Ad Hominem Abusive

Chuck Norris

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Chuck Norris doesn’t tolerate ad hominem attacks:

Hannity: Why don’t you run? No no no, there’s a solution — why wouldn’t you — Chuck Norris could be governor of Texas one day.

Norris: You know why? Because I’d be sitting here with my opponent, and debating, and then he would start attacking my character, and I’d jump over there and choke him unconscious.

[Laughter]

Hannity: You have more control than that!

Norris: I don’t! That’s the problem, you know. I have a thin skin. It was really tough in the film world. And in the political world, you know, I’d be killing half the people.

He chokes them. (Courtesy of C&L).

David Broder, Plain Bad Arguments, Unqualified Authority

Does David Broder read the Washington Post?

Two short points today. We’re still working out the kinks here.

First, my view is that we ought to redo our health care system. I think this is a matter of national security, much more say than the imaginary weapons of a fictional dictator. People here actually die from lack of adequate health care. Now, since it’s a matter of national security, and since we continue to pay richly for imaginary threats to our national security, we ought to not complain about things that are real. This is why this kind of stuff from David Broder) raises one’s blood pressure:

Acknowledging that “clearly, we need radical reconstructive surgery to make our health-care system effective, affordable and sustainable,” Walker cautioned that “what we should not do is merely tack new programs onto a system that is fundamentally flawed” — and rapidly driving the national budget into ruin.

He proposes a four-part test of fiscal responsibility for any health reform plan: “First, the reform should pay for itself over 10 years. Second, it should not add to deficits beyond 10 years. Third, it should significantly reduce the tens of trillions of dollars in unfunded health promises that we already have. Fourth, it should bend down — not up — the total health-care cost curve as a percentage of” gross domestic product.

If only people had made this argument about Iraq and Afghanistan.

Next point, the Lewin group is an insurance company-funded group. One ought not to cite them as independent and impartial observers. Following directly from the above:

An analysis by the Lewin Group shows that the Energy and Commerce Committee bill that was the basic blueprint for the House measure comes close to meeting the first of those tests and fails the other three, according to Walker, “by a wide margin.”

A separate Lewin Group study of the Finance Committee bill from which Majority Leader Harry Reid is working on the Senate legislation shows it is almost as much of a fiscal failure. It fails the fourth test, falls short on the third, and passes the first two only by assuming that future Congresses will force reductions in reimbursements to doctors and hospitals that lawmakers in the past have refused to impose.

Here is the Washington Post on the Lewin group on 7.23/2009:

Generally left unsaid amid all the citations is that the Lewin Group is wholly owned by UnitedHealth Group, one of the nation’s largest insurers.

Doesn’t Broder read his own paper?

General discussion

Speaking of hacks

1 Comment

We have written something like 155 posts on George Will, most of them criticisms of his arguments. “Why him?” people ask (they really do). If you follow the links to blogs discussing his articles and read the rarely published letters to the editor regarding them, you’ll find three basic types: (1) people who copy the whole op-ed to their web page, as if in some kind of sign of cyber approval; (2) people who talk about how they sometimes just have to disagree with him, despite their finding him a very intelligent and compelling writer; (3) people like me, who find his air of scholarship hollow, his premises too frequently dishonest or just wrong, and his conclusions weakly drawn when not just plain fallacious. That’s why we write about him.

But there is another reason. It’s still the reason we write about newspaper op-eds, and comparatively rarely about blogs. Detection of logical fallacies involves context. What is a straw man in one context, for instance, may not be a straw man in another context. In order to make a pedagogical point, for instance, a coach or a teacher may exaggerate the weakness of a particular course of action or point of view (Thanks to Scott for this example). In a similar fashion, poorly informed individuals may entertain lots of straw men concerning alternative views without knowing it. What’s wrong in their case is their ignorance of better arguments, not their malicious attempt to deceive. Whether that global ignorance is purposeful or not is another matter for another time.

The context of a high-caliber newspaper op-ed page, we maintain, ought to be another. We’d presume, I think fairly, that a newspaper such as the Washington Post aims to inform its readers. It has an interest therefore in the truth of the claims being alleged as true on its pages. Most of the newspaper aims to inform in a straightforward way. It does this so people can avoid the global ignorance about points of view, places, people, positions and postulations. This simple feature of the newspaper implies another one: the informative function of a newspaper ought to carry over on to its op-ed page. The op-ed page is worthless if it merely becomes a forum for the over-eager polemicist. It ought to be founded on the well-established facts of the world of honest reporting (not, for instance, the “scholars” of the American Enterprise Institute).

But we ask too much. In the context of an article gloating about how fewer Americans believe in anthropogenic climate change, he writes:

In their new book, “SuperFreakonomics,” Steven D. Levitt, a University of Chicago economist, and Stephen J. Dubner, a journalist, worry about global warming but revive some inconvenient memories of 30 years ago. Then intelligent people agreed (see above) that global cooling threatened human survival. It had, Newsweek reported, “taken the planet about a sixth of the way toward the Ice Age average.” Some scientists proposed radical measures to cause global warming — for example, covering the arctic ice cap with black soot that would absorb heat and cause melting.

Levitt and Dubner also spoil some of the fun of the sort of the “think globally, act locally” gestures that are liturgically important in the church of climate change. For example, they say the “locavore” movement — people eating locally grown foods from small farms — actually increases greenhouse gas emissions. They cite research showing that only 11 percent of such emissions associated with food are in the transportation of it; 80 percent are in the production phase and, regarding emissions, big farms are much more efficient.

Newsweek is not a peer-reviewed scientific journal. Levitt and Dubner have been roundly criticized for their hacking it up (today’s theme!) on global warming (links later, still dealing with format issues). And that point, by the way, of locavoring it misses it widely–it’s not the transportation only, it’s the method of monoculture and petroleum-intensive production that people are trying to avoid.

Such countervailing facts should be obvious to anyone who has read the Post (I should hope). Alas.

General discussion

Hacked

2 Comments

As you can see, we’ve suffered a dramatic loss of style. Our WordPress install was hacked sometime this weekend, but thanks to our backups we didn’t lose anything and were able to do a quick reinstallation. We’re taking our time getting things back to the way they were, however. Hopefully we’ll have things fully restored in the next couple of days and be back in the trenches.

Bad Explanations, Charles Krauthammer, hollow man, Michael Gerson, Straw Man, Suppressed Evidence

A time to gloat

Today's Washington Post features two articles about how bad Health Care reform is for us all from guest columnists, an article about awesome natural gas, and two of the regulars (Krauthammer and Gerson) gloating about the recent victories in the historically momentous off-off year governor elections in Virginia and New Jersey.  For Krauthammer, these victories show how Obama has not eliminated the need for elections:

In the aftermath of last year's Obama sweep, we heard endlessly about its fundamental, revolutionary, transformational nature. How it was ushering in an FDR-like realignment for the 21st century in which new demographics — most prominently, rising minorities and the young — would bury the GOP far into the future. One book proclaimed "The Death of Conservatism," while the more modest merely predicted the terminal decline of the Republican Party into a regional party of the Deep South or a rump party of marginalized angry white men.  

A straw man or a hollow man?  I can't think that anyone seriously would have predicted no republican would ever win any race ever again.  Many in fact won on that election night in 2008, it's just that Democrats secured large majorities in both houses of congress and won the presidency.  I'll go with hollow man here: no one held the view Krauthammer is attacking.

He should be allowed to have his fun about the great myth of Obama.  He continues:

The irony of 2009 is that the anti-Democratic tide overshot the norm — deeply blue New Jersey, for example, elected a Republican governor for the first time in 12 years — because Democrats so thoroughly misread 2008 and the mandate they assumed it bestowed. Obama saw himself as anointed by a watershed victory to remake American life. Not letting the cup pass from his lips, he declared to Congress only five weeks after his swearing-in his "New Foundation" for America — from remaking the one-sixth of the American economy that is health care to massive government regulation of the economic lifeblood that is energy.

Moreover, the same conventional wisdom that proclaimed the dawning of a new age last November dismissed the inevitable popular reaction to Obama's hubristic expansion of government, taxation, spending and debt — the tea party demonstrators, the town hall protesters — as a raging rabble of resentful reactionaries, AstroTurf-phony and Fox News-deranged.

Some rump. Just last month Gallup found that conservatives outnumber liberals by 2 to 1 (40 percent to 20 percent) and even outnumber moderates (at 36 percent). So on Tuesday, the "rump" rebelled. It's the natural reaction of a center-right country to a governing party seeking to rush through a left-wing agenda using temporary majorities created by the one-shot election of 2008. The misreading of that election — and of the mandate it allegedly bestowed — is the fundamental cause of the Democratic debacle of 2009.

Before Charles gets too heated about the death of the Obama mandate, he–and everyone else by the way Democrats included–should consider the following result from Tuesday's election:

House Democrats are adding two new members to their team Thursday and Friday, just hours before a crucial floor vote on health care reform.

One of those guys–Bill Owens–did defeat an authentic Fox-News-deranged guy.  To put this another way, Tuesday's election put Obama two votes closer to enacting his Maoist agenda; it's not the time for gloating. 

Politicians, Slippery Slope

Kang or Kodos

13 Comments

Normally the slippery-slope style argument predicts (sometimes but not always fallaciously) a kind of political or moral disaster if a certain kind of thing is allowed.  For this reason I sometimes wonder whether such an argument should be called "argument from permissiveness."  For, if we permit gay marriage, then all manner of things must also be allowed (triple marriage, quadruple marriage, limited liability companies, etc.).  They serve usually as a warning against something relatively minor and incremental: if they get their foot in the door, then you will have to contend with consequences x, y, and dreaded z!  

On this topic, the blogosphere is a aflame with Orrin Hatch's dire warning about the consequences of socialized medicine:

HATCH: That’s their goal. Move people into government that way. Do it in increments. They’ve actually said it. They’ve said it out loud.

Q: This is a step-by-step approach —

HATCH: A step-by-step approach to socialized medicine. And if they get there, of course, you’re going to have a very rough time having a two-party system in this country, because almost everybody’s going to say, “All we ever were, all we ever are, all we ever hope to be depends on the Democratic Party.”

Q: They’ll have reduced the American people to dependency on the federal government.

HATCH: Yeah, you got that right. That’s their goal. That’s what keeps Democrats in power.

There is also a little bit of "you're only saying that because. . . " in here: the Democrats only want health care reform because it keeps them in power.  I think there are more pressing reasons to want it, such as the fact that our current system is killing us, but maybe I'm naive.  

The weird thing about this particular slippery slope is that the consequence Hatch warns against is that people are going to like the Democratic party.  Such will be their adoration that they abolish by their votes the two-party system.

In the first place I think that's very unlikely, but if it were likely–and if Hatch weren't just lying–he'd see that he has just admitted that people would embrace the idea of "socialized medicine"–if they didn't like it,they wouldn't continue in Hatch's fantasy scenario to vote for Democrats.

Ad hominem tu quoque

Reagan quoque

2 Comments

Now that there has been a decisive ideological shift in American politics, I'm beginning to see a huge proliferation of "arguments from hypocrisy," i.e., arguments that accuse people of hypocrisy.  In a very general sense, such arguments can take two forms: good and bad.  The good ones point out some real case of hypocrisy, the bad ones a specious one.  One variety of bad argument from hypocrisy is the ad hominem tu quoque–this is when you accuse someone of hypocrisy when such a charge is irrelevant.

We've seen plenty of ad hominem tu quoques here.  What makes for a good argument from hypocrisy, however?  Is there some kind of expiration date?  Consider along these lines the following from the Washington Monthly: 

Right-wing leaders continue to find the strangest things to get upset about.

President Obama paid his respects to fallen U.S. soldiers. This doesn't seem like an especially controversial thing to do. President Bush chose not to greet returning caskets during his two terms, and didn't even want journalists to take photographs of the events, but nevertheless went out of his way to advertise private meetings with the families of the fallen. Was this "narcissistic," too?

For that matter, when 16 Americans were killed in an attack on the U. S. Embassy in Beirut, then-President Reagan not only appeared at Andrews Air Force Base to greet the flag-draped coffins, he brought the First Lady and the media, and then talked about his appearance in a weekly radio address. Did that make it a "photo-op"?

To be a hypocrite, one has to hold the beliefs one criticizes in others or one has to have ideological commitments to beliefs one criticizes in others.  The present case is of the latter variety.  The hypocrisy is inferential, since no is charging Bush or Reagan with hypocrisy, just people who purportedly adore them. 

There are two routes out of this charge, I think.  One is to deny they are adored.  For many of the chatterboxes who make these arguments, however, this is hard to do in the Bush case.  Their silence then would impugn them: they adored Bush, and most never criticized him.

The Reagan case, however, is a bit more difficult.  It happened so long ago, I think, that one might wonder whether the expiration date has passed.  One might wonder this, if it weren't for the canonization of St.Reagan.  So I think "Reagan did it too" or "Reagan quoque" still counts.  So given Reagan's stature within the current Republican worldview, one can use him in charges from hypocrisy.  Nixon, on the other hand, probably not–but that doesn't mean former employees of Nixon can accuse others of being Nixonian.  That expiration date has surely not passed.

Ad Hominem Abusive, Contradictions, George Will, ignorance of basic matters of logic, Ignoratio Elenchi, inconsistency, Plain Bad Arguments, Weak Analogy

You have a right to be wrong

True story.  A few years back one of my students had confused some minor matter about a text of Plato.  When I pointed that out, another student commented: "He has a right to be wrong."  That odd justification comes out in a George Will op-ed where he, unlike his usual, argues for new rights not enumerated in the constitution.  Now of course he probably thinks he can get there with a series of individually valid inferences.  Fine, but you have to understand that any other time one maintains a right not specifically enumerated in the Constitution, Will will shout "judicial activism" or some other synonym.  Don't get me wrong, I believe in the concept of inferential rights, I just think it's funny that Will doesn't, until he does.

This is not to say, however, that Will does not have a point.  He may, but I think, as is perhaps no surprise, that his argument for it sucks.  He maintains as a kind of premise one that liberals want to coerce others to believe like they do–this is their MO, which is a word the very pretentious Will would likely spell out: Modus operandi.  It's a little ironic, since the specific topic in question concerns the desire of some (not the liberals) to limit the rights of others to engage in private, self-regarding behavior.  Some people, not happy with the structure of our democracy (where fundamental rights get interpreted out of the Constitution sometimes), gather signatures to put such matters on the ballot.  This raises an important question: are signatures on referendums like voting and therefore private? 

I think it's fair to say that such a question admits of no easy answer.  But just because it doesn't admit of an easy answer, does not mean any answer, such as the following one offered by Will, will suffice:

The Supreme Court has held that disclosure requirements serve three government interests: They provide information about the flow of political money, they deter corruption and avoid the appearance thereof by revealing large contributions, and they facilitate enforcement of contribution limits. These pertain only to financial information in candidate elections. These cannot justify compelled disclosures regarding referendums because referendums raise no issues of officials' future performance in office — being corruptly responsive to financial contributors. The only relevant information about referendums is in the text of the propositions.

In 1973, Washington's secretary of state ruled that signing an initiative or referendum petition is "a form of voting" and that violating voters' privacy could have adverse "political ramifications" for those signing. In 2009, some advocates of disclosure plan to put signers' names on the Internet in order to force "uncomfortable" conversations.

In the interest of fairness, something I'm always interested in by the way, the above two paragraphs make some attempt at arguing for the position that referendum signatures ought to be private.  I think their attempt fails: The first is irrelevant to the particular issue and the second cites the irrelevant precedent of the secretary of state.  A referendum petition by any standard is not a vote: you sign your name and put your address on it for the purposes of public inspection of its authenticity.  You do not sign your vote. 

In any case, the following arguments for the above proposition really blow:

Larry Stickney, a social conservative and president of the Washington Values Alliance, says that disclosure of the identities of petitioners will enable "ideological background checks" that will have a chilling effect on political participation. He frequently encounters people who flinch from involvement with the referendum when they learn that disclosure of their involvement is possible. He has received abusive e-mails and late-night telephone calls and has seen a stranger on his front lawn taking pictures of his house.

The Wall Street Journal's John Fund reports that some Californians who gave financial support to last year's successful campaign for Proposition 8 — it declared marriage to be only between a man and a woman — subsequently suffered significant harm. For example, the director of the Los Angeles Film Festival, who contributed $1,500, was forced to resign. So was the manager of a fashionable Los Angeles restaurant who contributed just $100.

The first paragraph offers evidence that vociferous advocates may suffer the paranoia that comes along with taking an unpopular position on a matter of public interest.  It does not establish that a private citizen whose only action was signing a petition may suffer these things.  The second paragraph shows that people who have given financial support, something about which disclosure has been determined to be legitimate (and admitted to by Will himself only a three paragraphs before) have suffered harm.  I don't think one can be fired for one's political affiliations–there are laws against that I believe.

Charles Bouley, a gay columnist, has honorably protested such bullying. He says that people "have the right to be wrong," and reminds gay activists: "Even Barack Obama said marriage was between a man and a woman at a time when we needed his voice on our side on equality. He let us down, too, remember, and many of you still gave him a job."

Indeed, people do have a right to be wrong, and others have a duty to point that out.

Ross Douthat, Things that are false

Western Way of Reason

Culture Warrior Ross Douthat, columnist at the New York Times, opines on the coming religious war:

But in making the opening to Anglicanism, Benedict also may have a deeper conflict in mind — not the parochial Western struggle between conservative and liberal believers, but Christianity’s global encounter with a resurgent Islam.

Here Catholicism and Anglicanism share two fronts. In Europe, both are weakened players, caught between a secular majority and an expanding Muslim population. In Africa, increasingly the real heart of the Anglican Communion, both are facing an entrenched Islamic presence across a fault line running from Nigeria to Sudan.

Where the European encounter is concerned, Pope Benedict has opted for public confrontation. In a controversial 2006 address in Regensburg, Germany, he explicitly challenged Islam’s compatibility with the Western way of reason — and sparked, as if in vindication of his point, a wave of Muslim riots around the world.

The riots reference is silly and self-congratulatory, but "the Western way of reason" as an exclusive European notion betrays and ignorance of both the notions of "western" and "reason." 

Douthat at least, as a graduate of college, ought to know there would be precious little Western way of reason worth giving a crap about without, for instance, Averroe–che il gran commento feo.

So it's compatible, to say the least–one wonders, however, about whether Douthat's militant Christianity is. 

General discussion

It’s not so hard

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We've seen I think no shortage of really bad arguments against health care reform.  Arguments against, in my humble opinion, ought to take one of two forms: attack the facts (honestly), or criticize (honestly) the inferences drawn thereupon.  Looking around the op-ed pages one finds precious little of that.  This is either because the authors don't know how to do this (likely) or they're too lazy or dishonest to try (more likely).  Maybe, however, they don't think they'd be successful (maybe likely).  

Having said that, I was pleased to read this on a left-leaning blog (Political Animal):

When it comes to reform opponents pushing back against polls showing support for a public option, they have some credible options to choose from.

Conservatives could, for example, argue that there's still some confusion about the policy details, so the poll results should be taken with a grain of salt. That's not unreasonable. They could also argue that the public has simply embraced a bad idea, and that what it popular is not always right. That, too, is a plausible approach.

Simply pretending that the polls don't exist, however, is far more annoying.

See, it's really not very hard to have a meaningful discussion.

Your argument is invalid