Just a link. Read this analysis of a straw man. Fun stuff.
Category Archives: Informal Fallacies
One of these things is not like the other
Via Washington Monthly.
Some skinheads plotted to assassinate Obama and kill some 102 African-American children. As they were from Tennessee, the Tennessee Republican Party felt compelled to respond. They said:
"Hate is not a political party, policy statement, agenda or ideology — it is a pure evil that no place in civil society," said Robin Smith, Chairman of the Tennessee Republican Party. "Whether it is neo-Nazi skinheads plotting a racist shooting spree targeting Sen. Obama, or West Hollywood liberals hanging Gov. Sarah Palin in effigy and calling it 'art,' or unknown anarchists tossing bricks through the windows of a county Republican headquarters in Murfreesboro, Americans of all political views should be outraged."
A tasteless effigy and anonymous (who said they're anarchists?) bricks don't remotely equal political assassination and racially motivated mass murder. Nice attempted red herring however.
On the other hand
Richard Cohen on the vices of the two parties:
But the GOP's tropism toward its furiously angry base, its tolerance and currying of anti-immigrant sentiment, its flattering of the ignorant on matters of undisputed scientific consensus — evolution, for instance — and, from the mouth of Palin, its celebration of drab provincialism, have sharpened the division between red and blue. Red is the color of yesterday.
Ah, I know, the blues are not all virtuous. They are supine before self-serving unions, particularly in education, and they are knee-jerk opponents of offshore drilling, mostly, it seems, because they don't like Big Oil. They cannot face the challenge of the Third World within us — the ghetto with its appalling social and cultural ills — lest realism be called racism. Sometimes, too, they seem to criticize American foreign policy simply because it is American.
I think we have a case of false or forced equivalence. First, prominent Republican national candidates, conservative news networks and magazines, as well as leading conservative thinkers and media figures espouse the views in the first paragraph; few leading Democrats of equal stature, liberal thinkers, think tanks and so forth hold the views in the second paragraph.
Second, while for the Republican ills he mentions actual positions, for the Democrats he stresses their motives for holding the positions they hold. So while the one party's actual stated policies are absurd; the other party might include those whose motives are silly but whose views seem otherwise not to be that bad–after all, it's good to criticize offshore drilling, to have a nuanced understanding of social and cultural ills, and to criticize American foreign policy, isn't it?
Politiculous
On the whole this site concerns itself with top-shelf newspaper punditry primarily because as one descends into syndication things get pretty bad. So bad, at times, one wonders whether it's even fair to bring our very undergraduate skills of logical analysis to bear. But sometimes, however, it's just entertaining. If anything, Bill Maher's Religulous shows us that. Someone could do the same thing for the poltical world. Here's one place to start:
An e-mail: "OK, I'll say it…I believe today's massive decline was, in part (and maybe a big "in part"), in fear that the debate tonight won't go well for McCain and the implications that will have for an Obama victory. The likelihood of a recession has been talked about and, probably, factored in to a lot of folks' thinking already… …if tonight's debate tracks well for McCain, you'll see a positive response tomorrow; if it doesn't, hold on; it won't be pretty. Call it: 'Flight to Safety (from Socialism).'"
That's an email an editor at William F.Buckley's National Review thought important enough to repost online–without howls of laughter or at least notes of compassion for the person's diminished intellectual capacity. So here's the problem, if one were to do a Religulous of politics, where would one begin?
Merit
In a meritocracy, people earn their way upwards. So foundational is the notion of merit to a meritocracy, that for some, such as myself for instance, it has a broader application. In a meritocracy democracy, such as ours would like to be, people advance their position on the strength of their arguments. If your argument has no merit because it rests on made up facts–or lies as some call them–you ought to realize it does not deserve to be made not to mention win. Well, would that Jonah Goldberg thought this way, He writes:
I have no idea whatsoever if there's merit to this, and if there is how much merit, but lots of email like this:
When are people going to start talking about the REAL reason the markets are down – Obama up in polls. If I was McCain, I'd start telling people, "If you want to lose more money, vote Obama."
A person such as Goldberg could perhaps be bothered to check to see whether there is any merit to his obviously contentious, to say the least, claim. His readers could be forgiven, after all, they read him.
Thanks to Glenn Greenwald for the tip.
Association by guilt
Perhaps some of you might have heard that Barack Obama has been "pallin' around with terrorists," such as William Ayers of the Weather Underground, or that he listened while his minister criticized America, or that some guy from the same city as him is going to go to jail. Such are the McCain campaign's charges. You might also notice that these are attempts "guilt by association" (here we call it "bad company"). To many, such a tactic is wrong on its face. Rather than discuss the substantive policy questions that ought to be driving the current Presidential race, we have to sit through endless stories about who met with whom when where and how. It certainly is dumb, and it makes all of us dumber. Here's a well known leftish blogger:
So Palin’s "palling around" accusation is no more true than her boast that she "told congress ‘Thanks, but no thanks’" on the Bridge to Nowhere, or that she had the Alaska Permanent Fund divest from Sudan. But it seems to me that pointing out factual errors gives this line of argument too much credit: guilt by association, even when the association happens to be real, is a silly charge.
It's not a silly charge, however. Whether the charge is true is certainly important. As important as that, however, is whether the charge is relevant. Relevance, in fact, is what makes the difference between a fallacious guilt by association charge and a legitimate one. It's not, in other words, simply a matter of the form of argument. The content–who is the associate, how long? how important? etc.,–makes all of the difference.
It turns out, I think, that Palin's charges are false or at best misleading. Ayers is, in fact, a rather prominent person in Chicago politics–he even pals around with such mainstream figures as Richard M. Daley, our longtime mayor. Besides, Ayers isn't in jail, and he doesn't seem to be currently a terrorist. Besides that, he, in his civic role in Chicago politics, "palled" around with Republicans as well.
All of this, of course, makes a huge difference as to the relevance of the charge. If Sarah Palin, for instance, "palled around" with members of a treasonous secessionist political party, I think that would indeed be relevant. The same would be true for John McCain. If he palled around with people who advocated assassination as a policy, or who defrauded thousands of people of their life savings, we might have reason to question his judgment.
So, while whether such charges as these are true matters a good deal. But it matters just as much whether they have any relevance to stuff that matters. Sometimes they don't.
Stay classy, Bill Kristol
William Kristol has a strategy for raising the level our national discourse as the election draws near:
That debate is important. McCain took a risk in choosing Palin. If she does poorly, it will reflect badly on his judgment. If she does well, it will be a shot in the arm for his campaign.
In the debate, Palin has to dispatch quickly any queries about herself, and confidently assert that of course she’s qualified to be vice president. She should spend her time making the case for McCain and, more important, the case against Obama. As one shrewd McCain supporter told me, “Every minute she spends not telling the American people something that makes them less well disposed to Obama is a minute wasted.”
The core case against Obama is pretty simple: he’s too liberal. A few months ago I asked one of McCain’s aides what aspect of Obama’s liberalism they thought they could most effectively exploit. He looked at me as if I were a simpleton, and patiently explained that talking about “conservatism” and “liberalism” was so old-fashioned.
Maybe. But the fact is the only Democrats to win the presidency in the past 40 years — Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton — distanced themselves from liberal orthodoxy. Obama is, by contrast, a garden-variety liberal. He also has radical associates in his past.
The most famous of these is the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, and I wonder if Obama may have inadvertently set the stage for the McCain team to reintroduce him to the American public. On Saturday, Obama criticized McCain for never using in the debate Friday night the words “middle class.” The Obama campaign even released an advertisement trumpeting McCain’s omission.
The McCain campaign might consider responding by calling attention to Chapter 14 of Obama’s eloquent memoir, “Dreams From My Father.” There Obama quotes from the brochure of Reverend Wright’s church — a passage entitled “A Disavowal of the Pursuit of Middleclassness.”
So when Biden goes on about the middle class on Thursday, Palin might ask Biden when Obama flip-flopped on Middleclassness.
The answer, so it seems, is for McCain and Palin to turn the campaign away from issues that matter towards petty, false and irrelevant matters of "character." It's one thing third-tier minds such as Kristol says these kinds of things themselves, it's quite another when they advocate others think and act as they do. The one is just embarrassing, the other is criminal.
Stand down
A few posts back (and for a couple of posts) I remarked on the tendency of "liberal" pundits to separate themselves from the "liberal" candidate by frequently criticizing him or her, usually for failing to look enough like the conservative candidate. Yesterday Ruth Marcus provided another excellent example of this–going after one of Obama's campaign lines for "misrepresenting" John McCain's record. I wouldn't quibble with the criticism, my view is that no one should misrepresent anything. But there is a question of scale.
We have on the one hand Obama, in Marcus's world guilty of a straw man for not criticizing the strongest versions of McCain's one-time social security plan (Obama said had McCain had his way, many people would now be in dire straits–when in reality, only had this crisis happened a few years on, would people be in dire straits on account of McCain's plan–oops!). Obama probably is guilty of that logical offense. It's an offense nearly too typical, in my estimation, for one even to remark upon. Candidates thrive by knocking down weak versions of each others' policy positions. Obama didn't need to do it, however, as his point was independent of the specific facts of the case–in a privatized social security market, he had been saying, this is the sort of thing that could really doom us. And no doubt he's right about that.
But that's not my point. Marcus, for some reason, wanted to even the truthiness playing field, where McCain and Palin lie repeatedly and without apparent consequence about nearly everything, and Obama misrepresents McCain's position once. Marcus bent over backwards for apparent even-handedness.
To my very great and growing surprise, however, Marcus's righward colleagues, usually lockstep in their defense of their guy, have shown me to be astoundingly and thankfully wrong. Here, for instance, is George Will:
Conservatives who insist that electing McCain is crucial usually start, and increasingly end, by saying he would make excellent judicial selections. But the more one sees of his impulsive, intensely personal reactions to people and events, the less confidence one has that he would select judges by calm reflection and clear principles, having neither patience nor aptitude for either.
It is arguable that, because of his inexperience, Obama is not ready for the presidency. It is arguable that McCain, because of his boiling moralism and bottomless reservoir of certitudes, is not suited to the presidency. Unreadiness can be corrected, although perhaps at great cost, by experience. Can a dismaying temperament be fixed?
Ouch. Notice also for a moment the huge difference between Will and Marcus. Marcus takes Obama to task all of the time (and for the stupidest of reasons–such as he's not "regular" enough); Will, if you look at his recent posts (and search our Will archive) has almost never directly challenged the rightward guy. He's made, in fact, a rather valient effort in recent days to make McCain's case (arguing, in one instance, that maybe one should not think about the economy, since life has so much else to offer than just money).
There goes my theory about the right wing pundit corps, my theory of the non-existent left wing pundit corps still stands, for the moment.
American idle
In the wake of David Brooks's critical piece on Sarah Palin, I was going to point out that perhaps I was wrong about the right wing pundit corps. Maybe they don't marshal any argument, however foolish, in support of their "guy," whoever their guy is, or however silly his policy prescriptions. That would have been fun to write, as I enjoy being wrong, despite what people may think. But then I run across this morning's George Will column. He's not pro-Palin, but that's not going to stop him from making a pitch for McCain. Well it's not really a pitch for McCain, since he doesn't mention any of McCain's numerous virtues or policy proposals as a reason to vote for him.
What worries George Will, reputedly some kind of libertarian, about a Democratic Presidency is the possibility of (a) an (unlikely I think) expansion of unionization, (b) universal health care, (c) (unlikely again) laws regarding political speech. As a rule, one ought to dismiss out of hand Will's characterization of these issues, as he is, unfortunately, a serial straw man constructor. Perhaps one might find better arguments against those things elsewhere. What's silly is that these three things pose such a danger to the country and liberty, that Will finds their possible vetoing sufficient reason to vote for McCain. I mean, as they say, come on you've got to be kidding me. This is all you have?
Well, in other ironic matters, there's this:
Palin is as bracing as an Arctic breeze and delightfully elicits the condescension of liberals whose enthusiasm for everyday middle-class Americans cannot survive an encounter with one. But the country's romance with her will, as romances do, cool somewhat, and even before November some new fad might distract a nation that loves "American Idol" for the metronomic regularity with which it discovers genius in persons hitherto unsuspected of it.
"Liberals," of course, are elitists–i.e., not "everyday middle-class Americans." Don't they, by the way, belong to unions? Unions like the ones whose expansion this piece claims to offer reason to oppose? Then of course the irony: George Will, cursing elitism, makes fun not only of what lots of people watch, but of their aesthetic judgments as well. But perhaps he never cursed elitism.
In a related matter–this is dumbfoundingly hilarious.
Posts blog posts
I normally don't read the Post's election blog posts primarily because they're blog posts, but this one from Sebastian Mallaby, "Obama's Faulty Logic," caught my eye. I thought, "perhaps someone has caught Obama in a crazy non sequitur I can talk about here."
Then I read it and it occured to me that Mallaby thinks logic means something else than I do. But that's interesting anyway, because I often wonder what people who haven't been teaching it for many years think it is (feel free to comment on that). When I use the term, I mean something rather specific. I mean to point out the part of an argument that takes one from one fact to another fact. This is what logicians call an "inference." Even though this has to do with the facts in some very important sense, one can isolate the inference and see it as part of a larger pattern, a scheme, or whatever, independent of the particular facts. To say someone has faulty logic, for me, means he endorses faulty inference patterns or schemes.
For Mallaby it means something like there's something wrong with the thinking without any specific attempt at a diagnosis. In this particular case, in fact, he just seems to think Obama has wrongly diagnosed the cause of the current financial crisis. That's fine–so long as he attempts to prove it (which, to my mind, he doesn't, but that's another matter). Then Mallaby, swinging about accusations of faulty logic, writes:
The regulation-versus-deregulation rhetoric is appealingly simple, and both parties abuse it. Republicans like to say they will get the economy going by cutting red tape. Democrats like to say that they will make the economy more stable by demanding rational oversight. Neither claim is worth much.
The Republicans fail to acknowledge that the easy economic gains from deregulation were exhausted more than two decades ago, when clearly destructive restrictions on competition in trucking, airlines and so on were scrapped by Carter and Reagan. The Democrats fail to acknowledge that there is a limit to what government oversight can do. Modern financial institutions are so complex that government inspectors are hard pressed to understand their trading strategies. That is why an outfit such as Citigroup, a deposit-taking institution theoretically overseen by multiple government bodies including the Fed, could park billions of dollars of toxic mortgage securities in off-balance-sheet vehicles, with nary a protest from regulators.
Yes, Wall Street's woes reflect greed and reckless borrowing. And yes, some regulatory reform is necessary. But you can't blame the mess on either political party — at least not if you want to remain honest.
It's staggering to say that more rational oversight wouldn't have helped. But it's silly to say that anyone, even Democrats, would argue that oversight would solve all problems. That, in fact, is a bit of a George Will style straw man–one which has the liberals demanding that the government will prevent every wrong if it's allowed to. Obviously some amount of nefarious activity will take place, and unless Obama says that the government will stop every problem, cure every sickness and so on, then Mallaby is making Obama's position more absurd than it needs to be.
It's fine, in other words, for Mallaby to correct Obama's assertions–that's his job, I think at least. But accusing him of faulty logic when he's not guilty of it–even in Mallaby's enlarged sense–doesn't help anyone.