MPs are time-serving jobsworths - and it's the fault of the media

I had just got through chatting with my son who lives in the Emerald Isle, and telling him I thought I'd let OR lapse because I'm going to be AFK for most of the next three months, when this imbecility by Jonathan Isaby sprang at me from ConHome.

The media should stop vilifying MPs as lazy and idle if we want to continue attracting decent people into Parliament.

Kiddies, check out the list of logical fallacies in my last but one post before departing for Iberia, and see which ones apply most closely to that statement.

Hint: "continue" is the key word.

Climate catastrophist logical fallacies

Inspired by this unconsciously hilarious report in the Guardian about unexpectedly cold weather causing an increase in greenhouse gas ejaculations emissions because people selfishly wished to stay warm, I thought I'd run through the offences against logic commonly committed by the climate catastrophists. I doubt if the list is definitive!

• Ad hominem: seeking to discredit an argument by attacking an opponent's character (or funding!)
  
• Affirming a disjunct: A or B; A therefore not B
• Affirming the consequent: if A then B; if B therefore A
• Appeal to authority: a statement is correct because it is made by a person or persons regarded as authoritative
• Appeal to probability: because something could happen, it will happen
• Argument from ignorance: something is true because it has not been proved to be false
• Argument from repetition: something discussed so often that it does not need further discussion
• Argumentum ad populum: because many people believe something to be true, it must be true
• Argumentum verbosium: an argument too complex or verbose to make it possible to deal with all its details
• Bare assertion: an argument is assumed to be true because it says it is true
• Base rate: to make a probability judgment without taking into account empirical statistics about the probability
• Causal oversimplification: attributing a phenomenon to one cause when there are many
• Cherry picking evidence
• Circular causation: where the result of something is asserted to be its cause (carbon dioxide)
• Cum hoc ergo propter hoc: correlation between two factors does not imply one causes the other
• Demanding negative proof: avoiding the burden of proof by demanding proof of the contrary
• Denying the antecedent: if A then B; if not A therefore not B
• Equivocation: use of terms with more than one meaning without specifying which meaning is intended
• False analogy
• False attribution: appeal to false, fabricated, biased or irrelevant evidence
• False dichotomy: where two alternatives are declared to be the only possible options when there are more
• Jumping to a conclusion
• Moving the goalposts: changing the terms of the argument ("global warming" becoming "climate change")
• Negative proof: because a premise cannot be proved to be wrong, therefore it must be right
• Over-dramatization
• Over-simplification
• Petitio principii: where the conclusion of an argument is assumed in one or more of its premises.
• Post hoc ergo propter hoc: B follows A, therefore A causes B
• Reductio ad absurdam (a.k.a. slippery slope): seeking to deny that A is beneficial because A x 1000 is harmful
• Regression fallacy: ascribes cause where none exists
• Reification: when an abstraction or hypothesis is regarded as having a concrete existence
• Special pleading
• Suppressed correlative: redefining incompatible premises so that one encompasses the other

Correlation is NOT causation, dammit

Whoever wrote this article from the Economist's Democracy in America column (for "democracy" read the Democratic party) is just another standard product of Anglo-American "progressive" education, which eschews the teaching of history and logic because it would demolish the entire edifice of totalitarian thought the lefties have created. Such people simply lack the intellectual equipment to even see, let alone acknowledge, the gaping holes in their argument. 

First of all, as the article and the link on which it is based grudgingly admit, the relationship between the unionisation of teachers and performance in standarized testing proves nothing at all, not simply because - contrary to the indoctrination in those schools about global warming and other leftist pieties - correlation is not causation. However, another obvious objection is that the ACT and SAT tests are set by the teachers themselves in an institutional act of begging the question.

Yet another point ignored by the article is that the reason Republican are hostile to state employee trades unions is that the unions are the mainstay of the Democrats, recycling tax money back to the party that, unsurprisingly, has increased their pay and benefits beyond the ability of the productive sector to sustain them. So the following conclusion, so "wet" and so obviously written with an eye back across the Atlantic that it must have been by a Brit, is farcical.

There are clearly some serious problems facing American governance [1], and public-sector unions are going to have to make adjustments [2] to solve those problems, whether it means pension restructuring or allowing the firing of incompetent teachers. But those kinds of reforms will be unachievable if unions correctly [3] understand that their opponents, including Scott Walker and the modern Republican Party, are not in fact interested in collaborating with them on solutions [4], and are instead trying to destroy their existence as institutions [5].

1. No shit. Do you suppose a bloated parasitic sector might be one of them?
2. Adjustments, eh? Not "savage cuts", evidently. 
3. There can be no "if" in that statement. The unions' understanding is "correct", therefore their opponents are wrong, therefore:
4. Collaborative reforms are unachievable by Republicans [UK Conservatives] and we must all vote Democrat [UK Labour].
5. As to the Republicans attacking the unions, as the French aphorism puts it: Cet animal est très méchant: Quand on l'attaque, il se défend [This beast is very wicked: It will fight back, when it’s attacked].

The EU is a logical fallacy

Open Europe points to the manner in which the MSM uses words like:

. . . "mainstream", "slow lane" and waving "goodbye from the platform" - without any definition or further explanation - to present an underlying assumption as if it was a matter of fact. The assumption is that, looking ahead, not being in the eurozone is synonomous with being left on the periphery, in the slow lane or even standing still - an assumption which arbitrarily puts further integration in and of itself above, for example, economic growth as the main determinant of what constitutes the EU's "fast lane".

This borders on thought-terminating cliché - trying to end a debate with a commonly used phrase which is actually meaningless without some sort of definition, but that tends to discourage further reflection from the reader or listener. Or perhaps we can call this appeal to process.* Circular reasoning which sees the process of EU integration, in and of itself, as determining the speed at which a country travels - by virtue of being, well, EU integration. The actual outcome is secondary. 

 * Just a variant of petitio principii with elements of appeal to common practise and appeal to authority.

Reification

Although the proximate subject of this post is Andrew McCarthy's article "Imagining Islam" in NRO, the impediment to understanding posed by the lazy habit of attributing personality (see this post) to abstractions is not confined to Islam. It is another of the logical fallacies that have hollowed out modern political discourse

There is a nuanced difference, but for my purposes the term "reification" includes the belief that because you have hung a label on something (hypostatization) it must therefore exist. Among the more common are "human nature", "society", "community", "the government", and so on.*

McCarthy's imagined Islam is one that condemns the actions of jihadists, "an ideology so dedicated to human rights, so sternly set against savagery, that acts of terrorism were, by definition, 'un-Islamic activity'." But the one he claims is the real Islam, which is none of those things, is no less an imaginary construct.

His subject is not Islam, but rather the moral cowardice of those in his own society who seek to appease the unappeasable and, by doing so, increase the likelihood of greater aggression from a declared enemy that has been injured but not disabled - indeed has been further empowered - by an insufficiently ruthless application of the gun in gunboat diplomacy.

As I've said before, if someone - in this case the current rulers of Iran - repeatedly states that all must submit to their will or die, then they are my mortal enemies and I do not require any further justification for wishing them killed before they can carry out their threats.

I do not need to dehumanize or demonize them. They are human beings motivated by the usual mix of desires and fears, calculation and passion; but I do not care what their motives are - they pose an existential threat to all that I hold dear, and I want them gone.

All the rest of it is bull-shit.

*It occurs to me that "reification" may itself be a hypostatization. Hmm. Will have to revisit Chomsky's Language and the Mind, as I vaguely remember him resolving this conundrum.

P.S. By e-mail from Robin, I learn that the term "personification" is commonly used to describe the attribution of human characteristics to the inanimate/abstract. Damn. That complicates the linguistics even further.