Category Archives: Informal Fallacies

General discussion, George Will, non causa pro causa, Suppressed Evidence

Suppressed Will

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Today George Will goes after the Democratic congress for failing to avoid his misleading sarcasm.  The first charge, earmarks:

Hellbent on driving its approval rating into single digits, Congress adjourned after passing an omnibus spending bill larded with at least 8,993 earmarks costing at least $7.4 billion — the precise number and amount will be unclear until implications of some obscure provisions are deciphered. The gusher of earmarks was a triumph of bipartisanship, which often is a synonym for kleptocracy.

That first clause has a kind of causal ring to it I think, as if the cause of The Congress' low approval ratings were earmarks, lots of them.  On that presumption, the approval ratings of Congress ought to be higher than before.  Earmarks, under the Democrats, are down:

Democrats in Congress with the encouragement of President Bush vowed this year to seek a 50% reduction in federal budget "earmarks" — projects and programs inserted into spending bills by members of Congress to benefit their states or districts.

As it turns out, they didn't quite get there. How far they got depends on whose accounting method is used.

Democrats say they cut earmarks by 43%, to $9.2 billion, but they don't count water and military construction projects in their calculations. Those are mostly merit-based and less controversial than others.

Watchdog groups such as Taxpayers for Common Sense say the reduction is closer to 25%, once all earmarks are counted. They count 11,144, for $15.3 billion.

The White House puts the reduction at a meager 13%. Its Office of Management and Budget said Tuesday that the final spending bill, which was passed by the House on Monday and won Senate approval Tuesday night, would bring the total spent on earmarks to $16.4 billion. That's 87% of the 2005 peak, according to OMB's figures.

And the rest of this mendacious (that's a word Will would use) piece continues along the same lines: (a) misrepresent (by leaving out crucial facts) some Democratic achievement, (b) make sarcastic remark about how it either (i) fails some kind of consistency test or (ii) fails some kind of test of basic rationality.

Someone said–maybe Digby–that we continue to believe that our political discourse has to be this way, as if this were the logical consequence of our democratic system.  I fail to see how it is the case that we need people like Will, who in addition to the habitual abuse of logic, simply misrepresent facts.  Can't the Post put a fact-checker between his column and print?  The same for everyone.  Opinion pieces, as we all know here, are composed of factual assertions.  Those have to be correct in order for the opinions to be worth reading.  It would be extra special if they had a logic checker–one thing at a time.

One final, unrelated point.  With so many silly posts on this website, would anyone mind telling me what their favorite one of the past year was?  Jon Swift seems to be having a kind of contest.

Anne Applebaum, Bad Explanations, False Dichotomy, Lack of Evidence, Straw Man

La femminista

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Anne Applebaum gripes about how "feminism" cares not about issues that matter to real women.  She writes:

By contrast, the women of contemporary Saudi Arabia need a much more fundamental revolution than the one that took place among American women in the 1960s, and it's one we have trouble understanding. Unlike American blacks, American women have not had to grapple with issues as basic as the right to study or vote for a long time. Instead, we have (fortunately) fought for less fundamental rights in recent decades, and our women's groups have of late (unfortunately) had the luxury of focusing on the marginal. The National Council of Women's Organizations' most famous recent campaign was against the Augusta National Golf Club. The Web site of the National Organization for Women (I hate to pick on that group, but it's so easy) has space for issues of "non-sexist car insurance" and "network neutrality," but not the Saudi rape victim or the girl murdered last week in Canada for refusing to wear a hijab.

The reigning feminist ideology doesn't help: The philosopher Christina Hoff Sommers has written, among other things, that some American feminists, self-focused and reluctant to criticize non-Western cultures, have convinced themselves that "sexual terror" in America (a phrase from a real women's studies textbook) is more dangerous than actual terrorism. But the deeper problem is the gradual marginalization of "women's issues" in domestic politics, which has made them subordinate to security issues, or racial issues, in foreign policy as well.

American delegates to international and U.N. women's organizations are mostly identified with arguments about reproductive rights (for or against, depending on the administration), not arguments about the fundamental rights of women in Saudi Arabia or the Muslim world.

Until this changes, it will be hard to mount a campaign, in the manner of the anti-apartheid movement, to enforce sanctions or codes of conduct for people doing business there. What we need as a model, in other words, is not the 1960s feminism we all remember but a globalized version of the 19th-century feminism we've nearly forgotten. Candidates for the role of Elizabeth Cady Stanton, anyone?

In the first place, no one ought to be surprised that the National Organization for Women take issue with national issues, as they are are national organization.  Pointing out the "small" or "quaint" injustices with which they occupy themselves does not mean their members are not concerned or involved as women of international organizations with the plight of women in Saudi Arabia, or better, Afghanistan.  Those, however, are international issues.  

At the heart of Applebaum's astoundingly silly analysis, is the view that somehow concern for gender issues in America precludes one from being concerned about them in Canada or elsewhere.  Even dumber than that is the idea that one get a total picture of "reigning feminist ideology" from skimming the works of one "feminist" philosopher and clicking to the web pages of two different organizations.  Before she makes those claims, she should try a little harder, perhaps use the search function.

Appeal to Ignorance, Bloggers

May only

As I have nothing to say, I’m going to borrow wholesale from Sadly, No! an entertaining blog.

First, some set up. Glenn Reynolds, a kind of conservative law professor and well known blogger, cites with approval the following passage:

>LEE HARRIS ON UNINTENDED CONSEQUENCES: “It is simply a myth to believe that only interventionism yields unintended consequence, since doing nothing at all may produce the same unexpected results. If American foreign policy had followed a course of strict non-interventionism, the world would certainly be different from what it is today; but there is no obvious reason to think that it would have been better.” posted at 02:21 PM by Glenn Reynolds.

This remark produces the following hilarious retort from Gavin M. of Sadly, No!:

>Well, that’s certainly one way to look at things.

>For that matter, if I hadn’t accidentally flushed my wallet down the toilet, who’s to say that some maniac wouldn’t have come along and flushed it down a toilet anyway? It would almost certainly have been a different toilet, but there is no obvious reason to think that the result would have been better.

>It is simply a myth to believe that only self-wallet-flushing yields unintended consequences, for doing nothing at all may produce the same unexpected results. Say, can I see your wallet for a second?

I suppose the unfunny thing I would have said was that this is what you call the argumentum ad ignorantiam–i.e., when one turns the lack of evidence for a belief into evidence for it. If that sounds too dumb to be true, just reread Reynolds’ original post.

Academics, Ad hominem circumstantial, General discussion, Lack of Evidence

More on bias in academia

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The New York Times and the Washington Post must be under some kind of obligation to run an “academia is biased to the left” piece once or twice a year (excluding, of course, the regular appearance of this theme in the columns of David Brooks and George Will, to give two examples). And yesterday’s Outlook section in the Washington Post has another one.

According to the formula, it begins with an unverifiable anecdote:

>A sociologist I know recalls that his decision to become a registered Republican caused “a sensation” at his university. “It was as if I had become a child molester,” he said. He eventually quit academia to join a think tank because “you don’t want to be in a department where everyone hates your guts.”

>I think my political views hurt my career some years back when I was interviewing for a job at a prestigious research university. Everything seemed to be going well until I mentioned, in a casual conversation with department members over dinner, that I planned to vote Republican in the upcoming presidential election. Conversation came to a halt, and someone quickly changed the subject. The next day, I thought my final interview went fairly well. But the department ended up hiring someone who had published far less, but apparently “fit” better than I did. At least that’s what I was told when I called a month later to learn the outcome of the job search, having never received any further communication from the school. (A friend at the same university later told me he didn’t believe that particular department would ever hire a Republican.)

>Now there is more data backing up experiences like mine. Recently, my Villanova colleague Richard Redding and my longtime collaborator Frederick Hess commissioned a set of studies to ascertain how rare conservative professors really are, and why. We wanted real scholars to use real data to study whether academia really has a PC problem. While our work was funded by the right-of-center American Enterprise Institute, we (and our funders) have been very clear about our intention to go wherever the data would take us.

For those of you who don’t know what it’s like to look for a job in academia, the experience he mentions is completely common. Having been on both sides of hiring committees, “fit” considerations (not merely publications) can play a very central role. Besides, how can the author tell that he was rejected because he said he would vote Republican? He can’t read the minds of that committee, and no amount of research of the AEI is going to vindicate him. That anecdote, in other words, illustrates nothing other than the lazy way this guy reaches conclusions.

Of course, I’m just saying that because I’m biased.

There’s a better discussion of this piece (and this type of piece) at LGM.

non causa pro causa, Robert Samuelson

Coverage

Robert Samuelson, a kind of Captain Bringdown of economics columnists, argues that we cannot have an honest debate about health care so long as it is about expanding coverage. He writes:

>The politics of health care rests on a mass illusion:

I know what you’re thinking. The illusion is that way too much of the money Americans spend on “health care” pays for needless bureaucracy, so that’s what we need to cut, right?

Nope.

He continues:

>Most Americans think that someone else pays for their care. Workers with employer-provided insurance believe that their companies pay. Retirees and the poor think that the government, through Medicare (retirees) and Medicaid (the poor), pays. No one has an interest in controlling spending, because everyone believes that it burdens someone else. Naturally, the health-industrial complex — doctors, hospitals, drug companies — has no interest. Higher health spending raises their incomes and profits.

The problem is that people need health coverage. Perhaps they should need it less.

In all seriousness, while serious discussions of cost are always appropriate (I could make a living making that argument: here’s the formula: none of the candidates seriously want to address issue x, which is serious because of y, therefore z), Samuelson has to be aware of the rather obvious and well documented problem of how health insurance bureaucracy consumes a giant share of health care spending. Can’t we cut that first?

George Will, Straw Man

Childishness

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Whatever one’s position on the desirability or plausibility of government funded health insurance, this remark is just plain childish:

>About one thing, Hillary Clinton is, remarkably, both clear and opaque: Jefferson is anachronistic. “We can talk all we want about freedom and opportunity, about life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, but what does all that mean to a mother or father who can’t take a sick child to the doctor?” Well, okay, what does “all that” mean to someone stuck in congested traffic? Or annoyed by the price of cable television? What does Mrs. Clinton mean?

One can always make this kind of fundamentally crappy, not to mention dishonest, argument. For anyone’s view x, replace it with something manifestly different, then claim they are also arguing for that different thing. For those of you playing along at home, try this out on your friends. See if it works.

Academics, category mistake, Weak Analogy

Faith in science

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A grad school professor of mine once said: beware of scientists in a metaphysical mood. And lo. Yesterday’s New York Times op-ed section contains this, from Paul Davies, physicist:

>Clearly, then, both religion and science are founded on faith — namely, on belief in the existence of something outside the universe, like an unexplained God or an unexplained set of physical laws, maybe even a huge ensemble of unseen universes, too. For that reason, both monotheistic religion and orthodox science fail to provide a complete account of physical existence.

>This shared failing is no surprise, because the very notion of physical law is a theological one in the first place, a fact that makes many scientists squirm. Isaac Newton first got the idea of absolute, universal, perfect, immutable laws from the Christian doctrine that God created the world and ordered it in a rational way. Christians envisage God as upholding the natural order from beyond the universe, while physicists think of their laws as inhabiting an abstract transcendent realm of perfect mathematical relationships.

>And just as Christians claim that the world depends utterly on God for its existence, while the converse is not the case, so physicists declare a similar asymmetry: the universe is governed by eternal laws (or meta-laws), but the laws are completely impervious to what happens in the universe.

By religion, Davies means his version of the Christian religion, and others that will fit those particular metaphysical presuppositions (this won’t include Mormonism, by the way). And while Physicists don’t have all of the answers about the nature of the objects of their study (which discipline does?), that’s hardly grounds to claim that it’s a lot like religion. The evidence for the basic elements of religious faith (not to mention the truth of various intricate Christian doctrines, among others) is completely like evidence for the physical laws that characterize matter. Just because physics doesn’t tell the whole story (why should it and who claims it does?) does not mean the whole thing is accepted without evidence. Others, I’m certain, can say more.

But the Times ought to be beyond these tales of faith found among microscopes: it’s so washingtonposty.

Michael Gerson, Straw Man

Exactly as I predicted

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If you relocate the horizon of success, you can win at anything. Michael Gerson teaches us how to do that with arguments:

>On cultural issues, conservatives have been ambushed by hope. And Wehner and Levin provide two main explanations.

>First, societies can, over time, recognize their own self-destructive tendencies and reassert old norms — not just arresting decline but even reversing it. Many Americans, for example, have seen the damaging effects of divorce on children — sometimes from the firsthand perspective of their own childhoods — and divorce rates, especially among upper-income couples, have fallen. Over the decades the social wreckage of drug use has become undeniable — and the social judgment on this practice has shifted from “stylish rebellion” to “suicidal idiocy.” In many cases, our culture has benefited from the natural healing mechanism of simple sanity.

>The second reason for this cultural renewal is bold, effective public policy — welfare reform with time limits and work requirements; zero-tolerance approaches to crime; education reform that tests and requires basic skills; and comprehensive anti-drug efforts, including enforcement, treatment and education. In all these cases, good government and rational incentives have made a tremendous difference.

Lower crime, less drug abuse, lower divorce rates, real book learning of course, are all of them uniquely conservative positions. Liberals, of course, advocated drug abuse as stylish rebellion, no investment in quality public education, unlimited welfare, and a tolerant attitude towards crime.

Equivocation, Jonah Goldberg, Op-Eds and other opinions, Unclassifiable

Aqua-vocation

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It depends on what the meaning of “waterboarding” is (courtesy of Digby):

>DAVID RIVKIN, MILITARY LAW EXPERT: Incidentally, it is not a debate about whether torture is permissible, at least in my mind, it’s what things amount to torture. And with all due respect to my friend Charlie, there are several forms of waterboarding. Waterboarding is a very capricious term, it connotes a bunch of things. There are clearly some forms of waterboarding [that are] torture and off the table. They may well be some waterboarding regimens that while tough and useful in extracting information are not torture. My problem with the critics is that they don’t want to have, contrary to what Senator Edwards said, we are ought to have a debate as a serious society about what stress techniques of interrogation and what to do with it. Let me point out one thing, we actually waterboard our own people. Are we torturing our own people?

That silly and convenient relativism is matched only by an even more ridiculous sophistry:

>FOREMAN: But we’re waterboarding our own people to give them an idea of what they would encounter if they were captured by somebody else.

>RIVKIN: Well, forgive me, as a matter of law and ethics, if the given practice like slavery and prostitution is officially odious, you cannot use it no matter what our goals is, you cannot even use it to volunteers. So, if all forms of waterboarding are torture then we are torturing our own people, and the very same instructor who spoke before Congress the other day about how it’s torture, is guilty of practicing torture for decades. We as a society have to come up with the same baseline using (inaudible) in all spheres of public life instead of somehow singularizing this one thing, which is interrogation of combatants and we need to look at it in a broader way.

Um. So, in order to teach preparedness for torture, the military has used its methods on its own people, but in using these methods, by definition, they are not torture, because you cannot torture someone who is a volunteer. But if it was torture, then the instructor is guilty of torture. So it follows that these people are either guilty of torture, or since no one wants to be guilty of torture, their students learned nothing about torture, since waterboarding isn’t torture.

On a similar theme, Glenn Greenwald discusses Jonah Goldberg’s agony over the definition of torture.

Equivocation, Ignoratio Elenchi, Kathleen Parker, Straw Man

I fought the law

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Kathleen Parker, a deeply empathetic person, puts herself in the shoes of the typical illegal immigrant:

>As long as we offer jobs, medical treatment, driver’s licenses and in-state tuition to those who come here illegally, why would any right-thinking, would-be immigrant take a number and wait his or her turn? Why not just throw in the Dallas Cowboys cheerleaders and free tequila while we’re at it?

Indeed, the life of the typical illegal immigrant is full of all sorts of freebies; indeed, the only thing missing is the fulfillment of some kind of alcohol-fueled male adolescent sexual fantasy.

It gets worse:

>Arguments favoring services and privileges for illegal immigrants always point to the broader benefits to society.

God forbid.

>Healthy immigrants mean a healthier America; an educated populace means fewer jobless dependents; legal drivers are more responsible because, allegedly, they’ll also buy insurance and stick around when they have an accident.

>The latter seems unconvincing given that illegal immigrants, by definition, tend not to think legally.

A bachelor, by definition, is an unmarried man. An illegal immigrant, by definition, is someone who does not have legal status; but this actually doesn’t mean that this illegal immigrant has broken the law. The law might have been broken–as it is in numerous cases–when they were children. Besides, it’s not the case that anyone who breaks the law, in any regard, “tends to think illegally.” I’d be interested to find out what the thinking illegally tendency is.

She continues:

>In any case, by the same logic, we might also say that amnesty is good for the country because then everyone would be legal. Rather than fix something, we simply accommodate circumstances. As in: Kids are having sex anyway, so we’ll just give them condoms.

Parker suggests that the response to every problem is the same: stop it. While that might be desirable, as any sociologist could tell you, it’s not going to happen. Denying the reality and complexity of illegal immigration will not achieve much, however much you assert that illegal is as illegal does.