Category Archives: Straw Man

George Will, Straw Man, Things that are false

Built on sand

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George Will compares the housing "crisis" (his scare quotes) to another one of his famous pseudo crises:

The housing perhaps-not-entirely-a-crisis resembles, in one particular, the curious consensus about the global warming "crisis," concerning which, the assumption is: Although Earth's temperature has risen and fallen through many millennia, the temperature was exactly right when, in the 1960s, Al Gore became interested in the subject.

There is a big difference, someone ought to point out, between the "climate" and the "weather" or the "temperature" at any given year.  Suggesting that these are the same–and then pointing out how silly global warming is–is just dumb.  I'm not even sure if this would rise to the standard of the straw man.  At least with the straw man you have to approximate someone's real argument in order to make the deception work.    

Anyway, on the strength of this astounding misunderstanding, Will launches into an a priori, and rhetorical-question-driven, assault on the housing crisis.  He writes: 

Are we to assume that last year, when housing prices were, say, 10 percent higher than they are now, they were exactly right? If so, why is that so? Because the market had set those prices, therefore they were where they belonged? But if the market was the proper arbiter of value then, why is it not the proper arbiter now? Whatever happened to the belief, way back in 2007, that there was a housing "bubble"? Or to the more ancient consensus that, because of, among other things, the deductibility of mortgage interest payments from taxable income, too much American capital flows into the housing stock?

Where's the drooling dunce who holds the position Will ever so skillfully skewers (that's two alliterations) here?  Nowhere I bet.  People may be wrong about the nature of the housing issue–they may even exaggerate it in a bit of political hyperbole–but Will should do us a favor of describing someone's actual position rather than the a priori incoherence of a straw man's position. 

False Dichotomy, Michael Gerson, Red Herring, Straw Man

The Power of Science

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To my mind at least, the op-ed in a major national newspaper aims at a general audience–including if not composed entirely of people whose views differ from that of the writer.  The point, in fact, in writing one of these pieces is to convince people who disagree with you of the strength of your view.  Some writers, like E.J.Dionne (sorry I keep saying this–but it's true) don't seem to have a view to advocate.  Others, like Paul Krugman, George Will, Charles Krauthammer, and Michael Gerson (to name a few) most definitely do.  Gerson, after all, worked as a speech writer for the current President.  That's the very definition of political advocacy.

Should this political hack write for the Washington Post op-ed page?  I'm inclined to say no, because the current administration has enough paid advocates and media access (Fox news anyone?); it's hard to see in other words what Gerson, as a political hack, brings to the discussion that can't be found elsewhere–besides, his words have been driving the discussion ("axis of evil" etc.) for years now.

So when he oils up and engages the "liberal view" one can only shake one's head at the inanity.  Today he writes:

There are few things in American politics more irrationally ideological, more fanatically faith-based, than the accusation that Republicans are conducting a "war on science."

Few things, really?  This would mean that the current administration does not disregard scientists or punish those whose views disagree with their own, cultivate skepticism about widely understood phenomena, and so forth.  The documentary evidence for those things is too overwhelming to be disregarded as faith-based (which, by the way, is a silly twist of a twist of a phrase probably excogitated by Gerson himself).  Since Gerson seems to know that claim is false, he switches his focus ever so slightly to the political debate:

For the most part, these accusations are a political ploy — actually an attempt to shut down political debate. Any practical concern about the content of government sex-education curricula is labeled "anti-science." Any ethical question about the destruction of human embryos to harvest their cells is dismissed as "theological" and thus illegitimate.

Liberal views are "objective" while traditional moral convictions are "biased." Public scrutiny of scientific practices is "politicizing" important decisions.

These arguments are seriously made, but they are not to be taken seriously. Does anyone really believe in a science without moral and legal limits? In harvesting organs from prisoners? In systematically getting rid of the disabled?

Harvesting organs from prisoners.  Hm.  I think Gerson is talking here about moral questions relating to science.  No one has advocated that that debate be shut down.  Nor has anyone (by "anyone" I mean the minimally reasonable but informed person) suggested that there be no debate about the practical recommendations of scientific "conclusions."

What to do about global warming?  Well, it's happening–that's what scientists say–so now it's time for a political discussion about what to do.  That's a rather different thing from denying that it's happening–which is what the "war on science" is all about.  And Gerson cannot possibly claim that there isn't a strong global warming denier movement in the Republican party.  

It turns out, however, that Gerson means to claim that because liberals embrace scientific questions of fact, that they therefore embrace scientific definitions of value.  I can't think of what the justification for this claim would be, other than that Gerson has no understanding of that distinction.  He writes:

This last question, alas, does not answer itself. In America, the lives of about nine of 10 children with Down syndrome are ended before birth. In Europe, about 40 percent of unborn children with major congenital disorders are aborted.

All of which highlights a real conflict, a war within liberalism between the idea of unrestricted science in the cause of health and the principle that all men are created equal — between humanitarianism and egalitarianism.

In "Science and the Left," his insightful article in the latest issue of the New Atlantis, Yuval Levin argues that a belief in the power of science is central to the development of liberalism — based on the assertion that objective facts and rational planning can replace tradition and religious authority in the organization of society. Levin summarizes the liberal promise this way: "The past was rooted in error and prejudice while the future would have at its disposal a new oracle of genuine truth."

But the oracle of science is silent on certain essential topics. "Science, simply put," says Levin, "cannot account for human equality, and does not offer reasons to believe we are all equal. Science measures our material and animal qualities, and it finds them to be patently unequal."

Since there is distinction between fact and value–and a vigorous discussion over those terms in the scientific (broadly speaking) community, I can't figure who Gerson is talking about.  Besides, the alternative to the strictly "scientist" point of view is not religious or traditional authority (whose grasp, by the way, of human rights, equality, and so forth, seems tenuous at best).

But as Gerson seems little interested in the actual objection to the administration's handling of matters of scientific fact, one can see that he has little use for logic as well.

George Will, Ignoratio Elenchi, Straw Man

Shopworn Panaceas

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A frequent question among our chattering classes is whether our children is learning.  The answer seems to be no, they isn't.  What would explain that?  George Will has the answer:

Moynihan also knew that schools cannot compensate for the disintegration of families and hence communities — the primary transmitters of social capital. No reform can enable schools to cope with the 36.9 percent of all children and 69.9 percent of black children today born out of wedlock, which means, among many other things, a continually renewed cohort of unruly adolescent males. 

If you think the solution–the only solution, the panacea, as it were–is a rise in teacher salaries then George Will is going to prove you wrong:

Chester Finn, a former Moynihan aide, notes in his splendid new memoir ("Troublemaker: A Personal History of School Reform Since Sputnik") that during the Depression-era job scarcity, high schools were used to keep students out of the job market, shunting many into nonacademic classes. By 1961, those classes had risen to 43 percent of all those taken by students. After 1962, when New York City signed the nation's first collective bargaining contract with teachers, teachers began changing from members of a respected profession into just another muscular faction fighting for more government money. Between 1975 and 1980 there were a thousand strikes involving a million teachers whose salaries rose as students' scores on standardized tests declined.

In 1964, SAT scores among college-bound students peaked. In 1965, the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) codified confidence in the correlation between financial inputs and cognitive outputs in education. But in 1966, the Coleman report, the result of the largest social science project in history, reached a conclusion so "seismic" — Moynihan's description — that the government almost refused to publish it.

We've already established that teachers' salaries have nothing to do with output, haven't we?  But lo, continuing from above:

Released quietly on the Fourth of July weekend, the report concluded that the qualities of the families from which children come to school matter much more than money as predictors of schools' effectiveness. The crucial common denominator of problems of race and class — fractured families — would have to be faced.

But it wasn't. Instead, shopworn panaceas — larger teacher salaries, smaller class sizes — were pursued as colleges were reduced to offering remediation to freshmen.

Couldn't it be, however, that smaller class sizes and higher teacher salaries are goods to be pursued regardless of their effectiveness at fixing a social problem they're not supposed to be fixing?  Who could dispute that teachers ought to be well compensated for the very important work they do (I'll exclude myself from that work–what I do is not really work)?  What parent would not want her or his child in a smaller rather than a larger class?

More importantly, where is the social scientist who would claim that paying teachers more will remedy the various social problems produced–get this–as a result of income inequality?  Indeed, while we're at the correlation game, why don't we correlate family incomes and stability with the absence of well compensated, union labor?  Since Mr.Will is so interested in quantitative social science, perhaps he might find the results so alarming he'd refuse to read them until the Fourth of July, at night.

So to sum up.  Teachers' salaries may have nothing to do with educational outputs.  But that's not why teachers should have higher salaries in the first place.  Second, the social problems kids bring to school stem in no insignificant way from economic inequalities faced by their parents.  These may come together at school, no one expects the school to solve anything but what the school can solve.   But teachers and schools ought not to be punished just because they can't solve that which they aren't suited to solve.

Argument Analysis, False Dichotomy, General discussion, Ruth Marcus, Straw Man

With or Without Yoo

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Two interesting quotations from Ruth Marcus’s Washington Post column–One pro John Yoo, tortured torture memo writer, one contra.  The first one, from Columbia University law Professor Scott Horton, addresses someone (Elder) who does not find Yoo’s legal work grounds for discipline or revocation of his tenure at Berkeley.  He says that Elder

"is appropriately concerned about freedom of expression for his
faculty. But he should be much more concerned about the message that
all of this sends to his students. Lawyers who act on the public stage
can have an enormous impact on their society and the world around them.
. . . Does Dean Edley really imagine that their work is subject to no
principle of accountability because they are mere drones dispensing
legal analysis?"

There’s a wide gulf between "not punishable in this instance by the University" and "subject to no principle of accountability."  Horton sets up a false dichotomy–accountable or not.

On the pro-Yoo side:

The most useful analogy I’ve read on this subject comes from Princeton
professor Deborah Pearlstein, who asked what Berkeley would do if a
molecular biology professor "had written a medical opinion while in
government employ disclaiming the truth of evolution," and continued to
dispute the theory of evolution once he resumed teaching.

Pearlstein,
a human rights lawyer, found Yoo’s memo "blatantly, embarrassingly
wrong under the law," but she conceded that legal conclusions lack the
hard certainty of scientific truth. Yoo should no more be removed from
a teaching job than a Supreme Court justice who writes a despicable
opinion — upholding slavery, allowing separate but equal facilities,
permitting the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II —
should be impeached.

I’m confused by the analogy in the first paragraph.  If that’s the case, then indeed Yoo ought to be fired for not having competence in his subject matter.  Academic freedom ought not be a cover for incompetence.  But I doubt he would have gotten that far anyway. 

The second paragraph rings odd.  And it hardly makes the point that Yoo ought to be protected from firing.  Any Supreme Court judge who argues for slavery ought to be impeached–now (and probably back then as well).  Even though legal opinions lack the "hard certainty" of scientific truth (whatever that means), it doesn’t mean that some legal opinions are simply beyond the pale.  

By most accounts–even friendly ones–Yoo’s opinions were beyond the pale.  The fact is, however, that was a different job.  This seems to me to be the key difference that’s being overlooked here.  Berkeley was dumb enough to hire him and give him tenure.  They ought to be ashamed.  But it’s too late now. 

Of course, if he broke the law and is found to have committed war crimes, then indeed, he ought to be fired.  But that’s a matter for, er, the law.  

 

Ad Hominem, Ad Hominem Abusive, Ad hominem circumstantial, Straw Man

Elitism

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Judging by the number of op-eds by (ironically) elite (i.e., very rich, very educated, very isolated from the unwashed masses) writers, there’s a consensus forming around the notion of elitism: it’s bad.  Some argue that elitism is insulting; some argue that it could seem insulting; some use it to explain the Gore having "lost" the 2000 election.  By contrast, folksyism–the "wanna have a beer with" seems to be the true test of a presidential candidate.  The only people, oddly, who think this kind of nonsense are the members of the "elite" media.  

Today George Will, who makes untold thousands to give lectures to prominent law firms (Dear law firms: I’ll do it for one eighth of the price and I promise most of what I say will be true, coherent, and well established by argument) finds this elitism–I mean, liberal elitism, a bad thing.

Barack Obama may be exactly what his supporters suppose him to be. Not, however, for reasons most Americans will celebrate.

Obama may be the fulfillment of modern liberalism. Explaining why many
working-class voters are "bitter," he said they "cling" to guns,
religion and "antipathy to people who aren’t like them" because of
"frustrations." His implication was that their primitivism,
superstition and bigotry are balm for resentments they feel because of
America’s grinding injustice.

By so speaking, Obama does fulfill liberalism’s transformation since Franklin Roosevelt.
What had been under FDR a celebration of America and the values of its
working people has become a doctrine of condescension toward those
people and the supposedly coarse and vulgar country that pleases them.

"His implication" is a bit of a stretch, but let’s grant that some may reasonably be taken aback by those words.  That kind of stuff happens–and after nearly eight years of President Bush (and VP Cheney) Americans ought to be used to being offended.  But hey, we’re not going to draw any large, unjustified inferences from Bush’s malapropisms or Cheney’s meanness.  But George Will won’t can’t help himself:

The iconic public intellectual of liberal condescension was Columbia University historian Richard Hofstadter, who died in 1970 but whose spirit still permeated that school when Obama matriculated there
in 1981. Hofstadter pioneered the rhetorical tactic that Obama has
revived with his diagnosis of working-class Democrats as victims — the
indispensable category in liberal theory. The tactic is to dismiss
rather than refute those with whom you disagree.

You’ve got to be kidding me.  That’s exactly what Will is up to hear. 

Obama’s dismissal is: Americans, especially working-class
conservatives, are unable, because of their false consciousness, to
deconstruct their social context and embrace the liberal program. Today
that program is to elect Obama, thereby making his wife at long last
proud of America.

Hofstadter dismissed conservatives as victims of character flaws and
psychological disorders — a "paranoid style" of politics rooted in
"status anxiety," etc. Conservatism rose on a tide of votes cast by
people irritated by the liberalism of condescension.

Obama voiced such liberalism with his "bitterness" remarks to an audience of affluent San Franciscans. Perfect.

Here is what Will is trying to say: Liberals (spit spit) dismiss people as crazy rather than as merely being in the wrong.  Here’s what Will ends up saying: I dismiss liberals because they’re effete snobs (San Francicso, San Francisco) who look down on other people.

False Dichotomy, Red Herring, Straw Man, William Kristol

Crystal balls

Like his colleague David Brooks at the New York Times, William Kristol has been pretty much wrong about everything in the past several years (and probably before).  But wrongness, when it happens, just doesn’t happen.  There’s always a reason for it.  So I believe now, at least.

I’m not going to explain the wrongness of William Kristol–he’s wedded to an incoherent ideology, for instance.  I don’t know if that’s true, and besides I don’t have access to Kristol’s mental states.  So if  you read this and you’re a conservative, notice that I haven’t said "conservatives are wrong in their core beliefs."  Wrongness always happens in the particulars. 

I’m interested in the wrongness of his reasons.  To that end, let’s take a look at one or two.  In today’s column, he opposes the following claims:

But it’s one thing for a German thinker to assert that “religion is
the sigh of the oppressed creature.” It’s another thing for an American
presidential candidate to claim that we “cling to … religion” out of
economic frustration.

And it’s a particularly odd claim for
Barack Obama to make. After all, in his speech at the 2004 Democratic
convention, he emphasized with pride that blue-state Americans, too,
“worship an awesome God.”

That’s obviously not a contradiction or some kind of less rigorous "tension" or "inconsistency."  As explanations go, Obama’s seems fairly innocuous.  He’s clearly talking about a certain motivation for religion as distinct from say, God, the object of those religions.  Attacking this weak version of Obama’s remarks is what you might call a "straw man."
A little charity on Kristol’s part would help him see this.  But I ask perhaps too much.

Here’s another:

Then there’s what Obama calls “anti-immigrant sentiment.” Has Obama
done anything to address it? It was John McCain, not Obama, who took
political risks to try to resolve the issue of illegal immigration by
putting his weight behind an attempt at immigration reform.

Furthermore, some concerns about unchecked and unmonitored illegal
immigration are surely legitimate. Obama voted in 2006 (to take just
one example) for the Secure Fence Act, which was intended to control
the Mexican border through various means, including hundreds of miles
of border fence. Was Obama then just accommodating bigotry?

Anyone ought to be able to see the difference between criticizing "anti-immigrant sentiment" (which applies to both legal and  immigrants) fomented by Kristol’s partners on the right and supporting "unchecked and unmonitored illegal immigration."   Being against the latter, of course, doesn’t make you for the former.  This amounts to, I think, a kind of red herring.  Concern about "Illegal immigration" bears only a slight resemblance to "anti-immigrant sentiment" of the "bigotry" variety.

George Will, Straw Man

Accountability

You can tell a lot about people by how they define their enemy.  Everyone knows how George Will defines his:

"This is the crux of the difference between the two parties — belief
in the competence, responsibility and accountability of individuals.
When Obama characterizes my position as ‘little more than watching this
crisis happen,’ he again has part of a point. The housing market must
find its bottom, and no good can come from delaying the day that it
does."

I doubt any serious Democrat would agree with that silly characterization of the "crux of the difference" between the two parties.

Besides, and I might be mistaken, but it seems to me that the Democrats have long been alleging that certain individuals have been incompetent, irresponsible and, unfortunately, unaccountable. 

Op-Eds and other opinions, Straw Man

Chance of precipitation

Yesterday the Washington Post hosted one of those "pro and con" sets of op-eds.  The issue, "ending" the "war" in "Iraq."  Sorry about the quotes, but the disagreement about the issue was the issue.  Arguing for the "pro" (end the war in Iraq) was Carter administration National Security Advisor, Zbigniew Brzezinski.  He maintains that a precipitous and irresponsible withdrawal is just what America needs right now.  Well, that’s what Max Boot, the con in this scenario, maintains. 

And this amounts to a classic waste of time.  Boot actually addresses Brzezinski’s claims–or what Boot claims are Brzezinski’s claims–so the Post editors ought to have intervened.  Here’s what Zbigniew Brzezinski said:

Terminating U.S. combat operations will take more than a military
decision. It will require arrangements with Iraqi leaders for a
continued, residual U.S. capacity to provide emergency assistance in
the event of an external threat (e.g., from Iran); it will also mean
finding ways to provide continued U.S. support for the Iraqi armed
forces as they cope with the remnants of al-Qaeda in Iraq.

The decision to militarily disengage will also have to be accompanied
by political and regional initiatives designed to guard against
potential risks. We should fully discuss our decisions with Iraqi
leaders, including those not residing in Baghdad’s Green Zone, and we should hold talks on regional stability with all of Iraq’s neighbors, including Iran.

Take it or leave it.  As usual we’re agnostic about that position.  We’d like to point out, however, that Brzezinski isn’t advocating "precipitous" withdrawal from Iraq, which, as you can see from the following, Boot thinks he does.  Boot writes:

The consequences of withdrawal and defeat in Iraq are likely to be even
more serious, because it is located in a more volatile and
strategically important region.

and

It warned: "If Coalition forces were withdrawn rapidly … we judge
that the ISF [Iraqi Security Forces] would be unlikely to survive as a
non-sectarian national institution; neighboring countries — invited by
Iraqi factions or unilaterally — might intervene openly in the
conflict; massive civilian casualties and forced population
displacement would be probable; AQI [al-Qaeda in Iraq] would attempt to
use parts of the country — particularly al-Anbar province — to plan
increased attacks in and outside of Iraq; and spiraling violence and
political disarray in Iraq… could prompt Turkey to launch a military
incursion."

and

. . . nothing would be more calculated to aggravate other countries than a precipitous pullout.

and

 An early American departure is the last thing that most Iraqis or their elected representatives want.

and

An even more important sign of progress is the willingness of hundreds
of thousands of Iraqis to take up arms to fight Sunni and Shiite
terrorists alongside American troops. Imagine their fate if we suddenly
exit. I, for one, hope that we do not betray our allies in Iraq as we
did in Southeast Asia.

So according to Boot, Brzezinski advocates a sudden, early, rapid, precipitous, withdrawal and defeat in Iraq.  Of course that’s silly, as Brzezinski didn’t use any of the weaselly temporal qualifiers Boot imputes to him.  And so there is a classic straw man.  Can’t the editors at the Post point that out?

It really ought to be beneath grown up discourse to engage in this kind of adolescent distortion.  There’s more that could be said about Boot’s abysmal piece–such as dubious analogies with Vietnam.  Maybe tomorrow. 

For today it ought to be said that gainsaying isn’t argument.

 

 

George Will, Straw Man, Things that are false, Weak Analogy

Write No More Forever

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We normally try to keep current around here, but amidst the revelry and excess of our Spring Break, we missed something.  Okay, we missed a few things, but George Will’s performance of March 16, on ABC’s "This Week with George Stephanopolous," is worth back-tracking a bit.  Will is holding forth on matters of race and politics and then this happens:

If you want to know what America would look like, if liberals really had their way in running it, look at what they’re doing in their own nominating process on two counts. First, they cannot get to a majority because they have exquisitely refined rococo rules about how to achieve fairness. Secondly, they have worked for 20, 30, 40 years to make us all exquisitely sensitive to slights real or imagined, so that you run a 3 AM ad and someone says there’s not enough black people in it or where’s the Hispanics and it must be a racist ad. Hillary Clinton says something absolutely unexceptionable which is it took Lyndon Johnson also to pass the civil rights act. Denounced as racist. The Democrats are reaping what they have sown.

Fairness?! Equality?! Sensitivity?! Heaven forfend!

Ye gods. This logic is going to make Bright Eyes cry.

First, the primary process is to liberal governance as our making a mean Guinness stew is to operating a restaurant. Sure, it’s part of the process, but just as our Guinness stew prowess doesn’t indicate our ability to take over for Vongerichten, neither does the Democratic primary process indicate the inability of either Sen. Obama or Sen. Clinton–or any other liberal politician, for that matter–to properly govern the country.

Second, snide attacks and smug elitism are no argument. Will’s tritely insulting claim about sensitivity treats as a disadvantage an awareness that has, at least in part, helped us to advance from a country where blatant displays of racism and sexism and the genocide of indigenous persons are the norm, to a country where no matter what happens, the Democratic nominee for president of the United States will be either a woman or an African American man.  Without specific attempts to make people aware of the deep race and gender divides in this country, we never get to the place where Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama are the nominees for President. Yet Will dismisses these effects with a wave of the hand, instead twisting liberal social policies in service of an undergraduate view of liberalism and democratic process.

Ad hominem tu quoque, George Will, Straw Man

Cheapskates

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In yet another variation of his standard line, today George Will argues that when it comes to charity, liberal people and places lag behind conservatives and so "liberals" are little more than disingenuous bleeding hearts.  This combines Will’s love of the ad hominem tu quoque–the irrelevant charge of hypocrisy–with his love of the straw man–the purposeful distortion of his opponent’s view in order to knock it down (look here for a description of these particular logical errors).  His argument goes like this:

  • Liberals, judging by their bumper stickers in Austin, Texas are self-described bleeding hearts (they are motivated by pity and pity alone).
  • Self-described conservatives are more charitable than self-described liberals.
  • By their own self-description, liberals ought to be more charitable (on account of their bleeding hearts), so liberals are either:
  • (a) hypocrites for being all hat and no cattle (this is Texas we’re talking about); or (b) dumb to wait around for government to do the work that can be done by charity right now.

This argument sounds vaguely familiar.  Megan McCardle, a "liberatarian" blogger for the Atlantic Monthly, has made similar charges (discussed here and here on Crooked Timber).  She argues that if liberals want the government to tax so much, then why don’t they just give extra money voluntarily.  They don’t.  So there.  It also sounds like any similar charge of hypocrisy–if you cared so much about it, then why don’t you do something (for it, to stop it, etc.)? 

But that’s not really the point.  By any measure, liberalism is a broad political view about the just structure of government and the just distribution of goods.  Liberals will differ about the meaning of either of those things (They’ll differ to the same extent that conservatives will differ about the proper role of government).

More importantly, liberals will also differ about the reasons for their "liberalism."  Indeed, some liberals–some–might qualify as the "bleeding heart type" who fit Will’s perpetual caricature.  They whine about injustice, but they really don’t care.  Pointing out their hypocrisy might be entertaining, but it’s basically worthless.  They don’t represent all that is the liberal position.  Nor does their hypocrisy demonstrate anything about their broader political view. 

One can be liberal for reasons that have nothing to do with bleeding hearts, pity, or care.  And the strength (if it has any) of the liberal position has nothing do with the feelings and action of individual liberals–any more, at least, than the weakness of conservatism is demonstrated by the appallingly bad arguments of a pundit for the Washington Post.