Category Archives: Fallacies of Relevance

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.

George Will, Ignoratio Elenchi

Concision

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If ever rules should prove to difficult to manage, they should be done away with entirely:

>Thomas recognized that the likelihood of the rule of law, of principled government action, is related inversely to the number of criteria the court concocts for determining what political contribution limits are just right. What qualifies judges for this judgment, or how the First Amendment permits it, is unclear. So Thomas sensibly advocated overturning Buckley, allowing people to give, and candidates to spend, what they like, and allowing voters to sort things out. What a concept.

Justice Thomas ought to consult the previous post on interpreting the Constitution. Sometimes the 10 simple rules are not so simple. But the dumb thing about this is the suggestion that the complexity of the situation warrants (in virtue of its complexity) the simple solution of dumping the whole idea of regulating campaign finance altogether. Perhaps–and maybe I’m a communist radical–it warrants a more sensible set of rules, the kind of rules (or guidelines for rules) one would hope an independent body such as the Supreme Court of the United States might be able to concoct, as if it were their job.

Accident, George Will

10 Simple Rules

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General rules–such as Congress shall make no law abridging freedom of speech–are pesky things. As soon as they are posted in the village square people start confusing them. Luckily, when you have dipped your pen in the minds of the founders, you know that by “freedom of speech” Congress clearly meant, “no rule limiting how much *money* you can spend on a political candidate.” After all (1) you use your money to have a candidate “speak” for you, (2) your vast sums correlate with how much you have to say (and you have a lot to say if you have a lot of money–more freedom, as it were), (3) you cannot “speak” in any other way than putting your money where you mouth is (so limiting how much freedom you have would violate your right to speak), (4) The Constitution clearly says that no law can separate you from your money, and (5) finally, no law can limit what you spend your money on, because that too is “speech.”

Red Herring, Slippery Slope, Straw Man

Academic rights

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A number of comments have suggested that the debate over gay marriage is a smokescreen or a red herring. Maybe. But the arguments are real. And it turns out they’re not only offered by nincompoops. I found the following analysis while wandering in the blogosphere:

>Yes, Senator James Inhofe (“I’m very proud that in the entire recorded history of our family, there has never been…any kind of homosexual relationship”) is a sick and moronic bigot. Bill Bennett is a crude embarassment, mostly to himself.

>But all their repulsive, and obsessive, arguments against gay marriage, such as this from Inhofe — “Now, stop and think. What’s going to be the results of this? The results are going to be that it’s going to be a very expensive thing, all these kids, many of them are going to be ending up on welfare” — are to be found, dressed up in fancy-pants pseudo-Alisdair MacIntyre rhetoric, in this document, the Princeton Principles on Marriage, released recently.

>The signatories to this document include such previously respectable conservatives as Jean Bethke Elshtain (Chicago), Robert George (of Princeton, not the young New York Post editorialist), Mary Ann Glendon (Harvard Law), Leon Kass (Chicago), Jeremy Rabkin (Cornell) and the legendary Mr. James Q. Wilson.

>On reading this, my first reaction was that if the academic left can be a little wacky and irresponsible, the academic right is wacky and despicable.

>The most specific of their arguments against gay marriage — which is only one of the “Principles,” but obviously they chose to release it to coincide with the debate — is that marriage equals monogamy and gay marriage “would likely corrode marital norms of sexual fidelity, since gay marriage advocates and gay couples tend to downplay the importance of sexual fidelity in their definition of marriage.” In other words, when gay people make a lifetime vow, they probably don’t really mean it because, well, you know how those gays are.

Read the rest at TPMcafe. I haven’t yet found the document he is referring to. If anyone can, I’d appreciate it.

False Dichotomy, George Will, Straw Man

I fear the Greeks

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Especially when they are bearing gifts. George Will pens an approving and quote-rich column about Peter Beinert’s new book, *The Good Fight: Why Liberals — and Only Liberals — Can Win the War on Terror and Make America Great Again.* Beinert, in Will’s fawning presentation, rejects the progressive label in favor of believe it or not “liberal.” But this is liberal in a new sense: the hawkish anti-terror liberal, not the Saddam-loving, Bin Laden-excusing Michael Moore style liberal:

>But while excoriating the Bush administration for perhaps “creating exactly the condition the conservatives have long feared: An America without the will to fight,” Beinart’s most important contribution is to confront the doughface liberals who rejoice about the weakening of that will. Reading liberals who seem to think they “have no enemies more threatening, or more illiberal, than George W. Bush,” Beinart worries that Deaniac liberals are taking over the Democratic Party much as McGovernite liberals did after 1968. He discerns the “patronizing quality” of many liberals’ support for John Kerry in 2004: They “weren’t supporting Kerry because he had served in Vietnam. They were supporting him because they believed other, more hawkish, voters would support him because he had served in Vietnam.”

It’s fun to question people’s motives, but it’s impolite to confuse the motives imputed to them. So while many liberals may perhaps share the satisfaction of having been right about Iraq and Afghanistan from the very beginning, this does not mean (1) that they are gleeful over the damage that has been done to America, and more perniciously, (2) that they brought it about or desired it. The current weakening of America’s standing in the world was one of the arguments *against* silly saber rattling and thinly justified foreign misadventures, not the desired outcome. Taking them to task for having been right all along, as is the current fashion among those who were wrong all along, is like blaming mathematics for your inability to add.

One final point, the oft repeated meme that liberals disdain military service has never been borne out by the facts. A simple survey of leading democrats (vs. Republicans) who actually served their country should dispel this view.

George Will, Straw Man

Quote First Amendment Rights

John McCain is possibly unfit to serve as president, opines George Will, because in discussing campaign reform on a radio show he said:

“But I would rather have a clean government than one where quote First Amendment rights are being respected that has become corrupt. If I had my choice, I’d rather have the clean government.”

This sentiment, according to Will, might contradict the President’s oath to uphold the constitution since the constitution states “Congress shall make no law. . .abridging the freedom of speech.”

Will is suggesting that McCain is calling into question the existence of first amendment rights by placing them within so-called scare quotes. Will, of course, does not come out and say this directly:

In his words to Imus, note the obvious disparagement he communicates by putting verbal quotation marks around “First Amendment rights.” Those nuisances.

But raising the question of McCain’s suitability for President can only make sense under the supposition that McCain’s words reveal a ambivalence or hostility to the Constitution.

If on Jan. 20, 2009, he were to swear to defend the Constitution, would he be thinking that the oath refers only to “the quote Constitution”? And what would that mean?

To place a word or phrase in scare quotes is only to indicate that the speaker or writer wishes to take a distance to the use of that word or phrase. The most apparent interpretation of McCain’s phrase is referring to “those things that my opponents consider to fall under first admendment protection.” That is, there is a dispute betwen McCain and others about whether political donations are covered under the first amendment and whether they are absolutely protected if they do. (And we should, of course, note that in McConnell v. Federal Election Commission the Supreme Court upheld the fundamental ideas and provisions of the 2002 Campaign Reform Act as constitutional despite the plaintiffs claim that it violated quote first amendment protections.)

But Will engages in innuendo and cheap straw man argument dressed in disingenuous rhetorical innocence than consider an idea seriously with which he disagrees.

Argument Analysis, False Dichotomy, Straw Man

Cut and run

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Before he was swept up in a spam patrol sweep, a loyal reader of ours suggested we take a look at the Power Line Blog. He wrote:

>I would like to request that this blog focus a bit on another blog for the purpose of identifying and analyzing the methods of argumentation used there. The blog is Powerline and it is a conservative blog of some influence, although I cannot for the life of me determine why it should be so. In particular, please look over the posts of one of the site’s main contributors: Paul Mirengoff. He has been the subject of a previous post on this blog when he co-authored a Wash Post editorial. I think his posts are rife with certain techniques that debaters often use and which are used to hide some very interesting logical flaws, albeit always that easy to spot. The manner in which he consistently dismisses those with a viewpoint of which he disapproves strikes me both as unresponsive and as an ad hominem approach to argument. I’d be most appreciative of anyone’s observations here — I’ve no particular subject matter or viewpoint at stake here, but I am more than a little puzzled as to why Powerline is given so much credence in the blogosphere and elsewhere.

We’re generally not interested in blogs–it’s all we can do to read the op-eds of the major daily newspapers. As a way however of apologizing to this loyal reader, here’s a quick analysis of a brief Powerline passage:

>The fact that half of all deaths caused by terrorists last year were in Iraq is consistent with what the terrorists themselves often tell us: Iraq is the central front in the global war against Islamic terrorism. The old Andrew Sullivan would have understood that this means we should fight to win in Iraq, not cut and run.

Nevermind that Iraq hadn’t been a central front in the war on terrorism until we made it so by showing up there. The more interesting claim is the second–we should fight to win, not cut and run. “Cutting and running” has all the air of the straw man/false dichotomy. “Cutting and running” is not a strategic manuever; it is hasty, cowardly, and as a result ill-conceived. It is not a policy that any serious person advocates, or should be considered to advocate. So for that reason the powerline blogger blogs against no one. The false dichotomy consists in the implicit claim that the only alternative to “victory” (whose definition is always shifting, by the way, but that is another matter) is cowardly retreat. The alternative to victory, however, is defeat. A road that many claim we have already chosen. But that, again, is another matter.

Appeal to the People, George Will

Contra populum

One final post on George Will’s spectacularly dumb piece on global warming (later we will discuss the recurring Will canard that contractual benefits constitute “welfare”).

We should remind the reader that the whole point of Will’s essay is to challenge *the truth* of the claim of those white-coated types–also known as scientists–that the earth’s atmosphere is warming. We stress “truth” because as evidence *against* this claim, Will points out that many people *believe* it to be true:

>Eighty-five percent of Americans say warming is probably happening, and 62 percent say it threatens them personally. The National Academy of Sciences says the rise in the Earth’s surface temperature has been about one degree Fahrenheit in the past century. Did 85 percent of Americans notice? Of course not. They got their anxiety from journalism calculated to produce it.

Clearly the best explanation for why many Americans believe a claim to be true is that it’s false! Aside from that stunning non-sequitur, this is the flipside of another fallacy: the argumentum ad populum. Under normally fallacious circumstances, the devious and dishonest arguer will suggest that the sheer number of people who hold a belief is evidence of that’ belief’s truth (or moral goodness, or whatever), when that truth does not depend on a vote. Global warming is obviously a question for experts (so the number of non-experts who believe it or not doesn’t constitute evidence for or against it).

Will’s claim has a kind of tinfoil hat quality to it: if a lot of people believe something, then not only is it false, but it’s the product of a mass conspiracy:

>About the mystery that vexes ABC — Why have Americans been slow to get in lock step concerning global warming? — perhaps the “problem” is not big oil or big coal, both of which have discovered there is big money to be made from tax breaks and other subsidies justified in the name of combating carbon.

>Perhaps the problem is big crusading journalism.

The weird thing about this conspiracy, however, is that it’s stunningly effective and ineffective. Just compare the two passages (from the beginning and end of the piece): Americans have been slow to recognize the threat of global warming because of the success of journalism calculated to produce recognition of such threats, so therefore the problem is journalism. For once in my life I’m confused.

George Will, Straw Man

Don’t say “vouch”

In January of this year, the Florida Supreme Court–yes, that’s the one–held in a 5-2 ruling that tax payer funded vouchers for private school violate the state’s constitution. I wonder what their reasons were. But why bother, when you’re George Will you can attack their motivations and the people who approve:

>But Florida’s Supreme Court fulfilled the desires of the teachers unions, and disrupted the lives of the 733 children and their parents, by declaring, in a 5 to 2 ruling, that the voucher program is incompatible with the state constitution. Specifically, and incredibly, the court held that the OSP violates the stipulation, which voters put into the constitution in 1998, that the state shall provide a “uniform, efficient, safe, secure, and high quality system of free public schools that allows students to obtain a high quality education.”

Gee, George. You say “incredibly” but you don’t bother to point to any of the court’s actual reasons for its positions. Unlike twice or thrice weekly columnists, and once a week TV pundits, courts publish detailed *arguments* for their positions. These arguments offer *reasons*. Sometimes they please people, sometimes they don’t. But that fact does not make them credible or incredible. They are incredible if they distort facts, or if they reason badly, or have no basis in the law.

But why bother with such details when you have the power of the simple assertion:

>The court’s ruling was a crashing non sequitur: that the public duty to provide something (quality education) entails a prohibition against providing it in a particular way (utilizing successful private educational institutions). The court’s ruling was neither constitutional law nor out of character, and it illustrates why the composition of courts has become such a contentious political issue.

As readers of this site know, a non sequitur is a logical fallacy. Like the straw man in the previous sentence; Will has hopelessly distorted the argument of the Florida Supreme Court. The following snippet from USA Today makes a point George didn’t:

>But Thursday’s ruling ultimately could affect these and other voucher programs. The court found that taxpayer support for private schools in general is unconstitutional because Florida’s constitution requires “a uniform, efficient, safe, secure and high-quality system of free public schools.” Private schools aren’t “uniform when compared with each other or the public system,” the justices wrote. They’re also exempt from public standards on teacher credentials and requirements to teach about a wide range of subjects, such as civics, U.S. and world history and minorities’ and women’s contributions to history.

So missing from Will’s argument is a discussion of what the court meant by “uniformity,” one of the central legal issues in their ruling. And its absence surely makes the Florida court’s ruling look silly and arbitrary. And so Will can make the following Cornynesque assertion: “The court’s ruling was neither constitutional law nor out of character, and it illustrates why the composition of courts has become such a contentious political issue.” Having avoided the content of their argument by straw man, will can turn to attacking the motivations of the judges (all five democrat appointees) and the people who were pleased by the ruling (the NEA). A crashing non sequitur indeed. Don’t misspell misspelling.

None of this means the court’s decision was right–which it probably was however–but it’s certainly not wrong on Will’s childish and confused libertarian whining. After all–what happens if the state gains financial access to private education? Then they will have the means and the power to enforce “uniformity”; that means the science class will have to teach something other than creationism.

Appeal to Ignorance, False Dichotomy, Ignoratio Elenchi, Op-Eds and other opinions, Plain Bad Arguments, Straw Man

Maxima culpa (eorum)

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On the subject of straw men, the Associated Press could also have noted that the President is not alone in ridiculing his opponents–he is just less adept at it. In today’s *Washington Post*, Fareed Zakaria tears a page from the President’s play book; but befitting a professional opiniator, he does it with more subtlety.

After a string of *culpae eorum* (their, not his, faults) regarding the failures of intervention in Iraq, Zakaria asserts:

>And yet, for all my misgivings about the way the administration has handled this policy, I’ve never been able to join the antiwar crowd. Nor am I convinced that Iraq is a hopeless cause that should be abandoned.

Note that “hopeless” and “abandoned” sound a lot like “cut” and “run”–only less Texan. Nowhere in the piece does Zakaria address the reasonable (but not necessarily correct) alternatives to his strategy of staying the course–outside of, that is, the phrase “antiwar crowd.” So, one might surmise that the only other option to continuing with our increasingly disastrous (body count, political instability, etc.) intervention is the anti-war crowd. Despite his more reasoned tone then, Zakaria has used the straw man “some say” technique as the president, and as such, it is impossible for the reader to determine whether his three arguments for staying are any good.

Luckily, however, one doesn’t need to have present to mind an alternative to see just how bad these reasons are.

The first:

>So why have I not given up hope? Partly it’s because I have been to Iraq, met the people who are engaged in the struggle to build their country and cannot bring myself to abandon them.

And the oaths of TV pundits are written on water.

Second:

>there is no doubt that the costs of the invasion have far outweighed the benefits. But in the long view of history, will that always be true? If, after all this chaos, a new and different kind of Iraqi politics emerges, it will make a difference in the region.

It may or may not always be true that Iraq will be a disaster. But it’s very likely that it will be. It’s only getting worse. The possibility of it not being the case is hardly reason to stay. And it has made a difference in the region–it has emboldened Iran and served as a training ground and recruiting depot for all sorts of new terrorists.

Finally:

>These sectarian power struggles can get extremely messy, and violent parties have taken advantage of every crack and cleavage. But this may be inevitable in a country coming to terms with very real divisions and disagreements. Iraq may be stumbling toward nation-building by consent, not brutality. And that is a model for the Middle East.

A “sectarian power struggle” sounds like code for bloody religious civil war where the victor is determined by brutality and force of arms (and perhaps Iranian intervention, among other such things). How this means they are stumbling toward nation-building by consent is simply a mystery. All of the evidence Zakaria cites points in the other direction.

But again, these three really bad reasons only make marginal sense in the context of an absurd alternative. Perhaps one as knowledgeable of foreign affairs as Zakaria could find the time to research some of them.