Ad Hominem, Ad Hominem Abusive, Michael Gerson, Straw Man

Frankenquotations

4 Comments

Former George W.Bush speechwriter ("axis of evil….") and some kind of fervent Christian Michael Gerson alleges that Al Franken, former writer for Saturday NIght Live and current Senator from Minnesota, is not to be taken seriously.  He writes:

One problem with a political landslide of the kind that Republicans now contemplate in November is that it may also sweep into office various ideologues who become embarrassments — candidates such as J.D. Hayworth and Rand Paul. Democrats are familiar with this possibility, because they have Sen. Al Franken.

In the months since his election, the author of "Rush Limbaugh Is a Big Fat Idiot," who has referred to opponents as "human filth" and who once accused Ronald Reagan of supporting the torture and rape of nuns, has tried to control his bile addiction, at least in public. Speaking last week to the American Constitution Society, he relapsed.

Most of the traditional elements of a Franken rant were employed against Chief Justice John Roberts and conservatives on the Supreme Court. The attack on motives: The "Roberts court has consistently and intentionally protected and promoted the interests of the powerful over those of individual Americans." The silly hyperbole: "What individual rights are so basic and so important that they should be protected above a corporation's right to profit? And their preferred answer is: None. Zero." The sloppy, malicious mixed metaphor: The Roberts court is putting not a "thumb" but "a fist with brass knuckles" on the "scale" of justice. Franken was clearly summoning all his remaining resources of senatorial dignity not to say something like Roberts is a "lying liar who lies along with his lying lackeys for his lying corporate lying masters."

You would never suspect from Franken's speech that the Roberts court, in key cases, has sided with employees who allege discrimination and against corporations. It is never enough for Franken's opponents to be misguided or mistaken; they must want women to be sexually harassed in underpaid jobs while their children die of lead poisoning.

In all fairness, which is a kind of Christian attitude by the way–or so the nuns taught me–"Rush Limbaugh is a Big Fat Idiot" is ironic satire, about a fellow whose main mode of argument is the abusive ad hominem.  The same goes for the "human filth" remark about the vitriolic Karl Rove.  Now Reagan, in all honesty, did support regimes that raped and tortured nuns (I mean communists).  Now the point of bringing all of this up of course is to discredit Franken without considering Franken's particular argument (in this case).  It's the tactic of a big fat idiot, or human filth, to denigrate our discourse in this manner.  THAT LAST SENTENCE WAS SATIRE.  What's worse, however, is that Gerson has run out of misunderstandings to blame on Franken, so he resorts to making stuff up.  You can watch Franken's comments for yourself here. 
 
Franken doesn't say the "lying liars" quotation above.  That's pure invention.  If Franken had such a habit of bile, you'd think Gerson wouldn't need to resort to making crap up.  But he continues–and attributes more false intentions to Franken.  It is never enough for Gerson that his opponent is wrong or misguided, but apparently he must have some kind of warped personality and (as this dreary pieces goes on to fail more and more) and be a big fat idiot.  But maybe I'll talk about that tomorrow.
Ad Hominem, Ad Hominem Abusive, Colbert I.King

The most irresponsible piece

The other day during our massive blog fail outage, I read this piece from Colbert I. King in the Post.  King argued that certain leading conservative spokespeople for traditional values–such as Newt Gingrich and Rush Limbaugh–are hypocrites, because they're serial adulterers or husbands.  Well, to be more precise, that's what it should have argued.  Instead, here's what it set to establish:

Family, marriage and the contribution of fathers come together as topics for reflection on Father's Day. So I'd like to know why Barack Obama, a husband and a father in a family structure that encompasses bonds deemed essential to our society, is constantly and savagely attacked by conservative leaders whose personal circumstances undermine the family values they espouse?

Had King been arguing that when it comes to family or traditional values, the likes of Gingrich and Limbaugh ought seriously to STFU.  His mistake, I think, is the overly general nature of his criticism–they ought to shut up in general.  And that's just silly–and such an obvious example of abusive ad hominem that I almost feel bad pointing that out. 

But, on come the letter writers.  It's weird how people react:

Colbert I. King's column on President Obama's critics was the most irresponsible piece of ad hominem commentary I have ever read. Mr. King went to ridiculous extremes to denigrate key conservative spokesmen Rush Limbaugh, Newt Gingrich and Sarah Palin. They have had some significant marital and family issues, to be sure, but what does that have to do with many (if not most) of the political stances they take in opposition to the president?

According to Mr. King, they have the audacity to "look down their noses at our president," as though his commendable family life makes him immune from other scrutiny. Mr. King seemed to be saying, "Obama has a solid marriage and two cute kids: How dare they criticize his health policy, his economic policies, his foreign policy?!" The writing is a masterpiece of non sequitur. If only Mr. King were trying to champion "family values" instead of just using them as a weapon.

To continue along the same vein, no one who thinks for a second that Limbaugh, Gingrich, or Palin has anything to add to our public discourse can accuse other people of "the most irresponsible piece of ad hominem ever."  Having said that, the letter writer has the right idea about this article, unfortunately.

 

 

 

 

   

General discussion

A post with no links

3 Comments

Because I can't figure out video.

If you haven't had a chance, the past two days of the Daily Show have been very much worth watching, in my estimation.  The night before last, Obama pointed out how friendly Obama has been to Bush-era policies regarding rendition, detention, Gitmo, etc.  Last night, he ran through the litany of former Presidents who urged us to end our dependence on oil.  In both cases, the point was pretty clear.  Obama is somewhere to the right of Richard Nixon–yet we still have to have a debate with Fox News (and I would add the Washington Post Op-ed page, etc.) about whether Obama is a communist, a socialist, or a fascist.  Seriously.  I can't explain this.

George Will

Statism

10 Comments

The caricature of the Tea Party type holds a sign and calls every single government action "communist."  Please tell me how this caricature is not on display here:

Today's evidence suggesting sluggish job creation might give pause to a less confident person than Obama. But pauses are not in his repertoire of governance. Instead, yielding to what must be a metabolic urge toward statism, he says the Gulf of Mexico oil spill is yet another reason for yet another explosion of government's control of economic life. The spill supposedly makes it urgent to adopt a large tax increase in the form of cap-and-trade energy legislation, which also is climate legislation, the primary purpose of which is, or once was, to combat global warming, such as it is.

For the uninitiated, "statism" means "any increase in government activity."  That is a charitable interpretation (on my part).  Because the other one would be "communism," which wouldn't make this any different from the average Tea Party screed about health care or guns. 

So let's get this straight. 

  1. An under-regulated and unmonistored private industry, which enjoys by the way subsidies of all sorts (highways, etc.) incentivizing its products, caused what appears to be a calamity affecting the economy and ecology of entire region, if not the world.
  2. One contributing factor to the disaster was lax oversight.
  3. Therefore, this is not an argument for government regulation. 

That's really silly I think.  If we have an argument for effective government regulation, even if it requires "statism" (God is that term dumb), then this is it. 

On the other point in the paragraph, by the way, oil is dirty in the procuring (seeMexico, Gulf of) and dirty in the using (see Warming, Global).

General discussion, Michael Gerson

The pleasure of putting other people in the wrong

3 Comments

Some of you may remember the recent case of Mark Souder.  He was the latest in a string of Republican social conservatives to go down in a sex scandal (with a female staffer).  Pardon the pun, but it turns out one of our favorite deep thinkers, Michael Gerson, worked for him way back when.  Aside from cheating on his wife, turns out Souder's a nice guy or something, which leads Gerson to meditate on the meaning of morality:

Moral conservatives need to admit that political character is more complex than marital fidelity and that less sensual vices also can be disturbing. "The sins of the flesh are bad," said C.S. Lewis, "but they are the least bad of all sins. All the worst pleasures are purely spiritual: the pleasure of putting other people in the wrong, of bossing and patronizing and spoiling sport, and back-biting, the pleasures of power, of hatred. For there are two things inside me, competing with the human self which I must try to become. They are the Animal self, and the Diabolical self. The Diabolical self is the worse of the two. That is why a cold, self-righteous prig who goes regularly to church may be far nearer to hell than a prostitute. But, of course, it is better to be neither."

I think I agree with this stuff.  There is a lot more to morality than what one does with one's private parts.  And indeed, the "pleasure of putting other people in the wrong" is up there for me in the list of bad things. 

Gerson continues:

Yet moral liberals have something to learn as well. The failure of human beings to meet their own ideals does not disprove or discredit those ideals. The fact that some are cowards does not make courage a myth. The fact that some are faithless does not make fidelity a joke. All moral standards create the possibility of hypocrisy. But I would rather live among those who recognize standards and fail to meet them than among those who mock all standards as lies. In the end, hypocrisy is preferable to decadence.

I don't think anyone (serious) fits the description of "moral liberal" here.  The failure of self-righteous jerks like Gerson's former boss does not mean the values those self-righteous jerks hold are empty.  That's like a logical fallacy or something (play along at home–name that fallacy).  And I think attributing such sloppy thinking to non-existent opponents is a kind of "putting people in the wrong."  Moreover, it's just dishonest arguing.

But it gets worse.  Gerson seems to think that there is a stark choice–live among the inconsistent, but strident proponent of that old-time morality, or be a moral relativist.  He'd be first of alll hard-pressed to find moral relativists of the type he suggests anywhere.  Second, granted their existence somewheres, it doesn't follow that they are the only reasonable alternative to moral hypocrties.  That would indeed be a logical fallacy.  Can you guess which? 

h/t Alicublog

General discussion

A link

3 Comments

Here's an article worth reading.  A sample:

A powerful thunderstorm forced President Obama to cancel his Memorial Day speech near Chicago on Monday—an arbitrary event that had no affect on the trajectory of American politics.

And another:

Chief among the criticisms of Obama was his response to the spill. Pundits argued that he needed to show more emotion. Their analysis, however, should be viewed in light of the economic pressures on the journalism industry combined with a 24-hour news environment and a lack of new information about the spill itself.

Reminds me of this meta-news story story.

Equivocation, hollow man, Inexplicable, Plain Bad Arguments

3/5ths

3 Comments

Lately I've been thinking of making some modifications to my usual practice here.  One thought is that I should wander into some of the darker corners of the internet (by which I mean the National Review or Ann Coulter's website–if she has one, but she probably does).  One reason for this is that it's a sure bet you'll find something really silly.  Another reason is that I confess I sometimes think I'm guilty of the philosopher disease: shoddy and imperfect public discourse is too uninteresting to bother with (oddly enough, this disease produces two contrasting sets of symptom: (1) ignoring shoddy public discourse while engaging in the same; (2) being overly charitable to shoddy public discourse because it's not worth one's time to look at crappy arguments).  Well, crappy arguments exist, they really do.

And you don't need most of the time to leave the hallowed pages of the major dailies to see them.  Take this little gem from our favorite paralogist, George Will:

The name "progressivism" implies criticism of the Founding, which we leave behind as we make progress. And the name is tautological: History is progressive because progress is defined as whatever History produces. History guarantees what the Supreme Court has called "evolving standards of decency that mark the progress of a maturing society."

The cheerful assumption is that "evolving" must mean "improving." Progressivism's promise is a program for every problem, and progressivism's premise is that every unfulfilled desire is a problem.

Funny.  "Liberalism"–Will's usual name for the hollow man brigade he attacks–implies and endorsement of the "Founding" ("liber" means "free" or "book" or "child," well anyway).  Nonetheless, this has to be one of the sillier things he's written of late.  In the first place, a progressive, I would imagine, does not define his view tautologically, as Will says.  I think rather they have a pragmatic definition: are things working better, as in, "did you make any progress on the problem of the oil spilling in the Gulf of Mexico? " "No, we've made no progress.  Time has marched forward, so we have progressed into the future mind you, but we haven't made any progress with regard to our goal of an oil free Gulf of Mexico."  See, it's just not that hard. 

Second, in that phrase he quotes from the SCOTUS, evolving does mean "improving."  Oftentimes, however–at least in a scientific context–it doesn't. 

These objections of Will's are just silly.  Besides: didn't the "Founding" leave much to be improved upon?  After all, we had to declare that corporations were persons.  Also women.  And African Americans.

David Brooks, Ignoratio Elenchi

Gusher

2 Comments

So by now everyone knows that oil is being spilled into the Gulf of Mexico at a rate higher than 0 gallons.  That's bad for all involved.  What lessons do we draw from BP's epic failure to be regulated?  Let's ask David Brooks:

Everybody is comparing the oil spill to Hurricane Katrina, but the real parallel could be the Iranian hostage crisis. In the late 1970s, the hostage crisis became a symbol of America’s inability to take decisive action in the face of pervasive problems. In the same way, the uncontrolled oil plume could become the objective correlative of the country’s inability to govern itself.

Well if by "everybody" David Brooks means "everybody on Fox News and in the Right Wing think tanks David Brooks listens to," then, yes, everyone is comparing this unrelated thing to Hurricane Katrina.  In any case, the real parallel doesn't seem to be the Hostage Crisis either.  By all accounts, the Iranians had something to do with that (and it wasn't an accident).  (Funny thing: the other day George Will said that BP's failure demonstrates the failure of the regulatory system–rather than the failure of specific regulators). 

Brooks is drawing, I think, some pretty weird conclusions from the tandem failure of BP to control their own mess and of the government to make sure they don't make a mess in the first place.  What this fiasco tells me is this: BP ought to have to get some kind of permit and submit to some kind of honest inspection if they are to put everyone's oysters at risk. 

Indeed, perhaps it's time for the extreme socialism Obama has been advocating.

(For the humorless, the last sentence is a joke) 

Charles Krauthammer, hollow man, Ignoratio Elenchi

Personal virtue

4 Comments

Charles Krauthammer wonders:

Here's my question: Why were we drilling in 5,000 feet of water in the first place?

Ooo, Ooo [note–how does one write that Horshack noise?] pick me: "because oil, an increasingly scarce, difficult to procure, and fundamentally dangerous commodity must be the basis of our energy policy."  Or perhaps I could put this another way:

 Conservation may be a sign of personal virtue, but it is not the basis for a sound energy policy

That's Dick Cheney, mocking the idea that our energy policy (in May of 2001) ought to consist entirely in fossil fuel procurement.  Anyway, it's echoed in Krauthammer's attitude toward environmentalism:

Many reasons, but this one goes unmentioned: Environmental chic has driven us out there. As production from the shallower Gulf of Mexico wells declines, we go deep (1,000 feet and more) and ultra deep (5,000 feet and more), in part because environmentalists have succeeded in rendering the Pacific and nearly all the Atlantic coast off-limits to oil production. (President Obama's tentative, selective opening of some Atlantic and offshore Alaska sites is now dead.) And of course, in the safest of all places, on land, we've had a 30-year ban on drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.

That's right.  Blame those same environmentalists who have been saying, for quite a while now, that "conservation" (only one aspect, by the way, of the view mocked by Cheney–no one argued that conservation was the basis of a sound energy policy) is a public virtue–precisely because of spills such as these.  

*made some minor edits.

Your argument is invalid