Technical Fallacies

I wrote this last Christmas, but Ken said I should post it for all of you. Merry Christmas to all, and Happy New Year!

Peanut Brittle
Philip Snider, ©2007

The trouble with Mr. Van Camp, my high school chemistry teacher, was you couldn’t read him. He wasn’t Mr. Monotone, but he wasn’t what you’d call sparkling either. He was like his lab assignments—controlled. When his student teacher was telling us how to get out of the draft by inhaling a little bit of hydrogen sulfide gas to induce asthma right before a pre-induction physical, I don’t remember if Mr. Van Camp even blinked. I don’t have a clue how he felt about the war. And when that hippie kid with the beard and long hair that all merged into one huge helmet used to come in late every morning and sit on the front row in the middle of the classroom, stretch out his dirty feet and go right to sleep by 8:10 every day, Mr. Van Camp didn’t say anything about that either. But then later that year, when he was teaching us about colloidal suspensions, he mixed up a rust-colored paste, spun it out in the centrifuge and shook it onto a 3x5 card. He explained that it was a compound of mercury and, by the way, a contact explosive. Then he laid the card on the floor next to the hippie kid and dropped a pencil eraser on it and blew the kid out of his chair. You just couldn’t read Mr. Van Camp.
That’s probably why he could get away with the surprise lab on the Friday right before Christmas break. We walked in and saw all the lab stations set up with ring stands and Bunsen burners, and beakers of white crystals and small packet of other compounds, and a sheet of tinfoil, and lab instructions all laid out. The large beakers were marked with so-many cc’s of C12H22O11, and the instructions said we were going to reconfigure this carbohydrate chain. We added another so-many cc’s of NaCl and so many ml of H2O and dissolved the crystals over the burner. The sweet smell, of course, was a dead giveaway, and those of us who had watched our mothers make candy started to figure it out. When the dissolved crystals started to boil and then turn golden, we were to dump in the packet labeled “organic matter,” which turned out to be raw peanuts, and Mr. Van Camp walked around the chem lab and poured vanilla from a glass-stoppered bottle into our beakers. Then we poured the stuff out onto the tinfoil and it hardened into peanut brittle. It was my favorite lab of the whole year.
So I decided I was going to make peanut brittle for my family for a Christmas surprise. Mom made all kinds of candy every year. She would put the cookie sheet on the same cutting board where she sliced onions for our everyday meals, and then pour out the molten sugar that would become almond roca onto that cookie sheet, which would heat up the wood and bring out the scent of the onions every time. I can’t taste almond roca , even now, without smelling onions. Candy making at Christmas was Mom’s family tradition, and she was good at it.
Which was fitting because Dad had a sweet tooth. I was well into adulthood when I figured out the connection, but the fact that Dad was alcoholic probably played into that. He wasn’t what most people picture when they think of alcoholics. He didn’t drink in the mornings, and it wasn’t until after I had moved out that he ever actually passed out without getting undressed and going to bed first. I don’t think he ever even drank during the work day, and it’s only now in retrospect that I’ve begun to realize what it must have cost him to manage his addiction that tightly every day of his life. But part of that must have been that he substituted one hydrocarbon chain for the other—sugar for alcohol—every morning. I know when he finally did stop drinking, there were dishes of candy all around the house for the rest of his life. And I knew he loved peanut brittle.
Everybody else went to bed about eleven, and I told them I was going to stay up and watch the Carson show, which I usually did on Friday nights, and then I got things together to make the peanut brittle. Johnny was on it that night, and that was back when he did an hour-and-a-half show, so I didn’t even get started until about 1:30. The problem was that Mr. Van Camp’s lab instructions were for such a small batch, and they were all in metric measurements, so I had to convert them and then multiply them. Math was always my worst subject, but at that time I still believed Mrs. Shoebridge’s propaganda, that anybody could do math if they just took it slowly and followed the order of operations. I was probably the one who finally changed her mind on that. I suppose I should have known there was something wrong when it worked out to a cup of salt for one batch of candy, but the sugar was boiling on the stove, and the peanuts were getting burned, and I was committed.
It was awful. The sweet flavor came first, but then the salt bit like a mouth full of ants. The roof of my mouth went raw immediately, and it made my teeth tingle. I never could put salt on a slug after that peanut brittle. The cruelty of it was too clear and too familiar. All I can think of is that my tongue must have looked like a salted slug that night. I was so frustrated and disappointed, I just left everything on the counter and went to bed.
When I got up I heard my folks in the kitchen, and I went in to explain to them what had happened. Dad was drinking a glass of water, or as Mom said, “another glass of water,” and just stared at me. He never said anything. He just stared. It wasn’t a glare, really, because there was no anger or malice in it, but there wasn’t any holiday mirth there either. It was like he was looking into my head, with a face like Geraldo when he opened up Al Capone’s empty vault.
Mom saw the humor in it, but I’m not sure Dad ever did, which is odd because Dad was a great storyteller with a sharp sense of humor. Years later I tried telling the story once in his hearing, but he didn’t join in.

What's Next

A few days before the election I had lunch with some of my liberal friends. (I do have liberal friends. An English professor without liberal friends probably has no friends at all.) I enjoy their company. They usually inspire me to write, but immediately after the election, for obvious reasons, I felt pretty uninspired.

Then a few days later I heard a conversation on one of the news shows, and another on a political talk show, each recalling something I had heard from my liberal friends, and I began to recognize the fallacy that is going to be the first line of defense for the Obama Administration. As happened so often in the election, each of these conversations, no matter the original topic, came promptly around to the charge of racism. The groundwork has been laid, and from this point on you can be sure that any opposition to President Obama and his policies will, by definition, be racist.

That sounds so stark, and frankly ridiculous, when presented as a conclusion, but the deft academic gymnastics that are employed to establish the charge are worth examination. The argument goes like this: If you object to Obama's long-term relationship with terrorist William Ayers, what you are objecting to in essence is that Barack Obama is not "one of us." The average person of good judgment of course would never consider fraternizing with a person of that character, but President-elect Obama is smart enough and dedicated enough to handle such a relationship without being tainted. He's not like you and me, and if you object to that, it's because you hate and fear anyone that is different from you, someone who is "not one of us." (By the way, don't even raise the question of elitism in this regard. Anyone who considers any member of an oppressed race as elitist is clearly making an insensitive and racist argument. You don't want to go there.)

If you reject him because of his affiliation with a church where race-baiting and hate speech are part of the worship service, it's because you don't understand the Black Christian experience, and what you're really saying is "he's not one of us." If you think his tax policies and spending plan turn too much toward government control and too far from the free market, when you call that socialism you're trying to distance him from the mainstream of white American society and say "he's not one of us."

Now here's the payoff. The rejection of his "otherness" (one of those wonderful, made-up academic terms that supposedly freshens a stale concept by its very childishness) converts all these objections into an objection to his race; thus, rejection of his elitist attitudes, disapproval of his poor judgment in friends, disagreement with his fiscal policies, even concern over his lack of experience are all just code words to hide irrational, evil, racist opposition. (Fallacy Alert: Over-generalizing.) It's a very neatly packed argument, provided you don't look too closely at the label.

Besides being a vast over-generalization--for certainly it is possible to reject unsound, out-dated, Keynesian socialism or other leadership flaws without even knowing the racial heritage of the man--besides being an over-generalization, this argument is a classic red herring, a distraction right down to its spiny, segmented vertebrae (see Fallacies: Red herring).

But it's a red herring on steroids. When liberals deflect any single argument by calling it racism, they turn the discussion away from an argument that is capable of question, difficult to win, and toward an argument they cannot lose. Once the opponent must defend against the charge of racism, the debate is won. Better still, when they can group all objections into just one, and that one is the oppositions' "obvious" racism, then they never have to deal with logic or policy at all. No challenge has to be addressed as a discreet, rational issue. They can all be turned aside in one smooth counter-stroke as racist code words, not only not worthy of an answer, but clearly indicative of a moral failing in the opponent. You have to admire the audacity, to employ one of the President-elect's favorite words. This is a red herring the size of a halibut!

My timing, of course is a bit behind. It would have been useful to have posted this before the election, but have no fear. The charge of racism is not going away for at least the next four years. This particular fallacy worked well for liberals in the recent campaign, and if the Clinton Presidency taught us anything, it's that the campaign for the second term begins with the first inaugural. Don't expect the Obama team to be throwing down their tools anytime soon. If conservatives don't speak out and identify this tactic for the distraction it is, racism will certainly be the defining topic of debate for the entire Obama presidency.

I figured it out!

Barack Obama's definition of the "wealthy" whose taxes will increase under his plan keeps drifting downward.

For months, Obama had said that any family making less than $250,000/yr would get a tax break, but a couple of weeks ago that slipped to $200,000/yr. Then last week, Sen. Biden said it would be $150,000/yr, followed by Gov. Bill Richardson of NM setting the bar at $125,000. It doesn't look like it's going any lower--for now--and I think I know why.

The Palin family's annual income last year was $140,000. That'll fix her!

(I had actually intended this as a joke, but when I look at the investigation the Obama campaign launched against Joe "the Plumber" Wurtzelbacher, and the reporters they've kicked off their airplane, and the hit pieces published on Orlando reporter Barbara West for asking Sen. Biden some direct questions, I'm not sure it's all that funny.)

How Dumb Do They Think We Are?

A friend of mine announced the other day that he didn't much like any of the presidential/vice presidential nominees, but that whoever he voted for, it wasn't going to be Sarah Palin--that having a woman so stupid a heartbeat away from the presidency was more than he could contemplate. Of course, this isn't the first time we've heard this. The problem is, it doesn't square with the facts.

I've spent enough time in business, education and politics to know that, however little we may think of bosses, administrators and leaders, truly stupid people don't get very far in their fields. Truly stupid people get duped, get overwhelmed, get revealed, and then they get fired, early on. This is why the criticism of Sarah Palin, and for that matter Barack Obama, Joe Biden and George W. Bush, is so far off the mark. With careful editing and constant repetition in the media, anyone can be made to look like a fool (Fallacy Alert: Card Stacking). Certain conservative commentators have replayed ad nauseum Obama's claim to have visited 57 states, with just one or two more to go, as well as Joe Biden's invitation to a paraplegic to "Stand up, and let the people have a look at you." Such gaffs, and Palin has made her share, are red meat to the media critics, but they're not a valid standard for judgment.

So what is? Palin's resume provides some excellent examples. As Chair of the Alaska Oil and Gas Conservation Commission, and later as Governor of Alaska, Palin not only successfully negotiated with the world's most expensive lawyers, representing Exxon, BP and Conoco/Phillips, to obtain the most favorable development contracts the state has ever had, but then took them to court to force compliance--and won. You don't get to that point by being stupid. To accept the idea that Sarah Palin is stupid, you must also accept the idea that the oil companies are kind, beneficent, charitable institutions. Does anyone care to defend that proposition?

The truth is, the charge of stupidity is the default liberal argument applied to all Republicans, and it has worked for them for nearly four decades (Propaganda Alert: Name calling). Palin is a stupid, back-woods redneck. McCain is a dull, angry man. George W. Bush is a "village idiot" (the History faculty at Yale and the MBA faculty at Harvard ought to cringe at those charges, since they granted him his degrees). His father was a competent but uninspired bureaucrat, and Ronald Reagan was the original Dumb Republican President. But Reagan's economic policies laid the foundation for the longest, peacetime economic expansion in our nation's history, and his foreign policy pushed the Soviet Union to the brink of collapse. Bush Senior presided over that collapse, and his quiet diplomacy helped prevent the dissolution of that empire into multiple armed conflicts in all but a very few cases. An objective evaluation of George W.'s invasion of Iraq will have to wait for some future historian, but it should be remembered that this "village idiot" outsmarted two Democrat presidential candidates, a Supreme Court Challenge, and the American Congress on tax policy, education, court appointments and a variety of other issues. If these people are stupid, what does that make the ones they defeated?

There are any number of legitimate policy issues on which to base voting decisions in this election. The tired old charge that the candidate must be dumb because she's Republican isn't one of them.

An Ordinary Joe

Joe Wurzelbacher looks like the guy who plays third base at a Labor Day softball game, but he got a taste of political hardball this time. It seems that without any hostile intent, he threw Presidential Nominee Barack Obama a brush back curve and brought the Senator's team out of the dugout with bats in their hands.

Wurzelbacher is the ambitious plumber who wants to buy his own business, and whom Sen. Obama told he'd have to "share the wealth" (Propaganda alert: Euphemism--"Sharing the wealth" sounds so much less intrusive and punitive than "redistributing" it.) a terrific slip for the Presidential front-runner. Up to that point the Senator had contended that small businesses would be protected, and that all the little guys would get tax breaks, but in a moment of unfortunate candor, Sen. Obama admitted this would-be small businessman would have his wealth "shared out," which is to say, redistributed. Without time to spin his words, the Senator just blurted out the truth, which in his case is definitely a strike.


In the days that followed, Obama's team announced to the public that Wurzelbacher isn't a licensed plumber, that he owes the IRS back taxes, that he probably really isn't ready to buy that business anyway and that he doesn't make enough money to worry about the Obama Tax Plan, so he's just a trouble-maker after all. The Senator himself said to a rally, "Come on. How many $250,000 a year plumbers do you know?" (Fallacy alert: Red herring. the number of plumbers who make $250,000/year has no bearing on the impact of Obama's Tax Plan on small businesses. He's is trying to distract us.) There are, of course, defenses for each of these charges. As an employee, Wurzelbacher doesn't need to hold his own license. He works under the license of his boss. Many of us owe the IRS back taxes. If we don't have enough taxes withheld during a tax year (which is actually a better plan than giving the government a one-year interest-free loan), we may suddenly discover on April 15th that we owe the IRS a significant sum of money. There is even an automatic payment plan any taxpayer can apply for in order to pay off the deficit. The idea that Wurzelbach doesn't yet own the business and therefore shouldn't even be asking about the Tax Plan ignores the native ambition and high hopes of the American entrepreneur, or even the would-be entrepreneur. As Peter Stone wrote in his play 1776, most Americans would rather preserve the possibility of becoming rich than face the reality of being poor. Wurzelbacher has even been falsely accused of being a Republican plant, set up to trap the Senator, even though it was Obama who walked into Wurzelbacher's front yard. All of this, however, is entirely irrelevant.

And for the Obama Team, that's just the point. If Joe the Plumber can be made the focus of the discussion, and if he can be made to appear as an unreliable, or unworthy, or unsympathetic character, then the spotlight can be taken off Sen. Obama and his gaff. (Fallacy alert: Ad hominem)This is the essence of the ad hominem argument, to attack the man and thereby draw attention away from the argument. No one has denied that Sen. Obama want to redistribute the wealth created by successful workers, but by tarnishing the image of Joe Wurzelbacher, the Obama Team hopes to make people forget the suddenly public truth about the Tax Plan. It's a classic dodge.

It's also, as old time Democrat pollster Pat Caudell says, "Nixonian." Through it all though, Joe the Plumber has been a paragon of good-sportsmanship. He hasn't complained in the least, but he has made a very disturbing observation. To one interviewer this week he said, "When you can't ask a question of our leaders anymore, that gets scary." And it's still the first inning.

Bill Maher's "Religulous"

(*In the interest of full disclosure, I should note that I am an unapologetic member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, one of the churches Maher derides in his new film, Religulous.)

Bill Maher has made a career of mocking the beliefs and values of those with whom he disagrees. Unfortunately, the poverty of this one-note shtick escapes his most devoted fans because it appeals to their biases. His new film Religulous holds true to form, but it reveals perhaps as much about the man as it does about his subject, and that bears scrutiny.

For his victims, the appeal of Maher's diatribes may be hard to understand, but it goes to the very nature of humor. Mark Twain said (and he should know), "All humor is pathos." Pathos is a classic Greek concept that refers to suffering, empathy with it, sympathy for it or passive observation of it. We laugh at Chaplin's Little Tramp or John Heder's Napolean Dynamite because we empathize with the experience of playing the fool, and we find the characters sufficiently sympathetic that we hope for their eventual triumph. But Maher's derisive contempt demonstrates neither empathy nor sympathy. Instead he consciously relishes the discomfiture of those he considers his intellectual inferiors for the pure delight of seeing them suffer. His humor is quite literally pathetic.

Is this just sadism on Maher's part? No, that would be hypocritical, and clearly his contempt for most Americans is entirely sincere but, as noted before, revealing. It is one of the cliches of our contemporary society that hate is born of fear. Ask Mr. Maher. People who reject homosexuality are homophobic. People who oppose illegal immigration are xenophobic. Bill Maher, who hates God, religion and all who believe, is theophobic. The idea that he fears what religious people do to our society and in our government is a red herring (Fallacy Alert: Red herring). Somewhere at his core, beyond the clever sophistry and the glib mockery, Maher fears that those who believe are right, and if they are, the consequences for him are too appalling to contemplate. However much he may protest or profane, neither Maher nor anyone else would expend so much energy trying to tear something down if he were not threatened by it. The more insistently this fear nags at him, the more loudly he must shout to keep from hearing.

Bill Maher mocks the thing he hates because Bill Maher is a theophobe.

Propaganda Alert: The Big Lie

In all three of his debates with Senator McCain, and regularly on the stump, Senator Obama repeatedly refers to cutting the business tax as a tax cut for the rich. The phrase "tax cuts for the rich" is a buzz word designed to promote class envy from which liberal demagogues hope to profit. It imputes a nefarious purpose to those who support a healthy business climate and implies that their motives are nothing but greed for money and power. Even more harmful, and more dangerous for our economy and our nation, it eliminates the possibility that any two people can have a disagreement without one of them being "evil," "corrupt" and "exploitative of the poor." The wedge that this tactic has driven in American politics and society is appalling, but it has worked, and those who have used it are loath to give it up.

It's a lie. It's a Big Lie. And they're sticking to it.