of a religious subgroup?
Nut picking is a variety of straw man fallacy where one selects the looniest advocates of a position as representative of the best or the majority of the opposition. Fear of nut picking often leads to iron manning–purposely ignoring the degraded state of someone's argument so as not to be guilty of nut picking. Fear of nut picking also often forces people to look the other way, for fear of playing the race card. The race card is what Bob Somerby accuses the left of doing exclusively and obsessively. Somerby's Daily Howler is one of the inspirations for the iron man. Here was the original idea.
With those caveats, look with horror on the reactions of many Fox News commenters on the death of Whitney Houston. Here is an example:
A tragedy is when someones passes away from a terminal disease or something else that no one saw coming. Whitney is just an inferior lo w life ni gg er that needed to go,no tragedy,no loss.
via Little Green Footballs, Leiter.
Click here for a nice piece on the problem of iron-manning and the spread of ignorance. Here is a taste:
Self-deprecating, too liberal for their own good, today's progressives stand back and watch, hands over their mouths, as the social vivisectionists of the right slice up a living society to see if its component parts can survive in isolation. Tied up in knots of reticence and self-doubt, they will not shout stop. Doing so requires an act of interruption, of presumption, for which they no longer possess a vocabulary.
Perhaps it is in the same spirit of liberal constipation that, with the exception of Charlie Brooker, we have been too polite to mention the Canadian study published last month in the journal Psychological Science, which revealed that people with conservative beliefs are likely to be of low intelligence. Paradoxically it was the Daily Mail that brought it to the attention of British readers last week. It feels crude, illiberal to point out that the other side is, on average, more stupid than our own. But this, the study suggests, is not unfounded generalisation but empirical fact.
Via Leiter.
Also via Leiter, an interesting podcast on fallacies of reasoning.
*fixed crazy typo in title. Silly me.
**Had to change picture; I was getting malware warnings from Google Chrome.
It's a book. Check it out here.
It's also a method of arguing. Here's an illustration:
Here is another illustration:
Virginia Governor and Mitt Romney surrogate Bob McDonnell (R) on Sunday floated what may turn into a Republican talking point if the economy continues to improve: It wasn’t President Obama who made it happen, it was the GOP governors.
“Look, I’m glad the economy is starting to recover, but I think it’s because of what Republican governors are doing in their states, not because of the president,” McDonnell said on CNN’s “State of the Union.”
The Virginia governor unleashed a comprehensive broadside against Obama’s economic record and governance in his first term. “It’s been a complete failure of leadership,” he said. “He cannot run on his record. He’s had no plan for jobs or energy that he’s got passed, so he’s got a tough record.”
When things go well, the Republicans did it. When things go badly, democrats, so the Governor farted. As the author of the above snippett quickly pointed out, the Governor's claim is hard to square with the facts, as jobs were gained across the board (even in states with Democratic governors).
None of this is an argument for the claim that Obama did it. This view, however, doesn't amount to much more than farting in everyone's face. We need a shield.
Many have heard by now of Mitt Romney's relatively low (well, very low) tax rate: 13.9 percent on one accounting, 15 percent on another. This is because his income does not come from work, but rather from dividends and other investments. These are taxed at a different rate from work.
I am going to grant that there are arguments for taxing investments differently from work. Some of these arguments might be good ones, or at least strong ones. The one Romney offered in is own defense, however, is not one of them.
Here it goes (via TPM):
Romney’s argument is that even though he pays only 13.9%, he’s really paying something like 45% to 50% because the investment income he lives on comes from corporations. And those corporates also pay taxes. The nominal corporate tax rate is 35%, though of course many pay much lower. But if you add Romney’s rate together with this completely unrelated corporate tax he doesn’t pay, you get 50%, which Romney is now saying is real tax rate. In other words, he’s claiming he pays both taxes.
See the video at the link. I'm trying to figure out the ontology of this claim. It seems like Romney is saying that taxation runs with the money, as it were. So if a corporation (which is, after all, people for Romney) makes profits, those profits are taxed. That taxation counts for all of the money that then gets paid out in whatever way by that corporation (including the rise in the value of the stock price, etc.). If the corporation puts the money back into the business, and then later sells the business, the money has already been taxed! If a corporation pays me to do work for it, then I can claim the money they pay me has already been taxed! If I buy a product in a store, I can claim that sales tax has already been paid in huge amounts!
I think this only works if corporations are literally people.
Also, in the video, Romeny included his charitable contributions in his tax burden. Taxes and charity are significantly different, however. Taxes are obligations to your fellow citizens. Charity is up to you. I don't think he wants us to start thinking of the Mormon Church as a tax-supported entity.
There are people with no sense of humor at all (encountered them here) and there is NBC's Chuck Todd. He is concerned that Stephen Colbert's 24/7 satire of the Republican-allied Fox Network might be anti-Republican.
Appearing at a Winthrop University forum, Todd said that Colbert was doing a "noble" thing by educating his audience about the inner workings of a Super PAC. However, he told the crowd that he had been "very offended" when Colbert testified before Congress about immigration in character, and that he saw the comedian's presidential activities in the same light.
"He is making a mockery of the system," Todd said. "…Is it fair to the process? Yes, the process is a mess, but he's doing it in a way that feels like he's trying to influence it with his own agenda and that may be anti-Republican."
He cautioned the media to be "careful" about amplifying Colbert's message, and said it should not be treated as "shtick" or satire.
"What is his real agenda here?" he said. "Is it to educate the public about the dangers of money and politics, and what's going on? Or is it simply to marginalize the Republican Party? I think if I were a Republican candidate I would be concerned about that."
Perhaps this hypothetical Republican ought to be concerned about having such easily satirized views. I wonder if anyone pointed out to Todd that satire is a critical genre–someone is going to get it. Imagine Todd worrying that some Repubican lobbyist might be testifying before Congress with an agenda that "may be" anti-Democratic.
The other day I posted something on Senator Grassley's attempt to find a contradiction in Democrats' support for more robust child labor laws–it would keep children from being physically active, he said. That sounded like a joke–but it wasn't. Now comes Keith Ablow, of Fox News, arguing that Newt Gingrich's adultery makes him a better candidate for President than non-adulterers. He argues:
1) Three women have met Mr. Gingrich and been so moved by his emotional energy and intellect that they decided they wanted to spend the rest of their lives with him.
2) Two of these women felt this way even though Mr. Gingrich was already married.
3 ) One of them felt this way even though Mr. Gingrich was already married for the second time, was not exactly her equal in the looks department and had a wife (Marianne) who wanted to make his life without her as painful as possible.
Conclusion: When three women want to sign on for life with a man who is now running for president, I worry more about whether we’ll be clamoring for a third Gingrich term, not whether we’ll want to let him go after one.
The people, by whom I mean three women who have been married to Gingrich, have spoken. Clearly the nation as a whole will like him. There's more:
4) Two women—Mr. Gingrich’s first two wives—have sat down with him while he delivered to them incredibly painful truths: that he no longer loved them as he did before, that he had fallen in love with other women and that he needed to follow his heart, despite the great price he would pay financially and the risk he would be taking with his reputation.
Conclusion: I can only hope Mr. Gingrich will be as direct and unsparing with the Congress, the American people and our allies. If this nation must now move with conviction in the direction of its heart, Newt Gingrich is obviously no stranger to that journey.
Hm. Not sure if Ablow means he hopes Gingrich dumps the US for a younger, sexier country, which he will carry on a secret affair with (Iran maybe).