Shot in the Dark

Logic For Leftybloggers: A Remedial Course

I started reading a couple of Minnesota liberal blogs yesterday, with an aim toward perhaps addressing some of their arguments as the session gets underway…

…and I stopped.  It just got too depressing.

Minnesota liberal bloggers – many, many of them – have real serious trouble with simple logic; with the rhetorical equivalent of subject-verb agreement.

About a year ago, I started a series of posts called “Logic for Leftybloggers”; it was, as I sketched it out, a 25 part bit on some of the basics of logic – little things like “why a tu quoque argument (which makes up about 40% of leftyblog posts) makes you sound like you need more fiber in your diet” or “how ridicule isni’t technically evidence” or “when your argument includes more red herrings than the entire Norwegian fishing fleet, you’re really only convincing fellow ijjits”.

But I shelved it, largely because searching through the backlog for the examples was, again, just too damn depressing.

Still, my little bout (or perhaps “spasm”) of reading leftyblogs has made me think; maybe that’ll be my New Years’ gift to discourse; dust off the series and post it during the coming year.  At the very best, it’ll improve the level of discussion at least some.   At worst?  Someone’s body may physically reject its own brain; I’d hate to have that on my conscience, but I am a giver.

I gotta think about this a bit.

Posted

in

,

by

Mitch Berg

Tags:

Comments

34 responses to “Logic For Leftybloggers: A Remedial Course”

  1. Dog Gone Avatar
    Dog Gone

    Perhaps while you are at it you will answer my question — why do consumers, mostly on the right, accept such a consistently factually inaccurate source of almost-information as Faux News?

    This superior logic you claim really doesn’t work very well if you premise your thinking on faulty data….

    Happy New Year, Mitch, and a Happy New Year to all the Mitchketeers as well! Stay safe everybody!

  2. Mr. D Avatar
    Mr. D

    Perhaps while you are at it you will answer my question — why do consumers, mostly on the right, accept such a consistently factually inaccurate source of almost-information as Faux News?

    This superior logic you claim really doesn’t work very well if you premise your thinking on faulty data….

    And thus does Doggie prove Mitch’s point with a series of arguments by assertion.

  3. Mr. D Avatar
    Mr. D

    I was remiss in my earlier comment in neglecting the straw man argument (“consumers, mostly on the right”) and ad hominem (“Faux News.”)

    On the other hand, Dog got all her scurrility in without going over the 500 word mark. That’s progress.

  4. Mitch Berg Avatar
    Mitch Berg

    Those deer just keep sauntering across the path. My barrel is overheating.

  5. Mr. D Avatar
    Mr. D

    Those deer just keep sauntering across the path. My barrel is overheating.

    As Lucy once put it after pulling the ball away from Charlie Brown yet again, it’s just like shooting fish in a barrel. Happy New Year, Mitch!

  6. Bill C Avatar
    Bill C

    consistently factually inaccurate source of almost-information as Faux News?

    http://farm5.static.flickr.com/4017/4575208799_e7c6e34c94.jpg

    Just because you don’t agree with something (which is the pretty much absolute default case of any leftist pertaining to foxnews.com/*), does not make it factually inaccurate. The left’s usual dispensation points for their news of the day (NYT, WaPo, Big 3 networks, CNN, MSNBC, HuffPo, DailyKOS, Jon Stewart, et al.) are just as “factually inaccurate” as the leftist chanting point claims about Fox. And note, before you say “Beck/Hannity/OReilly…” they are the equivalent of the editorial boards of the newspapers. The actual NEWS of FOXNews is rarely inaccurate.

  7. Kermit Avatar
    Kermit

    Why do consumers, mostly on the Left, embrace such a consistently factually inaccurate description of Fox news? Why do they insist on calling it “Faux News”, as if that is some clever riposte instead of the inane, brain-dead cliche’ it is?
    I would love, love, love one of these hamsters to make an honest assessment of MSNBC. Behar, Maddow, Olbermann, take your pick. If you have enough intellectual honesty and stamina.

  8. Mitch Berg Avatar
    Mitch Berg

    DG,

    Perhaps while you are at it you will answer my question

    Naturally.

    — why do consumers, mostly on the right, accept such a consistently factually inaccurate source of almost-information as Faux News?

    Y’see, DG, that’s exactly the sort of thing I was writing about; you make a diversionary, off-topic accusation-disguised-as-a-question about “consumer behavior” (a Red Herring) “supported” with the claim that Fox (“Faux” may be a Ad Hominem, or it may be just Ridicule”) is “inaccurate” (an Appeal to Belief) to set up a Straw Man, trying to make me defend an argument that I’m not actually making (Consumers finding Fox New credible or not has nothing to do with anything I said).

    So when you say…:

    This superior logic you claim really doesn’t work very well if you premise your thinking on faulty data….

    “Data” about Fox News has nothing whatsoever to do with my premise!

    Drive carefully!

  9. Terry Avatar
    Terry

    Yet Dog Gone approves of CBS — whose news division used clumsily forged documents in an attempt to turn the 2004 presidential election for their favored candidate.

  10. nate Avatar
    nate

    Yes, Mitch, we do need those lessons posted, with reference numbers.

    Thereafter, when you respond to one of Dog Gone’s posts, you can simply write:

    “DG: 3, 6, 17, 23. Drive safely.”

    Those of us who know the system will quickly identify her logical errors. She’s not going to understand it either way, so you might as well save finger wear. Win-Win!

    .

  11. Kermit Avatar
    Kermit

    Does anyone else wish that just once Dog would come back and respond to the replies to her comments?

    I guess that might be to much to ask for. She is a girl, after all.

  12. Dog Gone Avatar
    Dog Gone

    I would point you gentlemen to the University of Maryland study that showed Fox News consumers were the most ill informed of all consumers of news sources – regardless of whether or not they were right, left, or centrist/ independent in their politics.

    Read it. Even Fox News didn’t deny the results, merely tried to trash the students at the school. The study wasn’t performed by the students, but by a well-regarded research group.

    If you don’t have factual information to work with, your efforts at logic are futile.

    So, I have been attempting to confirm, for example, the snow plowing union slow down in NYC. Funny thing…….the ONLY sources which are making this (as ever anonymous sourced) claim belong to the Rupert Murdoch empire.

    Not one other source, not a single local television station, not a radio station, not one other non-Murdoch source.

    So, if your logic is that this is a plausible instance of union misconduct for the reasons Mitch listed……then you would appear to be wrong. Again.

    Like the false claims about illegal felons stealing the 2008 election for Franken, the ice cream bribery of high school students for voting story in Cincinnati, the $200 million a day Obama expenditure during his visit to India. Or my 2010 ‘Bad Penny’ award for the claims of Glenn Beck that the town of Wilmington,OH has soldiered on, rejecting government assistance….. the list is endless.

    If your information is factually inaccurate, then it doesn’t matter what you do with it logically. It is time and effort wasted.

    Terry – you are wrong.
    I do not approve or condone the failure to fact check the story on ‘W’s national guard service. But if you recall, more accurately, what I have applauded was that CBS fired the people who screwed up, including Rather leaving. They – unlike Murdoch’s operations – have journalistic standards.

  13. Night Writer Avatar
    Night Writer

    It was, of course, CBS that also got caught a week or so ago promoting a faux version of the Bush’s memoir. The gate-keepers need fact-checkers.

  14. Dog Gone Avatar
    Dog Gone

    Night Writer, everyone needs fact checkers. Politifact.com, factcheck.org, snopes, etc. fact check the full political spectrum, with good reason. Heck, I fact checked Christmas.

    But – a quote from the 2010 politifact ‘lie of the year’ expose:

    “There was a uniformity of Republican messaging that was disconnected from facts,” Blumenauer said. “The sheer discipline . . . was breathtaking.”

    But when sources consistently are wrong – see Bachmann’s fact check failure rate for example – then those sources should be regarded with greater skepticism. That is the case with Murdoch sources. That is the case with the anonymous sources Mitch has cited here about alleged voter fraud.

    Conclusions cannot be logical if they are factually incorrect. Unless you don’t care about being reality based, and want to live in an ideological fantasy world……..and fantasy doesn’t need logic.

    But I don’t want to ‘badger’ Mitch about any other stories he has promoted here without adequate fact checking. So I won’t list them. (hope you’re smiling, Mitch – meant as a gentle nudge, not a nag.)

  15. Mitch Berg Avatar
    Mitch Berg

    DG:

    Not only are you continuing the straw man (to the point of “threadjacking”), but you are going down the path to just plain logical and factual incontinence.

    I would point you gentlemen to the University of Maryland study that showed Fox News consumers were the most ill informed of all consumers of news sources – regardless of whether or not they were right, left, or centrist/ independent in their politics.

    HAH!

    FACT CHECK!

    That “U of Maryland study” was shown to be pretty much garbage. It took the positions of liberal think tanks as “the truth” on quite a few contentious issues (in other words, disagreeing with positions whose only “proof” was liberal orthodoxy was considered “ill-informed”.

    Lee Doren trashes the “study” in a 20 minute video that should make you completely ashamed of having jumped on this fallacious bandwagon.

    Read it. Even Fox News didn’t deny the results, merely tried to trash the students at the school. The study wasn’t performed by the students, but by a well-regarded research group.

    Well, so we’re told. Watch the debunking. Remember that Appeal to False Authority is a logical fallacy in its own right. And for God’s sake, stop believing everything you hear from leftyblogs. Most of them are idiots.

    Onward:

    If you don’t have factual information to work with, your efforts at logic are futile.

    Heh heh heh. Sorry, DG. Petard, meet Hoist.

  16. Mitch Berg Avatar
    Mitch Berg

    Further onward:

    So, I have been attempting to confirm, for example, the snow plowing union slow down in NYC. Funny thing…….the ONLY sources which are making this (as ever anonymous sourced) claim belong to the Rupert Murdoch empire.

    So in other words, yet another Ad Hominem attack.

    You’ve found nothing to assail the actual story; merely repeating an Ad Hominem about the corporate ownership – itself founded in yet another herd-sourced bit of “conventional wisdom” about Fox’s general accuracy…

    …which is, itself, utterly unrelated to the topic of this post, although you’re doing a fine job of proving my contention.

  17. Mitch Berg Avatar
    Mitch Berg

    Yet further onward:

    Not one other source, not a single local television station, not a radio station, not one other non-Murdoch source.

    Again, illogical. Being correct about a story is not a matter of majority rule. Was the WaPo “wrong” when they were the only news outlet covering Watergate?

    Chew on that one for a while.

  18. Mitch Berg Avatar
    Mitch Berg

    And yet furtherer onward:

    So, if your logic is that this is a plausible instance of union misconduct for the reasons Mitch listed……then you would appear to be wrong. Again.

    And that’s just plain non-sequitur, perhaps the most facile logical error of all. Nothing you’ve presented in this comment thread logically attacks any of the facts presented, except by saying “it’s just Murdoch”. Which is, again, Ad Hominem. It’d be like someone saying “It’s just Dog Gone’s argument; she’s always wrong!”.

    Like the false claims about illegal felons stealing the 2008 election for Franken…

    …which is utterly, hopelessly, complete-waste-of-time irrelevant.

    If your information is factually inaccurate, then it doesn’t matter what you do with it logically. It is time and effort wasted.

    I’m sorry, DG, but light leaving “logical” right now won’t reach you until you’ve been dead for decades. You are the one whose facts have been debunked – which, to be honest, is more than the argument deserved, since it was a thread-jacking non-sequitur.

    I’ll try to boil down your argument for you; you’re saying “You can’t call anyone “illogical” unless you’re perfectly logical yourself!”. Not only is that itself just plain wrong – if that were true, nobody could make any argument at all, ever – but you have not shown me to be illogical; you merely introduced an off-topic argument in support of the idea that I’m not perfectly logical; as it turned out, every single “fact” presesnted as part of that “argument” is questionable (I’m being charitable) or irrelevant (becuase even IF every word out of Fox News’ mouth is a lie (untrue), and even IF every single person who watches Fox News’s IQ drops to 0 (demonstrably untrue), it affects neither my argument, which doesn’t refer to Fox News in any way, nor my central premise – that many leftybloggers couldn’t make a logical argument if it beat them over the head.

    Which I think we’ve shown pretty capably here.

  19. Ben Avatar
    Ben

    It’s funny, the lefties love to rip Rupert Murdoch but I don’t think I’ve heard them even heard a peep of them criticizing George Soros about anything. In fact they view him as some type of God, if they even acknowledge he exists. Yes Murdoch has a Media Empire but Soros has a freaking monopoly on the Left. He even bought, I mean donated, a bunch of NPR juniorlists (I am aware of what I just said). Plus he’s creepy.

  20. Mitch Berg Avatar
    Mitch Berg

    DG,

    To sum up: you really need to start considering sources outside the lefty echo chamber.

    They are not serving you well.

    At all.

  21. Ben Avatar
    Ben

    FYI I watch FNC usually because they are able to put an entertaining spin on boring news. MSNBC is boring and CNN is sad, almost embaressing but Fox puts both sides on. When was the last time you saw someone on Countdown or Muffdiver who disagrees with them (I give crazy ed credit for having Medved on every now and them).

  22. Terry Avatar
    Terry

    Dog Gone wrote:
    Terry – you are wrong.
    I do not approve or condone the failure to fact check the story on ‘W’s national guard service. But if you recall, more accurately, what I have applauded was that CBS fired the people who screwed up, including Rather leaving.

    To my comment
    Yet Dog Gone approves of CBS — whose news division used clumsily forged documents in an attempt to turn the 2004 presidential election for their favored candidate.

    Do you see the disconnect there? Dog Gone responded to a point I did not make. I did not say that Dog Gone approved of the CBS news div’s handling of the TANG story — I wrote of CBS in general, as she wrote of Fox News in general. Despite the fact that CBS tried to influence a presidential election using false accusations and forged documents for story about one of the candidates, she thinks that it remains a legitimate news source. Fox has done nothing so heinous, yet Dog Gone does not consider Fox a legitimate news source.

  23. Mr. D Avatar
    Mr. D

    Erratum:

    Earlier in the thread Mr. D noted that Doggie had managed to contain her scurrility to less than 500 words. She has returned to the thread and provided a significant amount of new scurrilities. As a result, a staff member of the Mr. Dilettante’s Neighborhood blog has fact-checked the matter and has discovered that Dog’s scurrilities on this thread now add up to 545 words.

    To rectify this issue, our team will be contacting Polifact, Snopes and anyone we can reach at the University of Maryland, but only if they are well-regarded*, to ensure this error is documented to their satisfaction.

    We regret the error.

    *It would appear that recently deposed Terrapins football coach Ralph Friedgen is no longer an employee of the University of Maryland and therefore is an example of someone not well-regarded in College Park. He will no longer be party to this matter.

  24. Badda Avatar
    Badda

    Once again I suggest that Dog is an actual Straw Man for Mitch.

    Perhaps I should say that Dog Gone is a login that someone is using to repeat comments that some actual person is saying… but no one could possibly be that effing clueless to miss the point time and again and get used over and over as an example of what Mitch posts about.

    Seriously… it’s a gotta be a put-on. It’s too convenient. No one lacks so greatly in dignity. No one is that immune to shame.

    Well… maybe Miss Peevish Dumont.

  25. jimf Avatar
    jimf

    Remember- DG was captain of her eigth grade debate team.

  26. Mitch Berg Avatar
    Mitch Berg

    Oh, I can’t believe I almost missed this:

    If your information is factually inaccurate, then it doesn’t matter what you do with it logically. It is time and effort wasted.

    True, sort of. But I’m actually arguing the inverse. A logical argument presented with facts that are incorrect is merely an incorrect argument – and it’s the logical the provides us the means to figure that out, anyway.

    But an illogical argument, even if presented with factual information, is a true waste; it diverts the reader from the truth. For example, dismissing the statement “Martha Stewart says the sky is blue” by saying “But she served jail time!”? It’s a fact, after all! But it’s an Ad Hominem, and utterly irrelevant. A waste of time.

    And as I’ve shown above, you’ve presented an illogical argument with false information. You can fill in the ending here.

  27. Mitch Berg Avatar
    Mitch Berg

    Once again I suggest that Dog is an actual Straw Man for Mitch.

    I keep thinking about adding a “Fifth Author”, a liberal whackdoodle named “Moonbeam Birkenstock”.

    But I barely have time and energy to do all of Mitch Berg’s writing.

  28. Terry Avatar
    Terry

    If your information is factually inaccurate, then it doesn’t matter what you do with it logically. It is time and effort wasted.

    Wrong! If I argue that FICA is 16% and that’s a tax on poor people since it starts at the first dollar number earned, the argument is just as valid if the real FICA tax is 15.3%.
    “Facts” are subordinate to reason. Reason gives context. Without reason, it would be a “fact” that the Sun goes around the Earth.
    If your debate instructor told that facts are more important than reason or rhetoric, he or she did you disservice, Dog Gone.

  29. mnbubba Avatar
    mnbubba

    On the other hand, Dog got all her scurrility in without going over the 500 word mark. That’s progress.

    dingdingdingdingdingdingdingdingding…

    Mr. D wins the thread.

  30. mnbubba Avatar
    mnbubba

    “I keep thinking about adding a “Fifth Author”, a liberal whackdoodle named “Moonbeam Birkenstock”.”

    I think Soucheray’s already done that.

  31. Kermit Avatar
    Kermit

    I for one have to give Dog props. She did come back to defend her position. That’s more than that candy-ass “Penigma” ever did.

  32. LearnedFoot Avatar
    LearnedFoot

    “I fact checked Christmas.”

    Do you know how I know you’re a loser?

  33. Kermit Avatar
    Kermit

    There is no empirical evidence for Christmas, therefore it is a fraud.
    Just ask Sol Gallivan.

  34. swiftee Avatar
    swiftee

    Dog, please factcheck this:

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O8KHOgyYyHQ

    The conclusion, multisourced and crosschecked, of course, is that you are still just as dim-witted now as you were at the start the year.

Leave a Reply

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.