General discussion

Time to employ the tu quoque

Short items today.

First, according one study, half of the recipients of social programs (including various tax credits) in the US do not know or believe they are participants.  As they continue to demand the government get their hands of their Medicare, or that the government stop treating social security like its some kind of government program, one may without reservation employ the tu quoque.

Second, hipster baby might inspire a new response to the ultra conservative pro-life types: I was gay before I was born.  Then again, perhaps the science is not clear on that, as the careful (though oddly selective) skeptic Tim Pawlenty proclaims.

   

General discussion

For those who are not rocking

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A return to rock'n'roll and logic blogging. AC/DC's "For Those About to Rock" has some trouble (Video, Lyrics).  The crucial line is the familiar:

For those about to rock, we salute you

Now, I'm inclined to say that those who are about to X are not currently X-ing.  If you're about to run, you're not running.  If you are about to sneeze, you are not currently sneezing.  If you are about to type, you are not right now typing.  And so on.

Trouble is, the line occurs in the midst of an AC/DC song.  We, then, have an interpretive dilemma.  On the one hand, the song is addressed to those currently listening to the song.  That means that those people listening to the song are not rocking.  And that means that the song is not rocking them.  This seems a bad thing for AC/DC to concede, especially in the middle of the song.

On the other hand, perhaps the song is not addressed to those listening to the song, but someone else, not listening to the song. Someone who is currently not rocking, but, perhaps, would like to rock and who, again perhaps unwittingly, is in fact about rock.  Trouble is, it certainly seems that the salute would mean that, well, those folks are listening to the song — else they wouldn't know that the guns going off are a salute, but rather a bombardment.  And then we're back to the first option.

Questions: Are AC/DC saluting people who are not rocking? (It seems so, if they are saluting people who are about to rock.)  If the people are not rocking and are currently listening to their song, "For those about to rock," what does that say about what AC/DC thinks about that song? (Maybe: you aren't rocking to this song, but wait until "Thunderstruck"!  We salute you for waiting patiently. Boom!)

Ad Hominem Abusive, Appeal to the People

Everyone ’round here loves the ad populum!

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Quin Hillyer, over at the American Spectator, is running the "We don't cotton to his kind" argument about President Obama's policies and style of governance. Hillyer has recently moved to Mobile, Alabama after years in Washington, D.C.  He's now writing about how everyday Americans in RedState American cities (or, as Hillyer calls them, "The Real America") have their American sensibilities offended by so obviously an un-American President. 

More than anything else, though, again and again and again, the question comes at me, with a deep concern almost plaintive in nature: Who is out there who can beat Obama and do an okay job? This isn’t merely a “Clinton is a scuzzbucket” or a “Carter is inept” sort of sentiment. This is different. This is an expression of the conviction that what Obama is doing, along with the likes of Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer, is alien to our very idea of what being an American means.

All of the alien ideas are: the health insurance mandate and government stimulus spending.  But what Hillyer takes as the indicator that Obama is so alien isn't really that he objects to his policies.  He takes it that because Obama doesn't go in for flag-waving extravaganza, he's not one of us.  Same goes for pretty  much anyone associated with him:

Does anybody doubt that Van Jones would sneer at the tri-colored bunting? Does anybody doubt that White House Science Czar John Holdren would look askance at the propagation of so many carbon-emitting children? Does anybody really think that Obama himself feels real joy at hearing a 13-year-old recite the Declaration’s words about rights endowed by a Creator?

Yes, it's come to this — the lefties are sneering cheese-and-brie-crowd haters of America and Americans. 

General discussion

SIWOTI

Somone Is Wrong On The Internet: now a syndrome.  Probably been so for a while.  This syndrome explains a lot about this blog.  There ought to be however an accompanying syndrome, something like: No One Cares About Your Criticism (NOCAYC)–only wittier and more elegant.

Perhaps the original (sorry don't feel like checking, summer time and all) can be found here. 

General discussion

To all the h8trs

3 Comments

Some puzzling words in favor of "traditional" marriage:

It was not for nothing that societies for millenniums recognized marriage for its civilizing properties and stepped in to regulate them secularly. That's because marriage, among other things, seeks to protect the lives and rights of women and children in a historically patriarchal society.

This from the mouth of the Chicago Tribune's get-off-my-lawn conservative guy, Dennis Byrne.  This is in an argument against gay marriage–or rather, to use his words, in support of "traditional marriage."  Of course, for Byrne, "traditional marriage" is one-man-one-woman  leave-it-to-beaver marriage: not the real traditional marriage of the kind where the wife had very much unequal status.  That particular argument from tradition would appeal to very few. 

Anyway, so Byrne maintains that marriage civilizes.  But it civilzes only when it's one-man and a series perhaps of individual women (or vice versa: one woman and a series of individual men).  There seems to be no actual evidence for that claim, other than the fact that some form of contractual union has existed for a long time.  In the absence of such evidence, one must naturally rely on the slope:

The formulated response to this point is that marriage can continue to go on protecting those lives and rights whether or not gays and lesbians are legally included in the marriage contract.

But that's too simplistic. Cultural institutions like marriage can be fragile structures, bending to the crosswinds of changing public attitudes. Tamper with them too much, and they become diluted and ineffective in their purpose.

I believe people have rights to legally designate in contract law who can visit them in hospitals, who can be named as insurance beneficiaries and the raft of other considerations sought for gay and lesbian couples. Call the arrangement civil unions if you wish.

But that's not the same as defining any union a marriage.

My fear — based on secular, more than religious precepts — is that watering down marriage could eventually rob society of the stabilizing and other beneficial effects of an institution now relentlessly under attack. Perhaps this argument is too ethereal to be grasped or accepted in an age of radical individualism. But it's an argument that is understood by plenty of Americans willing to state it, although it puts them in danger of being painted as haters.

This argument achieves new heights of terribleness.  Byrne believes people have contractual rights except when they don't.  Marriage, one might recall, as far as the law is concerned is a type of civil contract (that's why Sea Captains can perform marriages).  People have a right to this with its responsibilities and benefits or they don't.  If they don't, some aspect of contract is closed to them.  Why don't they have those rights, according to Byrne?  The slippery slope.

Recall that Byrne has already argued that marriage has stabilizing, er civilizing effects.  Nowadays, more people want access to those effects (people who would not have accessed it before).  So this means, somehow in Byrne's world, that marriage is under attack.  And of coruse, the very fact that more people want to realize the benefits of civilization means the very end of civilization.  I mean, you can't get a good drink around here anymore.

Slippery Slope

Witches are made of wood

2 Comments

Someone asked Mao Tse Tung (forgive me if I get this anecdote wrong) what he thought of the French Revolution.  His reply: it's too early to tell.  That's taking the long view.  Now comes David Frum, former Bush Speechwriter guy, and transplanted Canadian conservative.  He writes in favor of same sex marriage–good for him–but he does so in a way that makes you want to shake your head.  You see, fourteen years ago he had predicted the decline of society in some kind of slippery slope type argument.  He has waited around to see if that would happen, and lo, it didn't. 

Washington (CNN) — I was a strong opponent of same-sex marriage. Fourteen years ago, Andrew Sullivan and I forcefully debated the issue at length online (at a time when online debate was a brand new thing).

Yet I find myself strangely untroubled by New York state's vote to authorize same-sex marriage — a vote that probably signals that most of "blue" states will follow within the next 10 years.

I don't think I'm alone in my reaction either. Most conservatives have reacted with calm — if not outright approval — to New York's dramatic decision.

Why?

The short answer is that the case against same-sex marriage has been tested against reality. The case has not passed its test.

Since 1997, same-sex marriage has evolved from talk to fact.

If people like me had been right, we should have seen the American family become radically more unstable over the subsequent decade and a half.

Instead — while American family stability has continued to deteriorate — it has deteriorated much more slowly than it did in the 1970s and 1980s before same-sex marriage was ever seriously thought of.

By the numbers, in fact, the 2000s were the least bad decade for American family stability since the fabled 1950s. And when you take a closer look at the American family, the facts have become even tougher for the anti-gay marriage position.

Middle-class families have become somewhat more stable than they used to be. For example: College-educated women who got married in the 1990s were much less likely to get divorced than equally educated women who got married in the 1970s.

What's new and different in the past 20 years is the collapse of the Hispanic immigrant family. First-generation Latino immigrants maintain traditional families: conservative values, low divorce rates, high fertility and — despite low incomes — mothers surprisingly often at home with the children.

But the second-generation Latino family looks very different. In the new country, old norms collapse. Nearly half of all children born to Hispanic mothers are now born out of wedlock.

Whatever is driving this negative trend, it seems more than implausible to connect it to same-sex marriage. How would it even work that a 15-year-old girl in Van Nuys, California, becomes more likely to have a baby because two men in Des Moines, Iowa, can marry?

Maybe somebody can believe the connection, but I cannot.

You mean you cannot believe that anymore, dingis.  Fourteen years it took him to realize that the crazy ass slippery slope arguments–gay marriage will lead to the death of Merica!–were crap.  Fourteen years.  

Besides, there remains the question of whether what contractual relationships two constenting adults engage in is any part of anyone's business but their own. 

UPDATE.  Maybe Frum ought to revise his view in light of Pat Robertson's recent claim.

General discussion

Marriage is between one man and a series of women

1 Comment

Disgraced former Speaker of the House and current Presidential Candidate Newt Gingrich on Gay Marriage:

"I believe that marriage is between a man and a woman. I think that's what marriage ought to be and I would like to find ways to defend that view as legitimately and effectively as possible."

Getting hetero-married over and over (Gingrich is on his third wife) is not perhaps one of those ways.

In other news–every read this awesome post by Scott and Rob Talisse at 3 Quarks Daily.

Equivocation, General discussion, Slippery Slope

Slip Slidin’ to 20 Billion

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Crooks and Liars link to a Senate committee discussion featuring Al Franken, Bernie Sanders, and Rand Paul on funding the Older Americans Act–a program that provides services to the elderly to allow them to remain in their homes and be healthy.

PAUL: I appreciate the great and I think very collegial discussion, and we do have different opinions. Some of us believe more in the ability of government to cure problems and some of us believe more in the ability of private charity to cure these problems. I guess what I still find curious though is that if we are saving money with the two billion dollars we spend, perhaps we should give you 20 billion. Is there a limit? Where would we get to, how much money should we give you to save money? So if we spend federal money to save money where is the limit? I think we could reach a point of absurdity. Thank you.

FRANKEN: I think you just did.

This is probably not a slippery slope argument, though it has some similarities to one. In fact, it's hard to figure out what Paul's point is.

P1) If spending x produces savings, then spending 10x would save 10x as much.

P2) This will reach absurdity.

C) Therefore, we shouldn't spend x.

This is not a good argument, but primarily because premise 1 seems false. Most preventative expenditures are not infinitely scalable (how much preventative maintenance should you do on your car, as Crooks and Liars notes), and so the absurdity never gets generated.

I think, in fact, there is a sort of equivocation at the root of Paul's rhetoric.Rand Paul is obtusely refusing to admit that when you spend money in order to reduce future expenditures that you would otherwise be forced to incur we can consider these "savings." He seems to be relying on a narrow notion that would define savings and spending as contradictory concepts. Thus, spending cannot be savings and vice versa. This latter sense of savings and spending is certainly operative in our language ("How can spending money be saving money?"). But, Franken reasonably expects a bit more sophistication than Rand Paul is able to muster. Rand's problem, I think, is that he needs to deny that those savings will be realized, but is unable to do so, and so falls back and some very silly twaddle.

 

 

Your argument is invalid