Category Archives: Straw Man

Op-Eds and other opinions, Sebastian Mallaby, Straw Man

The Hobgoblin

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One way easiest ways to appear analytical to scream about inconsistency. Consistency with what, you ask? Doesn’t matter. The fact is, few of us are entirely consistent, so pointing out this fact is as easy as it as banal.

Take today’s op-ed in the Post by Sebastian Mallaby. He charges that the democratic strategy of “bashing” Wal*Mart will backfire, because Wal-Mart saves a lot of people money, and gives a lot of people jobs who could vote for democrats. But at a more basic level, such arguments are “inconsistent.”

He writes:

>Once upon a time, smart Democrats defended globalization, open trade and the companies that thrive within this system. They were wary of tethering themselves to an anti-trade labor movement that represents a dwindling fraction of the electorate. They understood the danger in bashing corporations: Voters don’t hate corporations, because many of them work for one.

This is colossally dumb for a number of reasons. But we’ll point out one of them. Wal-Mart has done much recently to undermine the Democratic Party’s principles and it has taken a decisive stand against a core principle–the right of workers to organize into unions. So perhaps the Democrats whose consistency Mallaby so superficially criticizes have moved back in the direction of their party’s base. Besides, the corporations Dems used to work for (and not alienate) were nothing like the Wal-Mart kind. They were the GM kind–where one could earn enough not to live on welfare.

Of course in some sense this is inconsistent. Democrats have taken money in the past, and some (Bill Clinton) have praised it’s founder as a great American). What their argument is now, however, is another question. One that Mallaby completely ignores in favor of a kind of perverse tu quoque: having supported Wal-Mart in the past somehow invalidates any present criticism as politically motivated. Besides consistency in the face of evidence to the contrary is the characteristic of another political party.

Jonah Goldberg, Straw Man

Cliches

Thomas Frank, author of What’s the Matter with Kansas? observes in today’s New York Times:

>Now upon the national stage steps one Karl Zinsmeister, formerly the editor of the American Enterprise Institute’s flagship magazine and now the president’s chief domestic policy adviser. In right-wing circles he is regarded as an intellectual heavyweight. What his career really shows us, though, is the looming exhaustion of the conservative intellectual system; its hopeless addiction to dusty, crumbling clichés; and a blindness to the reality of conservative power so persistent and so bizarre that it amounts to self-deception or, in Zinsmeister’s case, delusion.

I like the cliche’ part. Take this from the National Review’s Jonah Goldberg.

>A year ago, Slate magazine’s legal correspondent, Dahlia Lithwick, recounted this observation–from one of her bounteously sophisticated liberal readers–as a neat summary of the “doctrine” of a “living Constitution.” And a neat summary it is. How droll and obtuse that conservatives think the Constitution should remain anchored against the tides of change while those currents bring with them torrents of newfangled iPods and ever-changing gusts of news; one day about Britney Spears, the next day Paris Hilton. How very horse-and-buggy to suggest that the commerce clause wouldn’t change with the latest in slattern chic and personal electronics.

To be fair, Goldberg sets up to challenge the cliche’–of conservatives. But it never crosses his mind that the argument on which he has premised the superiority of his view is itself a cliched straw man, even though he can barely mention without sneering. This kind of shallow discourse is seriously unserious. Moreover, it violates very simple rules of civilized behavior: treat others with consideration and charity. If you think you have arguments for your view, then it’s likely that your oppoent does as well. You don’t win until you consider them.

Bush, Straw Man

Ask Questions

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There’s been a lot of talk recently about whether our President is an idiot. We don’t think that matters because in general with think such questions are a distraction from the real questions. How distracting is it? Look at this:

> My theory dovetails with something one of his most acerbic critics, columnist Molly Ivins, once wrote: “George W. Bush sounds like English is his second language.” That’s because it’s true. “Washington English” is a second language for Bush; “Texas English” is his first.

That’s Kathleen Parker. The problem with the plain-spoken meme is that it just doesn’t square with an Andover/Yale/Harvard education. Nor does it resemble the way his brothers or his family speaks. But like I say, that’s a distraction from things such as this:

>There’s a lot of people in the world who don’t believe that people whose skin color may not be the same as ours can be free and self-govern. I reject that. I reject that strongly. I believe that people who practice the Muslim faith can self-govern. I believe that people whose skins aren’t necessarily — are a different color than white can self-govern.

Are there now? Who are these people? Is it, perhaps, Pat Buchanan? Maybe it’s no one. And besides, he moved from “skin color” to the pleonastic “people who practice the Muslim faith.” Whatever questions this sort of argumentative nonsense raises about Bush, it ought to be pointed out by smart people in the media. In this case someone could have asked him a simple question: who sez?

Begging the Question, Bush, False Dichotomy, Formal Fallacies, Straw Man

Success is success

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A while ago we linked to an Associated Press story that said Bush often uses straw man arguments to advance his views. Since Bush doesn’t read “the filter” he never got the memo. But we think it would be nice if Bush reasoned or spoke coherently enough to commit discernable fallacies. Take a look at the following exchange from yesterday’s press conference:

>Q Quick follow-up. A lot of the consequences you mentioned for pulling out seem like maybe they never would have been there if we hadn’t gone in. How do you square all of that?

>THE PRESIDENT: I square it because, imagine a world in which you had Saddam Hussein who had the capacity to make a weapon of mass destruction, who was paying suiciders to kill innocent life, who would — who had relations with Zarqawi. Imagine what the world would be like with him in power. The idea is to try to help change the Middle East.

>Now, look, part of the reason we went into Iraq was — the main reason we went into Iraq at the time was we thought he had weapons of mass destruction. It turns out he didn’t, but he had the capacity to make weapons of mass destruction. But I also talked about the human suffering in Iraq, and I also talked the need to advance a freedom agenda. And so my question — my answer to your question is, is that, imagine a world in which Saddam Hussein was there, stirring up even more trouble in a part of the world that had so much resentment and so much hatred that people came and killed 3,000 of our citizens.

>You know, I’ve heard this theory about everything was just fine until we arrived, and kind of “we’re going to stir up the hornet’s nest” theory. It just doesn’t hold water, as far as I’m concerned. The terrorists attacked us and killed 3,000 of our citizens before we started the freedom agenda in the Middle East.

Idiot or not, this is laughably incoherent–especially the last remark. First he makes the “some say” move–“you’ve heard the theory.” But he doesn’t even bother to knock it down. Rather, he turns to his favorite subject–September 11. 9/11 happened even without the inspiration we have provided them in Iraq. That’s true, but it has nothing to do with the question asked. Neither does the hornet’s nest theory (which was, in a sense, Cheney’s theory during the Gulf War I). But nobody had really argued that anyway.

But the question asker–the one with the seersucker suit–kept at it (direclty following):

>Q What did Iraq have to do with that?

>THE PRESIDENT: What did Iraq have to do with what?

>Q The attack on the World Trade Center?

>THE PRESIDENT: Nothing, except for it’s part of — and nobody has ever suggested in this administration that Saddam Hussein ordered the attack. Iraq was a — the lesson of September the 11th is, take threats before they fully materialize, Ken. Nobody has ever suggested that the attacks of September the 11th were ordered by Iraq. I have suggested, however, that resentment and the lack of hope create the breeding grounds for terrorists who are willing to use suiciders to kill to achieve an objective. I have made that case.

>And one way to defeat that — defeat resentment is with hope. And the best way to do hope is through a form of government. Now, I said going into Iraq that we’ve got to take these threats seriously before they fully materialize. I saw a threat. I fully believe it was the right decision to remove Saddam Hussein, and I fully believe the world is better off without him. Now, the question is how do we succeed in Iraq? And you don’t succeed by leaving before the mission is complete, like some in this political process are suggesting.

Sadly, there is much the logic professor could comment on. But again take a look at the last remark. Bush repeats something of the one-percent doctrine (see below). But he seems to have forgotten there was no threat to us from Iraq (and that Iraq has made the world less safe). We’ll leave to one side the “better off without Saddam” remark and its implicit false dichotomy.

The last remark, “you don’t succeed before the mission is complete” is questionbeggingly tautologous. Completing the mission defines success in Iraq for Bush, but the question is whether success can be achieved in this way, not, as Bush seems to think, whether success is success.

category mistake, Jonah Goldberg, Op-Eds and other opinions, Straw Man, Weak Analogy

Gator Aid

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Jonah Goldberg, the editor-at-large at the National Review Online might soon qualify for the category “not worth the trouble.” That’s not yet a category, but it should be–it would be filled with all sorts of tripe merchants whose reasoning is so bad that it doesn’t warrant anyone’s attention.

The other day we find him arguing in favor of ethnic profiling. As we are all accustomed to by now from right-wing columnists, arguments in favor of such things are typically arguments against the oppositions’ straw men. Take the following, which barely merits response:

>What is so infuriating about this is that the ACLU favors policies that discriminate against all sorts of people–old people, women, children and others who, under random searches and other idiotic numerical formulas, are pulled aside for no reason at all.

That being randomly searched constitutes “discrimination” offends the conscience.

Even more absurdly, Goldberg argues in favor of Cheney’s whacked-out “One Percent Doctrine.” In brief, Cheney has held that even if there is one percent chance of a terrorist using a nuclear weapon, we should treat it as a one-hundred percent certainty. Here’s Jonah:

>Ron Suskind’s new book, “The One Percent Doctrine,” explores Vice President Dick Cheney’s view that if there’s a 1 percent chance terrorists might detonate a nuclear bomb in an American city, the government must act as if there’s a 100 percent chance. Despite the guffawing this elicited from administration critics, it strikes me as eminently sensible. (If there were a 1 percent chance the snake in your back yard would kill your child, wouldn’t 1 percent equal 100 percent for you too?) The ACLU’s self-indulgent position, meanwhile, seems to be that if there’s a 1 percent chance a cop will be a racist, we must act as if it’s a 100 percent chance. And that means humans can’t ever be trusted.

Hard to know where to begin with this one. In the first place, we’d take issue with the method of calculating the odds of such events. Considering the way Dick Cheney and his fans hyped the possibility of Saddam having weapons versus, say, the government of Pakistan (which actually has nuclear weapons) falling, we’d have to say that the odds were really far below one percent. Second, it strikes us that Cheney and Goldberg have conflated logical *possibility* with *probability.* Two fundamentally different things. Anything that doesn’t imply a contradiction is possible. Saddam having ties to al Qaeda was possible. It just wasn’t actual or even probable. Anyone with a passing knowledge of his regime could have told you that. Now just because something is logically possible doesn’t mean that it should be assigned a probablity score. One percent, in fact, probably means very little or no probability anyway. So if we actually calculated numerically what Cheney meant, the actual chance would be far below 1 percent. Finally, that Goldberg is confused is evident from his specious analogy (click here to see others do the same on various topics). For many parents–especially those who live in the bug, snake, shark, and gator-infested parts of our country–there is a chance that they’re kid will get eaten by these things in their natural habit. Their solution? Keep their kids of out the water with gators in it. Goldberg-Cheney’s solution? Get rid of all of the gators.

David Brooks, Straw Man, Suppressed Evidence

Not even counting the dichotomy. . ..

We’ve left David Brooks alone for a while now, ever since the NYT decided that their op-ed columnists could generate revenue. But I’ll return to Brooks, with apologies for the impossibility of linking to the whole editorial.

As our readers know, Brooks has probably never thought up an over-simplifying sociological dichotomy that he wasn’t impressed with and convinced contained profound insights into politics and society.

In the world of public policy, there are ecologists and engineers. The ecologists believe human beings are formed amid a web of relationships. Behavior is shaped by the weave of expectations and motivations that we pick up from the people around us every day.

In contrast there are “engineers” who believe that rational behavior can be effected through offering incentives. This dichotomy like most of Brooks’ simplifications conceals more than it reveals. One suspects that most people are more like ecological engineers. But, we won’t even count the irrelevant dichotomy in his column.

Nevertheless, the object of Brook’s column is a Democratic Leadership Council plan to increase the financial resources available for College. This he claims ignores the ecology of college graduation.

A case in point: Over the past three decades there has been a gigantic effort to increase the share of Americans who graduate from college. The federal government has spent roughly $750 billion on financial aid. Yet the percentage of Americans who graduate has barely budged. The number of Americans who drop out of college leaps from year to year.

So, according to Brooks the percentage of students who graduate has barely budged and the number of College drop outs has increased, despite spending three quarters of a trillion dollars! What’s going on here?

For one thing, the number of college graduates has increased dramatically over the “past three decades.” (US Department of Education claims 5.8 million full time students in 1970 and around 10 million in 2005). So the really significant number is not the graduation rate but the number of college graduates. Thirty years ago only 47% of high school graduates attended college. In the mid-90’s it was around 66%. In addition the percentage of Americans in the workforce with a Bachelor’s degree has increased in the past ten years from 26% to 33%.

Brooks seems to be doing some fairly standard manipulation of statistics to suggest that 750 billion of tax payer money has not had any significant benefit. He may be correct. But the picture is far more complicated than he admits and his argument for this conclusion is extremely weak. We would probably call this “suppressed evidence.”

Second, it isn’t entirely clear that financial aid is thought to have such a simple relationship to graduation rates. Financial resources are obviously a necessary condition but not a sufficient condition of college graduation. The question that we would need to ask is not whether financial aid has increased the graduation rate, but whether it is affected the graduation rate. Perhaps, and indeed, quite plausibliy, without that 750 billion in financial aid many more students would not have considered attending college, or the drop-out rate might have increased.

The only evidence that Brooks offers against this is the claim that only 8% of students are “driven away by purely financial reasons.” I’m not familiar with this research, but it strikes me that “financial reasons” are rarely “purely” the cause, since struggling with finances have many other effects for students.

But as an “ecologist,” Brooks thinks that providing financial assistance for college is a insufficient condition for affecting college graduation rates.

You have to promote two-parent stable homes so children can develop the self-control they need for school success. You have to fundamentally reform schools. You have to expand church- and university-sponsored mentoring programs and support groups. As Caroline Hoxby of Harvard notes, you have to surround students with people who will help them make informed decisions so they can attend a college they find useful.

Perhaps that is so. But the impression that the only thing the DLC’s proposal amounts to is throwing money at the middle class to buy votes is a gross oversimplification of the problems of rising costs of higher education.

Straw Man

A little analysis is a dangerous thing

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**Vacation is upon us, so this will be the last post until sometime after August 5th.**

That said, let’s have some fun with some academic style strawmanning. What’s that? Well, that’s when you are purposely obtuse in reconstructing someone’s argument. I found this, by the way, when I directed to the National Review Online. Kids, if you want to see grown persons reason like children, go there.

But this argument appears in First Things. Here goes. First, the author cites a comment on Bush’s stem cell veto:

>In vetoing the bill that would have funded stem-cell research, President Bush invoked what he termed a “conflict between science and ethics.” But what, exactly, is the “ethical” side of this conflict? … What the president describes neutrally as “ethics” is simply his own, sectarian religious belief. … [I]n what sense is it “ethical” for Mr. Bush—acting as president of the United States—to place his own sectarian, religious belief above the convictions of a majority of the American people and a substantial majority of both the House of Representatives and the Senate? In my judgment, this is no different from the president vetoing a law providing a subsidy to pork producers because eating pork offends his religious faith. Such a veto is an unethical and illegitimate usurpation of state authority designed to impose on all of society a particular religious faith.

That’s Geoffrey Stone, professor of law at the University of Chicago. Read the rest here. Before we look at the comment, it’s fairly obvious that Stone is puzzled over Bush’s assertion that there’s a conflict between science and ethics. Stone does not claim that no such conflict exists, he just wonders what *Bush* means by “ethics” in this particular circumstance. The burden is on Bush to specify, he made the claim. If he did so somewhere in his veto statement, then Stone ought to find out. But that’s not the claim of the commenter.

He writes:

>There are a different ways to make this argument work logically, and Stone doesn’t specify the one on which he relies. One version might look like this:

>(1) There can exist no purely rational basis for rejecting the federal financing of embryonic stem-cell research, and

>(2) Ethics is by its nature a rational process. Therefore,

>(3) When the president used the word ethics, he was either ignorant of the word’s meaning or disingenuous, since

>(4) Lacking any ethical—which is to say, rational—grounds for rejecting the federal funding of this research, the president must have been relying on nonrational motives. Perhaps not all nonrational motives are constitutionally impermissible for a public official, but

>(5) Religious motives are an explicitly prohibited form of nonrationality, and

>(6) President Bush is known to be a strong believer in a religion that rejects the destruction of embryos for scientific research, which leads to the reasonable inference that his particular nonrational motives were, in this case, at least “unethical and illegitimate,” and probably unconstitutional.

It’s obvious that Stone doesn’t assert (1), he puzzles over Bush’s “rational basis” as he has offered none (that Stone has noticed). But it only gets worse: (2) isn’t claimed at all, and then it just gets snide. What we have here is obtuse reconstruction. Sure it looks nice–all layed out analytic style with numbers–but in its pseudo rigor it completely misses Stone’s point.

Stone asks the President to assert a justification beyond simple assertion of his own particular religious ethical prejudice for his veto. The principle of charity would tell you that Stone isn’t asserting bald majority rule in ethics (and besides, he clearly isn’t). He is asserting that one’s own religious feelings *alone* do not constitute sufficient grounds for exercising legal force over a majority in democracy.

So, Stone is not arguing for the following:

>Either way, Stone’s argument demands that religious believers prove, far beyond any other public actors, that their public acts derive from rational motives—and when their actions match the result that their faith seems to require, the result is, on its face, constitutionally suspect.

>The various pieces of this argument are odd, but it seems to me that one runs across them more and more: the assumption, for instance, that religion is inherently irrational, and the assertion that religious reasoning is incapable of arriving at an extra-religious result, and the postulate that a sectarian motive is inherently illegitimate in a democracy.

Stone’s argument asks that religious believers *who are public officials* not inflict without argument their beliefs on others without an argument. He is not claiming that religious belief is irrational. Or the extreme case that anything sectarian have no place in a democracy. It’s just not *sufficiently* rational to say “do this because I believe it’s right.”

Ad Hominem, Op-Eds and other opinions, Richard Cohen, Straw Man, V.D.Hanson

A game of pong

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In today’s Washington Post, Richard Cohen aligns himself with such bellicose pundits as Victor Davis Hanson as he argues for unhinged and indiscriminate violence against any and all associated (if only geographically) with Hezbollah terrorists. To suggest otherwise, as he *imagines* serious people have done, is pernicious anti-semitism:

>It also includes a whole bunch of European newspapers whose editorial pages call for Israel to respond, *it seems*, with only one missile for every one tossed its way. Such neat proportion is a recipe for doom.

>The dire consequences of proportionality are so clear that *it makes you wonder* if it is a fig leaf for anti-Israel sentiment in general. [emphasis mine]

Two points. First, those who have urged restraint have not suggested (and even Cohen admits as much with “it seems”) Israel engage in a game of missile pong–one for one. Proportionality is a principle of just war–of *jus in bello* to be exact. Those who urge it have rightly suggested that Israel not obliterate innocent civilians who are no more capable of controlling Hezbollah than Israel is. This argument is made on two independent grounds. First, it’s morally wrong to kill civilians. Second, as a matter of prudence, Israel cannot achieve its goal of eliminating Hezbollah by advertising for it’s most extravagant claims–that Israel engages in terrorism.

Second, to criticize Isreal’s reaction to the kidnapping of two soldiers (remember that) is not anti-semitic:

>These calls for proportionality rankle. They fall on my ears not as genteel expressions of fairness, some ditsy Marquess of Queensberry idea of war, *but as ugly sentiments pregnant with antipathy toward the only democratic state in the Middle East.* After the Holocaust, after 1,000 years of mayhem and murder, the only proportionality that counts is zero for zero. If Israel’s enemies want that, they can have it in a moment. [emphasis mine].

First, no one seriously urges the kind of silly military policy Cohen suggests; second, sometimes, believe it or not, Israel can be in the wrong–not because it’s *Israel*, but just because, like anyone or anything human, it errs.

So, Cohen, show how Israel is not wrong this time, not how anyone who criticizes them secretly wishes its annihilation.

***UPDATE***

It’s hard to say the author of the following in today’s Washington Post has in mind a straw man: we have seen in recent days on this site various iterations of the argument he attacks. Read the whole thing, but especially:

>Unfortunately — as the United States itself discovered during World War II and Vietnam, to cite just two examples — strategic bombing has almost never worked. Far from bringing about the intended softening of the opposition, bombing tends to rally people behind their own leaders and cause them to dig in against outsiders who, whatever the justification, are destroying their homeland.

While this point had already been made by Mr.Grey in a comment a few days ago, it’s worth repeating.

False Cause, Op-Eds and other opinions, Straw Man, V.D.Hanson, Weak Analogy

Honest Abe made me do it

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The art of historical analogy is tricky and as such subject to dishonest manipulation. On that score, historian Victor Davis Hanson writes:

>The Bush administration can also use history to show that, despite what detractors say, its techniques aren’t so unreasonable. It’s worth reminding the American public that Abe Lincoln suspended habeas corpus and shut down newspapers; that Woodrow Wilson imprisoned prominent dissenters like Eugene Debs; and that Franklin Roosevelt ordered the internment of Japanese-American citizens and secret military tribunals for German saboteurs (six of whom were executed) and allowed the coverup of military catastrophes (such as the hundreds killed during training exercises for the Normandy landings).

>In other words, there’s an advantage to providing historical perspective by engaging one’s critics and answering their charges.

There’s a causal and analogical argument here. While Hanson does not say that the above mentioned things relate causally to the various military victories, he certainly suggests as much. While sorting out the causuality of these various claims might merit more serious attention, I think it’s plain to most mildly historically minded people that these claims are false. Interning Japanese and other Axis-related americans didn’t advance us militarily nor did executing German saboteurs (they were already captured). Covering up military disasters such as the one mentioned were done for purposes of concealing our plans (not our foolishness). Such things are obvious from even the most superficial History Channel surfing.

More pernicious is the suggestion that these situations are analogous to the present day. They’re not. Since they didn’t advance the cause then, analogous actions don’t advance it now.

One final point. Coming from a professor, such straw man arguments are shameful:

>The public, for example, should be informed that the accusation that the U.S. went into Iraq for oil (“no blood for oil,” as the slogan goes) is not merely inaccurate, but crazy. For starters, gas prices skyrocketed once we induced risky change in the Middle East. How does that benefit the American people? Meanwhile, because of the fall of Saddam Hussein, Iraq’s energy sector has been purged of corruption (such as the UN’s scandal-plagued oil-for-food program).

Such sloganeering inflames the passions but doesn’t constitute argument. Everyone knows that. The real arguments against attacking Iraq (not the protest march slogans) at the time were legion. It turns out, in fact, that many of those arguments were correct.

But while we’re on the subject of oil, at least one administration official (but certainly more) suggested–I think it was Paul Wolfowitz–that Iraqi oil revenues would pay for the reconstruction. How are we to have interpreted that? The consequences to the Iraqi oil industry which Hanson mentions were clearly not the ones offered to the American public when the administration rolled out its new September 2003 product line. It is false to suggest otherwise.

False Cause, False Dichotomy, George Will, Straw Man

My way or the highway

After a brief excursus on the wonders of–get this–taxpayer funded interstate highways (what he would in other circumstances call “welfare”) George Will concludes:

>American scolds blame the IHS and the automobile for everything from obesity (fried food at every interchange) to desperate housewives (isolated in distant suburbs without sidewalks).

I’m beginning to think he just can’t help himself: every view of his must be presented against a completely ridiculous alternative. In what could have been an innocuous piece about the virtues of highways, turns out to be whiny piece about people who would suggest they aren’t an unqualified good:

>This senator who did so much to put postwar America on roads suitable to bigger, more powerful cars was Al Gore Sr. His son may consider this marriage of concrete and the internal combustion engine sinful, but Tennessee’s per capita income, which was just 70 percent of the national average in 1956, today is 90 percent.

So, Al Gore, who has foolishly and sanctimoniously suggested we might rethink our dependence on fossil fuels (an inexhaustible resource), simultaneously betrays his father, his home state, his country and reason. The only way to account for Tennessee’s prosperity–and the only way it could have happened, and thus the only way it can be maintained–is with bigger and more fuel-guzzling cars.

Even crazed environmentalists appreciate the freedom of the open road (well maintained with tax dollars), perhaps they just don’t think it should be the only way to get around.