Bad Omen?

Do I have this right?
The catalyst for our current economic disaster was the collapse of the housing market, leading to mass foreclosures in which millions of people may lose their homes. Now the President's plan is to deal with this crisis by building more park benches, bridges, tunnels and overpasses.
Does anyone besides me think this is a bad omen?

Who do You Think You're Stimulating?

This site is dedicated to pointing out logical fallacies and propaganda techniques employed by newsmakers--ok, politicians and the media, really--but it's always fun to find examples in the news and illustrate them with my own experiences.

A few years ago I was teaching a pre-college composition course. This is a course that used to be called developmental, and before that remedial, and before that "bonehead" English (Propaganda Alert: Euphemism). One member of the class was a big, beefy young man with an attitude about English, so when I handed back his first in-class essay with a "D" grade on it, he wasn't happy with me. After class he dropped his paper on my desk, glared at me and said, "Why can't we have a real test?"

I confess I have a weakness for sarcasm, but I hasten to point out that while it may not be particularly polite, it's not a fallacy. I replied, "This was a real test. See your real grade?"

I think that was clever, but it was lost on my student. He said, "No, like, one where there's different answers, and I pick the right one."

I patiently explained that this was a writing class, and to determine his abilities I had to evaluate his writing. He replied, "Well, that's just stupid. I've taken this class three times before, and nobody else does it like that."

Besides providing me with a great teaching story, my student was falling victim to a classic fallacy. He thought that because everybody does something one way, that must be the only right way to do it. Vox populi, vox dei. "The voice of the people is the Voice of God." Except it's not.

Now President Obama is getting caught in the same type of error, and it's catching him from both directions. In fact, the whole Democrat power structure is engaged in the same kind of fallacious thinking. After his "stimulus" bill squeaked out of the House last week without a single Republican vote, the President held a pep rally to hearten his fainting party members. "We won," he told them, referring to last November's election, and so they get to do whatever they want. There's the Fallacy Alert: Vox populi, Vox dei.

The problem is that in our democratic republic the election is only the first opportunity for the people to speak, and the leaders continue to be accountable to them throughout their terms. Even if the Democrats did win last fall, they really can't do whatever they want because the people can change their minds so fast. At this point, less than a month after the Inauguration, barely 35% of the people--the same ones who voted for him last fall--now support the President's "stimulus" bill. They still like the President, but they recognize a pork-padded catastrophe when they see one. In fact, Congressional emails and telephones have been slammed by The People voicing their opposition. If the voice of the people really were the the great power in the land, the President would have withdrawn the bill long since. Hold your breath and wait for that to happen. At this point he really doesn't want to hear the voice of "God."

Instead the President is travelling around the country attempting to pump up support for his plan. It's a bad sign that he has to take to this extremity so early in his Presidency. If he really had the people behind him, it wouldn't be necessary to go out on the stump for it. President Obama has an unstoppable majority in both Houses of Congress that can pass whatever bills he wants, and probably will for a while. But I wonder if the President is starting to suspect the same thing that I am--that the people elected him as a symbolic President rather than as a working President. If that's the case, and it's looking more like it every day, it won't take long for them to begin resenting all that change he campaigned on in such vague terms.

PS

post script: After the quarter was over, I found out that beefy "kid" was twenty-six years old and had done time for assaulting an officer. It's probably just as well I didn't know that at the time.

Isn't that just like him?!

Dang. Whether as Senate Majority Leader or as a disgraced Cabinet nominee, I can always count on Tom Daschle to work counter to my interests. Just when I've got him nailed as an example of media propaganda (see Dizzy is Just How They Want Us, below), he goes and withdraws his name from consideration. Still, it was spin that kept him on the table for as long as he was.

PS

Dizzy is Just How They Want Us

There is an email making the rounds, which a good and honest man assures me he has researched and verified, comparing the media's reaction to Pres. Obama's Inauguration versus that to Pres. Bush's 2nd Inauguration. The contrast very effectively illustrates the political propaganda technique known as "spin" (see Propaganda Techniques).

Headlines On This Date 4 Years Ago:
"Republicans spending $42 million on inauguration while troops die in unarmored Humvees"
"Bush extravagance exceeds any reason during tough economic times"
"Fat cats get their $42 million inauguration party, Ordinary Americans get the shaft"

Headlines Today:
"Historic Obama Inauguration will cost only $120 million"
"Obama Spends $120 million on inauguration; America Needs A Big Party"
"Citibank executives contribute $8 million to Obama Inauguration"
"Everyman Obama shows America how to celebrate"

The content, the details, indicate that both Presidential parties were extravagant (I mean the "celebrations," not the "organizations," although...), but the difference in tone communicates volumes about how the media desires people to perceive the different administrations. That's spin.

Take another example. It was revealed in confirmation hearings that Timothy Geithner, Secretary of the Treasury in the Obama Administration, had failed to pay "tens of thousands of dollars in taxes," according to CBS News, over a period of four years during which he signed 16 quarterly statements affirming that he knew those taxes were due. Nevertheless, CBS and many others defended his confirmation, observing, "The 47-year-old is seen by many as the best candidate for the job, and there was concern that rejecting him would mean a delay in confirming a replacement that the country could not afford." So he's in, and with media approval.

But Geithner won't be alone at the Obama Presidential Cabinet table filing his amended return. Health and Human Services Secretary Designate, former Senator Tom Daschle, has admitted he owes nearly $100,000 in back taxes on "gifts" he received as professional courtesies. (Has anyone ever given you a gift that would trigger a $100,000 tax bill?!) The Obama administration is referring to Daschle's delinquencies as the result of "an honest mistake." It's an interesting phrase, "honest mistake." Have you ever heard of a politician who made a "dishonest mistake?" But the media is accepting that explanation without question or investigation.

Compare that to the treatment received by members of the Bush Administration. I can tell this one from personal experience. I get so tired of hearing of the inherent evil of that team that I occasionally invite my students to consider other possibilities. When I point out that Dick and Lynn Cheney donated over 70% of their 2007 income to charity, I never hear any appreciative response. Invariably I hear, "It was probably a tax dodge." Spin, you see, is subject to the Laws of Inertia--an idea set in motion by the media tends to stay in motion. That one will keep spinning long after the former Vice President's ashes are scattered over the Tetons.

Certainly no one party has a monopoly on spin as a propaganda technique. Both employ it regularly, and neither is as adept at spinning as their colleagues in the media. But judging from the current PR successes of the Obama Administration, supported by their media allies, and the dismal PR failures of the Bush Administration, there should be little doubt who is better at it.

Circus Animals for a Recession

A note to Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell as the Democrats' "Stimulus Package" moves from the House to the Senate without a single Republican vote:

Dear Senator McConnell,
I'm sure I'm not the first to notice the similarities between the work done by Congress and the labor of certain familiar draft animals. Getting legislative work done must indeed seem like pulling a wagon full of rocks on some days, and the abilities of those who work with you must count for much.
Donkeys and Elephants have a historic reputation for such work. For generations, various cultures have looked for them to get things done. I've seen both pull heavy loads over poor roads until they reach their goals. I've seen Donkeys carry heavy packs, walk impossibly narrow roads between a cliff on one side and an avalanche on the other, jump suddenly on command and form an impregnable circle to defend the herd. I've seen Elephants lift unbelievable burdens, walk faster than most others can run, and balance on one foot while picking a single straw out of a half-ton of hay. These are feats I cannot help but admire.
On the other hand, I've never seen a RINO* that could be trained to do anything. They're just not working animals. A RINO is blundering, intractable, unpredictable and dangerous. To keep them around in flush times as a curiousity is one thing; to expend precious resources on them when times are hard is just foolishness. Fence them in. Cut them off and let them forage for themselves or starve. Then later, if you want to display the stuffed head on the wall, that's fine. But don't waste our scant resources on a rogue beast that serves no useful purpose.
I hope as Minority Leader of the Senate, you'll be able to make the majority party own the upcoming "Stimulus" bill the way your House colleagues did.
Good luck!
PS

*Republican In Name Only

Religious Freedom Day

For the past eleven years, under both a Republican and a Democrat, the Office of the President has issued a proclamation declaring January 16 to be Religious Freedom Day in the United States. There are a couple of coincidences in this that interest me--first that even though I'm an addicted news junkie, I've never heard of this in the past eleven years; and second that it should be scheduled just days before the inauguration of the President. I suspect there is significance in both those facts, but I don't intend to pursue them here. Something else has caught my attention.


Michael Newdow, the professional gadfly and theophobe who brought suit to have the phrase "under God" stricken from the Pledge of Allegiance, has sued now to prevent the offering of prayers at the Obama inauguration and to prohibit the President-Elect from uttering the words "...so help me God" at the end of Oath of Office, as every President since Washington has. He's been making these protests quadrennially for many years, never with any success, but he keeps at it, and he backs his argument with several egregious fallacies.


Newdow's website (http://www.restorethepledge.com/) asserts that he is pursuing his agenda in order to protect the "right of Christians to worship God and Jesus whenever and wherever they choose," and that the only way to do this is to banish all mention of God, Jesus or religion from the mouths of any public servant. This is a fallacious twofer. His proposition is both self-contradictory and absurd in its extremity. He suggests that in order for Christians (or anyone else) to freely exercise their Constitutional rights of unhindered religious belief (or non-belief), all statements of belief, all recognition of beliefs, all actions, symbols, behaviors and words that might remotely infer belief should be prohibited to anyone connected in any way with government and entirely banished from public view. In other words, he wants to protect religious worship by making it utterly and completely invisible, private and without any form of mutual support system (Fallacy alert: see Oxymoron). This is like the 19th century naturalists who sought to preserve wildlife by killing it and having it stuffed.

Newdow's arguments against public expressions of religious belief are based in an extension of the concept of freedom of religion. The right itself is well-established in law (even though it appears in the Constitution only by inference), but Newdow's interpretation carries it to an absurd extreme (Fallacy alert: see Reductio ad absurdum), contending that the only way to freely exercise religious belief or non-belief is never to have to acknowledge the existence of any belief that differs from your own. Consequently, Americans could only enjoy freedom OF religion when they are made free FROM religion. It's an interpretation that suits Newdow's belief system, but only at the expense of all others who may disagree.


When challenged on this Newdow responds with his own question: "Why don't you want to follow the Constitution?" Sadly, he's gotten away with this false choice fallacy for so long that he feels smugly secure in making the charge. Here's the rub. The Constitution doesn't say what he wants it to say. The 1st Amendment prohibits Congress from creating any law "respecting an establishment of religion." Granted, the phrase can be read in various ways, either to prohibit legislative action to "establish" a state-sponsored religion or to prohibit legislative interference with any religious establishment, i.e. an organized church. But the Constitution does not say that religious organizations must be forced out of the public arena. Newdow is right when he contends that the Presidential Oath required by the Constitution does not include the the phrase "...so help me God," but neither did the Constitution prohibit George Washington from appending that humble phrase when he took the Oath. Nor does it require any other President to depart from the tradition Washington established, and which has been followed by every American President since, without exception. What Newdow fails to understand is the essential nature of the Constitution itself, and that the rights, powers and actions not specifically enumerated in the Constitution are "retained by" and "reserved to...the people," to be exercised at their discretion (9th and 10th Amendments). The people, by an 80-90% majority, retain the right to practice their religion openly, and no court can take that from them however many suits Newdow brings. His contention that the supporters of an appeal to God's grace appended to the Presidential Oath are not following the Constitution poses a false dilemma.

In defending his legal actions in various interviews, Newdow has jumped behind the favorite of his verbal barricades. He habitually recites that tired old argument that more wars have been fought over religion than any other cause or issue. He's right, or course--unless you count the Peloponnesian Wars, the Philippic and Alexandrian Conquests, the First and Second Punic Wars, Caesar's Conquests of Germany, Gaul and Britain (not to mention the Roman Civil War), the Gothic, Frankish and Vandal Invasions of Rome, the Incan and Mayan Conquests, the Norse Invasions of Europe, the Hundred Years' War, the Seven Years' War, the American, French and Russian Revolutionary Wars, the Napoleonic Wars (engulfing four continents for a generation)the American and Spanish Civil Wars, the Spanish-American War, the Philippine War, the Russo-Japanese War, the Manchurian Invasion, the First and Second World Wars, the Cold War, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, and hundreds of other conflicts that have consumed lives and treasure and in the course of steering history. The truth is that mankind has found a hundred excuses for war, including religion, and no one of them can reasonably be burdened with the entire blame. Newdow's claim is a textbook example of the Big Lie, told loudly, told often and told consistently until even the liars believe it, but it's a load of hooey.


It is cliche to note that the 1st amendment protects Newdow's right to make these ridiculous and fallacious claims, but it's also beside the point. He is free to be as wrong as he wants to be. It's just that his arguments don't hold up under scrutiny. That's why he and his supporters are so often wrong at the top of their lungs.

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.