Archive for Fallacies

Goodbye, Richard Jewell

August 30, 2007 at 2:57 am · Filed under Fallacies, Media Analysis

Richard Jewell, who died at the young age of 44 yesterday of complications from diabetes, was one of the very rare people who won an appeal from the World Court of Public Opinion.  The hero of the Atlanta 1996 bombing, he was quickly sidelined as a weird, mutant freak — and probably the bomber himself.  Why?

 Richard did not fit the Hollywood Last Action Hero mold.  A good old Georgia redneck who still lived at home with mom at the age of 33, he was more likely the candidate to be played by John Malkovich’s least favored understudy in the made-for-TV-inspired-by-a-true-story piece of cinematic pap.  Jaq truly believes this is why the media turned on him.  Jaq can’t blame the FBI for investigating Jewell for the reasons it did — but can blame them most wholeheartedly for firing the spark that inflamed the media into frenzied, heavy-handed innuendo and flat out accusation.

Jaq further blames the media for being so incredulously gullible.

From there, it entered a gross feedback loop.  Media blames Jewell.  Public cries out, demands more action.  Gummint, quacking like the duck you expect them to be, heats up public displays of accusation.  Ad continuum.

Amazingly enough, Richard was not only vindicated, but was done so not only within his brief lifetime but even quickly, with full (cash) apologies from the media.  Most of the media anyway.  The AJC to this day continues insist they did nothing wrong.  Richard even got an apology from Janet Reno while still in office.  This is unprecedented.  This is like the pope apologizing to Galileo, without waiting 400 years first.  Jaq knows of no other such unvarnished apologies from anyone in government for anything in the field of justice, can anyone else comment?

Today’s fallacies include “argumentum ad populo”, and the fallacy of Reverse Accident.  It works for Richard like this:

Assassins and psychopaths are most often loner weirdos with less-than-metrosexual outlooks on life.  Therefore weirdos like this are likely to be assassins and psychopaths.  This is False Cause, or inspecting the a small and unusual population (assassins and psychopaths) to find attributes (freaky weirdness), and concluding that anyone bearing these attributes (freaky weirdness) must belong to the population (of assassins and psychopaths).  This confuses what the definition of the group really is, and looks at minor, nonessential character traits rather than the core idea that assassins and homicidal maniacs are people who kill people.  Follow the evidence to find who done the killing, and you’ve found your maniac.

Richard’s problems, caused by this logical fallacy, were then magnified by the ethical fallacy, “argumentum ad populo,” or “I read it on the Internet, it must be true!”  This is an ethical argument.  Is Jaq saying that the media who attempted to character-assassinate Richard Jewell were dishonest as well as shtupid?  Yes, this is exactly what Jaq is saying.

This kind of behavior is often created by District or Federal Attorneys.  Witness the farce at the Duke Lacrosse trial.  Janet Reno did a truly amazing thing by apologizing.  Nifong, who was originally hoping for fame and fortune to fulfill his federal fancies, instead found failure in fallout, apologized mainly because it was his last, desparate hope for clemency.  May the World Peanut Gallery Court have more pity on him than it did for the Duke Lacrosse team.

Sometimes the trial is never resolved until the end of the poor guy’s life.  The increasingly bizarre case of John Demjanjuk, which Jaq has been following with interest since the mid-1980s, exemplifies this.  John seems to have lied on his I-94 or whatever the hell equivalent thing they had in 1951 about his involvement in WW II.  Jaq is increasingly convinced that this is his only possible crime, and the attempts to name him as a growing array of the worst possible Nazi monsters.  The idea that he is one of these people appeals to a sense of drama among the survivors.  What is offered, and has been accepted as proof in court nowadays is exceedingly similar to the “proof”, validated by “expert testimony”, offered back in the ’80s when John was supposed to be the Nazi monster Ivan the Terrible.  Jaq has vivid memories of the Plain Dealer showing pictures of John in 198x next to Ivan in 194x, saying “SEE?  Its the SAME GUY!!!”  Jaq didn’t see it then, and can’t quite believe it now.

Yes, he possibly lied on his paperwork.  John came to America in search of a new start.  Everyone has skeletons in their closet that they’re not too proud of.  Jaq can’t quite blame him for trying to forget the past.  Is “crime against paperwork” confused with “crime against humanity?”  Can’t say for sure, but to the bureaucrat who is out of touch with reality, people look only like paperwork.

If John did indeed work for the Nazis, only John knows for sure.  Worked, doing what, no one can prove,  and in the latest turn of the case it no longer seems that they’re even trying to prove any specific criminal act.

Oskar Schindler was ineligible to enter the US for his Nazi ties.  And Schindler is the very exception which proves the rule.  What rule?  The Fallacy of Division.  What is true of the whole must be true of the parts, says the fallacymaker (and the butcher and the baker).  Nazis were nasty, brutish, and killed Jews.  Therefore, so must have Oskar Schindler.  Or John Demjanjuk.

But in any case, congratulations to Richard Jewell for being fully exonerated in the 2005 conviction of Eric Rudolph — yes, another social misfit, who gives the rest of them a bad name.  And goodbye, Richard, your heroism and calm leadership in the face of panic will be remembered.

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Journalism’s Inner City Squeeze

August 24, 2007 at 5:36 am · Filed under Fallacies, Media Analysis

Jaq has strong, personal feelings about Georgia’s HOPE scholarship, and will therefore recuse themselves from making any judgements on the program itself in this forum.

For the confused, the HOPE scholarship is a program available to seniors who graduate from public Georgia high schools with a 3.0+ GPA, and proceed to attend a public Georgia collegiate-type institution. The student’s tuition, fees, and even some of books are fully paid for, so long as the student maintains GPA and attendance requirements. The scholarship is fully funded by the Georgia lottery. For those not so confused, Jaq apologizes for the lack of a good footnote facility within wordpress.

On the other hand, it’s open season on this rather rediculous puff piece from Creative Loafing.  The implication is left open in the article that changes in the inner workings of the HOPE scholarship are racist, and indeed were done to foment a racial agenda.

The article commits some rather standard fallacies, like “Biased Sample”, when talking about an inner city high school’s performance:

At Crim, a school that’s 99 percent African-American, a mere 47 seniors were eligible two years ago for the HOPE scholarship, which requires that students graduate with a 3.0 grade-point average. This year … the number of scholarship-worthy Crim seniors sank to three.

Why did such a thing happen?  The article asserts that it was caused by an administrative change to the operation of the HOPE scholarship, which reduced the overall number of eligible graduating seniors, in order to save costs in a dwindling revenue base.  The sample’s bias is revealed in one of the article comments, a clarification by the author:

Booker T. Washington High School sunk from 163 HOPE scholars in 2005 to 80 in 2007; Carver Comprehensive High School from 21 to 10; Douglass from 221 to 94; Benjamin E. Mays from 218 to 81; North Atlanta from 192 to 87; South Atlanta from 73 to 30; Southside from 82 to 42; and D.M. Therrell from 75 to 28. … Grady High School managed to hold onto most of its HOPE scholars.  

Okay, so things are bad, but nowhere near the 94% drop as reported by Crim.  Okay, so the author ‘fessed up.  Is all forgiven?  One other commenter disagrees:

you should have also been able to determine that Crim was in fact closed as a traditional high school two years ago (the year that 47 students qualified) and was repurposed by APS as an alternative campus high school for adult students seeking their diploma or GED. These are not exactly “Outstanding” pupils, or necessarily seeking to move on to college.

Here’s another fallacy revealed in the original article, called “Questionable Cause”.  Crim’s HOPE enrollee counts dropped, but could that have something to do with other circumstances?  HOPE scholarship is not available to folks too far removed from high school… The author threw these figures in for shock value. Article comments by the author indicate that this was done with full intention. Negative points for style! This is a failure to establish *ethos*, or the character implicit in the writing. Clearly the author has pathos for the subject, but folks, this ain’t enough. Errors in ethos … journalistic ethics, anyone?

Logos has got some major problems too, specifically in the area of economics.

To start with, the article’s tagline is “Now more than ever, the HOPE scholarship is taxing low-income minorities to pay for middle-class education“.  Taxing?

A tax is a forcible, involuntary confiscation of money.  The state of Georgia is not forcing anyone to buy lottery tickets to fund educations for whitey, either directly, nor by being a “tax on breathing” like gasoline taxes, or sales taxes on food.  (If you really want to help families with low incomes, eliminate these ugly regressive things!)  Be careful with your definitions.

If “lower class” folk are more likely to buy lotto tickets, is that such a bad thing?  If it is, then the implication is to take away what is condescendingly known as a “tax on people bad at math.”  Talk about an elitist attitude!  Some folk see the remote possibility of a lottery win as even a glimmer of hope, a way out of a bad situation that only costs a couple of bucks per week.  Take away the “tax”, and you take away that hope.  Nice.

The worst thing wrong with the article is the unstated conclusion: roll back the HOPE administrative changes.

Why is this a problem?  After all, the scholarship isn’t as out of money as they had originally thought.

Because the rest of the unstated conclusion is that if HOPE runs into fiscal problems again, the scholarship should be restructured to account for race, or income level, or something else.

Ack.  This arouses Jaq’s ire faster than a 3 AM cockroach.

While the scholarship didn’t start that way, for years it was run in a purely merit-based fashion.  If you change it to be race based, what is the emotional blowback?  “I got this scholarship … was it because I know my shit, or because I’m black?” is one possible reaction.  “Did I miss that scholarship because I wasn’t good enough, or because I’m not black enough?” is another.  No, this doesn’t cause any strain in race relations at all!

Race-based quotas are out of vogue, so another way to cut it is by income level.  This adds more complexity, because on one hand, everyone will know that “income level” means the same thing as “race-based quota” even if officially everyone will tiptoe around that particular elephant.  On another hand … “I got this scholarship … was it because I know my shit, or because I’m an object of pity for my family’s low income?”, and “Did I miss that scholarship because I wasn’t good enough, or because I’m too rich?  Well, I guess I had better rely on daddy’s money for the remainder of my days.”  Yay, equal distribution of inferiority complexes.

The HOPE scholarship is the only hope for higher education for many children of low-income families.  Did no one ever think that that, for children of rich parents, that the HOPE scholarship is their only hope to escape the tyranny of daddy’s money?

If HOPE funding is cut, and Georgia has to reduce the number of eligible students, unless you resort to one of the above measures you can’t help but cut unequally.  It doesn’t help anything in this situation to treat people like labels.  One inner-city high school managed not to lose as deeply as others; this says something about the rest of the story that the article does not discuss, like: what the hell is wrong with the teachers and administrators of these other schools?  They knew the changes were coming, why didn’t they straighten up?  Grady HS did.  Moreover, what the hell is wrong with the students, individually?  It’s not too terribly hard to beat a 3.0 GPA in a Georgia high school.

In the long run, this big problem is endemic to the idea of the HOPE scholarship in general.  Jaq likes the fact that no cash is forcibly taken from anyone in the redistribution scheme, but it is an economic fact that when something is subsidized, you get more of it.  Per the law of supply and demand, costs will rise and quality will fall as more people want it.  Economic factors change; because a subsidized program is run on political factors rather than economic, you end up with necessary cuts, and people on all sides of the equation get hurt by the reversal of expectations.  Somewhat like what has happened in health care, too.  It’s kinda funny, in a sad sort of way, when even “conservative” types who crab about “entitlement mentality” somehow think that they are different, that they’re entitled to that free education which is supposedly a right.

What happens when demand far exceeds supply?  When conditions become such that lotto sales drop, standards are lowered, or tuition prices rise to meet demand faster than lotto sales?  Then it really hits the fan.  Fortunately, the state of Georgia cannot resort directly to inflation, but however could try to broach the issue on a federal level, so as not to piss off the voters who can no longer expect the existing system to pay for what they want for free.  The feds can inflate.  They can pay for anything!  Financial cannibalism on a grand scale.  It would even be ironic; paying for the education for the future of America by sabotaging the currency necessary for the success of the future of America.

Forcible wealth redistribution breeds contempt among classes when all classes expect to be recipients.  So much for the classless society.

This has been a bit more ramble-y than usual.  There was a point coming originally, which totally got lost.  Tomorrow shall strive for greater coherency.

 

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Economic Phallacies, or “Jaq Recycles Email”

August 21, 2007 at 2:11 pm · Filed under Fallacies

Many fallacies are logical or rhetorical, or even grammatical (funny how it follows the Trivium, eh?  Broken thought parallels the structures we give to thought).  Others are fallacies of a more economic nature, and were first really discussed in depth by this dead white guy.

                                                            bastiat

Bastiat didn’t really make an impression on modern society, though.  Recently Jaq got an email entitled, “Can you help control the GAS price?”, one of those chain-letter type emails chiding that the recipient should pass along to thirty other people the idea that you should refrain from buying gas from Shell, Mobile, or Exxon gas stations, to punish these companies for excessive profits or something.  It was this beautifully done powerpoint presentation, and Jaq is sad that it was somehow lost among shuffling email accounts.  Jaq’s response, hitherto unpublished to the remainder of the world, lies below:

This won’t work.  Not at all.  Not even a little.

When you fail to buy gasoline from a specific brand, you do very, very little to hurt that brand.  Here’s some stuff you don’t see on the surface: you may end up hurting the station owner, who purchased a franchise and pays a small franchise fee every year in exchange for a very profitable marketing channel.  However, where does Racetrac or other smaller gas station brands buy their gas?  From Exxon, Shell, etc…

The reason that gas prices are rising has little to do directly with the oil companies themselves.  They have a hand in it, but it is not direct. I’ll explain below, after I cover the immediate cause.

The slideshow is correct when it says there is something fishy with the “lack of supply” argument.  But what few people seem to realize is that the law of supply and demand works in a completely separate dimension when talking about prices!  Not only do you have to talk about supply versus demand in what is being purchased, but you also have to talk about supply versus demand in what is offered in trade.

Here’s a hint.  Gas prices in Europe have gone up far less than ours have.  What is different?

It’s the medium!  The dollar has lost tremendous ground against the euro in the past several years.  This isn’t because the euro is being managed so well — it’s not — but rather that the dollar is being diluted to the point of invisibility.  This happens because, yet again, the law of supply and demand, courtesy John Smith.  The monetary measures of the dollar have indicated a tremendous amount of growth in the past few years, since the war started.  One measure, called the M3, was even discontinued by the Federal Reserve, because it put clearly on display the amount of embarrassing waste being generated on the mint printing press.

So then, why were these dollars printed?  It’s simple.  Bush wanted war, and he wanted tax cuts.  You *can* have both, if you own a machine for creating money out of thin air.  Back in 2000, there was a projected *surplus*.  Now, we’re talking about a half a trillion dollar deficit per year.  Thirty years ago, the total debt accumulated by the government since the 1830s was about half a trillion.  Now we’re losing that much per year?  Where did it go?

This money is created from thin air when the Treasury department trades federal bonds, which are claims against some future tax collection, someday maybe, for federal reserve notes.  These are what we now call “dollars”, although these don’t really resemble the dollar as it was defined prior to 1971 (or more so in 1933, and especially from 1913!)  The pace of this trade is trackable (somewhat, less so since the M3 was cancelled) by watching the money market — this is no paranoid fantasy, but the way central banks have operated since the 1700s.

The government gets ahold of these dollars first, where they are spent on government business.  Think government salaries, government contractors (Halliburton, anyone?) and the like.  Inflation, or at least the end result of inflation where prices rise, does not happen immediately.  It gradually happens over time, so the government and its close allies get to purchase goods and services at what is effectively a discount rate, given the added supply of dollars into the economy.  As the dollars trickle down — remember that phrase? — they gradually lose their purchasing power.

Remember when gas prices suddenly plummeted about 8-9 years ago?  I remember I once saw gas at $0.63 per gallon once during that time, it was awesome!  Did anyone praise the oil companies for their benevolence?  Was there suddenly extra supply?  No!  It was widely acknowledged that most of the price drop had to do with some Asian currencies, which were even more badly managed than the dollar, went into sharp decline.  We are in the same situation now, only reversed.

Incidentally, the prices of other commodities, such as gold, silver, sugar, corn, and others have also risen, much in the way oil has.  Same factors, same effect.

So that’s the real mechanism.  Now, if you look behind the scenes, *this* is where the oil magnates get involved — not really the oil companies themselves, but the big individual players, like the Rockefellers… or the Bushes.  Or even Dick Cheney, with his continued stake in Halliburton.  Oil investments take a long time to pay off, five to ten years or more.  What happens if these large-scale capitalists knows that war could break out in the middle east in a given span of years?  One in which the US would spend trillions of dollars in deficits, diluting the power of the dollar?  Is there a major incentive to push major investment into war, given that gas was $0.63 per gallon in 1998, when the PNAC first started publically agitating for plans to go back to war in Iraq?

The trouble with these kinds of actions, even for the oil companies, is that all prices gradually rise at different rates.  This means that in order to maintain profits, and not become victims to the same inflationary prices as the rest of the world, oil companies need to do several things. Firstly, ensure the continuation of war.  Secondly, keep the same cozy relationship with the US government so that the newly printed dollars go to them first.  Thirdly, ensure that oil is purchased on the international market using dollars primarily.

These are all activities that have been pursued since early 2002, when the public started forgetting that Osama was in Afghanistan, and somehow started getting Osama confused with Saddam.  Not only this, but other, ancillary big contracts have also gone to privileged players such as KB&R, a subsidiary of Halliburton, to do things like contracting small projects like military laundry!  Why would a subsidiary of of an energy company do laundry?  Because the entire purpose of KB&R as a whole is to get newly printed dollars from the US government before anyone else does.

The only way to help “control the GAS price” is to convince government to alter its fiscal practices.  These are issues like balancing the budget. Not going to crusade-like wars abroad, with no well-defined objective, no defined way to win, and no moral justification.  Not allowing the government to award no-bid contracts.  Limiting the discretionary power of the office of the President.  And most of all, killing the Federal Reserve Bank.  This bank, and its relationship with the US government, is even in the best of times a temptation by people in power to make life miserable for everyone by printing money to further pave the road to hell with good intentions.  In the worst of times, badly-intentioned people feel no guilt about raiding the wealth of future generations for quick gains in power and cash for a privileged few.  Without this mechanism, the government loses its teeth, and fall under the mercy of the people who are willing to fund it directly, with a balanced budget.

Without the federal reserve, and without government interfering in money, a new form of exchange has to arise.  This has to be easily and objectively identifiable, counterfeit-proof, and agreeable to all parties.  Preferably, it should hold value in its own right.  Historically in Western civilization (and other places), a money is defined in terms of a base metal such as gold, silver, or copper.

So how does this all happen?  Probably not overnight.  Tell people in Congress that you won’t vote for anyone who does not espouse these policies.  Tell people to tell people in Congress.  Heck, you can pass this along to 30 people et cetera.

So it’s not a great contribution to the body of economic thought like this is.  But hey, ya gotta start somewhere.  Someday I’ll add citations and links.

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Jaq Presents: Phallacies

August 15, 2007 at 4:01 am · Filed under Fallacies, Media Analysis, Tools - Human

A brand new feature is probably not a big deal, only four days into the existence of the blog.  However, since this is a big hint into some of the meat of the matter mentally masticated by the master of this mess, which Jaq shall be spewing forth in blogentries to come.

Fallacies may strictly be defined as defects in argumentation.  And there’s nothing wrong with committing defects in argumentation.  Nobody’s perfect.  Defects in communication are completely harmless — so long as whomever on the listening end of said communique identifies and renders harmless problems.

 To help me explain today’s fallacy, Lou Dobbs has graciously volunteered to assist Jaq Phule in a small demonstration.  Say hello, Lou!

                         Hello, Lou!

Now, you may have noticed that Lou is an absolute tool. “Now wait just a gravy-smothered minute,” you gasp. “You can’t say that. That’s an ad hominem fallacy!”

Jaq agrees, that this is a case in point example of an argument which is defective. It’s more than that, because you can’t make this kind of fallacy accidentally. More than that, by placing the picture of Lou with his head replaced with a hammer, it’s funny. (Jaq thinks it’s funny anyway.) You’re introduced to Lou, shown slanted humor, and then told flat out he is a tool. In this way, Jaq has combined inputs both visual and verbal (since you’re reading it in your head).   Combining channels like that is a trick that is used to confuse your brain into agreement without rational thought, and is why the political cartoonist is so highly regarded by newspaper editors.

Now, don’t get Jaq wrong, there’s no such thing as totally unbiased reporting. HOWEVER, There is such a thing as reporting in such a way that pushes an agenda, and does so not by rational argument but by innuendo and rhetorical brain tricks. Someone else’s agenda is probably not good for you, so what we’ve all come around the table to discuss is mental judo, or how not to get taken in.

Now Lou is an excellent candidate for skewering. Certainly Lou commits ad hominem rather blatantly. In fact, many of Lou’s arguments boil down to nothing more than ad hominem. Jaq has sworn never to rehash stuff from the LRC blog, but it’s so hard not to when the very topic Jaq wanted to write about is dancing nekkid in close proximity:

In this clip, Lou talks about one of his favorite subjects, immigration. Unfortunately, this is a subject that Lou is ill-equipped, mentally, to actually be coherent in. Clearly he disagrees with the open borders economists who are the subject of Lou’s report. However, Lou cannot actually articulate any points of disagreement other than to call these economists “idiots” and “jackasses”. Brilliant, Lou. For that kind of analysis, CNN pays you an exorbitant salary and feeds your ego. Congratulations.

Lou Dobbs may in fact be a tool. But whose tool is he? And whose tool is the toolmaker?

We’ll have more fun with Lou later.

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