Talisse and I have a short piece over at 3QuarksDaily about the difference between formal and informal fallacies (posted last Monday). HERE.
How not not to be a cynic
Inside Higher Education ran an advice post for newly hired academics in the StratEDgy blog section. They then posted the high points on the front page last week. Most advice was just fine, ranging from get tenure quickly, before they take that away to focus on the teaching and find ways to enjoy it. Then there was this gem:
Avoid cynicism by recognizing early that academe is just as fraught with petty squabbles, mean-spirited colleagues, and irrational rules as any other area of endeavor – but no more so than any other.
As far as I can take it, this advice is that one avoids cynicism by being a cynic. That’s simply not how you avoid being a cynic. I suppose the more charitable reading is that one can avoid the disappointment of realizing the truth of the cynical worldview (especially in the vaunted halls of academe) if one is antecedently cynical. But that’s a different thing, and, by the way, not very effective — expecting others to be small-minded and mean doesn’t decrease decrease disappointment when they invariably are so.
Classic Krugman
Check out this video on Bloomberg.
The story goes something like this. In the remark shown on the screen, Paul Krugman cautioned that he is not calling someone a name (via a Monty Python reference lost on the speaker), but rather questioning the evidence for his view. The stunningly clueless commentator remarks that this is “classic Krugman” for “going after a person,” which is greeted with all sorts of agreement from the assembled panel brainless commentators. She then refers to Niall Ferguson, who in his turn says Paul Krugman uses ad hominem arguments because he must have been abused as a child. That, of course, is an actual ad hominem; Krugman’s is not. You just cannot be this dumb.
Reduce, reuse, recyle
- Fig.1: Conservativism
Here is a post for those who think that pointing out the inconsistency between a party’s name and its alleged position on an issue constitutes a decisive refutation of their view. That “conservatives” fail to “conserve” or “preserve” or anything else along those lines does not mean they embody some kind of contradiction. George Will has used this line on “progressives,” or his army of hollow men in years past. Here he is the other day:
Progressives are remarkably uninterested in progress. Social Security is 78 years old, and myriad social improvements have added 17 years to life expectancy since 1935, yet progressives insist the program remain frozen, like a fly in amber. Medicare is 48 years old, and the competence and role of medicine have been transformed since 1965, yet progressives cling to Medicare “as we know it.†And they say that the Voting Rights Act, another 48-year-old, must remain unchanged, despite dramatic improvements in race relations.
What kind of move is this? I think it’s an equivocation–a rather textbook variety. Clearly “progressive” means something different to “Progressives” (the name a half-hearted attempt at rebranding “liberal,” by the way). Will’s thought goes something like this:
your name implies you like progress, but here is progress which you don’t like, so you’re not “progressive.” Your self-understanding therefore is laughably contradictory.
The problem with this is that “progress” (1)–things getting better, more just, etc–and “progress” (2)–things changing–mean different things to alleged “progressives”. Besides, what is at issue with voting rights is an empirical question: has progress been made on voting rights? Progressives say, pointing to the recent election, no; (some) conservatives say yes.
*minor edit for clarity.
Opinions for hire
However much we berate the conservative commentariat, we usually presume their opinions are actually their opinions. Turns out we might have been wrong. Turns out some of them, a crew of ten or so, were on the payroll of the anti-democratic government of Malaysia.  I wonder if Malaysia got what they wanted. I also wonder who else is paying these jokers. An interesting graph:
According to Trevino’s belated federal filing, the interests paying Trevino were in fact the government of Malaysia, “its ruling party, or interests closely aligned with either.” The Malaysian government has been accused of multiple human rights abuses and restricting the press and personal freedoms. Anwar, the opposition leader, has faced prosecution for sodomy, a prosecution widely denounced in the West, which Trevino defended as more “nuanced” than American observers realized. The government for which Trevino worked also attacked Anwar for saying positive things about Israel; Trevino has argued that Anwar is not the pro-democracy figure he appears.
I’m sure it was very nuanced. In total they received over 400k. Nice work, if you can get it.
Can’t tell if troll part the millionth
It turns out the military rape (of women) is a problem. The National Review Online responds, as you might imagine, by blaming the victims and by changing the subject.
In an epic move that should be satire, but isn’t, Heather Mac Donald argues thusly:
But let’s say that for these homeless female vets, it really was their sexual experiences in the military that caused their downward spiral into, as the Times puts it, “alcohol and substance abuse, depression and domestic violence.†Why then have those same feminists who are now lamenting the life-destroying effects of “MST†insisted on putting women into combat units? Arguably, coming under enemy fire or falling into enemy hands is as traumatic as the behavior one may experience while binge-drinking with one’s fellow soldiers or as scarring as being “bullied and ostracized†by a female superior. Are women on average going to be more able to emotionally handle the former than the latter? Isn’t there a contradiction in expecting the military to “protect†you while it also sends you out to face mortal risk? And do the feminists believe that there will be fewer of these alleged rapes in combat training and duty? Perhaps they think that with enough multi-million-dollar gender-equity training contracts showered on the gender-industrial complex, the problem will go away. Or perhaps they think that keeping before us proof that the patriarchy is alive and well is more important than protecting women from “MST,†especially if that image can serve as grounds for remaking the military.
The point is that if you cannot protect yourself from rape, or you cannot deal with the consequences of rape, then you have no place in the combat zone. To suggest otherwise is some kind of inconsistency: how can women sustain the rigors of combat? They can’t even deal with being raped.
Satire and Nihilism
Jim Geraghty at National Review Online has an interesting essay on the state of satire in American political culture. He makes a contrast between satire in the good old days and the way it’s used today:
When everybody’s getting mocked, there’s not much consequence to the mockery…. The older notion of satire as a tool for addressing some wrongdoing or social ill may be falling apart before us. We don’t hold many of our national political or cultural leaders in high regard, and yet somehow they keep on with business as usual. Some of the egos attracted to political power have proven that no amount of ridicule can deter them.
So, to keep score:  old satire is taking a moral stand using irony as a means to speaking truth to power, new satire is irony for its own sake. The new satire just heaps ridicule on everyone who’s earnest, so is incapable of communicating a coherent moral vision.
[T]here isn’t really room for a genuinely heroic or noble character in those (parodic) worlds. A storyline can’t include Mother Teresa or a Medal of Honor recipient. . . unless, say, the protagonists had just claimed to be noble and virtuous, and the genuinely heroic figures appeared in order to make the protagonists appear pitiful by contrast. The true heroes of the real world aren’t particularly funny….
And so the new satire is simply (a) nihilistic, and (b) because it takes no substantive moral stand, can’t have any real critical bite. Now, I think Geraghty is wrong about John Stewart’s political satire. He does have a moral view. But, regardless, if satire doesn’t have a critical bite and satirists are just nihilists, then why is it that satirists, according to Geraghty, only needle the Republicans?
As a close to the essay, Geraghty makes a move I find very interesting, and one I’ve been considering on and off for a while — the Poe phenomenon. Given all the scandals and their silliness (Mark Sanford, Bob Menendez, Larry Craig, Anthony Weiner, Elliot Spitzer), the real stories of those in power sound very much like the silly send-ups of them.  Geraghty notes:
[I]n the exaggerated, ludicrous, comedic alternative universe depicted by the Onion, there is no Onion. In a real world that increasingly resembles the Onion’s satires, the Onion is superfluous.
Now, I think this is an overstatement. I’m not sure that if Poe’s Law is true, satire is superfluous. Satire, even if it’s the nihilistic contempt Geraghty’s worried about, is expressively different (even if not always received as different) from the events satired. Satire is a meta-language, one that comments on and captures a reaction to the events satired. Now, I don’t think it follows that satire is superflous, even if it’s nihilisic and difficult to tell from simple reportage, as it’s a different thing from what’s satirized. But maybe Geraghty’s on the right track – some forms of satire are simply self-indulgent post-adolescent pap. But that can be satired, too, and (if it’s well done) that’s not superfluous, is it?
Something of a hyperbolic flourish
Ted Cruz, a newly-minted Senator out of Texas, has achieved some recent notoriety for his affinities with Joe McCarthy.
Here’s what Cruz had to say three years ago on the Harvard Law Faculty (from Jane Mayer at the New Yorker):
Cruz greeted the audience jovially, but soon launched an impassioned attack on President Obama, whom he described as “the most radical†President “ever to occupy the Oval Office.†(I was covering the conference and kept the notes.)
He then went on to assert that Obama, who attended Harvard Law School four years ahead of him, “would have made a perfect president of Harvard Law School.†The reason, said Cruz, was that, “There were fewer declared Republicans in the faculty when we were there than Communists! There was one Republican. But there were twelve who would say they were Marxists who believed in the Communists overthrowing the United States government.â€
That is a pretty straightforward claim. Here’s how the Cruz camp replied:
A Cruz spokesperson defended the Senator’s claim. “It’s curious that the New Yorker would dredge up a three-year-old speech and call it ‘news,’†Catherine Frazier told TheBlaze late Friday. “Regardless, Senator Cruz’s substantive point was absolutely correct: in the mid-1990s, the Harvard Law School faculty included numerous self-described proponents of ‘critical legal studies’ — a school of thought explicitly derived from Marxism – and they far outnumbered Republicans.â€
“His substantive point” was that there were twelve communists bent on overthrowing the US government.  For more hilarity, here’s some Harvard Law School Grad defending Cruz:
Now, it’s something of a hyperbolic flourish to describe armchair radicals of this sort as people “who believed in the Communists overthrowing the United States government.â€
You don’t say. And this is why we can’t have nice things.
RINOs are Hypocrites? Who knew?
Washington Post op-ed columnist Kathleen Parker recently made a case for a concerted effort from moderate Republicans to “take back the Republican Party.” (Here) In fact, she calls for a “RINO rebellion.” The trouble she sees is that taking over a party requires zeal, and RINOs are just sane people. This yields a zinger:
First, sane people are too busy Being Normal to organize. No, “normal†is not a relative term. We all know what normal is, and it doesn’t involve carrying gigantic photos of aborted fetuses to political conventions.
That’s pretty funny. (And, if I’m not mistaken, a step toward pro-choicing the Republicans?) Regardless, this suggestion to draw the Republican party closer to the center has yielded some criticism. Matt Purple over at the American Spectator is up to run the argument. Purple’s main line of criticism is that all of Parker’s suggested changes are actually all standard conservative commitments.
Yes, if only there was a political movement calling for reasonable budgets, more privacy for the individual, upholding the rule of law, and concern for national security. She must imagine hordes of earthy Tea Partiers holding the Post in their gunpowder-stained fingers while recoiling and exclaiming, “Compassion for the disadvantaged?! This paper’s gone to the dogs!â€Â  So Parker’s principles seem pretty similar to those of modern conservatives
Okay, that’s a nice point, I suppose. Though there’s a difference between ‘reasonable budgets’ and ones that, say, slash the Department of Education or that eliminate the IRS. It’s all what you’re counting as reasonable, I suppose. But when Purple turns to candidates, things get weird.
To understand just how vacuous the moderate stance has become, consider their embrace of New Jersey Governor Chris Christie. John Avlon praised the Garden State firebrand as a “Northeast Republican†with a “moderate record.†Joe Scarborough defended his accomplishments.… Conservatives can’t even support sequestration without drawing condemnation from the center-right. But Christie cuts funding for AIDS patients and he’s the moderate Moses leading the GOP out of the electoral desert. Again, it’s pure air.
First, to make this point, Purple had to look to other moderate Republicans to find Chris Christie as the candidate of choice. Now, you can’t make a hypocrisy charge stick when the inconsistency is that between different people. That’s not hypocrisy of the RINOs, that’s just that they disagree. Second, I’m unsure whether the moderate line was right with Christie in the first place — if he’s such a moderate, then why did Ann Coulter endorse him? My thought was that hailing him as a moderate was strategic packaging, not accurate description.
Finally, even were all these charges right, I have no idea what kind of point this hypocrisy charge scores with the RINOs. If it’s that the ‘moderate’ candidate they chose wasn’t all that moderate, then shouldn’t the RINOs just say back: Well, that’s as moderate as we can get in this party. We’d actually prefer John Huntsman.Â
Civility for jerks
Mallard Fillmore’s got a nice way to capture the civility problem — with a straw man followed by a tu quoque!
If President Obama charged the Republicans with wanting to kill the elderly and starve the poor, I don’t remember it. In fact, the only kill the elderly lines I remember were the old ‘death panel’ charges a few years back. (This, then, is more likely a hollow man.) So a hyperbolic line of argument to begin, but doubling down with the fallacies is… well… uncivil?
A few months back Rob Talisse and I took a shot at making the case that civility wasn’t a matter of being nice and calm, but a matter of having well-run argument. That sometimes requires goodwill, but more importantly civility is a matter of being able to argue appropriately when everyone in the conversation hates everyone else.