General discussion

Professional troll

2 Comments

Whilst waiting to begin serving his sentence for fraud, Lord Conrad Black pens an encomium to Ann Coulter and Laura Ingraham in the National Review Online.  He writes:

Coulter attracts greater leftish opprobrium because of her more frequent recourse to reflections that she well knows will, as she says, “stir the pot.” Thus, John Edwards was a “faggot,” by which, she explained, she only meant a “wuss,” and Christians were “perfected Jews” because the New Testament was “like Federal Express.” When an airline was boycotted for yielding to passenger concerns and disembarking six Muslim imams before takeoff, she said that if the Muslims would boycott all the airlines, there would be no need for any airport security. And when a Muslim questioner objected to this comment at one of her speeches, in Canada, she replied, “Take a camel.” More of a jolt to conventional sensibilities was her lamentation that Timothy McVeigh did not bomb the New York Times building instead of a federal building in Oklahoma, after, she explained as the intended controversy erupted, “everyone had left the building except the editors and reporters.” The mindless reflexiveness with which the soft Left responds to Coulter, especially, is premeditated by her and is a vastly entertaining send-up of the boring, high-minded liberals that she can turn on like a spigot at will, to her own amusement and profit.

As Black puts it very ironmannishly, Coulter is a professional troll, and people are suckers for feeding her.  I suppose I'd agree with that. 

via Sadly No   

Ad hominem circumstantial, Appeal to the People, ignorance of basic matters of logic

Wave the flag, miss the point

2 Comments

Melissa J. Ferguson, at Cornell University, just released findings showing that exposure to the American flag inclines you to vote Republican.  The more you saw the flag before the '08 election, the more likely it is that you voted for McCain.  The more you saw the flag in '10, the more likely you voted Republican — even if you self-identified as a Democrat.  This is troubling for two reasons.  First, it seems that patriotic displays count in favor of Republicans.  And so the causal connection is actually the other way — it's not that Republicans wrap themselves in the Flag because they're Republicans, it's that they're Republicans because they wrap themselves in the Flag.  That occasions the second piece of troubling news — it's imagery that's having the effect on people, not reasons, evidence, or anything like that.  Change a few features of your environment, and next thing you know, you're a conservative.  That should give conservatives pause about what basis they really hold their convictions.

But all that is beside the point when Lisa Fabrizio at the American Spectator responds to the news.  You see, she can't take the good news (that her ideological stripes have an advantage) without being suspicious of who's bringing it:

What is intriguing though, is the motivation behind these studies. Because they expose the tremendous anxiety of liberals when confronted by American patriotism, they reveal more about the observers than the observed. Because, in the main, liberals are ashamed of our country and all that it has represented and all that represents it: mainly our military and our flag.

But it seems she hasn't been paying attention. It's not the imagery that's the problem.  It's the ideology that the imagery serves that's the problem for those liberal folks.  To get hung up on the images is to miss the point.

Even the colors of the flag are cause for concern amongst those who despise what it stands for: purity, vigilance and valor. No, in modern America, liberal hearts do not beat true for the red, white and blue.

Now it's about color schemes.  Surely there's a correlation between you wearing an American Flag jacket or  John Phillip Sousa on your ipod and how you vote.  But the findings show that for many conservatives, it's the imagery that makes the determinations.  How does the motivation behind the researchers (whether or not they are liberals, commies, or whatever) influence the troubles for conservative conception?  Maybe, as noted before, it really is more a game of identity politics than anything else. You already know what to expect when you see someone wearing a tricorn hat.

General discussion

The ethics of student howlers competitions

11 Comments

Inside Higher Education just put up a list of the winners of the "exam howlers" competition.  Some are funny.  Some are dumb.  Some I don't get the humor about — they're not howlers, but just things that put sad on my face.  I've been teaching for a while, and I've got a pretty good list, myself.  Papers referring to Descartes "cognito" argument and complaining that there are no disguises, one paper on Aristotle's Five Causes which double-dips on efficient causation, and one jaw-dropper of a short essay on why we shouldn't worry about fallacies, because we'll never argue perfectly.  Also, since I edit a journal, I've got my fill of crazy submissions, too.  And I mean crazytown.

I got to wondering about these competitions.  Are they in the wrong spirit, especially for educators?  I mean, I've had many a laugh over beers with colleagues about some silly student paper, or a goofy  journal article I'm reviewing.  I don't see much wrong with that.  But why the public display?  A private chuckle over a student's error is one thing, but isn't putting that material up for public ridicule another?  Doesn't this break a tacit agreement of confidentiality between teachers and students to do this?  For example, I always ask students who wrote exemplary papers for my classes if I could save them and use them as models for further classes.  It seems wrong for me to use those papers, even in praise, without their permission.  Isn't it the same with howlers?
 

General discussion

Know when to walk away

5 Comments

Reputed gambling addict and relentless Christian moralizer William J. Bennett has stern words for the Grammy judges:

(CNN) — "They tried to make me go to rehab / I said, 'No, no, no.' " –Amy Winehouse, "Rehab"

Her most famous song may have been about substance abuse, but it mocked urges and demands to enter a rehab facility for her addiction problems. Then, in 2008, 24 years old and in the midst of story after story about her drug abuse, Amy Winehouse won Grammy Awards for best record of the year, best song of the year and best new artist of the year

With those awards, a message was sent: Mock addiction, create a rallying cry for those in its grip, blow your life up in every aspect other than financial success and name recognition, and you will be rewarded with the industry's gold medals. Today, at age 27, she is dead. The cause of death is unknown, but drugs took a toll on her life even if they did not they cause her death.

My guess is that William J.Bennett doesn't know a lot about music, or music awards, or song lyrics.  My guess is also that William J.Bennett wouldn't have written this same piece about the quondam drug-addled Johnny Cash, who celebrated cocaine-feuled spousal murder, or, for that matter, Kenny Rogers, who sung of gambling (while drinking).

Tu quoques aside, the song, if you listen to it, isn't quite as shallow as the refrain suggests.  Besides, I don't think people are looking for moral lessons from the Grammy judges in the first place.

Argument Analysis

Of aphorisms and neat language

8 Comments

Roger Scruton thinks the art of the aphorism in in decline among American English speakers. 

[W]hen they do talk, it is in an outpouring, in the belief that one person's language is as good as any other's. Bon mots, aphorisms, insightful quotations, nuggets of wisdom, or even ordinary apt remarks form only a tiny part of their conversation.

That's too bad, he thinks, because aphorisms are like stock cubes, they "are dry, salty, compact; and they are intended, when dissolved in thought, to be nourishing."  Not having that ability is a deficiency.  So far, this is just a point about rhetoric — we lack a special linguistic skill, apparently.  But, he notes, there are true and false aphorisms.  The true ones are from Henry James, Groucho Marx, and La Rochefoucauld. The false ones are from Marx, Christopher Hitchens, and Oscar Wilde. (Wilde gets lumped with the false aphorizers, because he came down against fox-hunting.) The trouble is that the catchiness of an aphorism is not what determines whether it is a true one or not, regardless of how one comes down on Scruton's division of them here.  The crucial thing is to direct them at truth, right?

How are we to recapture the forgotten ways of wit, and the use of aphorisms in the cause of truth? It seems to me that this is something that we ought to be teaching in our universities. A degree in the humanities should have something of the ancient study of rhetoric. It should be equipping students to persuade, to use language gracefully and succinctly, and to speak and write with style. Persuasion comes not through statistics and theories, but through the artful aphorism that summarizes, in the heart of the listeners, the things that they suspect but don't yet know.

But wait — it's in all those statistics and theories and stuff that the truth or falsity of something is found.  It's in the evidence, the argument.  Aphorisms are good ways to capture that stuff, but without the argument, the aphorism is just garbage.  And Scruton wants more rhetoric, not less?  What's necessary is more logic, more training in statistics, an education in history.  Not more rhetoric.

General discussion

He tweeted me so unfairly

1 Comment

I always (I think) name names here because it's hard to cite someone's arguments without naming them by name.  But sometimes, I've noticed, one does hear the expression, "I won't name names here."  I ran across an instance of this at the Washington Monthly today.  One fellow, Brendan Nyhan, is all upset over having been referred to (not named) with identifiable phrases he thinks taken out of context.  Here is what he is complaining about (it's a post by Nathan Silver–everyone's favorite numbers nerd):

The jobs numbers are awful, but they’ve also provided fodder for some poor political punditry. 

I won’t name names, since the people in question are normally thoughtful writers. But you can already find an article keyed off the news with the headline “How a one-term president is made.” And a political scientist in my Twitter feed wrote of how numbers like these will have Mitt Romney “measuring the drapes” in the White House.

I do not mean to suggest that the unemployment numbers are unimportant as a news story. To the contrary, recent polls find that four times as many people list jobs rather than the budget deficit as a top priority, even though the latter issue has gotten more press attention lately.

But if you’re going to write about the jobs numbers as a horse race story, you ought to do it right, and that means keeping an eye on the big picture.

Following up on this post from yesterday, this seems like a somewhat polite use of the "some say" trope.  You don't identify your opponents not because they don't exist; you avoid doing so in order to be nice.  Let's hope, perhaps is the thought, no one inquires but the guilty party gets the point.  This seems reasonable, as the point of the criticism is friendly correction, rather than triumphalist douchebaggery.

This strategy does not work, however, when the accused publicly complains about being strawmanned.  On this score, the criticism in question was directed at a tweet.  Two things:  One, don't tweet easily misunderstood condensed arguments (which require, as Nyhan maintains in his own defense, you to refer to your vast body of not-tweeted work) and expect to be tweeted fairly; and two, criticizing tweets is almost nutpicking, because tweets are usually dumb. 

Specious allegations of fallacy, Straw Man, weak man

Of Demagogues and Straw Men

4 Comments

Victor Davis Hanson, over at The National Review, is an accomplished classicist.  Today's column, "The Demagogic Style," was a short account of the early usage of 'demagogue' and 'demagoguery'  from Thucydides through Xenophon and Aristotle.  Once the apparatus is in place, Hanson turns to look at how the demagogic style works in President Obama's rhetoric.  One tactic that caught my eye was the strategic use of straw men:

3) The evocation of anonymous straw men, sometimes referred to as “some” or “they”

In the Manichean world of Barack Obama there are all sorts of such demons, mostly unnamed, who insist on extremist politics — while the president soberly and judiciously splits the difference between these fantasy poles. So for the last three years we have heard, but been offered few details, about the perils of both neo-con interventionists and reactionary isolationists, of both profligate big spenders and throw-grandma-over-the-cliff misers, of both socialist single-payer advocates and heartless laissez-faire insurers who shut emergency-room doors to the indigent in extremis — always with the wise Barack Obama plopping down in the middle, trying, for the sake of all the people, to hold onto the golden mean between these artificially constructed zealots.

Hanson's provided an interesting analysis of how demagogic moderates sell their ideas — they portray themselves as avoiding the vices of two extremes.  The trouble, as Hanson sees it, is that nobody actually occupies those extremes.  They are men of straw.

But a few things.  First, so far, all Hanson has done is say that the positions are anonymous.  That doesn't mean that they don't have occupants.  That just means that the president doesn't have to name his dialectical opponents.  That's an old rhetorical advantage presidents have always had — they are presidents. Second, Hanson's way off if given that President Obama doesn't name names, it means that nobody actually occupies that position.  I can name people on the two sides, at least for the medical insurance issue.  Mike Huckabee for the "personal responsibility" right, Michael Moore for the 'single payer' left.  Done.  Just takes some familiarity with the terrain, and we can easily populate those extremes for ourselves.

The straw man trouble with the setup, really, isn't that the extremes are anonymous or that they aren't populated, but that there is a lot of ground between the extremes.  And when one sets them that way, anyone can look like a moderate.

Ignoratio Elenchi

Ignoratio elenchi of the day

Oh the humanity:

Fast-food playlands under scrutiny

Arizona mom inspects, records appalling conditions

Representative graph from this article:

A reporter crawled through a few minutes later to find sticky surfaces, filmy windows, several broken pieces of equipment, food morsels in every compartment, trapped hair, garbage and thick black schmutz in most crevices.

By comparison, here are the ingredients in a Happy Meal:

White boneless chicken, water, food starch-modified, salt, chicken flavor (autolyzed yeast extract, salt, wheat starch, natural flavoring (botanical source), safflower oil, dextrose, citric acid, rosemary), sodium phosphates, seasoning (canola oil, mono- and diglycerides, natural extractives of rosemary). Battered and breaded with: water, enriched flour (bleached wheat flour, niacin, reduced iron, thiamin mononitrate, riboflavin, folic acid), yellow corn flour, food starch-modified, salt, leavening (baking soda, sodium acid pyrophosphate, sodium aluminum phosphate, monocalcium phosphate, calcium lactate), spices, wheat starch, whey, corn starch. Prepared in vegetable oil ((may contain one of the following: Canola oil, corn oil, soybean oil, hydrogenated soybean oil, partially hydrogenated soybean oil, partially hydrogenated corn oil with TBHQ and citric acid added to preserve freshness), dimethylpolysiloxane added as an antifoaming agent). Water, high fructose corn syrup and/or sucrose, citric acid, ascorbic acid (vitamin C), potassium benzoate (to protect taste), modified food starch, natural flavors (vegetable source), glycerol ester of wood rosin, yellow 6, brominated vegetable oil, red 40. Potatoes, vegetable oil (partially hydrogenated soybean oil, natural beef flavor (wheat and milk derivatives)*, citric acid (preservative), dextrose, sodium acid pyrophosphate (maintain color), dimethylpolysiloxane (antifoaming agent)), salt. Prepared in vegetable oil ((may contain one of the following: Canola oil, corn oil, soybean oil, hydrogenated soybean oil, partially hydrogenated soybean oil, partially hydrogenated corn oil with TBHQ and citric acid added to preserve freshness), dimethylpolysiloxane added as an antifoaming agent).

And she complains about the playlot.

Your argument is invalid