Category Archives: Fallacies of weak induction

Bad Explanations, Lack of Evidence, Post hoc ergo propter

Post torture, ergo propter torture

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Bill O'Reilly is happy Osama Bin Laden is dead.  Apparently, because there are political points to score.  OBL's assassination vindicates the use of torture, and that's cause to do a Bill O'Reilly in-your-face move. Like this:

[T]he big story to emerge from the action is that coerced interrogation gave the CIA vital information used to track bin Laden to his lair. . . .  Of course, that exposition is embarrassing to the left, including President Obama, Vice President Biden and Secretary of State Clinton, who are all on record as saying coerced interrogation does not work. Apparently, they were wrong in a big way.

Ah, so coerced information.  Yes, the result of enhanced interrogation.  Erm, torture.  OK, just so we're clear.  Yes, so, in your face, liberals and lefty-pansies!  And how do we know this?  Well, the story is clear:

The record shows that just three men were waterboarded: Khalid Sheik Mohammed, Abu Zubaydah and Rahim al-Nashiri, all al-Qaida big shots. Under duress, KSM gave up vital information that crippled his terror group and ultimately led U.S. authorities to watch bin Laden's top Pakistani courier. Eventually, that man led the CIA to the compound outside Islamabad.

Well, not so clear.  We captured KSM back in 2003, and he got about 183 sessions with waterboarding.  And then seven years later, we got OBL.  Case closed, right?   Well, no. If waterboarding works the miracles it supposedly does, then why did it take seven more years until we had the actionable intelligence to move on OBL?  If waterboarding works, then shouldn't we have caught him, like, earlier?  And, as I understand it (see the article here in Slate), KSM actually denied knowing the person known as OBL's courier.  That's, like, not what I'd expect as the slam-dunk case for enhancing interrogation.  'Cause aren't the tortured people supposed to say things that are true, instead of false?  That is, if torture works the way torture's supposed to work.  By 2005, remember, folks were saying the OBL trail had "grown cold".

Yeah, so here's another hypothesis.  We eventually stopped the simulated drownings of these folks and returned to the standard forms for interrogation — building trust, going over stories, treating prisoners with dignity.  And once that started working, then we started getting better intelligence.  There was an improvement in surveillance, and with info from Hassan Ghul (who was never waterboarded), OBL got tracked down.  Who knows… maybe the torture delayed the information coming out instead of hastened it.

But still, the far left won't budge. No matter what the facts are about the effectiveness of coerced interrogation, they will deny them. Infuriating.

Yep, it's infuriating, all right.  Infuriating.

General discussion, Op-Eds and other opinions, Slippery Slope

Their agenda is plain

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American Spectator has a regular blog series called Among the Intellectualioids.  Check out the picture of who the intellectualoids are — grubby-looking, beret-wearing, bad-hair eggheads.  Wait… is that Satan on the far left?

In the series' recent installment, Christopher Orlet argues in "The End of Evil" that a new intellectualiod menace is looming: the view that there is no evil.  Simon Baron-Cohen holds that the actions we deem evil are most often the consequence of a particular mental disorder characterized by an empathy deficiency.  Orlet glosses the view:

The Cambridge don finds the whole idea of evil unhelpful. What's more, it is simplistic and unscientific. It smacks of the Bible and ancient superstitions. And it tells us nothing. Why is one evil? Again, it comes down to the inability to empathize or to identify with others.

To this end, Baron-Cohen has devised six degrees of empathy. His empathy spectrum would award a six to someone like Bill Clinton, who claimed to be able to feel the pain of an entire nation, and a zero to the husband who honestly answers his wife's query about whether her jeans makes her butt look big. At the peak of the bell curve stands your Average Empathy Joe who tears up at Schindler's List, but remains dry-eyed if not slightly nauseous during the Titanic.

Note, by the way, the first couple sentences should be read with a mocking tone: This Cambridge don believes these things. (Modus Tonens alert)  All the examples of the variety of scores are Orlet's of course.  Especially the one about the jeans.  Actually, it seems the whole selection should be read with a mocking tone. 

Here's Orlet finally stating the view (and this time without detectable tone):

Baron-Cohen fingers our hormones, genes, and neglectful mothers as causes for empathy deficiency. One example: his research indicates the more testosterone you are exposed to in the womb, the less empathy you will have.

Ah, but once Orlet states the view, he  then identifies the real program behind it (and the broader commitment trying to understand why people do horrible things):

Naturally, if the problem is largely genetic and hormonal, as Baron-Cohen argues, it can be eradicated through gene/hormone therapy, thus setting the stage for an edenic future where Israelis and Palestinians group hug and your co-workers do not steal your bologna sandwiches from the lunchroom fridge.

Baron-Cohen's agenda is plain. Close the prisons and admit criminals to hospitals where ObamaCare can work its magic. After all, "no one is responsible for his own genes."

 

The slippery slope to Obamacare playing the role of prison warden.  First, the view is out to explain why people do things that are evil, not just wrong.  The objective is to give an account not of how someone could make a moral error, one that any of us could make (for example, stealing bubble gum).  No. Rather, the objective is to account for moral transgressions that we cannot think our way into, ones that are not normal, run of the mill moral errors.  We aren't just shocked at the acts, we are puzzled by the persons who commit those acts.  Calling those persons 'evil' is fine, but it (as Orlet sarcastically notes) does not explain anything.  Nor does it make it such that the punishments we give these people can have any effect other than inflict suffering on them.  Only if one is a pure retributivist about punishment would one not be interested in understanding why people are or do evil. 

Second, nothing introduces a slippery slope argument better than phrases like "Their agenda is plain…" or "You know where that leads…".  But Obamacare is about medial coverage for people who haven't got it.  Once the state takes a person into custody for committing a crime, the state is responsible for that person's care.  If the medical evidence is that the person suffers from a psychological illness, shouldn't it be treated? 

False Dichotomy, Weak Analogy

Donald Effin’ Trump

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Over at National Review Online, Dennis Prager has some important things to say about Donald Trump's choice of words.  Well, what choice of words, first:

The following comments were made in a public speech last week by a man considering running for president of the United States.

On gas prices: We have nobody in Washington that sits back and says, ‘You’re not going to raise that f***ing price.’”

On what he would say as president to China: “Listen, you mother f***ers, we’re going to tax you 25 percent.”

On Iraq: “We build a school, we build a road, they blow up the school, we build another school, we build another road, they blow them up, we build again. In the meantime we can’t get a f***ing school in Brooklyn.”

Ho hum.  The reality is that I love me some F-bomb.  I do object to Trump's sentiments, though.  But it's not the fact that Trump puts some salt on his verbiage, it's the fact that he thinks he can yell at China and say he can tax a trade partner at 25 percent.  Protectionism is great, until you pay for it with their tariffs and so on.  We're in the can with the Chinese, but I'm unsure that this is the solution. Washington doesn't set gas prices, either.  And Iraq?  Anyone who was for the war knew going in it was a 'you break it, you buy it' deal.  And Brooklyners don't need a school for f***ing.  They already know how (joke by amphiboly — like cooking school).  Regardless, Prager has other issues.  Yeah, it's with the dirty words, especially with their use in public.

But there is a world of difference between using an expletive in private and using one in a public speech. For those who do not see the difference, think of the difference between relieving oneself in private and relieving oneself in public. It usually takes a university education and a Leftist worldview not to see the enormous moral distinction between public and private cursing.

One disanalogy: nobody has to clean up a puddle when I tell a dirty joke.  Another: I'll still privately curse in front of my neighbors. One more: some cursing is artistic and is wasted unless it is shared with the world.  I can't help it: It's OK for someone to collect all the dirty language someone else has used.  Fine, fine — I do understand Prager's point, though.  It is unseemly to curse like that.  I get it, and I've even got a university education and everything (read the quote again, if you didn't get that last one).  I'm glad that Prager made sure to get in an unseemly jab at educated elites while chastising a Republican for acting indecently and uncivilly.

If we cannot count on Republicans and conservatives to maintain standards of public decency and civility, to whom shall we look?

Geez. Is this another false dilemma without the other option?

Ad Hominem, Ad Hominem Abusive, Fallacies of weak induction, Good Arguments, Hasty Generalization

Ad hominems and drawing conclusions about character

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Ad hominem abusive fallacies are fallacies of relevance.  The basic scheme for the fallacy type is:

P1: S holds that p

P2: S has some vice, X

C1:  Therefore, p is false (or unacceptable).

With my informal logic classes, I have the regular joke: Just because Brenda is a heavy drinker, that doesn't mean that she doesn't know much about politics — She may be a heavy drinker because she knows politics!  That gets lots of laughs, believe me.  But now, consider an argument of a different form, but composed of similar propositions:

P3: p is demonstrably false (i.e., there is sufficient and easily accessible evidence that p is false)

P4: S holds that p, despite P3

C2: Therefore, S has some vice X (where X = vices from simple stupidity to willful ignorance to suffers from ideological thinking)

Importantly, the argument has very similar claims as the ad hominem abusive, but it is of a different form — we are reasoning to S's vice, not from it.  Now, it is clear that this second kind of argument can be made hastily (as there is a big difference between being wrong and being stupid — that's the Fallacy of No Reasonable Alternatives, a species of false dilemma), but it does seem right that P3 and P4 are relevant to C2.  This second form of argument is one either (a) addressed to some third party about S or (b) addressed directly to S in order to request that S reform how she performs in argument regarding p (and perhaps other issues).

With the theoretical apparatus assembled, let's look at Steve Chapman's column, "Why Birtherism is Here to Stay," over at TownHall.com. 

There has never been a shred of persuasive evidence that Obama was born anywhere but Hawaii. But thanks to rampant paranoia and widespread credulity, the myth of his foreign origins gained currency among many people who should know better.

What is Chapman's explanation for this phenomenon — people who believe things that they should know better to not?

A poll taken after the release of his birth certificate showed 18 percent of those who have seen it still aren't convinced.  Something about this president impels many people to accept anything that is said about him, as long as it's unfavorable. . . .   Birthers don't dislike Obama because they think he was born abroad. They think he was born abroad because they dislike him. People of this bent don't proceed from facts to a conclusion. They prefer to reach a conclusion and then scrounge for any facts — or "facts" — that support it.  For them, being told Obama is a natural-born American is like being told he's a loving father and a loyal friend. They won't buy it because it doesn't confirm what they want to be true.

The logician and pragmatist C.S. Peirce called these sorts of patterns of thought 'pseudoreasoning,' and it looks very much like a form of rationalizing.  And the key to the effectiveness of these strategies of thought is that the people making errors with them are not exposed to the consequences of being wrong.  If you pseudoreason your way to believing that you can fly, you pay the consequences.  But if you pseudoreason your way to believing that the President of the United States is a Muslim Marxist AntiChrist, you make lots of friends (and if you stop believing them, you lose those friends).

This is surprising only if you think of political views as a matter of logical reasoning. For many people, they really aren't. They're a way of indulging emotional impulses without suffering painful consequences. . . . [I]f thinking Obama is a foreigner brings you closer to people you like, you come out ahead. Birthers would rather be wrong than be divided from their allies. So the fiction that Obama was born in Kenya will endure, and many Americans will hold fast to a ridiculous article of faith that has been conclusively refuted.

The thing is that this does amount to calling Birthers credulous, ideological, and cognitively blind.  Chapman forgot one thing more for his piece: directing readers to the comments for this piece!

Appeal to the People, Equivocation, Slippery Slope, Weak Analogy

Discrimination by any other name

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Roger Scruton is a serious philosopher.  That's why I was disappointed to read his American Spectator article defending an English couple's right to refuse to allow a gay couple to share a room at their hotel (see the Guardian report).  It's not that I was disappointed that Scruton would defend these folks (I expected that), but that I expected a good argument.  Instead, I got the old canards. 

Maybe that [laws prohibiting discrimination] is the only way to proceed, but it involves curtailing freedom in ways that can easily be resented.

Ah, prohibiting discrimination curtails the freedom of discriminators to discriminate.  That is a very important freedom, indeed.  And we must be very careful not to cause people the harm of feeling resentment.  That's a much worse harm than not being treated as an equal.

We discriminate between people on grounds of their height, their age, their strength, their virtue, their looks.

Oh, the false analogy!  The familiar, yet utterly irrelevant, old saw of the discrimination apologists.  Yes, we discriminate on the basis of characteristics relevant to a job, opportunity, and so on.  Isn't the burden of proof always on those who do the discriminating to explain why some characteristic is relevant?  If there is a relevant connection between the characteristic and the opportunity, we don't call the decision 'discriminating,' but 'distinguishing.'  Is there a relevant bit of distinguishing to be done with homosexuality?

The purpose of including sexual orientation in the open-ended "non-discrimination" clauses of modern legal systems is to overcome "prejudice," to normalize homosexuality…. It is, however, much more of a prejudice to think that matters of sexual conduct can, in this way, be simply placed beyond moral judgment — as though they were not, for ordinary people, the very essence of the moral life.

Ad populum, too. Everyone thinks it is unnatural and immoral, so that's evidence it is.  But why think that these views are right? 

It is one part of a considered religious morality that has stood the test of time.

But why does the fact that it is an old view make it a good one, yet?  Surely at some point in time over the course of the long testings of time someone must have said that perhaps the view needs to be worked out in some detail.  After all that time, all they have to say for the view is that it is old and keeps getting older… standing the test of time. Oh, but the times are changing. 

THIS, IT SEEMS TO ME, shows what is really at stake in these disputes. They are not about human rights, or about the perennial conflict between liberty and equality. "Non-discrimination" clauses are ways of smuggling in vast moral changes without real discussion . . . . Sex, sexual orientation, and maybe soon sexual practices — so that the hotel keeper will no longer be able to discriminate against the person who happens to live as a prostitute.

And the slippery slope to running a flophouse for prostitution for a finale!  Well, at least he didn't have the slippery slope to bestiality.  And after having repeated the same old weak arguments for discrimination, has Scruton made any headway in helping this real discussion he wants to have?  I'm sad to say I don't think so.  Which, again, is too bad.  Because he's the best thinker that conservatives have.  That may be evidence as to just how bad-off the conservative case against gay rights is.

David Brooks, General discussion, oversimplified cause, Straw We

The simple reason there is no simple reason

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David Brooks illustrates today that there's a simple, singular reason people employ the oversimplified cause argument scheme:

Over the course of my career, I’ve covered a number of policy failures. When the Soviet Union fell, we sent in teams of economists, oblivious to the lack of social trust that marred that society. While invading Iraq, the nation’s leaders were unprepared for the cultural complexities of the place and the psychological aftershocks of Saddam’s terror.

We had a financial regime based on the notion that bankers are rational creatures who wouldn’t do anything stupid en masse. For the past 30 years we’ve tried many different ways to restructure our educational system — trying big schools and little schools, charters and vouchers — that, for years, skirted the core issue: the relationship between a teacher and a student.

I’ve come to believe that these failures spring from a single failure: reliance on an overly simplistic view of human nature. We have a prevailing view in our society — not only in the policy world, but in many spheres — that we are divided creatures. Reason, which is trustworthy, is separate from the emotions, which are suspect. Society progresses to the extent that reason can suppress the passions.

That simple reason is that we believe some kind of Brooksian dichotomy: people are either x or y, etc.  My question: so we've been making dichotomies (I don't think we have–Brooks has), and this is too simple, and this is the simple reason why there is no simple reason.  This refutes itself.

Ad hominem tu quoque, Hasty Generalization, inconsistency, Jonah Goldberg

I won’t forget to place roses on your grave

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Tu Quoque arguments, it seems to me, have a statute of limitations on when the first of the two inconsistent acts can be relevantly inconsistent with the second. (See my long article in Informal Logic for the full story)  For example, someone may express appropriate surprise at the fact that the altarboy later became an atheist when he was a grownup, but that's not inconsistency in the relevant sense for an accusation of hypocrisy.  The two acts need to be close enough in time for them to be relevant to each other.  And so it's usual when someone runs an argument from inconsistency, she will say something like:

Person S says we should not do X, but then she turns right around and does X.

The important thing is that S turns right around and does it.  If she did X years ago, perhaps S has learned her lesson.  Or she's changed her mind.  Or maybe the facts regarding X have changed.  X may be the best option, nowadays.  The lesson: with charges of hypocrisy, time's relevant.

With that in mind, let's look at Jonah Goldberg's commentary on the (albeit grudging) praise of Ronald Reagan's presidency from liberals.  This is part of a trend he sees. Barry Goldwater, after being demonized by LBJ, was later portrayed as an "avuncular and sage grandfather type." William F. Buckley, too, went from being called a Nazi to later being an actual defender of liberalism.  Reagan, now:

As we celebrate the 100th anniversary of his birth, the Gipper is enjoying yet another status upgrade among liberals. Barack Obama took a Reagan biography with him on his vacation. A slew of liberals and mainstream journalists (but I repeat myself) complimented Obama’s State of the Union address as “Reaganesque.” Time magazine recently featured the cover story “Why Obama (Hearts) Reagan.” Meanwhile, the usual suspects are rewriting the same columns about how Reagan was a pragmatist who couldn’t run for president today because he was too nice, too reasonable, too (shudder) liberal for today’s Republican party.

Trouble is, while Reagan was alive, liberals didn't have too high an opinion of him:

[My] favorite comes from Madame Tussauds Wax Museum in London, which in 1982 held a vote for the most hated people of all time. The winners: Hitler, Margaret Thatcher, Ronald Reagan, and Dracula.

Now, first, note that these are cases where we're looking at things said in 1982 and 2011.  Almost thirty years difference.  Second, note that these inconsistencies are ones distributed over a group, Liberals, not individual people.  Regardless, it's almost as though Goldberg isn't paying attention to the subtext of these retrospectives:  that despite the fact that liberals disagreed with these conservatives, liberals could nevertheless see their virtues as people in retrospect.  And one of the reasons why those virtues are worth mentioning now is that current conservatives so clearly fail to have them.  I take it back.  Goldberg gets that part:

[S]o much of the effort to build up conservatives of the past is little more than a feint to tear down the conservatives of the present.

But, for some reason,  he thinks instead this is a point he's scoring on liberals by showing how they're inconsistent.  Again, in cases where time's changed the variables, sometimes what you've inveighed against earlier becomes the best choice.  Ask any liberal: would you take  Reagan or Buckley over Palin or Goldberg for a decent conversation about government and political norms?  You know the answer.  Goldberg thinks this means that liberals think that the only good conservative is a dead conservative. He's missed the point.  The point, instead, is sadly that all the good conservatives are dead.

Weak Analogy

Dibs

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Chicago (where I live) just had a fairly large blizzard (20 or so inches or about 51 cm) .  This, as you might imagine, causes problems for transportation.  Despite a robust system of public transportation, Chicago is a car city.  When it snows, these cars–often parked on the streets, get buried beneath mountains of plowed snow.  This creates a unique sort of property problem. 

It goes like this.  You spend four hours liberating your car from its snow tomb, or creating a parking spot where before there was just piled snow, so you conclude that on account of your mixing your labor with that parking spot, that you can call "dibs" on it; you worked it, it's yours.

Having just liberated my own vehicle from a snow tomb, I have a bit of sympathy for this approach.  Nonetheless, I'd prefer an honor system.  A student of mine this morning put it like this: if you are looking for parking, then you have yourself worked to free your car from a spot, which is now open.  Not a bad idea, though it needs some filling out.  

Another student forwarded me the following argument against dibs (from Time Out Chicago):

Why is dibs a bad thing? While snowfall can be a magical thing, snow doesn't magically turn public spaces into private property. It's a very un-Chicagolike tradition: When snow falls, all of a sudden neighbors become vehement and territorial.

If someone puts in the effort to shovel a spot, they don't deserve a claim on that space? If you push someone's car out of the snow, you don't say you own their car, do you? I also question how much sweat people put in. The snow that fell [in mid-December] was not enough that people had to dig their cars out, yet there are chairs all over.

Is there evidence that dibs is a problem? There's a thinly veiled threat of violence associated with dibs. People who've violated dibs have gotten their cars keyed. I once heard a story about someone breaking the back window of someone's car and putting a hose in there and turning it on.

Doesn't tradition carry some weight? Not all traditions are good. Political corruption is another Chicago tradition.

Even though I'm leaning against dibs, these are really terrible reasons.  The second one, especially.  The principle works on the Lockean (or something like it) theory of property.  If you mix your labor with it, you've earned it.  In this case you earn it temporarily, and no, it's not like claiming someone's car is yours.  

**Update

on dibs from the New York, I mean, Huffington Post.

False Dichotomy, specious comparisons, Things that are false, Weak Analogy

Now that gets me heated

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Christopher Orlet, over at the American Spectator, has a few things to say about what gets him riled up these days.  There aren't many, but two that stand out are:

About the only thing that gets me heated these days is my Bubblespa footbath. (I recommend the model with toe touch control.) That and being told by politicians, professors and anchorwomen how to behave.

No, this is not an ad for footbaths.  At least, I don't think it is. Instead, Orlet is using his  footbath as a way of showing that he's normally calm  —  footbath-excitement is usually tepid.  But being told how to argue breaks that calm.  Even the calm that can be achieved by a footbath.  You see, it's a rhetorical device.  You cast yourself as the minding-your-own-business everyman who loves footbaths, and then you portray yourself as just not being able to stand some imposition on what kind of rhetoric you can use.  How disruptive of our calm lives to be reminded of the importance of civility. 

Again, I'm no great champion of civility.  It is possible to argue well and be mean.  In fact, some matters require that we are mean, especially when the issue is significant and our interlocutors are vicious and in need of shaming.  But there are moral reasons why we must have our defaults set on civility first.  The most important reason is to avoid making the exchange of ideas toxic to the point where even those with good ideas don't want to enter the fray.  In discourse theory we call the outcome of those circumstances "error amplifications" and "hidden profiles" — increased group confidence in erroneous commitments and social pressures against correcting them.  Since we want truth, we've got to make the discussion welcoming.  That's just how it goes, and so the duties of civility must be exercised.

Would Orlet be moved by these sorts of reasons for civiity?  Well, if you sweetened the pot a little:

But men are stubborn animals. We may pretend to be more sensitive … , if it means we might get lucky more often

I see.

Well, what does Orlet think would happen were he to enforce this rule on liberals, too?

Just this morning, I heard someone on NPR say, "We need to really tackle these issues." I was immediately overwhelmed with the desire to sprint down the aisle and clothesline the director of marketing. Unfortunately, she stiff-armed me and rolled on to paydirt, by which I mean the ladies room.

Hm. This is just weird, now.  Golly.  Editors, anyone?

Let's ignore that, for the moment, and see where Orlet sees the requirements of civility leading us:

Since Tucson, editors have been having a "conversation" about banning more words from their newspapers, which pretty soon are going to read like The Poky Little Puppy, containing all 26 politically correct words and no more. . . . [N]ow they have to adopt the language of a tea party. And not The Tea Party either, but a real, doily and lace tea party.

So civil dialogue is like children's literature and tea-party frou-frou.  False analogy, leading to false dilemma.  But given the way that Orlet argues, the alternative might be an improvement.  The Poky Little Puppy isn't on the make with the people he's arguing with, and I don't think you call going to the bathroom 'rolling to paydirt' at a tea party (or in most any company). Maybe some, just a little, civility (that is, civilizing) would be good for Orlet.  But don't tell that to him just yet.  Let him enjoy the footbath.

Ad hominem tu quoque, General discussion, Op-Eds and other opinions, Weak Analogy

Argument by Tu Quoque Analogy

Cal Thomas has conjoined two fallacy forms, and it will make all attentive readers smile.  After hearing that Robert Brady (D-PA) has proposed a bill outlawing threatening elected officials, Thomas sees some analogies… some analogies that show some hypocrisies.

In the 1980s when conservative groups tried to "clean up" the bad language, sexual references and violence on TV, the Left cried "censorship." When conservatives campaigned against pornography and "music" that encouraged violence against women and racial epithets, they were told a healthy First Amendment required that even the most offensive speech be tolerated. It was the same argument used to allow the burning of the American flag at political protests. But the Left is intolerant of speech it disagrees with and so wishes to censor what it cannot overcome with superior argument.

Fallacy double-dipping.  Faulty analogy used in order to fix a premise for tu quoque.  It takes a special talent, you see.

The first problem is that Brady's bill is just extending the protections that are already given to the President to other officials.  For sure, enforcing it requires some judgment, but, you know, so do most laws governing speech (e.g., libel).  The crucial thing is that there's a difference between language that contributes to icky culture (profanity, obscenity, sexist and racist language) and language promoting violence on an individual.  This bill is only about the latter. So Thomas' analogy is way too thin to show a real inconsistency here.

Second, by saying that the Left (who says Democrats are of the Left, anyhow?) censors language they can't defeat by argument, is Thomas thinking that this bill extends to criticism?  It certainly seems so.  But that's not what Brady was talking about.  It was about threatening, not disagreeing with, refuting, or holding wrong.  Maybe that's just how Thomas does it, but most folks make that distinction.  I'd noted earlier that Thomas, when warned about tone, seems to get more aggressive.  He thinks he's being censored, not just criticized or given some advice.  (Nothing causes Thomas to be more caustic than his being told that he maybe could try to tone it down.)