Category Archives: Fallacies of Relevance

Robert Samuelson, Straw Man

The two Gores

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The war on Al Gore is really the specialty of the Daily Howler, but with all deference to Bob Somerby, let me take a stab at it today. The old war on Gore involved the claim that he had a kind of pathological obsession with becoming President of the United States. On this theme, the New York Times’ Healy and Leibovich:

>For Mr. Gore, who calls himself a “recovering politician,” returning to Capitol Hill is akin to a recovering alcoholic returning to a neighborhood bar.

That gratuitous aside puts the whole idea of testifying before Congress back in the old light of Al Gore will do or say anything to become President. But that’s par for the course, and has been amply demonstrated by the above sources.

Luckily we still have Al Gore to kick around. And, like Charles Krauthammer, we can question his grip on reality. So in today’s Post Robert Samuelson writes:

>Global warming has gone Hollywood, literally and figuratively. The script is plain. As Gore says, solutions are at hand. We can switch to renewable fuels and embrace energy-saving technologies, once the dark forces of doubt are defeated. It’s smart and caring people against the stupid and selfish. Sooner or later, Americans will discover that this Hollywood version of global warming (largely mirrored in the media) is mostly make-believe.

And the rest of the op-ed is filled with claims about our extensive use of coal and its contribution to greenhouse gases and so forth. Kudos to Samuelson for not doubting the science of global warming like his colleague, George Will. But like George Will, Samuelson is guilty of confusing the Hollywood story on global warming–necessarily fantastical–with actual probable policy recommendations offered by experts. On any charitable interpretation of what Al Gore is saying, one can’t draw the conclusion that a magic wand will make the whole thing go away. But one can conclude, as has Gore, that there is a major obstacle to progress of any kind on the issue–the will to implement policies aimed at clean and renewable sources of energy.

This is where the new script meets the old one. Isn’t Al Gore some kind of political addict who thrives on the complexity of policy making (rather than simple-minded Texas bromides about the good and the evil)? At least Samuelson didn’t stick to that script.

George Will, Straw Man

Notional Enemies

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Like all Marines, I spent a lot of time at firing ranges. It turned out however that sometimes these ranges lacked even fake targets. As a result we had to wage a kind of fake and frustrating war on an elusive “notional enemy.” One encounter with an actual enemy, however, gave me a new appreciation for the notional one. George F. Will, WaPo wordsmith, baseball fan, and resident raconteur, has made career out of this tactic. Real enemies, like real arguments, are hard to defeat; better to confront the fake ones. Although we are wearying of Will’s consistently fallacious claims, his nauseous elitism and his neo-conservative soap-boxing, today Will leads off with a real gem: >By striking down the District of Columbia's extraordinarily strict gun control law, which essentially bans guns, a federal appeals court may have revived gun control as a political issue. Perhaps I’m uninformed, but I was unaware that gun control had ceased to be a political issue. To argue that gun control has lain “dormant” lo these many years and that this federal court has now awakened some gun-toting, right wing giant is simply ridiculous. Will (inexplicably) wants to warn the Dems to look out for the right-wing gun nut majority that is now building steam. There’s not really an argument to be had there, so Will simply manufactures a premise that supports his tale of woe. We’ve seen this before, with our Beloved Leader. In lieu of an actual enemy, I’ll construct one, defeat it, and claim victory. I. Am. Awesome. Will isn’t ready to relinquish the traditional form of his preferred fallacy just yet, however: >Erwin Chemerinsky, professor of law and political science at Duke University, argued in The Post last week that even if the Second Amendment is construed as creating an individual right to gun ownership, the D.C. law should still be constitutional because the city had a defensible intent (reducing violence) when it annihilated that right. Go through the link in Will’s piece to Dr. Chemerinsky’s article. It’s actually a very nuanced claim about exactly what types of rights are enumerated in the Constitution and what types of rights the federal courts seem to be implying in their recent gun-control cases. Yet, Will ignores the built-in limitations of the 9th Amendment and mischaracterizes this piece as espousing some sort of paternalistic theory of Constitutional hermeneutics to prove the willingness of left to trample the rights of the people in their rush to take away all our guns. Here’s the payoff: >If the Supreme Court reverses the appeals court's ruling and upholds the D.C. gun law, states and localities will be empowered to treat the Second Amendment as the D.C. law does: as a nullity. This will bring the gun control issue — and millions of gun owners — back to a roiling boil. That is not in the interest of the Democratic Party, which is supported by most ardent supporters of gun control. Oh, is that right? -pm

Ad Hominem, Appeal to the People, David Brooks

A man with a fraudulent bearing

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Today we’ll continue the Brooks theme in celebration of our renewed free access to the opinion pages of the New York Times (I’m still asking myself why I was supposed to pay for this). Yesterday he wrote:

>Say what you will about President Bush, when he thinks a policy is right, like the surge, he supports it, even if it’s going to be unpopular. The Democratic leaders, accustomed to the irresponsibility of opposition, show no such guts.

This remark is confused on many levels. In the first place, Bush has obtusely adhered to failed policies, and, more damningly, neglected to question whether those policies were justified in the first place. Sometimes supporting something unpopular is just plain dumb. It’s moronic to suggest that such obtuseness constitutes courage. Besides, to do so is to commit a variant of the ad populum fallacy in that you take the lack of popular support for your position as a measure in favor of your position.

At a more basic level, however, this is a variation of the “manliness” meme so thoroughly discussed by Glenn Greenwald. Brooks has remarked on this before with Bush–even claiming that John Kerry, a man who actually voluntarily served his country in combat, was a “fraud with a manly bearing.” He wrote:

>The coming weeks will be so tough because the essential contest – of which the Swift boat stuff was only a start – will be over who really has courage, who really has resolve, and who is just a fraud with a manly bearing.

Never mind, of course, the courage to say that you blew it big time.

David Brooks, False Dichotomy, Straw Man

Welcome Back

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For those with “edu” email accounts, the New York Times Select pages are now free. That means once again we can read David Brooks, a man who has been wrong about everything. It’s been a while. But maybe some will remember David Brooks‘ favorite logical trope: the false dichotomy. For Brooks, the false dichotomy results from a straw man. First, he caricatures the opposition viewpoint, then he sets up that caricature as the unacceptable alternative in a false dichotomy. So today he misreads Carl Levin’s speech yesterday in the Senate. Brooks says:

>The intelligence agencies paint a portrait of a society riven at its base with sectarian passion. They describe a society not of rational game theorists but of human beings beset by trauma — of Sunnis failing to acknowledge their minority status, of Shiites bent on winner-take-all domination, of self-perpetuating animosities, disintegrating bonds and a complex weave of conflicts.

The problem is that no one argues (and no one’s view can be taken to imply) that Iraqi society is composed of “rational game theorists.” And the falsity of that claim does not imply the somewhat orientalist notion that Iraqi society is “riven at its base with sectarian passion.” So not only does that claim infantalize the Iraqis, grossly mischaracterize Levin’s argument, but it also fails to take into account the obvious fact that sectiarian passions can take shape in the mind of rational game theorists.

Ad Hominem, Ad hominem tu quoque, V.D.Hanson

Tu quoque Yogi Berra

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There must be something in the water at the venerable Hoover Institution. Just last week, we visited a piece, wherein one of their fellows leveled that most traveled of ad hominem attacks, the tu quoque at former VP Al Gore. This week, as Uncle Yogi once said, is “déjà vu all over again.” V.D. Hanson is concerned, folks—concerned that we, the people, only focus on the failings of right wing politicians, pundits, and politico-religious types. He means to remedy the situation. He says, >But moralist Republicans don't have the market cornered on hypocrisy. If giving into excess embarrasses some of them, for a number of Democrats–supposedly the party of the people–hypocrisy arises from enjoying elite privileges while alleging that America bestows favors unduly on the few. I suppose it’s fun to argue against a position no one has held or even implied. I haven’t heard anyone pretend that Mark Foley’s failings whitewash Ted Kennedy’s. Moreover, it has no bearing whatsoever, as Hanson implies it does, on the populist programs of those prominent Democrats he indicts. Hanson gives us a litany of hypocrisies perpetrated by the left and then pretends that it makes their period as the party in power somehow moot because all politicos are cut from the same cloth. Ye gods. There’s a stark distinction between the duplicity that lead to a war that has cost 3,000+ U.S. lives, along with the lives of untold thousands of Iraqis and the global warming activist who uses the quickest form of transport available to disseminate information. Hanson simply glosses this distinction, because, you know, they’re all crooks and liars, right? >For both liberals and conservatives, the days of the simple-living Harry Truman and clean-living Dwight Eisenhower are apparently long gone–and for two reasons. >First, the country has changed. Globalization, high technology and billions in borrowed money have made Americans in general materially wealthy beyond our parents' wildest imagination. >… >Second, in our world of celebrity sound bites and media saturation, talk, not reality, is what counts. Multimillionaires lecture us about fairness, while sinners rail about sin. Ah, yes—the good old days. Regardless of the fact Pound, err…Hanson, has a point here—we are a society of consumers, more importantly of irresponsible, uncouth consumers and that’s not a good thing—the point is out of place here. Unless we can now impeach all politicos as the very root of avarice and greed, all we’re left with is the conclusion that we’re all just a bunch of hypocrites, in spite of our high ideals. Great story. Really. Compelling and rich. Hanson regroups, however, to deliver another kick to this equine carcass: >The political leaders of this country are essentially too often homogeneous. Republicans may represent constituents of traditional values; Democrats may champion the underprivileged. But their similar lifestyles reflect more a political class' shared privilege than the inherent differences of their respective constituents' beliefs. National figures may talk conservative or liberal, but they both are more likely to act like libertines. Indicting all politicos as hypocritical and wrong adds nothing. In fact, it’s rather banal. Still worse is that Hanson hasn’t argued so as to support the conclusion that the analogous evils of both conservatives and liberals have some bearing on their legislative activity. Beyond his dazzling pithiness, the problems here are evident: one, Hanson assumes, incorrectly, that some causal link exists between how one lives and how one performs in the political arena. Secondly, even if that were the case, he so muddies the waters that it is unclear how the hypocritical similarities between politicos have any bearing on anything. Look who’s pithy now. -pm

Ad hominem tu quoque, Appeal to Ignorance, Begging the Question, category mistake, Robert Kagan, Unqualified Authority

Binge and surge

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**Update below**

I was going to make a post about the fallacy of amphiboly, but then I read Robert Kagan’s “The Surge is Succeeding” in today’s Washington Post. Kagan’s article is instructive in its subtle and misleading use of evidence. In the end he doesn’t so much as argue that the surge is working so much as claim the press ought not to be saying that it’s not working, because it’s too early to tell, so it’s working. That’s a pretty straightforward argument from ignorance. And we’ve seen this sort of thing before from Kagan–given the absence of attacks on the US in the wake of the invasion of Iraq, the invasion has stopped terrorism. Well, the acute will notice that the latter is a causal fallacy.

But back to the question of evidence. Kagan’s central evidence for the success of the surge:

>Four months later, the once insurmountable political opposition has been surmounted. The nonexistent troops are flowing into Iraq. And though it is still early and horrible acts of violence continue, there is substantial evidence that the new counterinsurgency strategy, backed by the infusion of new forces, is having a significant effect.

>Some observers are reporting the shift. Iraqi bloggers Mohammed and Omar Fadhil, widely respected for their straight talk, say that “early signs are encouraging.”

There is a puzzling circularity to Kagan’s reasoning here. His evidence for the success is the sentence that follows that reports evidence of the success–not the other way around. For most normal evidentialists, the Press–for which Kagan has no regard (more in a second)–reports things they claim to be happening, and we either believe them or disbelieve them. Not t’other way round. So Kagan ought to write: some observers have noticed a shift, and after considering their authority against that of, say, the White House, and the rest of the world media, I believe them. After all, they’re bloggers known for “straight talk.”

In addition to his strange selection of authorities and the weird and apparent circularity of his argument, Kagan finds time to dig at the press:

>A front-page story in The Post last week suggested that the Bush administration has no backup plan in case the surge in Iraq doesn’t work. I wonder if The Post and other newspapers have a backup plan in case it does.

Zing! Take that fact-reporting newspaper! The Post–for however wrong it has been about this entire Iraq fiasco–does not need a military back-up plan in case the surge works. It’s a newspaper. We hope that it will report when the surge is working. But apparently, it keeps reporting otherwise. Since those are facts friendly to the enemy, the Post must be working for the enemy. Sheesh.

And yet, Kagan writes for the Post.

**update**

Glenn Greenwald says what commenter Phil has been saying lately:

>No rational person would believe a word Robert Kagan says about anything. He has been spewing out one falsehood after the next for the last four years in order to blind Americans about the real state of affairs concerning the invasion which he and his comrade and writing partner, Bill Kristol, did as much as anyone else to sell to the American public.

Indeed.

category mistake, Jonah Goldberg, Straw Man

So yesterday

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Jonah Goldberg recently claimed to be interested in arguments–real arguments. But nope. You can’t really be interested in real arguments when the backdrop of your analysis is this:

>Maybe I’m remembering this wrong. But I could have sworn we spent the last seven years talking about how the Republican Party is the party of backward red states–where hate is a family value, fluffy animals are shot, and God is everyone’s co-pilot–and how the Democratic Party is the avant-garde of the peace-loving, Europe-copycatting blue states, where Christianity is a troubling “lifestyle choice,” animals are for hugging, and hate is never, ever a family value.

You’re remembering it wrong indeed. What’s weirder is the paragraph which follows the above:

>Admittedly, over time the red state-blue state thing was eclipsed by other cliches about how the GOP had been hijacked by “theocrats” or by K Street corporate lickspittles, warmongers, immigrant-haters, hurricane-ignoring nincompoops and, for a moment during the Mark Foley scandal, cybersex offenders. I can dredge up all the relevant quotes, but if you’ve been paying attention, I shouldn’t have to.

Cliches? Perhaps someone can remind Goldberg that facts are not cliches.

Ad Hominem, Ad hominem tu quoque, General discussion, Op-Eds and other opinions, Things that are false

Et tu quoque, Gore?

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The argumentum ad hominem is cool. Rather than address the salient points of your claim, I just attack you and declare your claim false on those grounds. QED. Such is the case with the “Al Gore’s an energy-hogging hypocrite” thematic. It’s a pitiful attempt to argue against global warming by proxy. Today, Dr. Henry I. Miller (not to be confused with Ana?s Nin’s lover) of the Hoover Institution joins the fray: >Perhaps I can offer a medical explanation for why Al Gore simply doesn't feel that he should be judged by standards of behavior applicable to everyone else. On the basis of his actions and writings over many years my guess is that Mr. Gore suffers from Narcissistic Personality Disorder. Dr. Howard, Dr. Fine, Dr. Howard? Paging Dr. Howard, Dr. Fine, Dr. Howard. Now, Dr. Miller holds both an M.S. and an M.D., but no mention of a PsyD. However, he has read a book: >The criteria for this diagnosis, as described in the psychiatrist's bible, the "Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders," include a "pervasive pattern of grandiosity [in fantasy or behavior], need for admiration, and lack of empathy, beginning by early adulthood and present in a variety of contexts," as indicated by the following: >"A grandiose sense of self-importance [e.g., exaggerates achievements and talents, expects to be recognized as superior without commensurate achievements]." Ah, I see: Al Gore is a self-aggrandizing narcissist (read: politician). So, that’s his problem. My problem is that I fail to see how his hypocrisy is germane to the issues of global warming. That Mr. Gore has, in his official function, wrapped himself in contradictions to appease constituents may be true. Yet, it has no bearing on the facts of global warming. That’s the funny thing about science: the facts speak for themselves, regardless of the apparent hypocrisies of the orator. Nevertheless, Dr. Miller has more important fish to fry, like this one:. >Mr. Gore regularly demonstrates his grandiosity. Who can forget his notorious claim that he had been instrumental in creating the Internet? Indeed–especially not when your ilk will not let it go away. Moreover, this entire “Gore thinks he invented the internet” meme is pure fiction, just ask Bob Somerby. But Wait! Not only is the former VP a deceitful hypocrite, he’s a big meanie in committee, as well: >While a senator, Mr. Gore was notorious for his rudeness and insolence during hearings. A favorite trick–which I experienced first-hand–was to pose a question and as the witness began to answer, Gore would begin a whispered conversation with another committee member or a staffer. If the witness paused in order that the senator not miss the response, Mr. Gore would instruct him to continue, then resume his private conversation, leaving no ambiguity: Not only is your testimony unimportant, I won't even pay you the courtesy of pretending to listen to it. Dr. Miller treats this as some sort of coup de grâce, but there’s one problem here: suppose everything Dr. Miller has accused the former VP of is true—the facts of global warming remain the case. Even if Mr. Gore is a hypocrite, a liar, a Senate bully, and a narcissist possessed of egregious delusions of grandeur, the temperature of the earth is rising, the hole in the ozone layer is still there, the polar ice cap continues to melt, sea levels continue to rise, and our increasing carbon emissions continue to contribute to the problem. –pm

Ignoratio Elenchi, Politicians

There ought to be a law

Two former Justice Department officials complain about Europe’s–in particular Italy’s–use of the courts to undermine some aspects of the war on terror, such as the practice of extraordinary rendition:

>The Italian case involves a 2003 CIA mission to apprehend an Egyptian cleric named Osama Mustafa Hassan Nasr. Suspected of terrorist ties, Nasr was seized in Milan and transported to Egypt, where he claims he was tortured. This was, of course, an “extraordinary rendition” — a long-standing and legal practice that generally involves the cooperation of two or more governments in the capture and transportation of a criminal suspect outside of normal extradition proceedings. It was through such a rendition that the terrorist “Carlos the Jackal” was delivered for trial to France from Sudan in 1994.

Of course the question is whether the Italian government had given their consent. According to their prosecutor, they had not:

>Yet the United States must still vigorously resist the prosecution of its indicted agents. If they acted with the knowledge and consent of the Italian government (as The Post’s Dana Priest reported in 2005), they are immune from criminal prosecution in that country. Although foreign nationals traveling abroad are ordinarily subject to local judicial authority, international law has long recognized an exception for government agents entering another country with its government’s permission.

“If” is the key word. The Italian prosecutor so far seems not to share that view. For the sake of the people ordered to rendition Nasr, let’s hope he’s wrong. This seems like it would be then a straightforward factual question. But the authors quickly shift gears:

>Unfortunately, the effort to prosecute these American agents is only one instance of a growing problem.

The growing problem of breaking the laws of allied nations? Not quite.

>Efforts to use domestic and international legal systems to intimidate U.S. officials are proliferating, especially in Europe. Cases are pending in Germany against other CIA agents and former defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld — all because of controversial aspects of the war on terrorism.

One man’s “controversial” is another’s “illegal.” What would the solution be, one might wonder, to this problem:

>Accordingly, Congress should make it a crime to initiate or maintain a prosecution against American officials if the proceeding itself otherwise violates accepted international legal norms.

This all seems to miss the point of the argument. Perhaps the conclusion ought to be that US officials should not prosecute the war on terror in a way that violates accepted international legal norms.

Appeal to Ignorance, George Will, Lack of Evidence, Red Herring, Things that are false

Weird Science

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Yesterday in my seminar on the philosophy of religion we had a discussion about burden of proof. Burden questions seem to be a tricky mix of psychology, politics, and epistemology–to name a few things. And this goes back to the second feature of critical thinking–at least the second one we came up with here (yesterday)–i.e., know where you stand. This doesn’t mean of course that you should know and defend where you stand, and be aware of the status of the questions before you (the first step–maybe). So, where do you stand relative to the burden of proof on any given topic? On some topics determining where the burden falls is hard, on others, it’s easy. Just ask the people who know better. Say, I don’t know, scientists on scientific questions.

So if your knee-jerk reaction to a scientific question is to question it, then you ought to know that you have a high burden of proof to overcome. Someone please tell George Will:

>Climate Cassandras say the facts are clear and the case is closed. (Sen. Barbara Boxer: “We’re not going to take a lot of time debating this anymore.”) The consensus catechism about global warming has six tenets: 1. Global warming is happening. 2. It is our (humanity’s, but especially America’s) fault. 3. It will continue unless we mend our ways. 4. If it continues we are in grave danger. 5. We know how to slow or even reverse the warming. 6. The benefits from doing that will far exceed the costs.

>Only the first tenet is clearly true, and only in the sense that the Earth warmed about 0.7 degrees Celsius in the 20th century. We do not know the extent to which human activity caused this. The activity is economic growth, the wealth-creation that makes possible improved well-being—better nutrition, medicine, education, etc. How much reduction of such social goods are we willing to accept by slowing economic activity in order to (try to) regulate the planet’s climate?

Hard to know what George Will, famous climate skeptic (see also here), could mean by “clearly true” in this instance. But I think it’s something like “not even I–who read Michael Crichton’s science fiction novel about global warming hysteria–can doubt that one any more.” I know that’s a little mean. But Will doesn’t bother even trying to support his claim–clearly at odds with current qualified scientific consensus–with any evidence (at all–not even bad evidence). Instead he changes the subject:

>We do not know how much we must change our economic activity to produce a particular reduction of warming. And we do not know whether warming is necessarily dangerous. Over the millennia, the planet has warmed and cooled for reasons that are unclear but clearly were unrelated to SUVs. Was life better when ice a mile thick covered Chicago? Was it worse when Greenland was so warm that Vikings farmed there? Are we sure the climate at this particular moment is exactly right, and that it must be preserved, no matter the cost?

That’s an argument from ignorance! Who knows–maybe global warming will be good for us. We could farm in Greenland. Since we can’t tell either way, let’s do nothing.