Wednesday, January 16, 2013

Rolling Stone on the bailout

Matt Taibbi rarely disappoints.

If-by-whiskey

A new example of argumentational fallacy (maybe) - so says Wikipedia but I see this as just a rhetorical figure.  "If by whiskey you mean <bad things>, then I'm naturally against it, but if by whiskey you mean <good things> then I'm for it, and I stand by that moral choice, etc., etc.".


Monday, January 7, 2013

Frames or tactics or ...

In "debate" on public fora, we very often observe a set of rhetorical frames or tactics that get reused a lot.  A response to the notion that conservative organizations constitute an ongoing financial scam is countered by "Do you know how much the CEO of the Red Cross makes?" (Real example; I've muted the poster because I just can't afford to blow up any more.)

OK.  So this "false equivalence" comes up a lot in this kind of discussion - it's OK for Republicans to do something because Democrats do it, too.  This one's a little weird because the Red Cross is generally considered in a positive light by essentially everybody, but money skews things.

I'd like to catalog this kind of rhetorical tactic so that I could just link to it in this kind of exchange, saving me a lot of time and agony.  Entries in this catalog should be dispassionate and sparse, showing as neutral a set of examples as possible.

I'm virtually positive this kind of catalog exists in multitudinous forms, so here would be a logical place to link to a few if I should ever get around to finding any.

Here's a paper, though: Equivalence and Issue Framing.  Definitely related.  Rhetoric.

False equivalence is what was used here - here's a list of other logical fallacies.

Bad Science

Speaking of which: a book on bad science.

Comment tone determines public reactions to science news

Interesting study.  Given a controlled set of blog posts on science with neutral or "less civil" comments, readers assign less trust to the scientific findings of the posts with less civil comments.

Saturday, January 5, 2013

Thursday, January 3, 2013

2013 forecasts

From the charmingly named Clusterfuck Nation, a doom-filled forecast for the future of America that I honestly have a hard time believing, and I specialize in hell-in-a-handbasket moping.  Still a good read, though.

Tuesday, January 1, 2013

Scythes

Here's a thought-provoking article from Metafilter.  I have little patience for people who grew up in town but now think the simple life of the countryside is for them - and incidentally for everybody else. Balderdash; you want to be Amish?  No.  You don't, and neither do I, and if we all went Amish tomorrow, most of us would die.

Conservatives shift on prison policy

Looks like the conservative brain trust has decided that mass imprisonment costs a lot, and since they want to look like fiscal conservatives, now they've decided the sensible thing to do is have less imprisonment.  Interesting take on this here, to wit: qui bono?