'You Must Be Mad, or You Wouldn't Be Here!"

September 9, 2006:

In a little while now, the people – some of them, at least – will participate in re-enactment of what may be the most cherished of their myths, that of republican democracy. The pundits and pollsters who would give us to understand that they are all in a lather, salivating over the prospects of a “landslide” (apropos, that – it goes with the blizzard of bullshit associated with the landslide) would also have us believe that we are choosing our government.

The wonder of it is that anyone cogent enough to find his way home after work or school could be so out of touch with the world around him as to believe anything so patently and obviously untrue. Of course, one way to accomplish such a mental miscue is to change word definitions. Equivocate, in other words. Since the dawn of militantly mindless feminism, we’ve become a people very adept at that. Don’t like the truth, reality? Change what you call it.

Yup, it’s everywhere you look these days. To call, for instance, what’s going on in Iraq “insurrection” implies that our invasion and the ensuing war ended as soon as President Bush said, “Mission accomplished.” Or, that it ended as soon as a citizen of Iraq welcomed us. All the people shooting at us didn’t count.

And, there’s no civil war going on there. Just because two major factions – eighty, even ninety percent of Iraqi citizens - are killing one another with weapons of war and in numbers like one hundred a day, you can’t call it a civil war. The definition is everything, and Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld will give you the correct – politically correct, that is – definition.
So there you have it. There will be a ritual called “election” where people will cast ballots. Voila – Democracy! Never mind that the “election” will offer two candidates controlled entirely by nameless and faceless persons, members of a corporate oligarchy who decide everything meaningful totally without the public’s representation or influence on what is decided.

Never mind that the candidates were in the main selected decades before, almost in adolescence and by that same corporate oligarchy. Never mind that to suggest the candidacy of a man or woman from actual mainstream “America” would draw nothing but derision and contemptuous laughter from the nation’s military industrial complex plenipotentiaries and the media it owns and controls.

So we may have “control” – notice the terminology; it means superiority in number – of the U.S. Congress by the Democratic Party. Tweedledee will supplant Tweedledee. Uriah Heap will sit in for Mr. Bumble the Beadle in our Dickensian national workhouse. And, like I said, don’t expect a Mr. Micawber to be elected any day soon – not even for janitor (that’ll be a Mexican, and they can’t – yet – hold public office; yet).

The “American” – even that requires defining – system of myths has reached absolutely religious proportions, dogma unquestionable by the faithful. There seems no limit. From the free market economy, to equality under the law, to federal government (“characterizing an agreement between states to unite, foregoing some sovereignty but remaining independent in internal affairs” – see anything like that here in the Land of the Fee, do you?), the United States of America is a myth, a people living in only virtual reality.

Why? How? Well, watch television for a week; and, if you are conversant with the rules of logic, keep score. (And for reference, here’s a page that will help you with the basic rules of effective thinking: http://www.don-lindsay-archive.org

Having done that, you will find that more than ninety percent of the argument and reasoning supporting it is fallacious. That, incidentally, is an actual statistical count done over a period of three months, and using the three major networks, CNN, and FoxNews. In the instance of “Fox,” matters were even worse. During on week’s programming, I found the following classical errors of logic:

Ad hoc
Ad hominem
Affirming the consequent
Appeal to authority
Appeal to fear
Appeal to pity
Appeal to probability
Appeal to tradition
Appeal to the majority
Argument from ignorance
Begging the question
Biased sample
Correlation implies causation
Denying the antecedent
Equivocation
False dilemma
Hasty generalization
Loki's Wager
No true Scotsman
Post hoc ergo propter hoc
Slippery slope
Straw man
Undistributed middle


In a number of instances, the fallacy was a specific variation on one of these, but one just as nonsensical. As a matter of fact, to cover the whole spectrum of blather spewed nightly by television pundit and expert would require a very voluminous book. Or two. It’s incredible.

A couple of nights ago, just for one instance by way of example, the national audience heard for what must be the fiftieth time since the President’s declaration of “war on terror” the argument concerning torture of prisoners. During a few minute segment featuring the remarks of former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich, Sean Hannity and his guest just about covered the waterfront of classical fallacy.

Of course, Fox News personality Sean Hannity always begins either with one kind or another of ad hominem attack, one made directly or by implication. Anyone who disagrees with him is an idiot, a traitor, or both – or worse, or less, whatever it takes. He specializes in the loaded question. “When are you going to begin condemning terrorism?”

Anyone who questions anything being done in Iraq or the "war on terror" is "encouraging the enemy" and "damaging the morale of our fighting men" (and, of course, women - demagoguery requires it). Supporting torture, Fox News' Bill O'Reilly does not once consider what that means for any of our troops captured by their enemies.

If that weren't enough, and speaking figuratively, the headline of the discussion was the contention that the means – torture - would justify the end - the supposed prevention of a nuclear attack on New York City. “We must use torture because it will get the information we need to prevent a cataclysmic attack on the United States.”

Now, any argument that the means can justify the end is a circular one, called petitio principii in formal logic. In the vernacular, it “begs the question.” This one assumes that what a person being tortured says is the truth. The specious argument, matter of fact, can be stated various ways, each fallacious for a different reason classically. This one will do:“Torture will get the truth. How do we know it will be the truth? Because torture always gets the truth."

While it is a statistical fact that more than half the human race has below average intelligence (something television’s owners and pundits rely upon heavily), it is an equally statistical fact that duress seldom obtains useful, much less truthful (not necessarily the same) information. That “stands to reason” – i.e., common sense due individual personal experience. Obviously, in the first place, the person being tortured may be willing to die, rather than say anything. That may be due several reasons, moreover. Then, too, the vast majority of persons will say under torture whatever they deem necessary to make the torture stop. A person ignorant of the information being sought is in a real fix, such that he will fabricate something, anything. The information then becomes something akin to an untested and unproven medicine.

I’m reminded of a drug(?) called Laetrile a few years ago. It supposedly cured cancer, but doctors pointed out that while the drug might be even inert, and therefore harmless, reliance up it might mean cessation of other kids of treatment more often effective. Information obtained under torture is often of that character.

But people intent upon misinformation aren’t going to just shut up when confronted with logical proof of their false reasoning or downright mendacity. During the week in question, Gingrich, Hannity, O’Reilly and the “Fox” team missed hardly one of the classical fallacies. That’s not just by way of several variations on petitio principii – like that which involves trying to prove what you say by arguing what you seek to disprove (an O’Reilly favorite, by the way) – but Argument From Adverse Consequences (“If we don’t torture, what’s to stop an attack?”), The Straw Man (“I can’t understand why anyone who doesn’t condone torture wants to leave us defenseless like that” - a Hannity favorite), and the Argument From Ignorance (“It hasn't been proved that torture doesn’t work, so we should do it.”).

Nastiest among the fallacious arguments, at least from my opinion, has been the relentless repetition (Argument ad nauseam) that torture of one or more al Qa’ida leaders prevented a particular attacked planned by the terrorists. That’s the fallacy usually called Argument By Selective Observation, or “Cherry Picking.” It’s what keeps the casinos in Las Vegas – to say nothing of the state lotteries – in business and very rich. Otherwise, it’s against the law and referred to as “bunco.” Like the “experts” on Fox, the argument counts the hits and ignores the misses. By that crack-brained criteria, any rifle becomes accurate enough to be trustworthy.

It goes on and on, a veritable blizzard of balderdash. For fun – well, hell; you owe it to yourself, to say nothing of your country - download a list of the logical fallacies, make a copy, and have it with you as you watch television, its “analysts” and “experts.” This is a collection of snake-oil salesman to beggar their counterparts in the patent medicine business of years past.

On the “Boob Tube” (singularly apropos here, what?), for example of the latter, Argument From Authority is everywhere. The “expert opinion” comes not only from individuals of experience and expertise doubtful in the extreme (why is today’s general automatically an authority where military tactics – especially having to do with guerrilla warfare – are concerned?), or those who have been thoroughly and publicly discredited. Former Los Angeles Police Detective Mark Fuhrman, for instance.

This is serious, my friend. In fact, it's nothing short of a crisis. The information media serve a societal and national purpose much like that which the brain and intellect serve for the individual. The fact is that our “information services” are nothing of the kind. They do not have that for their purpose. What they do intend is all but identical with that of the tabloids - money. None of it is real, none of it is honest, and none of it would make sense to an electorate of people educated anywhere but in our state-run schools.

Don't forget that half the people listening to this claptrap have intellect below normal.

The result is something for the society equivalent to insanity in an individual. Nothing explains as well, and is more symptomatic of, the bizarre state of affairs we find ourselves in. With Hurricanes Katrina and Rita victims collectively struggling like a wounded beast, possibly in its death throes, the result of a cataclysmic storm, we race to the aid of earthquake or tsunami victims overseas. While New Orleans languishes, we spend billions on Baghdad. Under threat of a clandestine terrorist infiltration, even a biochemical or nuclear terror attack, we leave our borders and ports wide open, while encouraging – even by way of incentives – illegal immigration. Meanwhile, to protect us from "terror," we are to be - are being - herded into virtual imprisonment, our rights protected by the U.S. Constitution arrogated by our "protectors."

If that isn’t illogical, even to the point of insanity, what the hell is?