{"id":4395,"date":"2013-09-05T00:07:12","date_gmt":"2013-09-05T05:07:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/?p=4395"},"modified":"2013-09-05T00:07:12","modified_gmt":"2013-09-05T05:07:12","slug":"under-a-description","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/?p=4395","title":{"rendered":"Under a description"},"content":{"rendered":"

Here’s a way you can straw man someone.\u00c2\u00a0 Pick out a bad decision she made, then say she chose that bad part of the decision.\u00c2\u00a0 For example, say my wife and I are\u00c2\u00a0 trying to decide where to vacation.\u00c2\u00a0 She wants to go to a cabin in the woods – something rustic and woodsy.\u00c2\u00a0 But we get there, and the cabin’s filled with spiders and there’s a raccoon in the fireplace.\u00c2\u00a0 Angrily, I say: We could have gone to Chicago, but you preferred a cabin filled with arachnids and vermin!<\/em> Yes, that’s the choice she made, but not what she chose as she chose it.\u00c2\u00a0 What she chose was rustic vacation… what that choice yielded was spiders and a hissing varmit.\u00c2\u00a0 The lesson: our desires are propositional attitudes, and those attitudes represent what we desire or choose under a specific description.\u00c2\u00a0 Again, she chose rustic cabin… and it happened to have spiders.\u00c2\u00a0 She didn’t prefer the spiders.\u00c2\u00a0 She just chose something that turned out had them.\u00c2\u00a0 That’s not choosing spiders.\u00c2\u00a0 So it’s a straw man – you’re misrepresenting the intentions of your interlocutor by describing them under the description of their worst consequences.<\/p>\n

OK.\u00c2\u00a0 So now the point about choice under a description and straw-manning is clear, let’s turn to the way George Neumayr<\/a> over at AmSpec<\/em> is handling his portrayal of the Obama Administration’s turn on foreign policy.\u00c2\u00a0 His view is not just that they make bad decisions, but that they choose terrible things.<\/p>\n

Ho Chi Minh once said that he won the Vietnam War not in the jungles of Asia but on the streets of America. Islamic terrorists could make a similar claim: from Libya to Egypt to Syria, they rose to power not in spite of American leaders but because of them. Obama and McCain preferred Morsi to Mubarak, the assassins of Christopher Stevens to Gaddafi, and now the enforcers of sharia to Assad<\/strong>.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The final point about Syria is a familiar one.\u00c2\u00a0 (If you haven’t, take a quick look at John Dickerson’s Slate overview<\/a> of the various arguments regarding Syria.)\u00c2\u00a0 The point is that there would be an unintended consequence of destabilizing Assad – the opposition’s not a bunch of liberal-minded democrats, but radical Islamists.\u00c2\u00a0 But it’s not that with the Arab Spring, the Obama Administration chose<\/em> to support a member of the Muslim Brotherhood to lead Egypt or that there would be a terrorist attack on a consulate in Libya.\u00c2\u00a0 Those were the consequences of the choices, but, again, choices are under descriptions, and not all consequences are the descriptions.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Here’s a way you can straw man someone.\u00c2\u00a0 Pick out a bad decision she made, then say she chose that bad part of the decision.\u00c2\u00a0 For example, say my wife and I are\u00c2\u00a0 trying to decide where to vacation.\u00c2\u00a0 She wants to go to a cabin in the woods – something rustic and woodsy.\u00c2\u00a0 But … Continue reading Under a description<\/span> →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[55,413,12],"tags":[1964,613],"class_list":["post-4395","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-bad-explanations","category-hollow-man","category-straw-man","tag-straw-man","tag-straw-obama"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4395","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4395"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4395\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4396,"href":"https:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4395\/revisions\/4396"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4395"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4395"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4395"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}