Welcome to DU!
The truly grassroots left-of-center political community where regular people, not algorithms, drive the discussions and set the standards.
Join the community:
Create a free account
Support DU (and get rid of ads!):
Become a Star Member
Latest Breaking News
General Discussion
The DU Lounge
All Forums
Issue Forums
Culture Forums
Alliance Forums
Region Forums
Support Forums
Help & Search
Demeter
Demeter's Journal
Demeter's Journal
November 20, 2014
By Matt Stoller, who writes for Salon and has contributed to Politico, Alternet, The Nation and Reuters. You can reach him at stoller (at) gmail.com or follow him on Twitter at @matthewstoller. Originally published at Medium and Firedoglake
If there’s one way to summarize Zephyr Teachout’s extraordinary book Corruption in America: From Benjamin Franklin’s Snuff Box to Citizens United, it is that today we are living in Benjamin Franklin’s dystopia. Her basic contention, which is not unfamiliar to most of us in sentiment if not in detail, is that the modern Supreme Court has engaged in a revolutionary reinterpretation of corruption and therefore in American political life. This outlook, written by Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy in the famous Citizens United case, understands and celebrates America as a brutal and Hobbesian competitive struggle among self-interested actors attempting to use money to gain personal benefits in the public sphere.
What makes the book so remarkable is its scope and ability to link current debates to our rich and forgotten history. Perhaps this has been done before, but if it has, I have never seen it. Liberals tend to think that questions about electoral and political corruption started in the 1970s, in the Watergate era. What Teachout shows is that these questions were foundational in the American Revolution itself, and every epoch since. They are in fact questions fundamental to the design of democracy.
Teachout starts her book by telling the story of a set of debates that took place even before the Constitution was ratified — whether American officials could take gifts from foreign kings. The French King, as a matter of diplomatic process, routinely gave diamond-encrusted snuff boxes to foreign ambassadors. Americans, adopting a radical Dutch provision banning such gifts, wrestled with the question of temptation to individual public servants versus international diplomatic norms. The gifts ban, she argues, was evidence of a particular demanding notion of corruption at the heart of American legal history. These rules, ‘bright-line’ rules versus ‘corrupt-intent’ rules, govern temptation and structure. They cover innocent and illicit activity, as opposed to bribery rules which are organized solely around quid pro quo corruption.
The Constitution is full of such bright-line rules. For instance, the residency requirement was intended to protect against ‘adventurers’ and the takings clause protects private property and has an anti-monopoly interpretive framework. The census, rules on representation of House members, the regular electoral cycle of two year terms, age requirements (to prevent dynasties), requirements for legislative journals, salary payments for legislators, and prohibitions on holding legislative and other offices are all anti-corruption provisions. The founders, Teachout argues, were obsessed with corruption. They had seen their beloved British system fall into the trap of corruption, with ‘place men’ (members of parliament dependent on the king) and rotten boroughs, and sought to prevent a recurrence in America.
Teachout points out something fairly obvious, but not recognized today — the theoretical underpinning of the American revolution was that a corrupt government had no legitimacy to govern....MORE
Lobbying Used to Be a Crime: A Review of Zephyr Teachout’s New Book on the Secret History of Corrupt
http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2014/11/matt-stoller-lobbying-used-crime-review-zephyr-teachouts-new-book-secret-history-corruption-america.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+NakedCapitalism+%28naked+capitalism%29By Matt Stoller, who writes for Salon and has contributed to Politico, Alternet, The Nation and Reuters. You can reach him at stoller (at) gmail.com or follow him on Twitter at @matthewstoller. Originally published at Medium and Firedoglake
If there’s one way to summarize Zephyr Teachout’s extraordinary book Corruption in America: From Benjamin Franklin’s Snuff Box to Citizens United, it is that today we are living in Benjamin Franklin’s dystopia. Her basic contention, which is not unfamiliar to most of us in sentiment if not in detail, is that the modern Supreme Court has engaged in a revolutionary reinterpretation of corruption and therefore in American political life. This outlook, written by Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy in the famous Citizens United case, understands and celebrates America as a brutal and Hobbesian competitive struggle among self-interested actors attempting to use money to gain personal benefits in the public sphere.
What makes the book so remarkable is its scope and ability to link current debates to our rich and forgotten history. Perhaps this has been done before, but if it has, I have never seen it. Liberals tend to think that questions about electoral and political corruption started in the 1970s, in the Watergate era. What Teachout shows is that these questions were foundational in the American Revolution itself, and every epoch since. They are in fact questions fundamental to the design of democracy.
Teachout starts her book by telling the story of a set of debates that took place even before the Constitution was ratified — whether American officials could take gifts from foreign kings. The French King, as a matter of diplomatic process, routinely gave diamond-encrusted snuff boxes to foreign ambassadors. Americans, adopting a radical Dutch provision banning such gifts, wrestled with the question of temptation to individual public servants versus international diplomatic norms. The gifts ban, she argues, was evidence of a particular demanding notion of corruption at the heart of American legal history. These rules, ‘bright-line’ rules versus ‘corrupt-intent’ rules, govern temptation and structure. They cover innocent and illicit activity, as opposed to bribery rules which are organized solely around quid pro quo corruption.
The Constitution is full of such bright-line rules. For instance, the residency requirement was intended to protect against ‘adventurers’ and the takings clause protects private property and has an anti-monopoly interpretive framework. The census, rules on representation of House members, the regular electoral cycle of two year terms, age requirements (to prevent dynasties), requirements for legislative journals, salary payments for legislators, and prohibitions on holding legislative and other offices are all anti-corruption provisions. The founders, Teachout argues, were obsessed with corruption. They had seen their beloved British system fall into the trap of corruption, with ‘place men’ (members of parliament dependent on the king) and rotten boroughs, and sought to prevent a recurrence in America.
Teachout points out something fairly obvious, but not recognized today — the theoretical underpinning of the American revolution was that a corrupt government had no legitimacy to govern....MORE
November 19, 2014
Tuesday, 18. November, 2014 FROM AN EMAIL...
Statistics guru Nate Silver simply can’t understand why every single legitimate poll indicated that Democrats should have gotten 4% more votes in the midterm elections than appeared in the final count. The answer, Nate, is “Crosscheck.”
No question, Republicans trounced Democrats in the Midterm elections. But, if not for the boost of this voter-roll purge system used in 23 Republican-controlled states, the GOP could not have taken the US Senate. It took the Palast investigations team six months to get our hands on the raw files, fighting against every official trick to keep them hidden. Here’s what we found.
Interstate Crosscheck is computer system that officials claim can identify anyone who commits the crime of voting twice in the same election in two different states. While the current list of seven million “suspects” did not yield a single conviction for double voting, Crosscheck did provide the grounds for removing the registrations of tens of thousands of voters in battleground states. The purge proved decisive in North Carolina, Colorado, Kansas and elsewhere. Without Crosscheck, the GOP could not have taken control of the US Senate.
Nate Silver might want to punch these numbers into his laptop:
The Crosscheck purge list also swamped GOP Senate margins in Alaska and Georgia and likely provided the victory margins for GOP gubernatorial victories in Kansas and Massachusetts.
No, states do not purge every name on the lists. Typical is Virginia which proudly purged 64,581 “duplicates” from its voter rolls in 2013, equal to about 19% of its Crosscheck list. Other states refuse to provide numbers, but their scrub methods are the same, or even more aggressive, than Virginia’s. We can conservatively calculate that the purge of 19% of the Crosscheck lists accounted for at least three GOP Senate victories – and thereby, control of the Senate. If the Crosscheck lists truly identified fraudulent double voters, then we’d have to concede that the election results are legit. But the ugly truth is, the lists are nothing more than racially-loaded lists of common names.
And that’s why GOP Secretaries of State, a gaggle of Katherine Harrises, hid the lists until we cracked through the official wall of denial and concealment. These election chieftains refused our demands for the lists on the grounds that these millions of voters are all suspects in a criminal investigation and so must remain confidential. Eventually (and legally), we were able to get our hands on 2.1 million of the 6.9 million names—and had them analyzed by the same list experts who advise eBay and American Express. What we found is simply a giant list of common names—a lot of voters named Michael Jackson, David Lee and Juan Rodriguez. The racial smell of it was apparent and awful. As the US Census tells us, African-Americans, Asian-Americans and Hispanics are 67% more likely to share a common name as a white American. In other words, the lists heavily targeted “blue” Americans, Democratic leaning voters.
While state officials claimed that the criminal double voters were matched by social security number and other key identifiers, we discovered that, in fact, they only matched first and last name. Nearly two million of the pairs of names lacked middle name matches. Example: James Elmer Barnes Jr. who voted in Georgia is supposed to be the same person as James Cross Barnes III of Virginia.
Republican officials have gone to great lengths to cover Crosscheck’s operations. Voters purged are not told they are accused of voting twice. The procedure, created by Kansas’ Republican Secretary of State Kris Kobach, is to send a postcard to each “duplicate” voter requiring them to re-verify their registration. A large percentage are never delivered—Americans, especially renters and lower-income Americans, move often—or cards are tossed away confused for junk mail. Brad Friedman, the investigative reporter with encyclopedic knowledge of elections shenanigans, was also bemused by Nate Silver’s confusion over the missing Democratic four percent. He cites the Crosscheck purges we discovered and adds in all the other tried and true methods of bending the vote, from Photo ID restrictions to missing voter registrations and a deliberate shortage of paper ballots in minority precincts. In Georgia alone, 56,000 registration forms collected by a coalition of minority voting rights groups were simply not added to the voter rolls.
The Tool to Take 2016
The purge of those snared in the Crosscheck dragnet has only just begun. The process of actually removing names from the voter rolls is subtle and slow, involving several steps over many months. Some states mark their voters on the Crosscheck list as “inactive”— which means that, if they failed to vote in this midterm election, they will be blocked from voting in 2016. As a result, Crosscheck will take an even bigger bite out of the 2016 voter rolls. This bodes ill for the upcoming Presidential contest when, once again, Ohio is expected to be decisive. Ohio’s Republican secretary of state, John Husted, has embraced Crosscheck.
We enlisted Columbus State University professor Robert Fitrakis, an expert in voting law to canvas county voting officials. He found these local elections officials concerned that the Republican Secretary of State is pushing counties to scrub voter rolls of “duplicates” within 30 days of receiving the names from the Secretary’s office. This gives counties little time and no resources to verify if an accused voter has, in fact, voted in a second state. Secretary of State Husted has refused to give us the list of the 469,201 names on Ohio’s Crosscheck list—but we’ve obtained thousands anyway. We found that Ohio’s lists have the same glaring mismatches as we saw in the Virginia, North Carolina and Georgia lists.
We have now launched an investigation to uncover the names of all the voters Ohio plans to scrub from the registration rolls by 2016. The answer may well determine who will choose our next president: the voters or Crosscheck.
http://projects.aljazeera.com/2014/double-voters/
The Secret Lists that Swiped the Senate By Greg Palast
Tuesday, 18. November, 2014 FROM AN EMAIL...
Statistics guru Nate Silver simply can’t understand why every single legitimate poll indicated that Democrats should have gotten 4% more votes in the midterm elections than appeared in the final count. The answer, Nate, is “Crosscheck.”
No question, Republicans trounced Democrats in the Midterm elections. But, if not for the boost of this voter-roll purge system used in 23 Republican-controlled states, the GOP could not have taken the US Senate. It took the Palast investigations team six months to get our hands on the raw files, fighting against every official trick to keep them hidden. Here’s what we found.
Interstate Crosscheck is computer system that officials claim can identify anyone who commits the crime of voting twice in the same election in two different states. While the current list of seven million “suspects” did not yield a single conviction for double voting, Crosscheck did provide the grounds for removing the registrations of tens of thousands of voters in battleground states. The purge proved decisive in North Carolina, Colorado, Kansas and elsewhere. Without Crosscheck, the GOP could not have taken control of the US Senate.
Nate Silver might want to punch these numbers into his laptop:
In North Carolina, Republican Thom Tillis upset incumbent Senator Kay Hagan by just 48,511 votes. North Carolina’s Crosscheck purge list targeted a stunning 589,393 voters.
In Colorado, Cory Gardner, the Republican, defeated Mark Udall by just 49,729 votes. Colorado’s Crosscheck “potential double voter” list totals 300,842.
In Colorado, Cory Gardner, the Republican, defeated Mark Udall by just 49,729 votes. Colorado’s Crosscheck “potential double voter” list totals 300,842.
The Crosscheck purge list also swamped GOP Senate margins in Alaska and Georgia and likely provided the victory margins for GOP gubernatorial victories in Kansas and Massachusetts.
No, states do not purge every name on the lists. Typical is Virginia which proudly purged 64,581 “duplicates” from its voter rolls in 2013, equal to about 19% of its Crosscheck list. Other states refuse to provide numbers, but their scrub methods are the same, or even more aggressive, than Virginia’s. We can conservatively calculate that the purge of 19% of the Crosscheck lists accounted for at least three GOP Senate victories – and thereby, control of the Senate. If the Crosscheck lists truly identified fraudulent double voters, then we’d have to concede that the election results are legit. But the ugly truth is, the lists are nothing more than racially-loaded lists of common names.
And that’s why GOP Secretaries of State, a gaggle of Katherine Harrises, hid the lists until we cracked through the official wall of denial and concealment. These election chieftains refused our demands for the lists on the grounds that these millions of voters are all suspects in a criminal investigation and so must remain confidential. Eventually (and legally), we were able to get our hands on 2.1 million of the 6.9 million names—and had them analyzed by the same list experts who advise eBay and American Express. What we found is simply a giant list of common names—a lot of voters named Michael Jackson, David Lee and Juan Rodriguez. The racial smell of it was apparent and awful. As the US Census tells us, African-Americans, Asian-Americans and Hispanics are 67% more likely to share a common name as a white American. In other words, the lists heavily targeted “blue” Americans, Democratic leaning voters.
While state officials claimed that the criminal double voters were matched by social security number and other key identifiers, we discovered that, in fact, they only matched first and last name. Nearly two million of the pairs of names lacked middle name matches. Example: James Elmer Barnes Jr. who voted in Georgia is supposed to be the same person as James Cross Barnes III of Virginia.
Republican officials have gone to great lengths to cover Crosscheck’s operations. Voters purged are not told they are accused of voting twice. The procedure, created by Kansas’ Republican Secretary of State Kris Kobach, is to send a postcard to each “duplicate” voter requiring them to re-verify their registration. A large percentage are never delivered—Americans, especially renters and lower-income Americans, move often—or cards are tossed away confused for junk mail. Brad Friedman, the investigative reporter with encyclopedic knowledge of elections shenanigans, was also bemused by Nate Silver’s confusion over the missing Democratic four percent. He cites the Crosscheck purges we discovered and adds in all the other tried and true methods of bending the vote, from Photo ID restrictions to missing voter registrations and a deliberate shortage of paper ballots in minority precincts. In Georgia alone, 56,000 registration forms collected by a coalition of minority voting rights groups were simply not added to the voter rolls.
The Tool to Take 2016
The purge of those snared in the Crosscheck dragnet has only just begun. The process of actually removing names from the voter rolls is subtle and slow, involving several steps over many months. Some states mark their voters on the Crosscheck list as “inactive”— which means that, if they failed to vote in this midterm election, they will be blocked from voting in 2016. As a result, Crosscheck will take an even bigger bite out of the 2016 voter rolls. This bodes ill for the upcoming Presidential contest when, once again, Ohio is expected to be decisive. Ohio’s Republican secretary of state, John Husted, has embraced Crosscheck.
We enlisted Columbus State University professor Robert Fitrakis, an expert in voting law to canvas county voting officials. He found these local elections officials concerned that the Republican Secretary of State is pushing counties to scrub voter rolls of “duplicates” within 30 days of receiving the names from the Secretary’s office. This gives counties little time and no resources to verify if an accused voter has, in fact, voted in a second state. Secretary of State Husted has refused to give us the list of the 469,201 names on Ohio’s Crosscheck list—but we’ve obtained thousands anyway. We found that Ohio’s lists have the same glaring mismatches as we saw in the Virginia, North Carolina and Georgia lists.
We have now launched an investigation to uncover the names of all the voters Ohio plans to scrub from the registration rolls by 2016. The answer may well determine who will choose our next president: the voters or Crosscheck.
http://projects.aljazeera.com/2014/double-voters/
November 18, 2014
...If you want a single reason for why Democrats lost big on Election Day 2014 it’s this: Median household income continues to drop. This is the first “recovery” in memory when this has happened. Jobs are coming back but wages aren’t. Every month the job numbers grow but the wage numbers go nowhere. Most new jobs are in part-time or low-paying positions. They pay less than the jobs lost in the Great Recession. This wageless recovery has been made all the worse because pay is less predictable than ever. Most Americans don’t know what they’ll be earning next year or even next month. Two-thirds are now living paycheck to paycheck.
So why is this called a “recovery” at all? Because, technically, the economy is growing. But almost all the gains from that growth are going to a small minority at the top. In fact, 100 percent of the gains have gone to the best-off 10 percent. Ninety-five percent have gone to the top 1 percent. The stock market has boomed. Corporate profits are through the roof. CEO pay, in the stratosphere. Yet most Americans feel like they’re still in a recession. And they’re convinced the game is rigged against them.
Fifty years ago, just 29 percent of voters believed government is “run by a few big interests looking out for themselves.” Now, 79 percent think so.
According to Pew, the percentage of Americans who believe most people who want to get ahead can do so through hard work has plummeted 14 points since 2000.
What the President and other Democrats failed to communicate wasn’t their accomplishments. It was their understanding that the economy is failing most Americans and big money is overrunning our democracy. And they failed to convey their commitment to an economy and a democracy that serve the vast majority rather than a minority at the top...
MORE
Robert Reich: The Real Reason Democrats Lost Big on Election Day
http://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/robert-reich-real-reason-democrats-lost-big-election-day?akid=12465.227380.p9D1Sh&rd=1&src=newsletter1027008&t=14&paging=off¤t_page=1#bookmark...If you want a single reason for why Democrats lost big on Election Day 2014 it’s this: Median household income continues to drop. This is the first “recovery” in memory when this has happened. Jobs are coming back but wages aren’t. Every month the job numbers grow but the wage numbers go nowhere. Most new jobs are in part-time or low-paying positions. They pay less than the jobs lost in the Great Recession. This wageless recovery has been made all the worse because pay is less predictable than ever. Most Americans don’t know what they’ll be earning next year or even next month. Two-thirds are now living paycheck to paycheck.
So why is this called a “recovery” at all? Because, technically, the economy is growing. But almost all the gains from that growth are going to a small minority at the top. In fact, 100 percent of the gains have gone to the best-off 10 percent. Ninety-five percent have gone to the top 1 percent. The stock market has boomed. Corporate profits are through the roof. CEO pay, in the stratosphere. Yet most Americans feel like they’re still in a recession. And they’re convinced the game is rigged against them.
What the President and other Democrats failed to communicate wasn’t their accomplishments. It was their understanding that the economy is failing most Americans and big money is overrunning our democracy. And they failed to convey their commitment to an economy and a democracy that serve the vast majority rather than a minority at the top...
MORE
November 17, 2014
LOTS OF DAMNING COMMENTARY AT LINK. THANKS TO NAKED CAPITALISM AND Lambert Strether
http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2014/11/jonathan-gruber-obamacare-stupid-voters-couldnt-happen-nicer-shill.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+NakedCapitalism+%28naked+capitalism%29
YES, FOLKS WE'VE BEEN HAD, AND SINGLE PAYER (NOT PEOPLE DYING FOR LACK OF AFFORDABLE HEALTH CARE) IS THE ENEMY:
The Author of the Obamacare Clusterfuck Speaks about "Stupid American Voters"
LOTS OF DAMNING COMMENTARY AT LINK. THANKS TO NAKED CAPITALISM AND Lambert Strether
http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2014/11/jonathan-gruber-obamacare-stupid-voters-couldnt-happen-nicer-shill.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+NakedCapitalism+%28naked+capitalism%29
YES, FOLKS WE'VE BEEN HAD, AND SINGLE PAYER (NOT PEOPLE DYING FOR LACK OF AFFORDABLE HEALTH CARE) IS THE ENEMY:
think for a minute about what Gruber’s magic box is really doing; far from being a “statistically sophisticated” “micro-simulation model,” it’s really got exactly one output, and it emits that output every single run when der Blinkenlights stop flashing: “Not single payer.” That’s by design; and Gruber’s software is quite performant. That’s why the the “long advocated” point that Krugman makes defending Gruber against Greenwald is irrelevant:
That’s at best silly and at worse disingenous; the single output of Gruber’s model (“not single payer”) never changes by design, and the basic parameters of the model were set by the Heritage Foundation in 1989, and all Gruber’s clients accept them; indeed, they hire them to validate their assumptions, not for simulation. Krugman is treating Gruber as if he were a scholar, when in fact Gruber is a consultant doing work-for-hire; his clients’ requirements have not changed, so naturally his deliverables have not changed.
"And one more thing: what Gruber has had to say about health reform in the current debate is entirely consistent with his previous academic work. There’s not a hint that he has changed views, or altered his model, to accommodate the Obama administration."
That’s at best silly and at worse disingenous; the single output of Gruber’s model (“not single payer”) never changes by design, and the basic parameters of the model were set by the Heritage Foundation in 1989, and all Gruber’s clients accept them; indeed, they hire them to validate their assumptions, not for simulation. Krugman is treating Gruber as if he were a scholar, when in fact Gruber is a consultant doing work-for-hire; his clients’ requirements have not changed, so naturally his deliverables have not changed.
November 17, 2014
By Laura Gottesdiener, a freelance journalist and author of A Dream Foreclosed: Black America and the Fight for a Place to Call Home. Her writing has appeared in Mother Jones, Al Jazeera, Guernica, Playboy, RollingStone.com, and frequently at TomDispatch. She is currently working with Zuccotti Park Press on a book about climate change and displacement. Originally published at TomDispatch.
In late October, a few days after local news cameras swarmed Detroit’s courthouse to hear closing arguments in the city’s historic bankruptcy trial, “Commander” Dale Brown cruised through the stately Detroit neighborhood of Palmer Woods in a Hummer emblazoned with the silver, interlocking-crescent-moon logo of his private security company. Brown rolled down the window to ask a middle-aged woman walking her dog whether everything was okay (it was), and whether she had seen anything out of the ordinary (she hadn’t). Satisfied, he continued on, guided by a futuristic tablet map of the neighborhood’s languid streets. These had become even more impenetrable last year when the bankrupt city paid for and constructed a series of traffic barriers on the community’s edges. On his right, he pointed out, was the Bishop’s Residence, a 30-room Tudor Revival castle originally commissioned by a family of fabulously wealthy automobile pioneers who later sold their company to General Motors.
Brown is the founder of Threat Management, a private security company hired by the Palmer Woods’ neighborhood association to provide 24-hour protection to this elite enclave. He knows the two sides of Detroit more intimately than just about any of its residents. After a stint as an Army paratrooper, he moved to the city’s East Side in the mid-1990s and into a neighborhood dubbed “crack alley.” There, he started running free security for his neighbors and a few adjacent apartment buildings with only a rifle, a dog, and psychological tricks like heavily pocketed vests, since “pockets represent the unknown.” Next, he worked at a nightclub, enforcing such a strict no-beating-women-on-the-dance-floor policy that the joint soon had a regular stiletto-heeled line out the door. Two decades later, Brown’s officers, with their distinctly paramilitary aesthetic, are among the most recognizable of a burgeoning number of private security personnel and surveillance systems scattered across neighborhoods in the former Motor City that people with money have decided are worth protecting.
But the future of the rest of the sprawling city — once the symbol of American industrialization and working-class power — remains at best insecure, physically and financially. In the 1940s, President Franklin Roosevelt declared Detroit, then the nation’s fourth largest city, the “great arsenal of democracy” for churning out bombers for the Allied powers, as in peacetime it rolled out cars for the consumer economy. Then the auto giants began closing their urban factories and reopening their plants in white suburbs. In the same era, the industry, national unions, and the FBI all cracked down on the labor organizations founded by radical black workers.
The foreclosure crisis of this century, fueled by racially discriminatory predatory lending, forced hundreds of thousands of residents out of the city. The governor’s office placed the public school system and then the entire local government under emergency management, suspending the democratic process in the “arsenal of democracy.” And now, after seven decades of these slow-moving storms, including acts that are almost impossible to see as anything but retribution against the city’s predominantly African American population, Detroit is often viewed from afar as a cautionary tale, a post-industrial dystopia of vacant buildings and dormant factories.
The truth, however, is more complicated. On the brink of a new, post-bankruptcy beginning, Detroit is really two cities. One is comprised of wealthy enclaves like Palmer Woods linked to a compact, rapidly redeveloping downtown. The other is made up of the rest of the 139-square-mile urban expanse, populated by longtime residents who have fought for decades to survive in an environment that has become increasingly uninhabitable. In the first Detroit, private security is common and the living is relatively safe. In the second, running water has systematically been cut off from at least 27,000 households this year alone, the latest in a series of government-enacted policies that have made daily life an increasingly desperate battle. Rather than growing closer in the coming post-bankruptcy era, many residents fear that these two Detroits — already so separate and unequal — will have increasingly divergent futures....For Wayne State law professor Peter Hammer, however, lurking in the bankruptcy plan is a potential future that’s far more sinister than anyone is advertising. As Hammer explained, Detroit has become a blueprint for the creation of a “self-acknowledged, self-defined second-class city,” one where the state guarantees only the most basic services to most of its inhabitants: “some police,” “some fire protection,” and “a bulldozer department” to raze abandoned houses, while the remaining essential services will be available only on a private basis for those who can pay.
That Detroit is a more than 80% African American metropolis makes the idea of its rise from bankruptcy with second-class status all the more problematic. As Hammer explains, the plan for Detroit bears an eerie back-to-the-future resemblance to the famed Kerner Commission report of 1968, issued by a presidentially appointed panel in the wake of the urban rebellions that were then sweeping the country. Its findings were that the nation was moving toward two societies: black and white, separate and unequal....As the city government has receded, a lack of services has made parts of Detroit all but uninhabitable. The injustices pile up: the threat that Child Protective Services will seize custody of children who are living in waterless homes; the streets upon streets of emptied houses, their roofs caving in, their porches collapsing, their bricks blackened by fire; the all-too-common violent deaths in neighborhoods without private security, where residents must rely on a decimated public police force that clocked an average response time of 58 minutes in 2013; the charade of public school board meetings, where few decisions can be made because the school district is under the control of an unelected emergency manager the board has voted three times without success to fire; the death of a seven-year-old girl at the hands of a Detroit police officer wielding a submachine gun as his unit was being filmed executing home raids for an A&E reality TV show; the heartbreak of watching the city being disassembled and sold off as if at an estate sale — despite the fact that this Detroit has declared it will not die....Many here quietly wonder about the purposefulness of it all or, as one resident finally asked the U.N. officials during their visit: “Does this, all that you’ve heard, meet the legal definition of genocide?”
And yet, despite these injustices and the feeling of bitterness that go with them, each morning this Detroit, too, rises.... For the record, because this is not made clear in the article, both Palmer Woods and East English Village, enclaves in Detroit that ‘look far more like something you would find in Detroit’s mostly white suburbs” are both more than 80% black.
Black elites really do not differ from white elites all that much.
I EDITED OUT SO MUCH OF THIS...THE CURIOUS WOULD BE GLAD TO READ THE WHOLE THING
Two Detroits, Separate and Unequal: A Journey Across a City Divided
http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2014/11/two-detroits-separate-unequal-journey-across-city-divided.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+NakedCapitalism+%28naked+capitalism%29By Laura Gottesdiener, a freelance journalist and author of A Dream Foreclosed: Black America and the Fight for a Place to Call Home. Her writing has appeared in Mother Jones, Al Jazeera, Guernica, Playboy, RollingStone.com, and frequently at TomDispatch. She is currently working with Zuccotti Park Press on a book about climate change and displacement. Originally published at TomDispatch.
In late October, a few days after local news cameras swarmed Detroit’s courthouse to hear closing arguments in the city’s historic bankruptcy trial, “Commander” Dale Brown cruised through the stately Detroit neighborhood of Palmer Woods in a Hummer emblazoned with the silver, interlocking-crescent-moon logo of his private security company. Brown rolled down the window to ask a middle-aged woman walking her dog whether everything was okay (it was), and whether she had seen anything out of the ordinary (she hadn’t). Satisfied, he continued on, guided by a futuristic tablet map of the neighborhood’s languid streets. These had become even more impenetrable last year when the bankrupt city paid for and constructed a series of traffic barriers on the community’s edges. On his right, he pointed out, was the Bishop’s Residence, a 30-room Tudor Revival castle originally commissioned by a family of fabulously wealthy automobile pioneers who later sold their company to General Motors.
“This is the part of Detroit that most people are not aware of,” Brown told filmmaker Messiah Rhodes and me. And indeed, the turreted neighborhood did look far more like something you would find in Detroit’s mostly white suburbs than deep inside the city itself.
Brown is the founder of Threat Management, a private security company hired by the Palmer Woods’ neighborhood association to provide 24-hour protection to this elite enclave. He knows the two sides of Detroit more intimately than just about any of its residents. After a stint as an Army paratrooper, he moved to the city’s East Side in the mid-1990s and into a neighborhood dubbed “crack alley.” There, he started running free security for his neighbors and a few adjacent apartment buildings with only a rifle, a dog, and psychological tricks like heavily pocketed vests, since “pockets represent the unknown.” Next, he worked at a nightclub, enforcing such a strict no-beating-women-on-the-dance-floor policy that the joint soon had a regular stiletto-heeled line out the door. Two decades later, Brown’s officers, with their distinctly paramilitary aesthetic, are among the most recognizable of a burgeoning number of private security personnel and surveillance systems scattered across neighborhoods in the former Motor City that people with money have decided are worth protecting.
But the future of the rest of the sprawling city — once the symbol of American industrialization and working-class power — remains at best insecure, physically and financially. In the 1940s, President Franklin Roosevelt declared Detroit, then the nation’s fourth largest city, the “great arsenal of democracy” for churning out bombers for the Allied powers, as in peacetime it rolled out cars for the consumer economy. Then the auto giants began closing their urban factories and reopening their plants in white suburbs. In the same era, the industry, national unions, and the FBI all cracked down on the labor organizations founded by radical black workers.
The foreclosure crisis of this century, fueled by racially discriminatory predatory lending, forced hundreds of thousands of residents out of the city. The governor’s office placed the public school system and then the entire local government under emergency management, suspending the democratic process in the “arsenal of democracy.” And now, after seven decades of these slow-moving storms, including acts that are almost impossible to see as anything but retribution against the city’s predominantly African American population, Detroit is often viewed from afar as a cautionary tale, a post-industrial dystopia of vacant buildings and dormant factories.
The truth, however, is more complicated. On the brink of a new, post-bankruptcy beginning, Detroit is really two cities. One is comprised of wealthy enclaves like Palmer Woods linked to a compact, rapidly redeveloping downtown. The other is made up of the rest of the 139-square-mile urban expanse, populated by longtime residents who have fought for decades to survive in an environment that has become increasingly uninhabitable. In the first Detroit, private security is common and the living is relatively safe. In the second, running water has systematically been cut off from at least 27,000 households this year alone, the latest in a series of government-enacted policies that have made daily life an increasingly desperate battle. Rather than growing closer in the coming post-bankruptcy era, many residents fear that these two Detroits — already so separate and unequal — will have increasingly divergent futures....For Wayne State law professor Peter Hammer, however, lurking in the bankruptcy plan is a potential future that’s far more sinister than anyone is advertising. As Hammer explained, Detroit has become a blueprint for the creation of a “self-acknowledged, self-defined second-class city,” one where the state guarantees only the most basic services to most of its inhabitants: “some police,” “some fire protection,” and “a bulldozer department” to raze abandoned houses, while the remaining essential services will be available only on a private basis for those who can pay.
That Detroit is a more than 80% African American metropolis makes the idea of its rise from bankruptcy with second-class status all the more problematic. As Hammer explains, the plan for Detroit bears an eerie back-to-the-future resemblance to the famed Kerner Commission report of 1968, issued by a presidentially appointed panel in the wake of the urban rebellions that were then sweeping the country. Its findings were that the nation was moving toward two societies: black and white, separate and unequal....As the city government has receded, a lack of services has made parts of Detroit all but uninhabitable. The injustices pile up: the threat that Child Protective Services will seize custody of children who are living in waterless homes; the streets upon streets of emptied houses, their roofs caving in, their porches collapsing, their bricks blackened by fire; the all-too-common violent deaths in neighborhoods without private security, where residents must rely on a decimated public police force that clocked an average response time of 58 minutes in 2013; the charade of public school board meetings, where few decisions can be made because the school district is under the control of an unelected emergency manager the board has voted three times without success to fire; the death of a seven-year-old girl at the hands of a Detroit police officer wielding a submachine gun as his unit was being filmed executing home raids for an A&E reality TV show; the heartbreak of watching the city being disassembled and sold off as if at an estate sale — despite the fact that this Detroit has declared it will not die....Many here quietly wonder about the purposefulness of it all or, as one resident finally asked the U.N. officials during their visit: “Does this, all that you’ve heard, meet the legal definition of genocide?”
And yet, despite these injustices and the feeling of bitterness that go with them, each morning this Detroit, too, rises.... For the record, because this is not made clear in the article, both Palmer Woods and East English Village, enclaves in Detroit that ‘look far more like something you would find in Detroit’s mostly white suburbs” are both more than 80% black.
Black elites really do not differ from white elites all that much.
I EDITED OUT SO MUCH OF THIS...THE CURIOUS WOULD BE GLAD TO READ THE WHOLE THING
November 16, 2014
http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/future_tense/2014/11/how_corporations_are_adopting_cyber_defense_and_around_legal_barriers_the.single.html
...In June 2013, Microsoft joined forces with some of the world’s biggest financial institutions, including Bank of America, American Express, JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup, Wells Fargo, Credit Suisse, HSBC, the Royal Bank of Canada, and PayPal, to disable a huge cluster of hijacked computers being used for online crime. Their target was a notorious outfit called Citadel, which had infected thousands of machines around the world and, without their owners’ knowledge, conscripted them into armies of “botnets,” or clusters of infected computers under the remote control of a hacker, which the criminals used to steal account credentials, and thus money, from millions of people. In a counterstrike that Microsoft code-named Operation b54, the company’s Digital Crimes Unit severed the lines of communication between Citadel’s more than 1,400 botnets and an estimated 5 million personal computers that Citadel had infected with malware. Microsoft also took over servers that Citadel was using to conduct its operations.
Microsoft hacked Citadel. That would have been illegal had the company not obtained a civil court order blessing the operation. Effectively now in control of Citadel’s victims—who had no idea that their machines had ever been infected—Microsoft could alert them to install patches to their vulnerable software. In effect, Microsoft had hacked the users in order to save them. (And to save itself, since the machines had been infected in the first place owing to flaws in Microsoft’s products, which are probably the most frequently exploited in the world.)
It was the first time that Microsoft had teamed up with the FBI. But it was the seventh time it had knocked down botnets since 2010. The company’s lawyers had used novel legal arguments, such as accusing criminals who had attacked Microsoft products of violating its trademark. This was a new legal frontier. Even Microsoft’s lawyers, who included a former U.S. attorney, acknowledged that they’d never considered using alleged violations of common law to obtain permission for a cyberattack. For Operation b54, Microsoft and the banks had spied on Citadel for six months before talking to the FBI. The sleuths from Microsoft’s counter-hacking group eventually went to two Internet hosting facilities, in Pennsylvania and New Jersey, where, accompanied by U.S. marshals, they gathered forensic evidence to attack Citadel’s network of botnets. The military would call that collecting targeting data. And in many respects, Operation b54 looked like a military cyberstrike. Technically speaking, it was not so different from the attack that U.S. cyber forces launched on the Obelisk network used by al-Qaida in Iraq.
Microsoft also worked with law enforcement agencies in 80 countries to strike at Citadel. The head of cybercrime investigations for Europol, the European Union’s law enforcement organization, declared that Operation b54 had succeeded in wiping out Citadel from nearly all its infected hosts. And a lawyer with Microsoft’s Digital Crimes Unit declared, “The bad guys will feel the punch in the gut.”
Microsoft has continued to attack botnets, and its success has encouraged government officials and company executives, who see partnerships between cops and corporate hackers as a viable way to fight cybercriminals. But coordinated counterstrikes like the one against Citadel take time to plan, and teams of lawyers to approve them. What happens when a company doesn’t want to wait six months to hack back, or would just as soon not have federal law enforcement officers looking over its shoulder?
The Mercenaries HACKERS
Ex-NSA hackers and their corporate clients are stretching legal boundaries and shaping the future of cyberwar.http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/future_tense/2014/11/how_corporations_are_adopting_cyber_defense_and_around_legal_barriers_the.single.html
...In June 2013, Microsoft joined forces with some of the world’s biggest financial institutions, including Bank of America, American Express, JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup, Wells Fargo, Credit Suisse, HSBC, the Royal Bank of Canada, and PayPal, to disable a huge cluster of hijacked computers being used for online crime. Their target was a notorious outfit called Citadel, which had infected thousands of machines around the world and, without their owners’ knowledge, conscripted them into armies of “botnets,” or clusters of infected computers under the remote control of a hacker, which the criminals used to steal account credentials, and thus money, from millions of people. In a counterstrike that Microsoft code-named Operation b54, the company’s Digital Crimes Unit severed the lines of communication between Citadel’s more than 1,400 botnets and an estimated 5 million personal computers that Citadel had infected with malware. Microsoft also took over servers that Citadel was using to conduct its operations.
Microsoft hacked Citadel. That would have been illegal had the company not obtained a civil court order blessing the operation. Effectively now in control of Citadel’s victims—who had no idea that their machines had ever been infected—Microsoft could alert them to install patches to their vulnerable software. In effect, Microsoft had hacked the users in order to save them. (And to save itself, since the machines had been infected in the first place owing to flaws in Microsoft’s products, which are probably the most frequently exploited in the world.)
It was the first time that Microsoft had teamed up with the FBI. But it was the seventh time it had knocked down botnets since 2010. The company’s lawyers had used novel legal arguments, such as accusing criminals who had attacked Microsoft products of violating its trademark. This was a new legal frontier. Even Microsoft’s lawyers, who included a former U.S. attorney, acknowledged that they’d never considered using alleged violations of common law to obtain permission for a cyberattack. For Operation b54, Microsoft and the banks had spied on Citadel for six months before talking to the FBI. The sleuths from Microsoft’s counter-hacking group eventually went to two Internet hosting facilities, in Pennsylvania and New Jersey, where, accompanied by U.S. marshals, they gathered forensic evidence to attack Citadel’s network of botnets. The military would call that collecting targeting data. And in many respects, Operation b54 looked like a military cyberstrike. Technically speaking, it was not so different from the attack that U.S. cyber forces launched on the Obelisk network used by al-Qaida in Iraq.
Microsoft also worked with law enforcement agencies in 80 countries to strike at Citadel. The head of cybercrime investigations for Europol, the European Union’s law enforcement organization, declared that Operation b54 had succeeded in wiping out Citadel from nearly all its infected hosts. And a lawyer with Microsoft’s Digital Crimes Unit declared, “The bad guys will feel the punch in the gut.”
Microsoft has continued to attack botnets, and its success has encouraged government officials and company executives, who see partnerships between cops and corporate hackers as a viable way to fight cybercriminals. But coordinated counterstrikes like the one against Citadel take time to plan, and teams of lawyers to approve them. What happens when a company doesn’t want to wait six months to hack back, or would just as soon not have federal law enforcement officers looking over its shoulder?
November 15, 2014
Usually an instance of fallacious argument has several aspects; I have highlighted those that (after a very cursory scan of the options) seem to apply to your post, for your edification.
Yes, people want to live here---except for those that don't want to
and those who would rather live in other places would much rather be not a target for US Empire hegemony/punishment/exploitation....
You really need to learn how to construct an argument. Logic 101, perhaps, and the Classic Fallacies?
List of fallacies
A fallacy is incorrect argument in logic and rhetoric resulting in a lack of validity, or more generally, a lack of soundness. Fallacies are either formal fallacies or informal fallacies.
Formal fallacies
A formal fallacy is an error in logic that can be seen in the argument's form. All formal fallacies are specific types of non sequiturs.
Appeal to probability – is a statement that takes something for granted because it would probably be the case (or might be the case).
Argument from fallacy – assumes that if an argument for some conclusion is fallacious, then the conclusion is false.
Base rate fallacy – making a probability judgment based on conditional probabilities, without taking into account the effect of prior probabilities.
Conjunction fallacy – assumption that an outcome simultaneously satisfying multiple conditions is more probable than an outcome satisfying a single one of them.
Masked man fallacy (illicit substitution of identicals) – the substitution of identical designators in a true statement can lead to a false one.
Propositional fallacies
A propositional fallacy is an error in logic that concerns compound propositions. For a compound proposition to be true, the truth values of its constituent parts must satisfy the relevant logical connectives that occur in it (most commonly: <and>, <or>, <not>, <only if>, <if and only if>
. The following fallacies involve inferences whose correctness is not guaranteed by the behavior of those logical connectives, and hence, which are not logically guaranteed to yield true conclusions.
Types of Propositional fallacies:
Affirming a disjunct – concluded that one disjunct of a logical disjunction must be false because the other disjunct is true; A or B; A; therefore not B.
Affirming the consequent – the antecedent in an indicative conditional is claimed to be true because the consequent is true; if A, then B; B, therefore A.
Denying the antecedent – the consequent in an indicative conditional is claimed to be false because the antecedent is false; if A, then B; not A, therefore not B.
Quantification fallacies
A quantification fallacy is an error in logic where the quantifiers of the premises are in contradiction to the quantifier of the conclusion.
Types of Quantification fallacies:
Existential fallacy – an argument has a universal premise and a particular conclusion.
Formal syllogistic fallacies
Syllogistic fallacies – logical fallacies that occur in syllogisms.
Affirmative conclusion from a negative premise (illicit negative) – when a categorical syllogism has a positive conclusion, but at least one negative premise.
Fallacy of exclusive premises – a categorical syllogism that is invalid because both of its premises are negative.
Fallacy of four terms (quaternio terminorum) – a categorical syllogism that has four terms.
Illicit major – a categorical syllogism that is invalid because its major term is not distributed in the major premise but distributed in the conclusion.
Illicit minor – a categorical syllogism that is invalid because its minor term is not distributed in the minor premise but distributed in the conclusion.
Negative conclusion from affirmative premises (illicit affirmative) – when a categorical syllogism has a negative conclusion but affirmative premises.
Fallacy of the undistributed middle – the middle term in a categorical syllogism is not distributed.
Informal fallacies
Informal fallacies – arguments that are fallacious for reasons other than structural (formal) flaws and usually require examination of the argument's content.
Argument from ignorance (appeal to ignorance, argumentum ad ignorantiam) – assuming that a claim is true because it has not been or cannot be proven false, or vice versa.
Argument from (personal) incredulity (divine fallacy, appeal to common sense) – I cannot imagine how this could be true, therefore it must be false.
Argument from repetition (argumentum ad nauseam) – signifies that it has been discussed extensively until nobody cares to discuss it anymore.
Argument from silence (argumentum e silentio) – where the conclusion is based on the absence of evidence, rather than the existence of evidence.
Argument to moderation (false compromise, middle ground, fallacy of the mean, argumentum ad temperantiam) – assuming that the compromise between two positions is always correct.
Argumentum ad hominem – the evasion of the actual topic by directing an attack at your opponent.
Argumentum verbosium – See Proof by verbosity, below.
Begging the question (petitio principii) – providing what is essentially the conclusion of the argument as a premise.
(shifting the) Burden of proof (see – onus probandi) – I need not prove my claim, you must prove it is false.
Confirmation bias (also called confirmatory bias or myside bias) is the tendency to favor information that confirms one's beliefs or hypotheses and to ignore information that disagrees with one's point of view.
Circular reasoning (circulus in demonstrando) – when the reasoner begins with what he or she is trying to end up with; sometimes called assuming the conclusion.
Circular cause and consequence – where the consequence of the phenomenon is claimed to be its root cause.
Continuum fallacy (fallacy of the beard, line-drawing fallacy, sorites fallacy, fallacy of the heap, bald man fallacy) – improperly rejecting a claim for being imprecise.
Correlative-based fallacies
Correlation proves causation (cum hoc ergo propter hoc) – a faulty assumption that correlation between two variables implies that one causes the other.
Suppressed correlative – where a correlative is redefined so that one alternative is made impossible.
Equivocation – the misleading use of a term with more than one meaning (by glossing over which meaning is intended at a particular time).
Ambiguous middle term – a common ambiguity in syllogisms in which the middle term is equivocated.
Ecological fallacy – inferences about the nature of specific individuals are based solely upon aggregate statistics collected for the group to which those individuals belong.
Etymological fallacy – which reasons that the original or historical meaning of a word or phrase is necessarily similar to its actual present-day meaning.
Fallacy of composition – assuming that something true of part of a whole must also be true of the whole.
Fallacy of division – assuming that something true of a thing must also be true of all or some of its parts.
False attribution – an advocate appeals to an irrelevant, unqualified, unidentified, biased or fabricated source in support of an argument.
Fallacy of quoting out of context (contextomy) – refers to the selective excerpting of words from their original context in a way that distorts the source's intended meaning.
False authority (single authority) – using an expert of dubious credentials or using only one opinion to sell a product or idea. Related to the appeal to authority fallacy.
False dilemma (false dichotomy, fallacy of bifurcation, black-or-white fallacy) – two alternative statements are held to be the only possible options, when in reality there are more.
False equivalence – describing a situation of logical and apparent equivalence, when in fact there is none.
Fallacy of many questions (complex question, fallacy of presupposition, loaded question, plurium interrogationum) – someone asks a question that presupposes something that has not been proven or accepted by all the people involved. This fallacy is often used rhetorically, so that the question limits direct replies to those that serve the questioner's agenda.
Fallacy of the single cause (causal oversimplification) – it is assumed that there is one, simple cause of an outcome when in reality it may have been caused by a number of only jointly sufficient causes.
Furtive fallacy – outcomes are asserted to have been caused by the malfeasance of decision makers.
Gambler's fallacy – the incorrect belief that separate, independent events can affect the likelihood of another random event. If a fair coin lands on heads 10 times in a row, the belief that it is "due to the number of times it had previously landed on tails" is incorrect.
Hedging – using words with ambiguous meanings, then changing the meaning of them later.
Historian's fallacy – occurs when one assumes that decision makers of the past viewed events from the same perspective and having the same information as those subsequently analyzing the decision. (Not to be confused with presentism, which is a mode of historical analysis in which present-day ideas, such as moral standards, are projected into the past.)
Homunculus fallacy – where a "middle-man" is used for explanation, this sometimes leads to regressive middle-men. Explains without actually explaining the real nature of a function or a process. Instead, it explains the concept in terms of the concept itself, without first defining or explaining the original concept. Explaining thought as something produced by a little thinker, a sort of homunculus inside the head, merely explains it as another kind of thinking (as different but the same).
Inflation of conflict – The experts of a field of knowledge disagree on a certain point, so the scholars must know nothing, and therefore the legitimacy of their entire field is put to question.
If-by-whiskey – an argument that supports both sides of an issue by using terms that are selectively emotionally sensitive.
Incomplete comparison – in which insufficient information is provided to make a complete comparison.
Inconsistent comparison – where different methods of comparison are used, leaving one with a false impression of the whole comparison.
Intentionality fallacy – the insistence that the ultimate meaning of an expression must be consistent with the intention of the person from whom the communication originated (e.g. racist speech is not racist if the person from whom the speech originated did not intend to be racist or a work of fiction that is widely received as a blatant allegory must necessarily not be regarded as such if the author intended it not to be so.)
Ignoratio elenchi (irrelevant conclusion, missing the point) – an argument that may in itself be valid, but does not address the issue in question.
Kettle logic – using multiple, jointly inconsistent arguments to defend a position.
Ludic fallacy – the belief that the outcomes of non-regulated random occurrences can be encapsulated by a statistic; a failure to take into account unknown unknowns in determining the probability of events taking place.
Mind projection fallacy – when one considers the way one sees the world as the way the world really is.
Moral high ground fallacy – in which one assumes a "holier-than-thou" attitude in an attempt to make oneself look good to win an argument.
Moralistic fallacy – inferring factual conclusions from purely evaluative premises in violation of fact–value distinction. For instance, inferring is from ought is an instance of moralistic fallacy. Moralistic fallacy is the inverse of naturalistic fallacy defined below.
Moving the goalposts (raising the bar) – argument in which evidence presented in response to a specific claim is dismissed and some other (often greater) evidence is demanded.
Naturalistic fallacy – inferring evaluative conclusions from purely factual premises in violation of fact–value distinction. For instance, inferring ought from is (sometimes referred to as the is-ought fallacy) is an instance of naturalistic fallacy. Also naturalistic fallacy in a stricter sense as defined in the section "Conditional or questionable fallacies" below is an instance of naturalistic fallacy. Naturalistic fallacy is the inverse of moralistic fallacy.
Naturalistic fallacy fallacy (anti-naturalistic fallacy) – inferring impossibility to infer any instance of ought from is from the general invalidity of is-ought fallacy mentioned above. For instance, is P \lor \neg P does imply ought P \lor \neg P for any proposition P, although the naturalistic fallacy fallacy would falsely declare such an inference invalid. Naturalistic fallacy fallacy is an instance of argument from fallacy.
Nirvana fallacy (perfect solution fallacy) – when solutions to problems are rejected because they are not perfect.
Onus probandi – from Latin "onus probandi incumbit ei qui dicit, non ei qui negat" the burden of proof is on the person who makes the claim, not on the person who denies (or questions the claim). It is a particular case of the "argumentum ad ignorantiam" fallacy, here the burden is shifted on the person defending against the assertion.
Petitio principii – see begging the question.
Post hoc ergo propter hoc Latin for "after this, therefore because of this" (faulty cause/effect, coincidental correlation, correlation without causation) – X happened, then Y happened; therefore X caused Y. The Loch Ness Monster has been seen in this loch. Something tipped our boat over; it's obviously the Loch Ness Monster.
Proof by assertion – a proposition is repeatedly restated regardless of contradiction.
Proof by verbosity (argumentum verbosium, proof by intimidation) – submission of others to an argument too complex and verbose to reasonably deal with in all its intimate details. (See also Gish Gallop and argument from authority.)
Prosecutor's fallacy – a low probability of false matches does not mean a low probability of some false match being found.
Proving too much - using a form of argument that, if it were valid, could be used more generally to reach an absurd conclusion.
Psychologist's fallacy – an observer presupposes the objectivity of his own perspective when analyzing a behavioral event.
Red herring – a speaker attempts to distract an audience by deviating from the topic at hand by introducing a separate argument the speaker believes is easier to speak to.
Referential fallacy – assuming all words refer to existing things and that the meaning of words reside within the things they refer to, as opposed to words possibly referring to no real object or that the meaning of words often comes from how we use them.
Regression fallacy – ascribes cause where none exists. The flaw is failing to account for natural fluctuations. It is frequently a special kind of the post hoc fallacy.
Reification (hypostatization) – a fallacy of ambiguity, when an abstraction (abstract belief or hypothetical construct) is treated as if it were a concrete, real event or physical entity. In other words, it is the error of treating as a "real thing" something that is not a real thing, but merely an idea.
Retrospective determinism – the argument that because some event has occurred, its occurrence must have been inevitable beforehand.
Shotgun argumentation – the arguer offers such a large number of arguments for their position that the opponent can't possibly respond to all of them. (See "Argument by verbosity" and "Gish Gallop", above.)
Special pleading – where a proponent of a position attempts to cite something as an exemption to a generally accepted rule or principle without justifying the exemption.
Wrong direction – cause and effect are reversed. The cause is said to be the effect and vice versa.
Faulty generalizations
Faulty generalizations – reach a conclusion from weak premises. Unlike fallacies of relevance, in fallacies of defective induction, the premises are related to the conclusions yet only weakly buttress the conclusions. A faulty generalization is thus produced.
Accident – an exception to a generalization is ignored.
No true Scotsman – when a generalization is made true only when a counterexample is ruled out on shaky grounds.
Cherry picking (suppressed evidence, incomplete evidence) – act of pointing at individual cases or data that seem to confirm a particular position, while ignoring a significant portion of related cases or data that may contradict that position.
False analogy – an argument by analogy in which the analogy is poorly suited.
Hasty generalization (fallacy of insufficient statistics, fallacy of insufficient sample, fallacy of the lonely fact, leaping to a conclusion, hasty induction, secundum quid, converse accident) – basing a broad conclusion on a small sample.
Inductive fallacy – A more general name to some fallacies, such as hasty generalization. It happens when a conclusion is made of premises that lightly support it.
Misleading vividness – involves describing an occurrence in vivid detail, even if it is an exceptional occurrence, to convince someone that it is a problem.
Overwhelming exception – an accurate generalization that comes with qualifications that eliminate so many cases that what remains is much less impressive than the initial statement might have led one to assume.
Thought-terminating cliché – a commonly used phrase, sometimes passing as folk wisdom, used to quell cognitive dissonance, conceal lack of thought-entertainment, move on to other topics etc. but in any case, end the debate with a cliche—not a point.
Red herring fallacies
A red herring fallacy is an error in logic where a proposition is, or is intended to be, misleading in order to make irrelevant or false inferences. In the general case any logical inference based on fake arguments, intended to replace the lack of real arguments or to replace implicitly the subject of the discussion.
Red herring – argument given in response to another argument, which is irrelevant and draws attention away from the subject of argument. See also irrelevant conclusion.
Ad hominem – attacking the arguer instead of the argument.
Poisoning the well – a type of ad hominem where adverse information about a target is presented with the intention of discrediting everything that the target person says.
Abusive fallacy – a subtype of "ad hominem" when it turns into verbal abuse of the opponent rather than arguing about the originally proposed argument.
Appeal to authority (argumentum ab auctoritate) – where an assertion is deemed true because of the position or authority of the person asserting it.
Appeal to accomplishment – where an assertion is deemed true or false based on the accomplishments of the proposer.
Appeal to consequences (argumentum ad consequentiam) – the conclusion is supported by a premise that asserts positive or negative consequences from some course of action in an attempt to distract from the initial discussion.
Appeal to emotion – where an argument is made due to the manipulation of emotions, rather than the use of valid reasoning.
Appeal to fear – a specific type of appeal to emotion where an argument is made by increasing fear and prejudice towards the opposing side
Appeal to flattery – a specific type of appeal to emotion where an argument is made due to the use of flattery to gather support.
Appeal to pity (argumentum ad misericordiam) – an argument attempts to induce pity to sway opponents.
Appeal to ridicule – an argument is made by presenting the opponent's argument in a way that makes it appear ridiculous.
Appeal to spite – a specific type of appeal to emotion where an argument is made through exploiting people's bitterness or spite towards an opposing party.
Wishful thinking – a specific type of appeal to emotion where a decision is made according to what might be pleasing to imagine, rather than according to evidence or reason.
Appeal to equality – where an assertion is deemed true or false based on an assumed pretense of equality.
Appeal to motive – where a premise is dismissed by calling into question the motives of its proposer.
Appeal to nature – wherein judgment is based solely on whether the subject of judgment is 'natural' or 'unnatural'.
Appeal to novelty (argumentum novitatis/antiquitatis) – where a proposal is claimed to be superior or better solely because it is new or modern.
Appeal to poverty (argumentum ad Lazarum) – supporting a conclusion because the arguer is poor (or refuting because the arguer is wealthy). (Opposite of appeal to wealth.)
Appeal to tradition (argumentum ad antiquitam) – a conclusion supported solely because it has long been held to be true.
Appeal to wealth (argumentum ad crumenam) – supporting a conclusion because the arguer is wealthy (or refuting because the arguer is poor). (Sometimes taken together with the appeal to poverty as a general appeal to the arguer's financial situation.)
Argument from silence (argumentum ex silentio) – a conclusion based on silence or lack of contrary evidence.
Argumentum ad baculum (appeal to the stick, appeal to force, appeal to threat) – an argument made through coercion or threats of force to support position.
Argumentum ad populum (appeal to widespread belief, bandwagon argument, appeal to the majority, appeal to the people) – where a proposition is claimed to be true or good solely because many people believe it to be so.
Association fallacy (guilt by association) – arguing that because two things share a property they are the same.
Bulverism (Psychogenetic Fallacy) – inferring why an argument is being used, associating it to some psychological reason, then assuming it is invalid as a result. It is wrong to assume that if the origin of an idea comes from a biased mind, then the idea itself must also be a false.
Chronological snobbery – where a thesis is deemed incorrect because it was commonly held when something else, clearly false, was also commonly held.
Fallacy of relative privation – dismissing an argument due to the existence of more important, but unrelated, problems in the world.
Genetic fallacy – where a conclusion is suggested based solely on something or someone's origin rather than its current meaning or context.
Judgmental language – insulting or pejorative language to influence the recipient's judgment.
Naturalistic fallacy (is–ought fallacy, naturalistic fallacy) – claims about what ought to be on the basis of statements about what is.
Reductio ad Hitlerum (playing the Nazi card) – comparing an opponent or their argument to Hitler or Nazism in an attempt to associate a position with one that is universally reviled. (See also – Godwin's law)
Straw man – an argument based on misrepresentation of an opponent's position.
Texas sharpshooter fallacy – improperly asserting a cause to explain a cluster of data.
Tu quoque ("you too", appeal to hypocrisy, I'm rubber and you're glue) – the argument states that a certain position is false or wrong or should be disregarded because its proponent fails to act consistently in accordance with that position.
Two wrongs make a right – occurs when it is assumed that if one wrong is committed, another wrong will cancel it out.
Conditional or questionable fallacies
Broken window fallacy – an argument that disregards lost opportunity costs (typically non-obvious, difficult to determine or otherwise hidden) associated with destroying property of others, or other ways of externalizing costs onto others. For example, an argument that states breaking a window generates income for a window fitter, but disregards the fact that the money spent on the new window cannot now be spent on new shoes.
Definist fallacy – involves the confusion between two notions by defining one in terms of the other.
Naturalistic fallacy – attempts to prove a claim about ethics by appealing to a definition of the term "good" in terms of either one or more claims about natural properties (sometimes also taken to mean the appeal to nature) or God's will.
Slippery slope (thin edge of the wedge, camel's nose) – asserting that a relatively small first step inevitably leads to a chain of related events culminating in some significant impact/event that should not happen, thus the first step should not happen. While this fallacy is a popular one, it is, in its essence, an appeal to probability fallacy. (e.g. if person x does y then z would [probably] occur, leading to q, leading to w, leading to e.) This is also related to the Reductio ad absurdum.
A fallacy is incorrect argument in logic and rhetoric resulting in a lack of validity, or more generally, a lack of soundness. Fallacies are either formal fallacies or informal fallacies.
Formal fallacies
A formal fallacy is an error in logic that can be seen in the argument's form. All formal fallacies are specific types of non sequiturs.
Appeal to probability – is a statement that takes something for granted because it would probably be the case (or might be the case).
Argument from fallacy – assumes that if an argument for some conclusion is fallacious, then the conclusion is false.
Base rate fallacy – making a probability judgment based on conditional probabilities, without taking into account the effect of prior probabilities.
Conjunction fallacy – assumption that an outcome simultaneously satisfying multiple conditions is more probable than an outcome satisfying a single one of them.
Masked man fallacy (illicit substitution of identicals) – the substitution of identical designators in a true statement can lead to a false one.
Propositional fallacies
A propositional fallacy is an error in logic that concerns compound propositions. For a compound proposition to be true, the truth values of its constituent parts must satisfy the relevant logical connectives that occur in it (most commonly: <and>, <or>, <not>, <only if>, <if and only if>
. The following fallacies involve inferences whose correctness is not guaranteed by the behavior of those logical connectives, and hence, which are not logically guaranteed to yield true conclusions.
Types of Propositional fallacies:
Affirming a disjunct – concluded that one disjunct of a logical disjunction must be false because the other disjunct is true; A or B; A; therefore not B.
Affirming the consequent – the antecedent in an indicative conditional is claimed to be true because the consequent is true; if A, then B; B, therefore A.
Denying the antecedent – the consequent in an indicative conditional is claimed to be false because the antecedent is false; if A, then B; not A, therefore not B.
Quantification fallacies
A quantification fallacy is an error in logic where the quantifiers of the premises are in contradiction to the quantifier of the conclusion.
Types of Quantification fallacies:
Existential fallacy – an argument has a universal premise and a particular conclusion.
Formal syllogistic fallacies
Syllogistic fallacies – logical fallacies that occur in syllogisms.
Affirmative conclusion from a negative premise (illicit negative) – when a categorical syllogism has a positive conclusion, but at least one negative premise.
Fallacy of exclusive premises – a categorical syllogism that is invalid because both of its premises are negative.
Fallacy of four terms (quaternio terminorum) – a categorical syllogism that has four terms.
Illicit major – a categorical syllogism that is invalid because its major term is not distributed in the major premise but distributed in the conclusion.
Illicit minor – a categorical syllogism that is invalid because its minor term is not distributed in the minor premise but distributed in the conclusion.
Negative conclusion from affirmative premises (illicit affirmative) – when a categorical syllogism has a negative conclusion but affirmative premises.
Fallacy of the undistributed middle – the middle term in a categorical syllogism is not distributed.
Informal fallacies
Informal fallacies – arguments that are fallacious for reasons other than structural (formal) flaws and usually require examination of the argument's content.
Argument from ignorance (appeal to ignorance, argumentum ad ignorantiam) – assuming that a claim is true because it has not been or cannot be proven false, or vice versa.
Argument from (personal) incredulity (divine fallacy, appeal to common sense) – I cannot imagine how this could be true, therefore it must be false.
Argument from repetition (argumentum ad nauseam) – signifies that it has been discussed extensively until nobody cares to discuss it anymore.
Argument from silence (argumentum e silentio) – where the conclusion is based on the absence of evidence, rather than the existence of evidence.
Argument to moderation (false compromise, middle ground, fallacy of the mean, argumentum ad temperantiam) – assuming that the compromise between two positions is always correct.
Argumentum ad hominem – the evasion of the actual topic by directing an attack at your opponent.
Argumentum verbosium – See Proof by verbosity, below.
Begging the question (petitio principii) – providing what is essentially the conclusion of the argument as a premise.
(shifting the) Burden of proof (see – onus probandi) – I need not prove my claim, you must prove it is false.
Confirmation bias (also called confirmatory bias or myside bias) is the tendency to favor information that confirms one's beliefs or hypotheses and to ignore information that disagrees with one's point of view.
Circular reasoning (circulus in demonstrando) – when the reasoner begins with what he or she is trying to end up with; sometimes called assuming the conclusion.
Circular cause and consequence – where the consequence of the phenomenon is claimed to be its root cause.
Continuum fallacy (fallacy of the beard, line-drawing fallacy, sorites fallacy, fallacy of the heap, bald man fallacy) – improperly rejecting a claim for being imprecise.
Correlative-based fallacies
Correlation proves causation (cum hoc ergo propter hoc) – a faulty assumption that correlation between two variables implies that one causes the other.
Suppressed correlative – where a correlative is redefined so that one alternative is made impossible.
Equivocation – the misleading use of a term with more than one meaning (by glossing over which meaning is intended at a particular time).
Ambiguous middle term – a common ambiguity in syllogisms in which the middle term is equivocated.
Ecological fallacy – inferences about the nature of specific individuals are based solely upon aggregate statistics collected for the group to which those individuals belong.
Etymological fallacy – which reasons that the original or historical meaning of a word or phrase is necessarily similar to its actual present-day meaning.
Fallacy of composition – assuming that something true of part of a whole must also be true of the whole.
Fallacy of division – assuming that something true of a thing must also be true of all or some of its parts.
False attribution – an advocate appeals to an irrelevant, unqualified, unidentified, biased or fabricated source in support of an argument.
Fallacy of quoting out of context (contextomy) – refers to the selective excerpting of words from their original context in a way that distorts the source's intended meaning.
False authority (single authority) – using an expert of dubious credentials or using only one opinion to sell a product or idea. Related to the appeal to authority fallacy.
False dilemma (false dichotomy, fallacy of bifurcation, black-or-white fallacy) – two alternative statements are held to be the only possible options, when in reality there are more.
False equivalence – describing a situation of logical and apparent equivalence, when in fact there is none.
Fallacy of many questions (complex question, fallacy of presupposition, loaded question, plurium interrogationum) – someone asks a question that presupposes something that has not been proven or accepted by all the people involved. This fallacy is often used rhetorically, so that the question limits direct replies to those that serve the questioner's agenda.
Fallacy of the single cause (causal oversimplification) – it is assumed that there is one, simple cause of an outcome when in reality it may have been caused by a number of only jointly sufficient causes.
Furtive fallacy – outcomes are asserted to have been caused by the malfeasance of decision makers.
Gambler's fallacy – the incorrect belief that separate, independent events can affect the likelihood of another random event. If a fair coin lands on heads 10 times in a row, the belief that it is "due to the number of times it had previously landed on tails" is incorrect.
Hedging – using words with ambiguous meanings, then changing the meaning of them later.
Historian's fallacy – occurs when one assumes that decision makers of the past viewed events from the same perspective and having the same information as those subsequently analyzing the decision. (Not to be confused with presentism, which is a mode of historical analysis in which present-day ideas, such as moral standards, are projected into the past.)
Homunculus fallacy – where a "middle-man" is used for explanation, this sometimes leads to regressive middle-men. Explains without actually explaining the real nature of a function or a process. Instead, it explains the concept in terms of the concept itself, without first defining or explaining the original concept. Explaining thought as something produced by a little thinker, a sort of homunculus inside the head, merely explains it as another kind of thinking (as different but the same).
Inflation of conflict – The experts of a field of knowledge disagree on a certain point, so the scholars must know nothing, and therefore the legitimacy of their entire field is put to question.
If-by-whiskey – an argument that supports both sides of an issue by using terms that are selectively emotionally sensitive.
Incomplete comparison – in which insufficient information is provided to make a complete comparison.
Inconsistent comparison – where different methods of comparison are used, leaving one with a false impression of the whole comparison.
Intentionality fallacy – the insistence that the ultimate meaning of an expression must be consistent with the intention of the person from whom the communication originated (e.g. racist speech is not racist if the person from whom the speech originated did not intend to be racist or a work of fiction that is widely received as a blatant allegory must necessarily not be regarded as such if the author intended it not to be so.)
Ignoratio elenchi (irrelevant conclusion, missing the point) – an argument that may in itself be valid, but does not address the issue in question.
Kettle logic – using multiple, jointly inconsistent arguments to defend a position.
Ludic fallacy – the belief that the outcomes of non-regulated random occurrences can be encapsulated by a statistic; a failure to take into account unknown unknowns in determining the probability of events taking place.
Mind projection fallacy – when one considers the way one sees the world as the way the world really is.
Moral high ground fallacy – in which one assumes a "holier-than-thou" attitude in an attempt to make oneself look good to win an argument.
Moralistic fallacy – inferring factual conclusions from purely evaluative premises in violation of fact–value distinction. For instance, inferring is from ought is an instance of moralistic fallacy. Moralistic fallacy is the inverse of naturalistic fallacy defined below.
Moving the goalposts (raising the bar) – argument in which evidence presented in response to a specific claim is dismissed and some other (often greater) evidence is demanded.
Naturalistic fallacy – inferring evaluative conclusions from purely factual premises in violation of fact–value distinction. For instance, inferring ought from is (sometimes referred to as the is-ought fallacy) is an instance of naturalistic fallacy. Also naturalistic fallacy in a stricter sense as defined in the section "Conditional or questionable fallacies" below is an instance of naturalistic fallacy. Naturalistic fallacy is the inverse of moralistic fallacy.
Naturalistic fallacy fallacy (anti-naturalistic fallacy) – inferring impossibility to infer any instance of ought from is from the general invalidity of is-ought fallacy mentioned above. For instance, is P \lor \neg P does imply ought P \lor \neg P for any proposition P, although the naturalistic fallacy fallacy would falsely declare such an inference invalid. Naturalistic fallacy fallacy is an instance of argument from fallacy.
Nirvana fallacy (perfect solution fallacy) – when solutions to problems are rejected because they are not perfect.
Onus probandi – from Latin "onus probandi incumbit ei qui dicit, non ei qui negat" the burden of proof is on the person who makes the claim, not on the person who denies (or questions the claim). It is a particular case of the "argumentum ad ignorantiam" fallacy, here the burden is shifted on the person defending against the assertion.
Petitio principii – see begging the question.
Post hoc ergo propter hoc Latin for "after this, therefore because of this" (faulty cause/effect, coincidental correlation, correlation without causation) – X happened, then Y happened; therefore X caused Y. The Loch Ness Monster has been seen in this loch. Something tipped our boat over; it's obviously the Loch Ness Monster.
Proof by assertion – a proposition is repeatedly restated regardless of contradiction.
Proof by verbosity (argumentum verbosium, proof by intimidation) – submission of others to an argument too complex and verbose to reasonably deal with in all its intimate details. (See also Gish Gallop and argument from authority.)
Prosecutor's fallacy – a low probability of false matches does not mean a low probability of some false match being found.
Proving too much - using a form of argument that, if it were valid, could be used more generally to reach an absurd conclusion.
Psychologist's fallacy – an observer presupposes the objectivity of his own perspective when analyzing a behavioral event.
Red herring – a speaker attempts to distract an audience by deviating from the topic at hand by introducing a separate argument the speaker believes is easier to speak to.
Referential fallacy – assuming all words refer to existing things and that the meaning of words reside within the things they refer to, as opposed to words possibly referring to no real object or that the meaning of words often comes from how we use them.
Regression fallacy – ascribes cause where none exists. The flaw is failing to account for natural fluctuations. It is frequently a special kind of the post hoc fallacy.
Reification (hypostatization) – a fallacy of ambiguity, when an abstraction (abstract belief or hypothetical construct) is treated as if it were a concrete, real event or physical entity. In other words, it is the error of treating as a "real thing" something that is not a real thing, but merely an idea.
Retrospective determinism – the argument that because some event has occurred, its occurrence must have been inevitable beforehand.
Shotgun argumentation – the arguer offers such a large number of arguments for their position that the opponent can't possibly respond to all of them. (See "Argument by verbosity" and "Gish Gallop", above.)
Special pleading – where a proponent of a position attempts to cite something as an exemption to a generally accepted rule or principle without justifying the exemption.
Wrong direction – cause and effect are reversed. The cause is said to be the effect and vice versa.
Faulty generalizations
Faulty generalizations – reach a conclusion from weak premises. Unlike fallacies of relevance, in fallacies of defective induction, the premises are related to the conclusions yet only weakly buttress the conclusions. A faulty generalization is thus produced.
Accident – an exception to a generalization is ignored.
No true Scotsman – when a generalization is made true only when a counterexample is ruled out on shaky grounds.
Cherry picking (suppressed evidence, incomplete evidence) – act of pointing at individual cases or data that seem to confirm a particular position, while ignoring a significant portion of related cases or data that may contradict that position.
False analogy – an argument by analogy in which the analogy is poorly suited.
Hasty generalization (fallacy of insufficient statistics, fallacy of insufficient sample, fallacy of the lonely fact, leaping to a conclusion, hasty induction, secundum quid, converse accident) – basing a broad conclusion on a small sample.
Inductive fallacy – A more general name to some fallacies, such as hasty generalization. It happens when a conclusion is made of premises that lightly support it.
Misleading vividness – involves describing an occurrence in vivid detail, even if it is an exceptional occurrence, to convince someone that it is a problem.
Overwhelming exception – an accurate generalization that comes with qualifications that eliminate so many cases that what remains is much less impressive than the initial statement might have led one to assume.
Thought-terminating cliché – a commonly used phrase, sometimes passing as folk wisdom, used to quell cognitive dissonance, conceal lack of thought-entertainment, move on to other topics etc. but in any case, end the debate with a cliche—not a point.
Red herring fallacies
A red herring fallacy is an error in logic where a proposition is, or is intended to be, misleading in order to make irrelevant or false inferences. In the general case any logical inference based on fake arguments, intended to replace the lack of real arguments or to replace implicitly the subject of the discussion.
Red herring – argument given in response to another argument, which is irrelevant and draws attention away from the subject of argument. See also irrelevant conclusion.
Ad hominem – attacking the arguer instead of the argument.
Poisoning the well – a type of ad hominem where adverse information about a target is presented with the intention of discrediting everything that the target person says.
Abusive fallacy – a subtype of "ad hominem" when it turns into verbal abuse of the opponent rather than arguing about the originally proposed argument.
Appeal to authority (argumentum ab auctoritate) – where an assertion is deemed true because of the position or authority of the person asserting it.
Appeal to accomplishment – where an assertion is deemed true or false based on the accomplishments of the proposer.
Appeal to consequences (argumentum ad consequentiam) – the conclusion is supported by a premise that asserts positive or negative consequences from some course of action in an attempt to distract from the initial discussion.
Appeal to emotion – where an argument is made due to the manipulation of emotions, rather than the use of valid reasoning.
Appeal to fear – a specific type of appeal to emotion where an argument is made by increasing fear and prejudice towards the opposing side
Appeal to flattery – a specific type of appeal to emotion where an argument is made due to the use of flattery to gather support.
Appeal to pity (argumentum ad misericordiam) – an argument attempts to induce pity to sway opponents.
Appeal to ridicule – an argument is made by presenting the opponent's argument in a way that makes it appear ridiculous.
Appeal to spite – a specific type of appeal to emotion where an argument is made through exploiting people's bitterness or spite towards an opposing party.
Wishful thinking – a specific type of appeal to emotion where a decision is made according to what might be pleasing to imagine, rather than according to evidence or reason.
Appeal to equality – where an assertion is deemed true or false based on an assumed pretense of equality.
Appeal to motive – where a premise is dismissed by calling into question the motives of its proposer.
Appeal to nature – wherein judgment is based solely on whether the subject of judgment is 'natural' or 'unnatural'.
Appeal to novelty (argumentum novitatis/antiquitatis) – where a proposal is claimed to be superior or better solely because it is new or modern.
Appeal to poverty (argumentum ad Lazarum) – supporting a conclusion because the arguer is poor (or refuting because the arguer is wealthy). (Opposite of appeal to wealth.)
Appeal to tradition (argumentum ad antiquitam) – a conclusion supported solely because it has long been held to be true.
Appeal to wealth (argumentum ad crumenam) – supporting a conclusion because the arguer is wealthy (or refuting because the arguer is poor). (Sometimes taken together with the appeal to poverty as a general appeal to the arguer's financial situation.)
Argument from silence (argumentum ex silentio) – a conclusion based on silence or lack of contrary evidence.
Argumentum ad baculum (appeal to the stick, appeal to force, appeal to threat) – an argument made through coercion or threats of force to support position.
Argumentum ad populum (appeal to widespread belief, bandwagon argument, appeal to the majority, appeal to the people) – where a proposition is claimed to be true or good solely because many people believe it to be so.
Association fallacy (guilt by association) – arguing that because two things share a property they are the same.
Bulverism (Psychogenetic Fallacy) – inferring why an argument is being used, associating it to some psychological reason, then assuming it is invalid as a result. It is wrong to assume that if the origin of an idea comes from a biased mind, then the idea itself must also be a false.
Chronological snobbery – where a thesis is deemed incorrect because it was commonly held when something else, clearly false, was also commonly held.
Fallacy of relative privation – dismissing an argument due to the existence of more important, but unrelated, problems in the world.
Genetic fallacy – where a conclusion is suggested based solely on something or someone's origin rather than its current meaning or context.
Judgmental language – insulting or pejorative language to influence the recipient's judgment.
Naturalistic fallacy (is–ought fallacy, naturalistic fallacy) – claims about what ought to be on the basis of statements about what is.
Reductio ad Hitlerum (playing the Nazi card) – comparing an opponent or their argument to Hitler or Nazism in an attempt to associate a position with one that is universally reviled. (See also – Godwin's law)
Straw man – an argument based on misrepresentation of an opponent's position.
Texas sharpshooter fallacy – improperly asserting a cause to explain a cluster of data.
Tu quoque ("you too", appeal to hypocrisy, I'm rubber and you're glue) – the argument states that a certain position is false or wrong or should be disregarded because its proponent fails to act consistently in accordance with that position.
Two wrongs make a right – occurs when it is assumed that if one wrong is committed, another wrong will cancel it out.
Conditional or questionable fallacies
Broken window fallacy – an argument that disregards lost opportunity costs (typically non-obvious, difficult to determine or otherwise hidden) associated with destroying property of others, or other ways of externalizing costs onto others. For example, an argument that states breaking a window generates income for a window fitter, but disregards the fact that the money spent on the new window cannot now be spent on new shoes.
Definist fallacy – involves the confusion between two notions by defining one in terms of the other.
Naturalistic fallacy – attempts to prove a claim about ethics by appealing to a definition of the term "good" in terms of either one or more claims about natural properties (sometimes also taken to mean the appeal to nature) or God's will.
Slippery slope (thin edge of the wedge, camel's nose) – asserting that a relatively small first step inevitably leads to a chain of related events culminating in some significant impact/event that should not happen, thus the first step should not happen. While this fallacy is a popular one, it is, in its essence, an appeal to probability fallacy. (e.g. if person x does y then z would [probably] occur, leading to q, leading to w, leading to e.) This is also related to the Reductio ad absurdum.
Usually an instance of fallacious argument has several aspects; I have highlighted those that (after a very cursory scan of the options) seem to apply to your post, for your edification.
November 14, 2014
The news industry has had more than its share of colorful, powerful figures, and today I'd like to review the career of William Randolph Hearst, a 1%er if there ever was one, whose influence dominated a century of US policy, domestic and foreign, in his own right and that of his descendant: Patty Hearst.
Castle Photo Slideshow
http://hearstcastle.org/
Weekend Economists Stop the Presses! November 14-16, 2014
The newspaper industry was known as the 4th Estate, because
The Fourth Estate (or fourth power) is a societal or political force or institution whose influence is not consistently or officially recognized. "Fourth Estate" most commonly refers to the news media; especially print journalism or "the press". Thomas Carlyle attributed the origin of the term to Edmund Burke, who used it in a parliamentary debate in 1787 on the opening up of press reporting of the House of Commons of Great Britain. Earlier writers have applied the term to lawyers, to the British queens consort (acting as a free agent, independent of the king), and to the proletariat. The term makes implicit reference to the earlier division of the three Estates of the Realm...
In current use the term is applied to the press, with the earliest use in this sense described by Thomas Carlyle in his book On Heroes and Hero Worship: "Burke said there were Three Estates in Parliament; but, in the Reporters' Gallery yonder, there sat a Fourth Estate more important far than they all."
In Burke's 1787 coining he would have been making reference to the traditional three estates of Parliament: The Lords Spiritual, the Lords Temporal and the Commons. If, indeed, Burke did make the statement Carlyle attributes to him, the remark may have been in the back of Carlyle's mind when he wrote in his French Revolution (1837) that "A Fourth Estate, of Able Editors, springs up; increases and multiplies, irrepressible, incalculable." In this context, the other three estates are those of the French States-General: the church, the nobility and the townsmen. Carlyle, however, may have mistaken his attribution: Thomas Macknight, writing in 1858, observes that Burke was merely a teller at the "illustrious nativity of the Fourth Estate". If Burke is excluded, other candidates for coining the term are Henry Brougham speaking in Parliament in 1823 or 1824 and Thomas Macaulay in an essay of 1828 reviewing Hallam's Constitutional History: "The gallery in which the reporters sit has become a fourth estate of the realm." By 1835, when William Hazlitt (another editor of Michel de Montaigne—see below) applied the term to an individual journalist, William Cobbett, the phrase was well established...In United States English, the phrase "fourth estate" is contrasted with the "fourth branch of government", a term that originated because no direct equivalents to the estates of the realm exist in the United States. The "fourth estate" is used to emphasize the independence of the press, while the "fourth branch" suggests that the press is not independent of the government.
The networked Fourth Estate
Yochai Benkler, author of the 2006 book The Wealth of Networks, described the "Networked Fourth Estate" in a May 2011 paper published in the Harvard Civil Liberties Review. He explains the growth of non-traditional journalistic media on the Internet and how it affects the traditional press using Wikileaks as an example. When Benkler was asked to testify in the United States vs. PFC Bradley E. Manning trial, in his statement to the morning July 10, 2013 session of the trial he described the Networked Fourth Estate as the set of practices, organizing models, and technologies that are associated with the free press and provide a public check on the branches of government. It differs from the traditional press and the traditional fourth estate in that it has a diverse set of actors instead of a small number of major presses. These actors include small for-profit media organizations, non-profit media organizations, academic centers, and distributed networks of individuals participating in the media process with the larger traditional organizations...wikipedia: Fourth Estate
In current use the term is applied to the press, with the earliest use in this sense described by Thomas Carlyle in his book On Heroes and Hero Worship: "Burke said there were Three Estates in Parliament; but, in the Reporters' Gallery yonder, there sat a Fourth Estate more important far than they all."
In Burke's 1787 coining he would have been making reference to the traditional three estates of Parliament: The Lords Spiritual, the Lords Temporal and the Commons. If, indeed, Burke did make the statement Carlyle attributes to him, the remark may have been in the back of Carlyle's mind when he wrote in his French Revolution (1837) that "A Fourth Estate, of Able Editors, springs up; increases and multiplies, irrepressible, incalculable." In this context, the other three estates are those of the French States-General: the church, the nobility and the townsmen. Carlyle, however, may have mistaken his attribution: Thomas Macknight, writing in 1858, observes that Burke was merely a teller at the "illustrious nativity of the Fourth Estate". If Burke is excluded, other candidates for coining the term are Henry Brougham speaking in Parliament in 1823 or 1824 and Thomas Macaulay in an essay of 1828 reviewing Hallam's Constitutional History: "The gallery in which the reporters sit has become a fourth estate of the realm." By 1835, when William Hazlitt (another editor of Michel de Montaigne—see below) applied the term to an individual journalist, William Cobbett, the phrase was well established...In United States English, the phrase "fourth estate" is contrasted with the "fourth branch of government", a term that originated because no direct equivalents to the estates of the realm exist in the United States. The "fourth estate" is used to emphasize the independence of the press, while the "fourth branch" suggests that the press is not independent of the government.
The networked Fourth Estate
Yochai Benkler, author of the 2006 book The Wealth of Networks, described the "Networked Fourth Estate" in a May 2011 paper published in the Harvard Civil Liberties Review. He explains the growth of non-traditional journalistic media on the Internet and how it affects the traditional press using Wikileaks as an example. When Benkler was asked to testify in the United States vs. PFC Bradley E. Manning trial, in his statement to the morning July 10, 2013 session of the trial he described the Networked Fourth Estate as the set of practices, organizing models, and technologies that are associated with the free press and provide a public check on the branches of government. It differs from the traditional press and the traditional fourth estate in that it has a diverse set of actors instead of a small number of major presses. These actors include small for-profit media organizations, non-profit media organizations, academic centers, and distributed networks of individuals participating in the media process with the larger traditional organizations...wikipedia: Fourth Estate
The news industry has had more than its share of colorful, powerful figures, and today I'd like to review the career of William Randolph Hearst, a 1%er if there ever was one, whose influence dominated a century of US policy, domestic and foreign, in his own right and that of his descendant: Patty Hearst.
William Randolph Hearst ( April 29, 1863 – August 14, 1951) was an American newspaper publisher who built the nation's largest newspaper chain and whose methods profoundly influenced American journalism. Hearst entered the publishing business in 1887 after taking control of The San Francisco Examiner from his father. Moving to New York City, he acquired The New York Journal and engaged in a bitter circulation war with Joseph Pulitzer's New York World that led to the creation of yellow journalism—sensationalized stories of dubious veracity. Acquiring more newspapers, Hearst created a chain that numbered nearly 30 papers in major American cities at its peak. He later expanded to magazines, creating the largest newspaper and magazine business in the world.
He was twice elected as a Democrat to the U.S. House of Representatives, and ran unsuccessfully for Mayor of New York City in 1905 and 1909, for Governor of New York in 1906, and for Lieutenant Governor of New York in 1910. Nonetheless, through his newspapers and magazines, he exercised enormous political influence, and was famously blamed for pushing public opinion with his yellow journalism type of reporting leading the United States into a war with Spain in 1898.
His life story was the main inspiration for the development of the lead character in Orson Welles's film Citizen Kane. His mansion, Hearst Castle, on a hill overlooking the Pacific Ocean near San Simeon, California, halfway between Los Angeles and San Francisco, was donated by the Hearst Corporation to the state of California in 1957, and is now a State Historical Monument and a National Historic Landmark, open for public tours. Hearst formally named the estate La Cuesta Encantada ("The Enchanted Slope" , but he usually just called it "the ranch."
William Randolph Hearst
He was twice elected as a Democrat to the U.S. House of Representatives, and ran unsuccessfully for Mayor of New York City in 1905 and 1909, for Governor of New York in 1906, and for Lieutenant Governor of New York in 1910. Nonetheless, through his newspapers and magazines, he exercised enormous political influence, and was famously blamed for pushing public opinion with his yellow journalism type of reporting leading the United States into a war with Spain in 1898.
His life story was the main inspiration for the development of the lead character in Orson Welles's film Citizen Kane. His mansion, Hearst Castle, on a hill overlooking the Pacific Ocean near San Simeon, California, halfway between Los Angeles and San Francisco, was donated by the Hearst Corporation to the state of California in 1957, and is now a State Historical Monument and a National Historic Landmark, open for public tours. Hearst formally named the estate La Cuesta Encantada ("The Enchanted Slope"
, but he usually just called it "the ranch."
William Randolph Hearst
Castle Photo Slideshow
http://hearstcastle.org/
November 14, 2014
Normally spotted in Australia, the marsupial species is thriving on a remote island off the Irish coast...At first glance, the sighting of a wallaby emerging from a cool fog off the Irish Sea doesn’t seem real. The steep, rocky cliffs and the wet Irish weather are far from the usual depictions of the Australian brush, about 9,000 miles away. The conditions on Lambay, however, have proven to be almost perfect for the wallabies. The cliffs around the perimeter—and the rocky ground nearby—are a fair substitute for wallabies’ natural environment in Australia, where they favor rugged terrain. The 600-acre island sits three miles off the eastern coast of Ireland, offering isolation that seems to suit the shy wallabies. They are much less aggressive than their well-known counterpart, the kangaroo, and Lambay is a private island with few visitors to disrupt or threaten them.
The one condition on the island that might give someone pause is the temperature. On Lambay, the warmest days of the year are often in the 60-degree range, while the coldest days can dip into the low 40s. By contrast, Australia's island state of Tasmania, where wallabies usually abound, enjoys heat in the 80s and above in summer. Only the coolest parts of the state near the coast and in the highlands see temperatures as low as the 30s and 40s. “They don’t really do well with cold,” says wallaby expert Kevin Drees, director of animal care and conservation at the Blank Park Zoo in Des Moines, Iowa. To help them handle the Irish winter, the Lambay wallabies grow dense coats of fur.
The island first became home to a bunch of wallabies during the 1950s and 1960s when the Barings, a well-known banking family that has owned the island since 1904, decided to raise them. There are rumors that Cecil Baring, the original purchaser of the island, introduced a number of species including tortoises and lizards, but none of them survived. His son Rupert had dreams of opening a zoo on Lambay, but his plans never came to fruition.
Peter Wilson was director of the Dublin Zoo in the mid-1980s when its wallaby population expanded rapidly. Their enclosure was too small to house all of them, and Wilson had a difficult time finding the excess wallabies a new home. A wildlife park near Cork in southern Ireland took a few, but no other zoo would take the rest. Wilson said he was sure Australia would not want them back either. Not wanting to euthanize the animals if he could find them a home, Wilson turned to the Baring family, whose private island was an ideal choice with its extant population of the species. Bringing new wallabies to the island would even help the older mob survive by adding new genes to the pool...
What the Heck Are Wallabies Doing in Ireland?
http://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/what-heck-are-wallabies-doing-ireland-180953304/?utm_source=feedburner&no-istNormally spotted in Australia, the marsupial species is thriving on a remote island off the Irish coast...At first glance, the sighting of a wallaby emerging from a cool fog off the Irish Sea doesn’t seem real. The steep, rocky cliffs and the wet Irish weather are far from the usual depictions of the Australian brush, about 9,000 miles away. The conditions on Lambay, however, have proven to be almost perfect for the wallabies. The cliffs around the perimeter—and the rocky ground nearby—are a fair substitute for wallabies’ natural environment in Australia, where they favor rugged terrain. The 600-acre island sits three miles off the eastern coast of Ireland, offering isolation that seems to suit the shy wallabies. They are much less aggressive than their well-known counterpart, the kangaroo, and Lambay is a private island with few visitors to disrupt or threaten them.
The one condition on the island that might give someone pause is the temperature. On Lambay, the warmest days of the year are often in the 60-degree range, while the coldest days can dip into the low 40s. By contrast, Australia's island state of Tasmania, where wallabies usually abound, enjoys heat in the 80s and above in summer. Only the coolest parts of the state near the coast and in the highlands see temperatures as low as the 30s and 40s. “They don’t really do well with cold,” says wallaby expert Kevin Drees, director of animal care and conservation at the Blank Park Zoo in Des Moines, Iowa. To help them handle the Irish winter, the Lambay wallabies grow dense coats of fur.
The island first became home to a bunch of wallabies during the 1950s and 1960s when the Barings, a well-known banking family that has owned the island since 1904, decided to raise them. There are rumors that Cecil Baring, the original purchaser of the island, introduced a number of species including tortoises and lizards, but none of them survived. His son Rupert had dreams of opening a zoo on Lambay, but his plans never came to fruition.
Peter Wilson was director of the Dublin Zoo in the mid-1980s when its wallaby population expanded rapidly. Their enclosure was too small to house all of them, and Wilson had a difficult time finding the excess wallabies a new home. A wildlife park near Cork in southern Ireland took a few, but no other zoo would take the rest. Wilson said he was sure Australia would not want them back either. Not wanting to euthanize the animals if he could find them a home, Wilson turned to the Baring family, whose private island was an ideal choice with its extant population of the species. Bringing new wallabies to the island would even help the older mob survive by adding new genes to the pool...
November 13, 2014
REPOST ON MEDICARE INFO
5 Ways To Keep Your Health And Your Wealth In Retirement
http://www.forbes.com/sites/nancyanderson/2014/10/27/5-ways-to-keep-your-health-and-your-wealth-in-retirement/REPOST ON MEDICARE INFO
Profile Information
Gender: FemaleHometown: Ann Arbor, Michigan
Home country: USA
Member since: Thu Sep 25, 2003, 02:04 PM
Number of posts: 85,373