Monthly Archives: August 2011

Appeal to the People, Unqualified Authority

Ad populum seals it

10 Comments

A good deal has been made about Rick Perry's doubts about evolution and global warming.  And so the concern that we have yet another know-nothing Republican on our hands is pretty popular (though Hitchens has an interesting take, too, namely, that he's cynically just putting on).  Rich Lowry, over at National Review, has seen this game before, and he warns his readers that this is an old familiar canard, the "Anti-Science Smear" on Republicans.  Here's how he responds to the evolution line:

According to Gallup, 40 percent of Americans think God created man in his present form, and 38 percent think man developed over millions of years with God guiding the process. Is three-quarters of the country potentially anti-science?

Seriously. That's the response about evolution. 

The trouble is that I am unsure that those three quarters polled by Gallup that day could answer many detailed questions about evolution.  They may not be anti-science, but they aren't science literate, at least most of them.  That's probably the case about many, many things. (I'd love to see if Gallup could produce a  percentage of people who think that there's a highest number.) Calling people who answer a poll question in a fashion that does not reflect the scientific consensus 'anti-science' is probably too quick, but calling a Presidential candidate who should know better the same is just about right.   Or else, perhaps, Hitchens is right, and he's just putting on for the cameras and the 75% that really think that way.

General discussion

7 years

8 Comments

Today is the seven-year anniversary of this blog.  I used to hate calling it a blog.  But that's what it is.  As far as I can tell–and you can correct me if I'm wrong–there are not a lot of blogs like this.  That is, there are not blogs that have argument per se as their sole subject matter.  I wonder if this is because for the most part people think they are just fine at argumentation.  My sense was, when we started this, was that they are not in fact very good at it.  That's pretty much how I feel today.  Sad, this is, because with a little effort we could have something closer to the public discourse our country ought to think it deserves.

Appeal to the People, Jonah Goldberg, Specious allegations of fallacy, Things that are false

Unpatriotic

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In what's good for the gander news, NRO's Jonah Goldberg thinks that President Obama's rhetoric has turned ugly.  He's using patriotism against Republicans. 

According to his new stump speech, if you oppose his agenda, then you don’t care about America as much as he does.

Well, let's see the line that Goldberg thinks crosses the line.

What is needed is action on the part of Congress, a willingness to put the partisan games aside and say we’re going to do what’s right for the country, not what we think is going to score some political points for the next election. . . . There is nothing that we’re facing that we can’t solve with some spirit of ‘America first.'

Goldberg objects that the 'America First' spirit is supposed to "separate the patriotic from the petty."  But surely this is mild compared to, say, Michele Bachmann saying liberals are unAmerican or even the rest of Goldberg's article, which makes hay about how the President is going on vacation (and so thereby must not be patriotic, either!).  

The point, however, isn't to make the hypocrisy charge here.  The point is to say that Goldberg doesn't defend those charged with pettiness.  He only cries foul at their being called petty.  But surely if there is a group of legislators that are out only to save their hides for the next election rather than making hard choices or getting on with the work of governing, then they need to be called out.  Moreover, it's not the charge of being unpatriotic that I saw in the Obama speech, but the charge of political cynicism.  And it's easy to be a political cynic and be really patriotic.  In fact, those all too often go hand in hand, don't they?

General discussion

Definitional hackery

3 Comments

A hack is someone who can be relied on to make any argument–sound or not–for his preset view and against any perceived opposition.  Somehow our media and political culture relies in large part on this sort of person's insights, however completely predictable and frequently unreasonable or irrational.  Here is a fun case in point. 

Obama was photographed on vacation riding a bicycle with one of his daughters.  This provoked the following comment from Jay Nordlinger at the National Review Online:

I’m sorry, but a grown man wearing a bicycle helmet, when he’s not training or racing like LeMond, is just — is just . . . Well, I think Dukakis looked better in his tank, is all I’m saying.   

In the first place, he's not really sorry.  Second, Greg LeMond has long retired from cycling.  So has Lance Armstrong.  I'd suggest in the first place that this jack ass update his references.  I'll suggest "Andy Schleck" because (1) he's currently a famous cyclist; (2) he's got a cool-sounding name.  Third, this is completely asinine.  As anyone who rides a bike ought to know, you're wearing a helmet because someone might run into you.  If you fall from your bike going slow, you might end up as brain damaged as someone going a whole lot faster.  Finally, Dukakis?

via Sadly, No.

And by the way, helmets off to the commenters at NRO online for pointing out the stupidity of Nordlinger's argument. 

General discussion

Corporations are people

4 Comments

No, Mitt Romney, they're not really.  They're completely unlike people in almost every way.  They may, however, involve people, real people, at some stage in the process.  But this doesn't mean the corporation simply is the people who work there.  That would be, er, communism or socialism.  In a recent add, Romney says:

At just over the halfway mark, Romney declares: "Businesses are comprised of people. I'm talking about repair shops, and gas stations, and beauty salons, and restaurants. I'm talking about Apple computer, and Facebook, and Microsoft. I'm talking about businesses that employ people. It's really astonishing to me that the Obama folks would try and argue that businesses aren't people. What do they think they are? Little men from Mars? But when they tax business, they tax people."

Well, this is different from "corporations are people."  But it's still equally wrong.  It's wrong now because repair shops and gas stations really don't belong in the same category as Microsoft, etc..  More to the point, the problem with this new formulation is positively Clintonian–it depends on what the meaning of "is" is.  Corporations involve people; sometimes lots of people, transnationally.  But they are certainly not identical with them in the narrow sense of identity Romney seems to suggest.  Anyway. 

On this same point, here is an epic Iron Man (by a liberal commentator, of course–it's a disease they have) of Romney's argument:

Matthew Zeitlin has a nice New Republic post on the Romney “corporations are people” clip and the very real “hack gap” between Democratic and Republican parties.

The title of my own comment on this imbroglio, Separating the wheat from the gaffe, telegraphs my view. What Romney said is obviously true, and everyone who thinks seriously about economic policy understands it. Taxes on corporations fall on the owners of corporations and on other stakeholders. On the specifics, this particular attack on Romney is devoid of substance.

So the taxes fall on their "owners" (who sometimes aren't even actual people), but this doesn't mean corporations are people too.  It means, at some level, they involve people.  No one denies that.  They object to the way they involve those people.

General discussion

Not the O’Malley Fallacy

Hats off to Maryland's governor Martin O'Malley for his well crafted response to the Archbishop of Baltimore's exhortation not to support expansion of gay rights in their state.  Here is the espistolary exchange.  The governor keeps it classy, noting that he appreciates that the Archbishop and he disagree, but that he is not going to question His Excellency's motives (as His Excellency did his).

Ad hominem circumstantial, Ad hominem tu quoque, Argument from Double Standards, Argument from Inconsistency

The symbols of my religion are religiously neutral

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Joseph Ianfranco and Byron Babione's recent post at the American Spectator, "Atheists Attack 9/11 Cross," deserves some comment, as it instantiates a troubling bit of doublethink when it comes to defending state-sponsored religious symbolism.  On the one hand, there is the line that these symbols are representative of the religion of the society, and so what's wrong with a democracy that reflects the religious views of the majority?  On the other hand, there is the line that recognizes the necessity of restraint, but also holds that using the specific symbols in question doesn't amount to government endorsement of any particular religion.  The trouble is that you can't have both. 

They run their first line of argument by quoting the majority (with Kennedy as the lead writer) in the SCOTUS Salazar v Bruno case regarding a giant cross erected in the Mojave desert:

The Constitution does not oblige government to avoid any public acknowledgment of religion's role in society.

That's fine, but the key is that using that symbolism for lots of people's acts displays those people's acts in the light of those religious stories.  There's having holidays on days that people of the dominant religion will likely take off, then there's using their symbols to invoke public virtues.  This puts too much stress on the establishment issue, so defenders of religious symbolism then demur that the symbolism is all that religious to begin with.

Who drives by such a cross and immediately sees an "establishment of Christianity" instead of a memorial? Not most Americans, 72 percent of whom favor inclusion of the 9/11 cross at the New York memorial and see no constitutional violation.

Huh. That's funny, as invoking the opinions of the majority of people won't save the case that is the tyranny of the majority.  As if the issue was settled as follows:  You say this is the majority overreaching its bounds?  Well, 75% of the people we polled say this is just fine with them!

But the deeper issue is the strange cultural blindness that Christian monoculture imbues people with.  The state erecting a giant cross doesn't look in the least like an endorsement of Christianity, because crosses just mean piety and holiness and such.  That's just what crosses mean, right?   It seems reminiscent of the Wittgenstein joke about the Frenchman who said that French is the best language, because the words come out in the order that you think them.

 

Other problems, Things that are false

Unnecessary scarequoting

William Murchison, at the American Spectator, is counting off Rick Perry's virtues as a low-tax, pro-growth Presidential candidate.  One of Murchison's lines is that Perry won't regulate industry, especially with environmental restrictions.

Were Perry to become president, the Environmental Protection Agency could forget about lashing coal producers and automobile manufacturers to lofty standards for "pollution reduction."

I assume he's right about the facts, but what exactly is the point of putting the words 'pollution reduction' in scare quotes?  Is it that he thinks that car exhaust or smoke from coal fires count as pollution in name only?  Is it that he thinks that the EPA's standards don't reduce the pollution?  For the life of me, I can't make out what exactly is being communicated with the quote marks.  I'm assuming they are scarequotes – invoking the terms of the other side of the debate to call attention to the fact that they are wrong about some factual matter.  But what is the matter, here?

General discussion

Who Doesn’t Remember Hillary vs. Obama?

1 Comment

The answer is Rush Limbaugh:

My gosh, does nobody on this panel remember that we're running against Obama?…. Fox wants these people to tear each other up. Cause they want approval from the mainstream media, cause that's what the mainstream media would do….. You never see the Democrats pitted against each other, not like this was.

Yeah, dude, that's the nature of the debates and primaries.  The candidates have to disagree with and score points on each other before they go on to the general.  It's agreed that the ultimate opponent is X, but if you can't get past persons Y and Z who generally agree with you in a debate, you're in all sorts of trouble.