Category Archives: Reason

Robbing Peter To Pay Pedro

“Robbing Peter To Pay Pedro” is the current column, now on WND. An Excerpt:

“… Yes, an open border is open season on private property, starting with the person’s prime real estate: himself.

In making their case for this sorry state-of-affairs, one fully expects Pelosi and cerebrally compromised cretins like her in both political camps to deploy “Appeals to Pity” instead of argument. However, hard to beat for his use of emotional language in the service of ‘deception and manipulation’ was conservative columnist George Will. Preached Will: ‘We ought to say to these children, ‘Welcome to America. You’re going to go to school and get a job and become Americans.’ We have 3,141 counties in this country. That would be 20 [children] per county. The idea that we can’t assimilate these 8-year-old ‘criminals’ with their teddy bears is preposterous.’

Argumentum ad misericordiam, Mr. Will. Explained the late Robert J. Gula, author of ‘Nonsense: A Handbook of Logical Fallacies’: ‘Instead of giving carefully documented reasons, evidence, and facts, a person appeals to our sense of pity, compassion, brotherly love. We are shown a picture of an emaciated child,” yet little do we consider how much of our funds will be used for the ‘plush salaries’ of the political administrators, for instance. As posited ever so rationally by the Center for Immigration Studies’ Jerry Kammer:

The 57,000 minors Will proposes to welcome are only a small part of the Central American exodus. According to an internal memo from Deputy Border Patrol Chief Ronald Vitiello, the number of minors detained by the Border Patrol is expected to reach 90,000 this year and 142,000 next year. There is a vast river of desperate humanity rising in Latin America, straining to flow northward, already eroding the dam of restraint that has long been a mostly psychological barrier constructed by the belief that the mighty United States wants to control its border.

… Read the complete column. “Robbing Peter To Pay Pedro” is now on WND.

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When An Exceptionally ‘Good Country’ Downs A Plane

America, Crime, Criminal Injustice, Ethics, Iran, Reason, Russia

To extrapolate from Dinesh D’Souza’s illogic (explained nicely by Jack Kerwick), when an exceptionally ‘Good Country,’ as the US surely is, downs a plane, that country deserves mitigation, for it is good. In other words, the properties of the crime, which are the same whoever commits it, somehow change, depending on the identity of the perpetrator.

Thus, because he belongs to a good collective, D’Souza, presumably, would diminish the culpability of the “U.S. Navy captain” who shot “Iran Air Flight 655” out of the sky, on July 3, 1988.

“A quarter-century later,” writes Fred Kaplan of Slate, “the Vincennes is almost completely forgotten, but it still ranks as the world’s seventh deadliest air disaster (Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 is the sixth) and one of the Pentagon’s most inexcusable disgraces.”

Kaplan compares the downing of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 to “The time the United States blew up a passenger plane—and tried to cover it up.”

… In several ways, the two calamities are similar. The Malaysian Boeing 777 wandered into a messy civil war in eastern Ukraine, near the Russian border; the Iranian Airbus A300 wandered into a naval skirmish—one of many clashes in the ongoing “Tanker War” (another forgotten conflict)—in the Strait of Hormuz. The likely pro-Russia rebel thought that he was shooting at a Ukrainian military-transport plane; the U.S. Navy captain, Will Rogers III, mistook the Airbus for an F-14 fighter jet. The Russian SA-11 surface-to-air missile that downed the Malaysian plane killed 298 passengers, including 80 children; the American SM-2 surface-to-air missile that downed the Iranian plane killed 290 passengers, including 66 children. After last week’s incident, Russian officials told various lies to cover up their culpability and blamed the Ukrainian government; after the 1988 incident, American officials told various lies and blamed the Iranian pilot. Not until eight years later did the U.S. government compensate the victims’ families, and even then expressed “deep regret,” not an apology. …

Read “America’s Flight 17.”

UPDATED: The Illogic (And Tyranny) Of Gender Preferences

Affirmative Action, Feminism, Gender, Reason, Science

To say that “Science needs women” is as logically consistent as saying that, “‘Heavyweight boxing needs Malays,’ ‘Football needs dwarf goalkeepers,”Quantity surveying needs bisexuals,’ ‘Lavatory cleaning needs left-handers’ …”

The above logical parallels make the absurdity of the argument for more women in science “immediately apparent,” reasons Theodore Dalrymple.

Science does not need women any more than it needs foot fetishists, pole-vaulters, or Somalis. What science needs (if an abstraction such as science can be said to need anything) is scientists. If they happen also to be foot fetishists, pole-vaulters, or Somalis, so be it: but no one in his right mind would go to any lengths to recruit for his laboratory foot fetishists, pole-vaulters, or Somalis for those characteristics alone.

“A Miasma of Untruth” by Theodore Dalrymple: A little long-winded for me, but well-worth the read for that priceless kernel of logic.

UPDATE (7/1): Myron Pauli’s Demonstration of Illogical Reasoning (LOL):

Myron Robert Pauli: “now hold on …. [1] I am a scientist; [2] I need women; therefore [3] science needs women!!!”

The Military, The Mission And The Sunk-Cost Fallacy

Economy, Foreign Policy, Iraq, Military, Reason

Again and again one hears it repeated that our “brave men and women of the military,” having sacrificed for Iraqi “freedoms,” must be furious to see the gains they made squandered. Thus, goes the argument made by Stewart Varney (for example) of Fox Business, today, more resources must be committed forthwith in order to redeem the original (misguided) commitment of men, money and materiel to Iraq.

This is the sunk-cost fallacy, as explained by the Skeptic’s Dictionary:

When one makes a hopeless investment, one sometimes reasons: I can’t stop now, otherwise what I’ve invested so far will be lost. This is true, of course, but irrelevant to whether one should continue to invest in the project. Everything one has invested is lost regardless. If there is no hope for success in the future from the investment, then the fact that one has already lost a bundle should lead one to the conclusion that the rational thing to do is to withdraw from the project.
To continue to invest in a hopeless project is irrational. Such behavior may be a pathetic attempt to delay having to face the consequences of one’s poor judgment. The irrationality is a way to save face, to appear to be knowledgeable, when in fact one is acting like an idiot.