Category Archives: Philosophy

Media Criticism, Philosophy, Political Commentary

Jeffrey Sachs

39 Comments

…versus Victor Davis Hanson. It’s no contest. In theory, they invented the mercy rule for things like this, but Sachs is undeserving. As a commenter notes, it’s rare to see such a pure, nasty, unadulterated version of ad hominem, but when you do it generally comes from a clueless leftist.

Which brings up a general gripe, sustained for years both at blogs and, before them, Usenet, on the general lack of understanding of what an ad hominem argument is. Here’s what it is not. It is not a mere gratuitous insult tossed into the middle of an otherwise strong argument, whether accurate or not (I’ve often been accused of ad hominem for this — it might well be rude, but it’s not ad hominem). It is not saying “so and so is on the take by the Evil Corporation X, so we should take with a grain of salt things that so and so says in defense of Evil Corporation X,” at least when one has made a strong case against ECX and the defender has made a weak one, or lied about it, and this is pointed out. An ad hominem argument would be to say simply that you should not believe what he says for no other reason than this (and even then it’s not true ad hominem, because the information is relevant to the topic at hand), but stated properly, it is rather an explanation for why such a poor/mendacious argument is being made. For an example of this non-example of ad hominem, see my post yesterday about Loren Thompson. Note that I eviscerated his foolishness — the fact that he’s on the payroll of major aerospace corporations who favor the status quo was simply lagniappe for the benefit of readers who might wonder why he was making such absurd, unfactual and illogical arguments.

But as I said, what Sachs did to Hanson was a pure, logic-free, irrelevant and false attack on his character as an excuse to avoid having to deal with the substance of his comments, and I point it out as an example of the real deal.

Business, Economics, Media Criticism, Philosophy

Politifact?

2 Comments

…or PolitiFiction?

In fact—if we may use that term without PolitiFact’s seal of approval—at the heart of ObamaCare is a vast expansion of federal control over how U.S. health care is financed, and thus delivered. The regulations that PolitiFact waves off are designed to convert insurers into government contractors in the business of fulfilling political demands, with enormous implications for the future of U.S. medicine. All citizens will be required to pay into this system, regardless of their individual needs or preferences. Sounds like a government takeover to us.

…As long as the press corps is nominating “lies of the year,” ours goes to the formal legislative title of ObamaCare, the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. For a bill that in reality will raise health costs and reduce patient choice, the name recalls Mary McCarthy’s famous line about every word being a lie, including “the” and “and.”

I’ll go with politifiction.

[Update a while later]

Pere Suderman isn’t impressed, either:

If you had to rank the biggest political lie of 2010, what would it be? The utter horse-hockey that we’ve somehow proven that the stimulus created a zillion-billion long-term jobs and acted like a fiscal-policy Powerbar for the economy? The president’s oft-repeated and flatly untrue statement that under the health care overhaul, if you like your doctor or your health plan, you can keep it? The contrived justifications for describing ObamaCare as indisputably “fiscally responsible” despite a hotly contested and thoroughly gamed budgetary scoring process? How about the administration’s repeated but totally false claim that the CBO backs up its Medicare accounting, when in fact the CBO has said that the administration’s numbers constitute a form of “double counting”?

Say what you will about the rest of its accomplishments (or lack thereof), but the White House has proven a remarkably consistent and high-quality bullshit factory this year. The way they churn this stuff out, you might think they’d be up for an award! No such luck…

PolitiFiction.

Philosophy, Social Commentary, Technology and Society, Weird

The Weirdness Of The Human Mind

9 Comments

Often, when I mistype, unless I’m in a huge hurry and just sit on the backspace, I’ll be careful to not delete letters I’ve already typed, but move the cursor around them if they’ll be useful in the fix, because I don’t like to waste them.

Just so you know. I’m a child of parents who were children of the Depression. What can I say? I’m just frugal, if not always rational.

General Science, Humor, Philosophy, Popular Culture

Cosmological Thoughts

4 Comments

From Lileks:

Says io9: “Two enormous, gamma-ray-emitting structures are bubbling out of the center of our galaxy. And astronomers have no idea what caused them.” That’s comforting. They do have an explanation for the enormous white brackets and letters and numbers, each of which is several hundred light-years across, but about the bubbles they got bupkis. That’s not what gets me, though: it’s the Milky Way. Suddenly it seems as if we really should have a better name for the galaxy. You meet some aliens, work out the language issues, and find out they call the Galaxy “The Hand of God Prime” or “The Torch of the Void” or “The Cradle of Light,” and then they ask us, and then they look at us with their eyes on stalks moving quizzically up and down and say, in their grating metallic voices, “The Fluid of Mammary Glands Road? Seriously?” And one of them spies a Milky Way candy bar – actually, he heard its distinct chemical signature as it underwent a chemical change when the wrapper opened, and this produced a rather dissonant change in the infra-red spectrum, which they usually reserve for tragedy and dark comedy – and he asks why that is named after the galaxy. Or if it’s named for breast milk. “It’s all about tits with you people, isn’t it?” And then we sort of nod and say, well, you got us there, what can we say. But what did you say you called Andromeda, the Comely Buttock? To each his own, then.

Also thoughts on colliding galaxies, and failure to us a turn signal.