Long ago and far away, my undergraduate major — one of them, at least — was Philosophy. Based on having watched too much Star Trek, I took a course in logic. Now, on Star Trek, Spock’s logic was basically a sort of inchoate Stoicism with a lot of “I like what will make the next gag work”, but as I was exposed to real logic, I was hooked. Eventually that led me to mathematical logic, which turned computer programming from a handy job I was good at into an intellectual obsession, which made me the cranky old hermit I am today — but that’s another story.
But my first Philosophy course was on Rhetoric and Logic, and that was what made me change my major. There were actual rules for arguments, and they were rules that had clear reasons behind them. Even better, there was a catalogue of common flawed arguments, or fallacies, and seeing those rules made it easier to pick out flawed arguments.
For me, it was a life-changing experience. (Don’t judge.)
One of those fallacies has been much bandied about this week. The classical name for it is tu quoque, which is the Latin for “and you’re another.” (Really.) The problem is, people are misusing it.
Here’s a paraphrase of an argument I’ve seen over and over again, all week, on the Rush Limbaugh thing.
“We shouldn’t bring up the things liberal talkers say about conservative women. What Rush said was indefensible and anyway, just because they say it doesn’t make it right for us to say it.”
Sometimes people explicitly call out the tu quoque making this argument, but in any case the point is to claim it’s tu quoque to defend Rush by pointing out the offenses of the liberal talkers. The flaw is that tu quoque is to claim “It’s okay that I did this Bad Thing, because those others were doing it too.” However, I don’t know of anyone who’s defending Rush calling Fluke a slut — not even Rush.
Saying “If it’s bad when someone on our side does it, then it’s bad when someone on the other side does it too” is perfectly valid — and very unpopular.
I think you’re missing the real issue. It isn’t a question of whether or not the other guy doing A justifies A. It’s the question of who makes up the rules, and who gets to change them, and when.
This is entirely analogous to the Loughner/civility thing. The left was in fact trying to rewrite the rules ex post facto. The counter, that leftist have been engaging in far worse transgressions isn’t so much a justification as an attempt to point out that what Palin did was socially “legal” all along, and the left was trying to change the rules to suit themselves.
Ultimately, this is why people find hypocrisy wrong: it’s an attempt to change the rules after the fact, and then disingenuously pretend that the new rules were there all along. And often it works, because people have short memories.
If I’m missing the real issue, why are we agreeing?
There’s often more than one way to arrive at the right conclusion. Very often people are right for the wrong reason. Witness the climate wars. There are only a small number of possible positions (the sky is falling, the earth is cooling, and a couple shades in between), but there are hundreds of crackpot theories (the greenhouse effect is thermodynamically impossible, the earth is heated by volcanoes, the sun has an iron core, etc.). There are all kinds of people who are right for the wrong reason (spend some time at Curry’s and you’ll see what I mean). There are also a lot of people who are wrong, but for almost plausible reasons.
There is a very marked up and battered copy of “The Art of Reasoning” on the bookcase behind me as I write. After a stint with the Legislature, I returned to the Executive Branch as a SME and supervisor in the labor relations function. The Democrats had run off all the experienced staff, me among them, hence my sojourn with the Legislature, and my staff was very young, foolish, and inexperienced – a perfect Democrat staff in other words – but even the Democrats had run out of patience with their union friends and my job was to spin up that staff. Few of them had any real knowlege of the functions and processes of the various State departments and I was being forced to deal with issues and functions even I wasn’t familiar with. I’d always stayed far away from the “soft” departments like Health and Social Services, Education , Labor; the Democrat departments full of union radicals and Democrat apparatchiks. Anyway, you can’t just become an instant expert when a union grievance gets filed or they make a contract proposal, but I found my old friend formal logic and my old college text to be invaluable because most grievances and the support for most contract provisions were subjectivist fallacies of some sort. Mostly, argumentum ad populum; everybody in the union thinks this, therefore it is true or argumentum ad baculum; we don’t like it therefore we’re going to huff, and puff, and blow your house down. Before long there were copies of “The Art of Reasoning” on every staff member’s desk. I can’t say that I was a great logician but being one at all gives you a great advantage over those that have none of those skills. And I certainly can’t say that I made logicians of my staff; for even college educated 20-somethings it was “tooooo haaaaard” and “BO-ring,” but since I was the boss, I could make them at least learn to apply some of it. Formal logic is hardly taught at all anymore, even to law students – who could really use it. It has been replaced by “critical thinking,” which is more accurately titled, “How To Think Like a Democrat.”
If you made it a law that no politician could utter a fallacious statement or use an invalid sylogism, you’d never hear from another Democrat again and the mainstream media would go dark. Assuming, of course, you didn’t have a Democrat President and a law that Democrats didn’t like could be enforced.
Oh no, you do. I call a slut anyone who says that she needs 11 condoms a day, every day, for three years. And I call her a sex addict that should see a psychologist.
If it is not offensive to her to say such a thing about herself, why should the use of a common English term that describes exactly that behavior be offensive ?
Are we going to call a bank robber a “long term unsecured loan borrower” next ?
If we’re going to call females this name, then we need to call the males who behave this way the same name.
Most certainly. I didn’t mean to be sexist, I meant to speak a normal language, not vetted by the lefties censorship.
Okay, I don’t know anyone defending “slut” who isn’t being a fool. Go read her testimony — the 11 condoms a day thing is someone’s interpretation, but the testimony was about needing a specific birth control pill that was expensive.
Now, since it appears Georgetown’s policy will pay for hormone pills for other medical conditions, and given that Fluke seems to be a little less that forthcoming on a lot of topics, I might have bought “liar”.
As I said before, Rush owes sluts an apology. Comparing harmless sluts to pernicious activists is an insult to sluts.
Then there is another point.
We always feel timid and scared and we let ourselves be described by the lefties.
Why do I say that ?
Because we keep reasoning in terms of “what we do”, “what they do”.
Let’s define what THEY do.
They call Ann Coulter or Laura Ingram names.
They call them names BECAUSE those women write from a conservative point of view.
WHAT has that to do with calling with a normal English world that defines her objective behavior a woman who says she NEEDS eleven condoms a day every day ?
It is not the “same”.
It is not that “we can do” that name calling “because they do it”.
They don’t call Ann and Laura names because Ann and Laura have confessed a behavior that can be described by those offensive words !!!!
In one case we have the lefties offending two intellectuals, for no reason.
In the other case we are just describing what the woman has actually said about herself.
We can do it. And they can’t. Because it’s two completely different things we are talking about.
you are very correct. the conservatives get caught trying to be nice and nice isn’t going to get you anywhere with these hyenas. slut is appropriate in the case of Fluke. liar also fits.
the conservatives need to stop worrying about being ridiculed ..they will be anyhow. stop playing the progs game ! PERIOD.
The difference is that Rush was just using reducto ad absurdum to illustrate the fallacy of Fluke’s position. Liberals use personal invectives to demean their opponents.
Good youtube videos and article too