Category Archives: General discussion

Anything else.

General discussion, George Will, hollow man

Clownface

Few people could seriously claim the behavior of the Obama administration has been socialist by any stretch.  It is characterized, in the minds of many progressives, by its adherence to Bush-era policies, giveaways to the banking and credit industry, and its obvious reluctance to challenge the insurance industry in enacting health reform.  In a sign, however, of just how no amount of democratic caving will satisfy some people, George Will writes:

As memories of the Cold War fade, like photographs bleached by sunlight, few remember the Brezhnev Doctrine. It was enunciated by Leonid Brezhnev in Warsaw in November 1968 as a retrospective justification for the Soviet-led invasion of Prague the previous August by Warsaw Pact forces to halt Czechoslovakia's liberalization. The doctrine was supposed to guarantee that history would be directional, controlled by a leftward-clicking ratchet. It asserted a Soviet right to intervene to protect socialism wherever it was imposed.

We are already testing whether President Obama and other statists who have given his administration and this Congress their ideological cast have a doctrine analogous to Brezhnev's. Having aggressively, even promiscuously, blurred the distinction between public and private sectors with improvised and largely unauthorized interventions in the economy, will they ever countenance a retreat of the state? Or do they have an aspiration that they dare not speak? Do they hope that state capitalism will be irreversible — that wherever government has asserted the primacy of politics, the primacy will be permanent?

Not only is this comparison ridiculous, it lacks imagination.  There are probably a thousand plausible things one could say, from the right, about Obama.  Comparing him to long dead Soviet Premier Brezhnev–"who is that, by the way?" the young ones will ask–is just shy of Godwin territory.

General discussion

Preventive scare

3 Comments

Charles Krauthammer is a doctor, the kind of doctor an insurance company would love:

How can that be? If you prevent somebody from getting a heart attack, aren't you necessarily saving money? The fallacy here is confusing the individual with society. For the individual, catching something early generally reduces later spending for that condition. But, explains Elmendorf, we don't know in advance which patients are going to develop costly illnesses. To avert one case, "it is usually necessary to provide preventive care to many patients, most of whom would not have suffered that illness anyway." And this costs society money that would not have been spent otherwise.

Think of it this way. Assume that a screening test for disease X costs $500 and finding it early averts $10,000 of costly treatment at a later stage. Are you saving money? Well, if one in 10 of those who are screened tests positive, society is saving $5,000. But if only one in 100 would get that disease, society is shelling out $40,000 more than it would without the preventive care.

In the very abstract, of course, that's not a ridiculous claim.  I think he's right to make the claim that preventive care is not the high road to lower health care costs (no one he cites seems to argue for that particular claim). He is also right to grant (as he does, a few paragraphs later) that there is a moral reason for preventive care–to limit suffering.  Nonetheless, I think there are two objections one could make here.

First, the economic calculation is the very one the insurance company makes–which, if I am not mistaken, is the problem.

Second, while Krauthammer is not wrong to say that preventive care is economically different from any other medical procedure (he does have an MD after all), he's allowing you to think that preventive care means everyone gets a series of costly tests every year, no matter how irrelevant or unnecessary.  He writes:

That's a hypothetical case. What's the real-life actuality? In Obamaworld, as explained by the president in his Tuesday town hall, if we pour money into primary care for diabetics instead of giving surgeons "$30,000, $40,000, $50,000" for a later amputation — a whopper that misrepresents the surgeon's fee by a factor of at least 30 — "that will save us money." Back on Earth, a rigorous study in the journal Circulation found that for cardiovascular diseases and diabetes, "if all the recommended prevention activities were applied with 100 percent success," the prevention would cost almost 10 times as much as the savings, increasing the country's total medical bill by 162 percent. That's because prevention applied to large populations is very expensive, as shown by another report Elmendorf cites, a definitive review in the New England Journal of Medicine of hundreds of studies that found that more than 80 percent of preventive measures added to medical costs.  

On the cost of an amputation, I'd say the surgeon definitely does not make that, but I think Obama means the total cost–which has to be somewhere around there (but I could be mistaken). 

But the "large populations" claim strikes me as odd, because not everyone will be a candidate for every preventive measure.  Besides, not every preventive measure is a 500 dollar test (which seems to be the basic idea of preventive care in the CBO study):

During a press briefing Tuesday, Thorpe said “the CBO focuses on one type of prevention, which is trying to detect disease through screenings. And some of those types of disease screenings can actually reduce costs, as in the case of colorectal cancer. And a lot of it is really not designed to reduce cost, it’s designed to get people medical intervention earlier,” he said. “So the intent of disease detection is not to save money, it’s sort of a straw man.” [Sorry for the format, but the original is behind a pay wall].

Finally, he is also assuming the present (inflated) cost structure as a baseline.  Some have argued recently that the cost structure and the medical practice we are the problem.  Others have argued that the metric of the CBO study leaves out what really ought to be measured in the first place.  While neither of these demonstrates the cost-effectiveness of preventive care–they do at least point out that we should be minimally circumspect about the CBO's study.

 

Ad hominem circumstantial, General discussion

You’re just saying that because it’s true

11 Comments

One day someone with more time than me will write about the various forms of meta debate.  By "meta debate" I mean, of course, discussions about the various forms and rules of "debate" (a word I don't like so much) or "discussion." Here's an example of a particularly pernicious form of meta debating (courtesy of Sadly,No!):

Pointing out that both sides engage in the same tactics, and that, in this case, one set of tactics seems to be unrelated to a substantive policy outcome neither presuppose the truth of one side of the debate nor does it presuppose that one side of the debate isn't actually, ultimately, right.  In the same way, it is illogical to assume that because one side distorts the debate far more than the other side, the debate itself ought to turn out in any prescribed way.  When I write things like this, it drives some partisans absolutely crazy. They don't like where the I'm drawing the "truth" line, and instead of reading the judgments that I've made — the Right is appealing to anger and fear and is distorting the debate more — they focus on the link that I won't then make — the link that I have no expertise to make — the link that, if I were to make it, I would be guilty of an offense against democracy — the link between what IS and what OUGHT to be. 

This is not actually that bad of a disclaimer (save for the confused "is-ought" business at the end.  Nonetheless, where this fellow's observations fall on rocky soil (I just heard that phrase the other day) is earlier in the piece.  He writes:

The field of cognitive neuroscience has all but given up trying to distinguish between emotion and reason, but political debate evidently lags far behind the science. Some observers of health care politics, particularly on the left, tend to accuse their opponents of trying to trigger emotional panic points rather than argue dispassionately about the facts. The implication is that the Right doesn't have any facts, so it looks to exploit voters' fears. There is something to be said for this argument, but it's not what proponents would have you believe. In policy debates where the target voter claims an independent identity, the side that's proposing something usually has a set of normative facts, and the side that's against something always appeals to that which most powerfully undercuts a fact. Democrats and Republicans both use emotion, but they use it differently, and use it to achieve different goals. 
 
The pro-reform side is appealing to emotion, too — albeit a wholly different emotion — the self-satisfaction one feels when one believes one has rationally deliberated something and meaningfully contributed to an important public debate.  This is called a solidary incentive. It's a powerful — and often completely ignored — sentiment, one that the Obama presidential campaign found, capitalized on, and won the election by exploiting.

As an empirical matter, I think this observation is just plain false.  Both "sides" (there are more than two for Pete's sake), appeal to facts.  The screaming Mimis at the town hall meetings (who are largely opposition types) come harmed with "facts" that have produced "emotions" although emotions of a decisively negative kind (relative to the things being proposed).  Let me put that another way: given the facts as they know them, they really hate the proposals.  The degree of their hatred of the proposals does not (for a careful observer) accentuate or diminish the basic factual assertions some of them seem to make.  In other words, they're not wronger or righter because they're screaming.  Maybe they're just jerks for that.  But that's a different question.

The real idiocy here of course consists in the claim that the side whose appeal is primarily factual (in the silly description offered here) is also appealing to emotion–the satisfaction one gets from doing the right thing.  I mean, again, for Pete's sake.  This is the lowest form of ad hominem argument: attacking someone because they're eager to have the correct position.  There's no defense against this.

I don't mean to allege that the screaming Mimi opposition doesn't have the right answer.  I think they think they do.  This author's analysis here is too shallow and too facile to bother with such weighty questions.  Instead, we are treated to the silliest form of meta debate analysis.  Everybody poops.

General discussion

Slippery herring

6 Comments

I may have used this title (we are, after all, heading into year six on August 23rd), so I reserve the right to change it.  Today I think it would be worth it to think about the slippery slope fallacy.  Inspired by this post by John Holbo at the always worth reading (save for the occasional comment trolls) Crooked Timber.  Here in any case is a representative paragraph:

Hypocrisy is the tribute that vice pays to virtue. And slippery slope arguments, arguments from unintended consequences and the paranoid style generally are the tribute conservatism pays to the deep appeal of progressive and liberal values. They are all attempts to outflank all that without engaging it. These are methods for getting off the hook of saying there’s something wrong with what liberals/progressives want. You pretend your opponent isn’t really a liberal/progressive but some secret radical. That’s method one. You pretend the results of liberal/progressive policies wouldn’t be truly liberal/progressive (because we would slip past all that or otherwise end up elsewhere than intended.) That’s method two. That’s pretty much it.

My informal sense (driven by an examination of the categories here on the left of this page) is that the real favorite of conservative types (at least the ones explicitly covered here) is that they prefer the straw man.  The straw man is a fallacy of relevance, a subject-changer in other words: don't attack the opponent's strong argument, go for the weak one (and then claim to have beaten the strong one).  Well that's one form of it, at least.  

But this seems to me to be what Holbo has in mind above anyway.  And I think he's certainly not wrong to notice the relevance issues brought about by slippery slopes.  It's important, to me at least, to keep the two questions distinct–though they may overlap in the mind of the fallacy employer.

In the first place, I think the slippery slope is a variety of causal fallacy–it alleges causal series where none will likely be the case.  So, if we do x (have national health care), in a few disastrous steps we'll be euthanizing the elderly.  Not bloody likely, as someone might say.

In a secondary way, however, such specious causal chains make us argue against the crazy thing–systematic government euthanasia programs–rather than the actual thing (some kind of moderate national health insurance system).  

This–the fact that you have two distinct logical issues–makes the fallacy hard to answer.  You have to answer each part separately, but, unfortunately, by then everyone has lost interest (if they had any to begin with).

General discussion, hollow man, Inexplicable, Lack of Evidence, Plain Bad Arguments, Richard Cohen, Things that are false

Slippery McCoy

1 Comment

The very idea of hate crimes laws drives some people deeply into the forest of confusion, where they forget that speech and belief is punished all of the time, and that doing so is not some kind of violation of one's constitutional rights.  One's constitutional rights have some common sense limits: I cannot shout "fire" in a crowded theater, I cannot say (as someone once said to me–seriously) "I'm going to put a cap in your ass."  Unable to countenance such distinctions, Richard Cohen, some kind of liberal columnist for the Washington Post, writes an extremely confused op-ed wherein he rejects the entire idea of hate crimes legislation.  The whole piece hinges on the following snippet in the Senate discussion of hate crimes laws:

 "A prominent characteristic of a violent crime motivated by bias is that it devastates not just the actual victim . . . but frequently savages the community sharing the traits that caused the victim to be selected."

Let's do some googling before we read Cohen.  And when we do, we find that the passage he cites is not the definition of a hate crime, but rather a "finding."  Here is the definition:

the term “hate crime” has the meaning given such term in section 280003(a) of the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994 (28 U.S.C. 994 note).

Ok, so now more googling:

(a) DEFINITION- In this section, `hate crime' means a crime in which the defendant intentionally selects a victim, or in the case of a property crime, the property that is the object of the crime, because of the actual or perceived race, color, religion, national origin, ethnicity, gender, disability, or sexual orientation of any person.

Cohen ignores that–but refers instead to the "findings" of the new 2009 bill, and attacks that as if it were the very definition and sole motivation for their being hate crimes legislation.  That makes the rest of the argument a hollow man–in that he attacks an argument no actually makes.  He writes,

He [James von Brunn] also proves the stupidity of hate-crime laws. A prime justification for such laws is that some crimes really affect a class of people. The hate-crimes bill recently passed by the Senate puts it this way: "A prominent characteristic of a violent crime motivated by bias is that it devastates not just the actual victim . . . but frequently savages the community sharing the traits that caused the victim to be selected." No doubt. But how is this crime different from most other crimes? 

How is "pre-meditated murder" different from "unpremeditated murder"?  How is killing a police officer in the line of duty different from killing a rival mafioso?  Why is it especially heinous to commit offenses against children and the elderly?  Not all murders are the same, sometimes they have special conditions (premeditation), sometimes they have special victims (police, children, politicians).  None of this is unusual or strange.  

Cohen's argument stinks in other ways.  He alleges a slippery slope without attempting to establish it.

The real purpose of hate-crime laws is to reassure politically significant groups — blacks, Hispanics, Jews, gays, etc. — that someone cares about them and takes their fears seriously. That's nice. It does not change the fact, though, that what's being punished is thought or speech. Johns is dead no matter what von Brunn believes. The penalty for murder is severe, so it's not as if the crime is not being punished. The added "late hit" of a hate crime is without any real consequence, except as a precedent for the punishment of belief or speech. Slippery slopes are supposedly all around us, I know, but this one is the real McCoy. 

Criminal acts of speech, thought, expression (and even religion) get punished all of the time.  It's not that hard to draw relevant distinctions (there will certainly be hard cases, but that's what the judiciary is for).

This op-ed is too full of confusion for one post, so I'll stop with the following:

I doubt that any group of drunken toughs is going to hesitate in their pummeling of a gay individual or an African American or a Jew on account of it being a hate crime.

Um–I really doubt this, but it also seems irrelevant.  

 

Ad hominem tu quoque, General discussion, Ignoratio Elenchi, Red Herring

Dubious is as dubious does

1 Comment

Apparently, John's latest foray into the entangling brambles of Will's global warming denial struck a chord.  In particular, his questioning the expertise of Will and Mark Steyn to one, deny global warming, and two, to properly adjudicate what qualifies as adequate evidence for their denials seemed to have aroused the ire of none less than Steyn himself. To wit:

In a column about "the environment" the other day, George Will quoted yours truly, and has received a lot of grief ever since for relying on a notorious know-nothing.

As he should.  Part of constructing a refutation of a given position is making sure the expertise of the sources one cites in said refutation is commensurate to level of expertise one is seeking to refute.  In short, you don't go ask a carpenter to cut you a porterhouse.  But rather than acknowledge the dubious nature of his source, Steyn lapses into some dubious rhetorical trickery of his own, quoting Thomas Friedman's (neatly deprived of context) admonition to further reduce carbon footprints, then providing a picture of Friedman's ample estate. The conclusion we're meant to draw?

Well, obviously, being a renowned expert, Thomas Friedman, like Al Gore and the Prince of Wales, needs a supersized carbon footprint.

Ah, yes.  They're all hypocrites.  We've touched on this favorite hobby horse of the global warming deniers before (here and here).  What we said then bears repeating now.  Al Gore, Thomas Friedman and a whole host of pocket-mulching hippies could be the biggest hypocrites that ever walked the face of the earth: they drive the biggest trucks, own the biggest houses, fly to conferences in jets fueled with Ozone Penentrator 2.0 while tossing styrofoam plates out of the plane and it would not matter one whit, in so far as the facts of global warming are concerned.  But you see, it's always easier to attack the arguer than the argument. Moreover, Steyn's not done reasoning like a lazy freshman:

But you don't [need a huge carbon footprint]- you can get by beating your laundry on the rocks down by the river with the native women all day long.

"Environmentalism" is a government restraint on economic advance and, therefore, social mobility. In other words, it's a way to ensure you'll never live like Tom Friedman.

Maybe it's just the fact that I've misplaced my tinfoil hat, but a more bizarre and unwarranted conclusion, I cannot imagine.  Especially in light of the fact that governments the world over have long been among the most vehement opponents of environmental movement.  Of particular note, our own.

General discussion, Ignoratio Elenchi, Richard Cohen

Iron Justice

2 Comments

Today the Washington Post features a column by the "liberal" Richard Cohen.  He writes:

In the meantime, Sotomayor will do, and will do very nicely, as a personification of what ails the American left. She is, as everyone has pointed out, in the mainstream of American liberalism, a stream both intellectually shallow and preoccupied with the past. We have a neat summary of it in the recent remarks of Sen. Benjamin L. Cardin (D-Md.), who said he wanted a Supreme Court justice "who will continue to move the court forward in protecting . . . important civil rights." He cited the shooting of a gay youth, the gang rape of a lesbian and the murder of a black man — in other words, violence based on homophobia and racism. Yes. But who nowadays disagrees? 

No really.  His problem, so it seems, is that Sotomayor may be boring (unlike Scalia):

From Sotomayor, though, came not one whimper of regret about the current legality of capital punishment. Innocent men may die, the cause of humanism may stall, but she will follow the jot and tittle of the law, with which she has no quarrel anyway. Little wonder moderate conservative senators are enamored.

Contrast her approach to this and other problems with what Antonin Scalia has done with issues close to his own heart. Where in all of Sotomayor's opinions, speeches and now testimony is there anything approaching Scalia's dissent in Morrison v. Olson, in which, alone, he not only found fault with the law creating special prosecutors but warned about how it would someday be abused? "Frequently an issue of this sort will come before the court clad, so to speak, in sheep's clothing," he wrote. "But this wolf comes as a wolf."

My admiration for Scalia is constrained by the fact that I frequently believe him to be wrong. But his thinking is often fresh, his writing is often bracing; and, more to my point, he has no counterpart on the left. His liberal and moderate brethren wallow in bromides; they can sometimes outvote him, but they cannot outthink him.

It's not Iron Chef, it's the Supreme Court of the United States: boring yet principled predictability and meticulous correctness matter.

General discussion

What others are thinking

1 Comment

Here are the guys at Media Matters on Charles Krauthammer:

Mr. Krauthammer is, of course, free to voice any political point of view he likes, and he should never draw criticism simply for his professed conservative beliefs. But like so many conservative critics, Krauthammer's work is characterized by sloppy thinking, factually-challenged analysis, and partisan hyperbolae that undermines his credibility as an analyst and pundit.

I find it odd to talk about a pundit's "credibility," but alas.

 

General discussion

Happy Fourth of July

2 Comments

I've posted some things here about the arguments for torture.  I find them unpersuasive.  Many, like certain former American VP, his pundit defenders, and the current members of the Iranian government, do not:

The government has made it a practice to publicize confessions from political prisoners held without charge or legal representation, often subjected to pressure tactics like sleep deprivation, solitary confinement and torture, according to human rights groups and former political prisoners. Human rights groups estimate that hundreds of people have been detained.

Oh well.