George Will, Ignoratio Elenchi

Fight for your right to party

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Here's a fun assignment.  Think of all of things you can do with yourself, then ask, do I have a constitutional right to do this? If it's not explicitly mentioned in the Constitution in unambiguous language, like the second amendment's unequivocal guarantee of your individual and unrestricted right to pack heat, then no, you don't have a right to it.  The second part was kind of a joke.  The first part not–you'll find that you have no explicit constitutional right to do most of the things you do.  So the fact that something you do or can do is not explicitly mentioned in the constitution does not ipso facto mean it's not a guaranteed right.  Or so I would think.  Not so much George Will.

In Roe, the court said that the 14th Amendment guarantee of "due process" implies a general right of privacy, within which lurks a hitherto unnoticed abortion right that, although it is "fundamental," the Framers never mentioned. And this right somehow contains the trimester scheme of abortion regulations.

Since 1973 the court has been entangled in the legislative function of adumbrating an abortion code the details of which are, Wilkinson says, "not even remotely suggested by the text or history of the 14th Amendment." Parental consent? Spousal consent? Spousal notification? Parental notification? Waiting periods? Lack of funding for nontherapeutic abortions? Partial-birth abortion procedures? Zoning ordinances that exclude abortion facilities? The court has tried to tickle answers for these and other policy questions from the Constitution.

Last thing first.  According to the Constitution, it's the judiciary's job to interpret the law.  The Supreme Court interprets all laws in virtue of their consistency with the U.S. Constitution.  That's its job.  Second,  did you think of any of the things  you do which aren't explicitly mentioned as rights?  

George Will, Stanley Fish, Things that are false

Job Market

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Anyone who has gone through the relentless misery known as the academic job market knows that one's political affiliations are the farthest thing from one's mind (and the least likely subject of conversation at any of one's many interviews).  One worries rather about the really long CV of one's competitors.  Having gone through that myself, I can say that George Will's whining about ideological imbalance in the humanities is uninformed and silly.  Speaking of a recent and most likely annoying book by Stanley Fish, he suggests that one ought to study the causes and consequences of there being so many lefties in academia.  Laying out his case for affirmative action for conservatives, Will writes: 

Fish does not dispute the fact that large majorities of humanities and social science professors are on the left. But about the causes and consequences of this, he airily says: It is all "too complicated" to tell in his book, other than to say that the G.I. Bill began the inclusion of "hitherto underrepresented and therefore politically active" groups.

Then, promiscuously skewering straw men, he says, "these were not planned events" and universities do not "resolve" to hire liberals and there is no "vast left-wing conspiracy" and inquiring into a job applicant's politics is not "allowed" and "the fact of a predominantly liberal faculty says nothing necessarily about what the faculty teaches." Note Fish's obfuscating "necessarily."

The question is not whether the fact "necessarily" says something about teaching but whether the fact really does have pedagogic consequences. About the proliferation of race and gender courses, programs and even departments, Fish says there are two relevant questions: Are there programs "with those names that are more political than academic?" And do such programs "have to be more political than academic?" He says the answer to the first is yes, to the second, no.

The "consequences," however, of this phenomenon have been studied.  Turns out, say some, students are unlikely to be indoctrinated.  I know I say this a lot, but I'm tired of being called an indoctrinator: I can't even indoctrinate my students to underline or italicize the title of that leftist handbook, The Prolegomena to any Future Metaphysics.  When they get that, perhaps will move on to my views about race and gender. 

General discussion, Plain Bad Arguments

White Christmas

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Daniel Henninger of the L'Osservatore Romano Wall Street Journal opines on the true cause of our current economic crisis.  He writes:

Notwithstanding the cardboard Santas who seem to have arrived in stores this year near Halloween, the holiday season starts in seven days with Thanksgiving. And so it will come to pass once again that many people will spend four weeks biting on tongues lest they say "Merry Christmas" and perchance, give offense. Christmas, the holiday that dare not speak its name.

This year we celebrate the desacralized "holidays" amid what is for many unprecedented economic ruin — fortunes halved, jobs lost, homes foreclosed. People wonder, What happened? One man's theory: A nation whose people can't say "Merry Christmas" is a nation capable of ruining its own economy.

One had better explain that.

Yes indeed.  One had better explain how a newspaper with "Wall Street" in the title has published an op-ed linking the simple courtesy of not wishing non Christians a happy-holiday-they-don't-celebrate and the various and nefarious causes of the current economic meltdown.  Someone had better explain that.

Via commenter Gary and the rest of the baffled blogosphere.

General discussion, Thomas Friedman

One can only dream

If you haven't seen the Yes Men in action, then I recommend you do.  Since explaining what they do would ruin it, here's an example of their latest work.

Go read it here.  Enjoy the op-eds especially.  Here's an excerpt from "Tom Friedman's":

In any case, I have made a decision: as of today, I will no longer write in this or any other newspaper. I will immediately desist from writing any more books about how it’s time for everyone to climb on board the globalization high-speed monorail to the future. I will keep my opinions to myself. (My wife suggested that I try not to even form opinions, but I think she might have another agenda.)

Baffled? I don’t blame you. So I’ll cite some facts to support my decision — a practice, I must admit, I have too seldom followed.

Let’s start with the invasion itself. I was pretty much all for it. Mind you, I was not one of the pundits, reporters, or public figures who said that Saddam Hussein was a threat to the United States. I knew better — but I said it didn’t matter!

Back in February of 2003, I wrote in this space: “Saddam does not threaten us today. He can be deterred. Taking him out is a war of choice — but it’s a legitimate choice.” In other words, we should invade a sovereign state and replace its government in order to remake the world more to our liking.

Now the simple fact is, an unprovoked attack on a sovereign state is a war crime, even when linked to grand ideas of the future of mankind. In fact, that’s exactly what Hitler did, for exactly the same reasons. The Nuremburg War Crimes Tribunal called it the “the supreme international crime, differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole.”

What was I thinking? And more importantly, why didn’t anyone stop me?

One can only dream.

General discussion, Slippery Slope

Slipsliding away

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Slippery slope style arguments tend to be fallacious.  In one sense, they suggest non-existent causal chains as reasons not to engage in some or other activity.  An example: If we allow gay marriage in California, then we will have to allow polyandry, polyzoology, poly-whatever-you-wish, because the door will have been opened, the foot will be in it, and the slope will be greased and increasing its degree of descent.  Downward, indeed, we will go if we allow gay marriage.  That of course is not so much an argument against gay marriage as it is an argument against the things that would follow gay marriage.  Perhaps it's an implicit admission that one has no argument at all against gay marriage.  This causal chain, of course, starts at straight marriage.  Seems like if we allow that, then we will have to allow marriage between to "straight" Christians, and then therefore etc., as they used to say.  This of course points to the other variety of slippery slope fallacy–the relevance variety.  Man-turtle marriage really isn't what one was talking about when one advocated gay marriage.  Man-turtle marriage is irrelevant.  It's not like man-man or woman-woman marriage at all.  In the first place, turtles can't contract.  So there's that.

Sometimes however slippery slopes are not fallacious.  No, these are not the slippery slope arguments that I use–because, as we all know, I can never be guilty of a fallacy.  Rather, these are slippery slopes that aren't causal, but rather analogical.  If we make a law, for instance, which benefits company A, call it, I don't know, GM, then, by analogy, we must also make a law which benefits company B, which finds itself in the same circumstances.  That's not really a slippery slope in the fallacious sense, as it's more of an argument by analogy anyway.

I make this point because I encountered this surprising instance of a non-fallacious argument in Michael Gerson's piece today.  Speaking of a government bailout of General Motors, he writes:

But wouldn't government intervention be a slippery slope? Why bail out GM and not Circuit City? Well, perhaps because the closing of Circuit City leaves an empty place at the mall, while the collapse of the American auto industry would leave entire regions of the country in crisis. It is the job of a president — on issues from military intervention to economic policy — to keep his footing on unavoidably slippery slopes.

Maybe there is also a kind of implicit false dichotomy here as well–one can either help everyone or no one.  There is no middle ground.  We cannot afford to help everyone.  So we must therefore help no one.  Or maybe perhaps there's a kind of fallacy of accident–the misapplied general rule: if the rule states we help companies who are in dire straits, then we must help all companies regardless, etc.  That's what the rule states, after all.

So Gerson is of course right that is not a slippery slope.  But he's wrong as to why.  The reason why it isn't is because not all slippery slopes are fallacious.  One sometimes hears complaints in the fallacy literature to the effect that some alleged fallacies are not fallacies at all.  My answer to that is a resounding "maybe" or "sometimes."  Sometimes they're not.  Sometimes they are.  When they are, they're fallacious.   

Inexplicable, Reporting

The number of the beast

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In addition to being a communist, a socialist, a professional politician who won a Presidential election on a center-right platform, Barack Obama might also be the Antichrist.  Indeed, it's a serious question, Newsweek, after all, ran a story about it.  This story included such gems as the following:

No wonder, then, that Obama triggers such fear in the hearts of America's millennialist Christians. Mat Staver, dean of Liberty University's law school, says he does not believe Obama is the Antichrist, but he can see how others might. Obama's own use of religious rhetoric belies his liberal positions on abortion and traditional marriage, Staver says, positions that "religious conservatives believe will threaten their freedom." The people who believe Obama is the Antichrist are perhaps jumping to conclusions, but they're not nuts: "They are expressing a concern and a fear that is widely shared," Staver says.

No.  They're nuts.  Completely nuts.

Via Digby and Political Animal.

Bad Explanations, Deborah Howell, General discussion, Inexplicable, specious comparisons

Balancing act

I saw this absurd piece by Deborah Howell, the Washington Post ombudsperson, on Saturday, but I had other things to do so no time to write anything.  Having established by quantitative means that the Post had a crush on Obama the previous week, she now attempts to make a more substantive case with a recommendation for how to avoid it.  Here's more substance:

Tom Rosenstiel, a former political reporter who directs the Project for Excellence in Journalism, said, "The perception of liberal bias is a problem by itself for the news media. It's not okay to dismiss it. Conservatives who think the press is deliberately trying to help Democrats are wrong. But conservatives are right that journalism has too many liberals and not enough conservatives. It's inconceivable that that is irrelevant."

Journalism, like academia, seems full of crazed liberals such as myself.  A neighbor of mine, a journalist for a major newspaper, has confirmed this (so it must be true).  The liberal dominance of journalism–the fact that many reporters are liberals in other words–ought to raise at least two more questions: (1) why's that? and (2) does it affect their readers (not their reporting–you can't tell that, after all, because only academic liberals would be able to study whether it has)?  I can't answer (1) with anything but the speculative–because liberals live in a reality-based world, reporters who report on the world, come to share those views.  Or perhaps one could say reporters are cynical nihilists, like many godless liberals, so therefore, etc.  Anyway, the answer to (2) seems more important.  Since Howell discounts liberal bias going out in the form of reporting, there out to be evidence of a "liberal tilt" in the reading of that reporting.  I don't really know what that would be, short of something like this: "I have an unjustified feeling of good will toward Obama and Nancy Pelosi."

Anyway, here's the funny part.  Howell suggests that this perception of bias on the part of people who don't believe the stories anyway–that is, people already immune to bias–is for newsrooms to hire more conservative journalists:

Are there ways to tackle this? More conservatives in newsrooms and rigorous editing would be two. The first is not easy: Editors hire not on the basis of beliefs but on talent in reporting, photography and editing, and hiring is at a standstill because of the economy. But newspapers have hired more minorities and women, so it can be done.

Rosenstiel said, "There should be more intellectual diversity among journalists. More conservatives in newsrooms will bring about better journalism. We need to be more vigilant and conscious in looking for bias. Our aims are pure, but our execution sometimes is not. Staff members should feel in their bones that unfairness will never be tolerated."

Perhaps the new affirmative action hires of conservative journalists could write for the irony page, where they can report on the failure of affirmative action programs and the like.

Update.  Just saw this on Political Animal–it's a better post on the same topic with some good links.

Kathleen Parker, Plain Bad Arguments

Idiot wind

As a general rule, this blog applies the same level of rigor to A-level (nationally syndicated) pundits as its author applies to first year college students in Philosophy 101.  I'm not complaining because someone failed to distinguish between analytical and synthetic a priori judgments.  An introductory course in logic–the ones that often get called "critical thinking" or better "critical reasoning"–ought to be sufficient for both understanding my critiques and avoiding being the subject of them.  

I just felt like saying that.  Anyway.  It appears Kathleen Parker has definitely moved up to the A-level for her criticism of the Palin choice.  This same kind of pundit promotion has happened to a number of former conservatives as well as former supporters of the Iraq war.  Being wrong about some major thing for a long time, it turns out, increases one's credibility in the media world.  I just wanted to say that too.

Back to Parker.  Speaking of Larry Summers, former President of Harvard University and possible pick for Treasury Secretary in the Obama administration, she writes:

Fresh ire aimed at former Harvard University President Larry Summers prompts the question: Shouldn't there be a statute of limitations on dumb things expressed in public?

(Please say yes.)

Forever accursed is the economist and Clinton-era treasury secretary for having raised — more than three years ago — the eensy-weensy possibility that innate differences between men and women might explain in part why more men than women reach the top echelons in math and science.

His comments, though not completely without scientific basis, unleashed a millennium worth of female scorn, making Hell a suddenly attractive destination for the discriminating traveler in search of cooler climes.

Research pointing to male-female differences that could partly explain different career outcomes is available to anyone in search of clues to the gender universe. But let's not go there. The social construct versus hard-wiring debate will continue unabated until the last woman utters: "No, honey, you stay in bed. I'll go see what that noise was."

For these purposes, let's stipulate that Summers said a dumb thing. He didn't, really. Provocative, yes, but it was a question about theory, not an assertion of belief. Impolitic? Without question. Still, we'll call it dumb.

Should said offense forevermore disqualify Summers from public service? Or even public appearances?

President of Harvard or not, Summers had wandered far out of his natural intellectual element in order to speculate on matters without any scientific basis.  He was justly criticized for being lazy and for casting about for genetic explanations for sexual differences in employment and achievement.  Turn back the clock twenty or thirty years, Summers could have made the same remark about female medical doctors.  Turn back the clock maybe five years, and perhaps he could have said the same thing about African American quarterbacks in the NFL.  Why are there so few? He and Rush Limbaugh might wonder.

So it was a dumb thing to say.  Should he be forgiven for it as Parker suggests?  I don't know.  Probably.  But does Parker's assertion of sexual difference in home security measures excuse Summer's thinking that there are signficant and innate differences in mathematical ability?  Nope.

Inexplicable, Sarah Palin

Pile on

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There's misspeaking and there's incoherence.  Here's incoherence:

BLITZER: Another question. What are your new ideas on how to take the Republican Party out of this rut that it’s in right now? Give me one or two new ideas that you’re going to propose to these governors who have gathered here in this hotel.

PALIN: Well, a lot of Republican governors have really good ideas for our nation because we’re the ones there on the front lines being held accountable every single day in service to the people whom have hired us in our own states and the planks in our platform are strong and they are good for America. It’s all about free enterprise and respecting the …

BLITZER: Does that mean you want to come up with a new Sarah Palin initiative that you want to release right now.

PALIN: Gah! Nothing specific right now. Sitting here in these chairs that I’m going to be proposing but in working with these governors who again on the front lines are forced to and it’s our privileged obligation to find solutions to the challenges facing our own states every day being held accountable, not being just one of many just casting votes or voting present every once in a while, we don’t get away with that. We have to balance budgets and we’re dealing with multibillion dollar budgets and tens of thousands of employees in our organizations.

Dumbfounding.  Anyone have an interpretation?  Sounds like a literal translation some kind of syntax-challenged computer.

(via Kevin Drum,via The Confabulum, via Hilzoy at Political Animal).

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