Here's Republican idea man Newt Gingrich on Obama:
"What we need is a president, not an athlete," Gingrich said during a question and answer period after his speech. He added: "Shooting three point shots may be clever, but it doesn't put anybody to work."
Big ideas.
Fun with video. Watch this video mash-up of cable TV discussion of the Commonwealth of Virginia's "Confederate History Month" Proclamation, then add your favorite points in the comments.
Here's an entertaining misuse of an argument schema (or topic as they were once called):
KRAUTHAMMER: It’s only nine times the length of the Gettysburg Address, and Lincoln was answering an easier question, the higher purpose of the union and soldiers who fell in battle. The president had an easy answer. He could have said I wanted to make history with health care and to do it I have to raise your taxes. … End of answer.
He's talking about Obama's response to a question about health care and taxes–a response that went 17 minutes. Aside from the fact that Krauthammer's argument just blows, as the Gettsyburg address wasn't a response to a specific question about policy, the form of this argument is ludicrous. Imagine–every policy matter less important than the preservation of the Union (or the tyranny of Northern aggression, depending on your viewpoint) must be discussed for a time commensurate with its relationship to the Gettsyburg Address.
Today Robert Samuelson, mustachioed captain bringdown of the Washington Post op-ed page, meditates on the obvious fact that people who think they're right about something feel good about being right. The only thing is that he mistakes this for some kind of profound discovery. He writes:
Obama's approach was politically necessary. On a simple calculus of benefits, his proposal would have failed. Perhaps 32 million Americans will receive insurance coverage — about 10 percent of the population. Other provisions add somewhat to total beneficiaries. Still, for most Americans, the bill won't do much. It may impose costs: higher taxes, longer waits for appointments. [argument please–eds]
People backed it because they thought it was "the right thing"; it made them feel good about themselves. What they got from the political process are what I call "psychic benefits." Economic benefits aim to make people richer. Psychic benefits strive to make them feel morally upright and superior. But this emphasis often obscures practical realities and qualifications. For example: The uninsured already receive substantial medical care, and it's unclear how much insurance will improve their health. [WTF? –eds.]
Purging moral questions from politics is both impossible and undesirable. But today's tendency to turn every contentious issue into a moral confrontation is divisive. One way of fortifying people's self-esteem is praising them as smart, public-spirited and virtuous. But an easier way is to portray the "other side" as scum: The more scummy "they" are, the more superior "we" are. This logic governs the political conversation of left and right, especially talk radio, cable channels and the blogosphere. [Or it's even easier to portray them as having ulterior psychological motivations about feeling good about themselves-eds.]
I think a country as rich as ours ought to be able to provide health insurance for everyone. I think this for moral reasons and practical ones. On the practical front, the total costs, I think, of our current system outweigh the benefits. The new bill, by the way, wasn't just about the uninsured (and really Samuelson ought to know this)–it was about reforming the insurance you already have (which in many cases barely qualifies as "insurance"). Now, thankfully, if Samuelson develops a new condition–mustache cancer for instance–he can't be "rescinded" (that was the idea, anyway) by his insurance company just because he's sick. If his kid has a preexisting condition, the Post's insurance policy can't not cover him. Well, that's the idea anyway.
Does it make me feel good about myself to have supported such a position? Maybe. Did I think it was the correct position to take? Yes. That feeling–feeling good about having the right position–is a consequence of my thinking I have the right position, rather than the cause of it.
But in any case, I think we can all assume for the sake of argument that everyone always wants to feel good about himself. We can also assume that people want to feel good about themselves for good reason. The relevant question here is whether people who supported (or opposed) HCR have good reason to feel good about themselves.
Maybe they do, maybe they don't.
It's 83 degrees on April 2nd in Chicago, (and 82 on April 1st), do you know where your global warming denier is?*
*It being warm, really warm, nay recordly warm today does not demonstrate by itself the view that the globe is warming. Nor does, however, an entirely predictable winter snow storm in one part of the world disprove it. I just thought we would be hearing screaming from Sean Hannity, George Will, and the rest of the denier community.
It's Holy Week, so here's a post about religion–Catholicism in particular. The US Conference of Catholic Bishops has been busy campaigning against Health Insurance Reform, dishonestly claiming that somehow despite severe restrictions, abortions might be covered. Reason enough to trash the whole thing.
Now comes of course another scandal, brought about no doubt by liberals attempting to destroy the Catholic Church. Not only have liberals been circling like buzzards above the latest priest-abuse (that's now an adjective, like "school shooting") scandal, they also, you see, had a hand in producing it. That's how ingenious this whole thing is.
Here's Ross Douthat, op-ed columnist for the New York Times:
This hasn’t prevented both sides in the Catholic culture war from claiming that the scandal vindicates their respective vision of the church. Liberal Catholics, echoed by the secular press, insist that the whole problem can be traced to clerical celibacy. Conservatives blame the moral relativism that swept the church in the upheavals of the 1970s, when the worst abuses and cover-ups took place.
In the first place, conservatives don't blame "moral relativism," they blame (wrongly) homosexuals (and the phenomenon of homosexuality). One might raise serious questions about the rate of the abuse among Catholic clergy (versus say other faiths), but no one can doubt that the One Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church as an institution sought to deny and cover up its crimes. Denying and covering up your crimes isn't what a moral relativist does. A moral relativist admits they happened, but denies that they are crimes. No one is alleging that.
Here is an interesting item from John Holbo at Crooked Timber:
No, I don’t mean: arguing fair. I think it should be ab homine. A moving (irrationally) away from the man. It’s a fallacy.
Here’s the context. Matthew Yglesias and Jonathan Chait have a diavlog in the course of which Chait takes the scrupulous high-road position that, when it comes to charges of racism, you really have to be slow to accuse. He rolls out the standard fair-play-in-debate considerations: if the person is saying something wrong, but not explicitly racist, you can just point out the wrongness, without speculating, additionally, that they said the wrong thing out of racism. There is, he implies, no real loss in not being able to delve into dark motive.
But here’s the problem with that. In an environment in which creative and speculative accusations of bad motives are, otherwise, flying back and forth in free and easy style, a social norm against accusing people of one sin in particular is actively misleading. It inevitably generates the strong impression that this bad motive – out of the whole colorful range of diseases and infirmities of the mind and spirit – is an especially unlikely motive. Which, in the sorts of cases Chait and Yglesias happened to be discussing, is not true. So, contra Chait, an inconsistent semi-norm against ad hominem arguments encourages an ab homine error that may be less angry (that’s not nothing) but is significantly more confused tha[n] what excessive – but even-handedly excessive! – hermeneutics of suspicion would produce.
I seem to remember talking about something like this before. I'd call this an error of excessive scrupulousity. Philosopher types fall prey to this one out of an overabundance of charity: Sure this argument really blows, but maybe there really is a good one in here somewhere. (Sometimes, I think, philosopher types do not want to trouble their beautiful minds with silly arguments, so they just deny their existence or refuse to discuss them).
Nonetheless, I still think one ought to be especially careful in attributing motives, including racist ones, to other arguers. In the first place, those motives are hard to know (and therefore easily disputed); second, they are hard to define (and therefore easily disputed); third, and most importantly (and tragically) they are come across as illegitimate ad hominems (and are therefore easily disputed). The ease of dispute of imputation of racism places a heavy practical burden on the accuser. Does one really want, in other words, to go through the necessary evidence in order to make a point likely to be only tangentially related to the discussion at hand (even if true)?
So this is mostly a pragmatic objection to Holbo's point. Unfortunately, what makes these sorts of accusations difficult (even if true and relevant) is the deeply entrenched presence of the fallacy fallacy. This is the view that the very criticizing of someone else–especially in accusing them of fallacies–is itself a kind of fallacy. The rules of our dumb discourse prevent legitimate criticism. The only thing that counts, I still maintain this week, is consistency. This is why Pat Buchanan, despite his Hitler apologetics, is constantly on TV. He's consistent.
Too much of our critical political discourse depends on one single virtue: consistency. This is why Pat Buchanan, a man who writes articles (I am not exaggerating) in praise of Hitler–is a kind of pundit saint. Since consistency matters, and consistency depends on memory–or rather, detecting someone's inconsistency depends on remembering what she's said in the past, let's have some fun with our favorite son on an economist, Robert Samuelson. Samuelson, is like the captain bringdown of the Post editorial page. He's got a droopy mustache, a dour expression, and he poo-poos just about everyone who tries to do something about something–environmentalists are dumb and self-indulgent for buying Priuses!.
For a while–for those who remember–Samuelson been poo-pooing Obama's "self-indulgence" on health insurance reform. A more competent rhetorical analyst, by the way, might have fun with the way he always goes ad hominem on Obama–treating his own impoverished and uncharitable image of Obama rather than Obama's stated positions (he even admitted once that this was his own problem). But it's worthwhile to poke fun at Samuelson's priorities. Way back before we spent 700 plus billion dollars in Iraq, chasing what turned out to be an easily uncovered deception, here is what Samuelon wrote:
A possible war with Iraq raises many unknowns, but "can we afford it?" is not one of them. People inevitably ask that question, forgetting that the United States has become so wealthy it can wage war almost with pocket change. A war with Iraq would probably cost less than 1 percent of national income (gross domestic product). Americans have grown accustomed to fighting with little economic upset and sacrifice.
Pocket change. In reflecting on this piece (called "A War We Can Afford") Samuelson wrote:
Yes, that column made big mistakes. The war has cost far more than I (or almost anyone) anticipated. Still, I defend the column's central thesis, which remains relevant today: Budget costs should not shape our Iraq policy. Frankly, I don't know what we should do now. But in considering the various proposals — President Bush's "surge," fewer troops or redeployment of those already there — the costs should be a footnote. We ought to focus mostly on what's best for America's security.
When it comes things that are actually real, on the other hand, Samuelson is skeptical:
When historians recount the momentous events of recent weeks, they will note a curious coincidence. On March 15, Moody's Investors Service — the bond rating agency — published a paper warning that the exploding U.S. government debt could cause a downgrade of Treasury bonds. Just six days later, the House of Representatives passed President Obama's health-care legislation costing $900 billion or so over a decade and worsening an already-bleak budget outlook.
900 billion? That figure is almost exactly what we've spent in seven years of war. Weird. But this time cost is all that matters.
Lately I've been in a kind of why-bother mood. Has the world of political discourse been particularly foul lately? It's hard to say. It's certainly true that the imminent (maybe today!) health-care legislation has driven many around the bend. For too many people who ought to know better, this corporate-friendly legislation is basically communism. Pointing out that such people have constructed hollow men seems really ineffective. Not because they don't get it, but rather because they know exactly what they're doing, and they know that our current discourse rules reward them for doing so. Why's that?
We'll all agree it's wrong to break the rules. The rules in this circumstance (tv and print political discourse) include the following:
(1) being accurate and truthful;
(2) being decorous (not being a name calling arse);
(3) managing your facts well–i.e., drawing the appropriate connections, etc. (not blaming things on voodoo for instance);
(4) being consistent in your positions (goose and gandering).
These are the ones I can think of at the moment. Fallaciously reasoning or behaving covers all of these or some of these depending on the infraction. Hollow-manning, for instance, is a failure of all four of these, but particularly the first two. When one hollowmans, one isn't being accurate and one isn't be decorous.
I think we all know that. The problem, however, seems to be in pointing this out. The hollow manner (and by extension the fallacy-employer) has an advantage. He can break the rules, claim not to, and then claim, as they often do, that pointing out violations of the rules is a violation of the rules. So therefore:
(5) accusing someone of a violation of the rules is a violation of the rules.
This makes the whole rule-bound enterprise very odd. If I suggest someone has made sh*t up, I'm going to open myself to the accusation of not being decorous. It's not sporting, in other words, to accuse people of cheating. Or at least one–a devious one–will be allowed to make that accusation–so now you're the d**che for pointing out the dishonesty, and now the discussion regards your violation of the rules, rather than the initial one.
I'd suggest that this is one reason at least we see so little explicit fallacy-identification in our political discourse. Put another way, this is why people–such as those who frequently appear here–get away with arguing the way they do. That's the way the rules of discourse have been allowed to work.
Now if anyone has an explicit example of what I'm talking about here I'd appreciate it. I've seen it a gazillion times, but it's Sunday morning, and though I've been gone for a week so, I'm now on vacation.
Thankfully Cornell University's very excellent philosophy program is off the hook for the following travesty:
As I approach my 10-year college reunion, it's clear that I missed a few classes that would have proved helpful.
Those classes include "Leadership and Ethics" and "Ethical Theory," offered by the Program on Ethics and Public Life at my alma mater, Cornell University.
See, I'm certain that at some point those classes would have covered the issue I've been grappling with recently, in which case I'd be able to tell you what Plato and Aristotle said about it. Maimonides and Thomas Aquinas, too. I bet you Hobbes and Locke have really super advice on this one. And you just know Ayn Rand would be all over it.
Alas, I chose to commune with the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles of the art history department instead – Leonardo, Michelangelo, Donatello and Raphael. So to sort through my philosophical conundrum, I will enlist your help.
With President Obama making his final push for health care reform, I ask you to consider the following "If, Then" theorem: If our health is the President's business, then the President's health should be our business.
What follows is a series of ad hominem tu quoques. For instance:
* The President's push for health care is disingenuous.
In June 2009, he called the sweeping tobacco legislation that he passed "a victory for health care reform" and "a step that will save lives and dollars." Whether Obama's main interest in passing health care reform in America is to save lives or save dollars – and it has been both over the past year – one could argue that a President who smokes isn't really doing much of either.
One could argue that, but one would be wrong. Perhaps she should have taken a logic class as well.
Courtesy of the guys at Sadly, No!