Aug 7, 2014

Logical Fallacy #21 - Appeal To Nature


Some people use the phrase "naturalistic fallacy" or "appeal to nature" to characterize inferences of the form "This behaviour is natural; therefore, this behaviour is morally acceptable" or "This property is unnatural; therefore, this property is undesireable." Such inferences are common in discussions of homosexuality, environmentalism and veganism.

The naturalistic fallacy is the idea that what is found in nature is good. It was the basis for Social Darwinism, the belief that helping the poor and sick would get in the way of evolution, which depends on the survival of the fittest. Today, biologists denounce the Naturalistic Fallacy because they want to describe the natural world honestly, without people deriving morals about how we ought to behave (as in: If birds and beasts engage in adultery, infanticide, cannibalism, it must be OK). The moralistic fallacy is that what is good is found in nature. It lies behind the bad science in nature-documentary voiceovers: lions are mercy-killers of the weak and sick, mice feel no pain when cats eat them, dung beetles recycle dung to benefit the ecosystem and so on. It also lies behind the romantic belief that humans cannot harbor desires to kill, rape, lie, or steal because that would be too depressing or reactionary.[5]

Aug 6, 2014

A Certain Sameness

Addicting Info ran a piece about how the Wingnut Militia Goons who were supposed to gather en masse along the US-Mexico border have come up just a tad bit short.
As it turns out, patrolling the border isn’t exactly the adventurous and glamorous life that right-wing militia members thought it would be.
In fact, the militias are all talk and no walk with internal disputes and just plain boredom leading to many armed vigilantes taking their weapons and going home.
Last month, a Minuteman militia member named Chris Davis announced via video a plan for stopping undocumented immigrant children from crossing the border. They’re idea? Aim guns at them and shoot if they don’t turn around and go back to the hell they’re escaping from. After catching much flak for it, the man who issued the call in the first place backed away from his words and removed the video. His plan failed and his hope for a groundswell of volunteers to militarize the border fizzled as well. Currently, Davis and a tiny band of militiamen are spread out along a wide swath of the border along three states.
So the effect here is pretty interesting.  These guys (prob'ly) got all het up about patrolling the border cuz they spend way too much time surfing the wingnut website whirlpool where every link they click on takes 'em to another page that says almost exactly the same thing as all the other pages, and so they end up believing not only the bullshit story, but that everybody buys the bullshit story, and it's driving millions of good decent Muricans - just like their-own-bad-selves - to take up arms and defend our sovereign purity from the hordes of filthy vermin blah blah blah.

The Right Wing Echo Chamber's a real thing, but it's actually intended just to make you think you'll be joined by a gigundous mob of like-minded cheese fritters just itchin' to go for a little target practice while playing Rambo Junior in the desert southwest.  The Panic Pushers are hoping to manufacture a critical mass when there really isn't the slightest potential for such a thing to happen organically.  That kind of self-delusion is what got you that Romney Landslide in 2012, remember?

Do ya just never get tired of chasing the tin cans they're tyin' on your tail?

As a simple exercise, every once in a while take whatever nonsense du jour pops up and google the main point; something like "immigrants infected".  No matter what it is, an awful lot of the time, you'll get several pages of hits that say practically the same thing - including a bunch where it's an obviously copy-n-paste-verbatim kinda deal.  And it's not just DumFux News and Breitbart and Wingnut Daily either.

It's good to refresh your memory about just how In The Tank these chuckleheads really are, and how way too many Press Poodles are doing anything they need to do to cater to some people's willing ignorance in order to sell 'em some extra camo shirts or dippin' snuff or gold-leaf-plated pot metal "coins".  Business is the first order of business after all; and the "News Bidness" is no exception - not any more.

But it's just as important to remember that rubes are always willing to buy into the belief that no matter what they get talked into doing, as long as they're convinced they're acting in the name of some greater calling or higher power, nothing is out of the question, so everything is acceptable.

'Twas ever thus, and ever thus 'twill be I suppose.  Society carries the seeds of its own destruction just as our own individual bodies carry a host of harmful bacteria and viruses that can kill us whenever the balance of "good germs vs bad germs" goes a little wacky.

The body politic seems in dire need of a powerful high colonic right about now.


Aug 5, 2014

The Power Of Nightmares

This is a blast from the past, and I'm putting it up again because (1st) it's a good look at how the perceptions and opinions of whole populations can be cynically manipulated, and (2nd) because as time passes, we need to stay aware of the extreme dangers that arise from the merger of Religion and Politics.



You can watch the 2nd and 3rd episodes at the archive site.

Today's Christianist

Ya can't be "a true Christian" if you don't vote Republican.



hat tip = Mock Paper Scissors


Aug 4, 2014

Just Chill A Minute, Dammit

Thanks to (and a big ol' hat tip for) Charles Johnson at Little Green Footballs.  It's good to take a step back and try to remember where we were trying to go before all this weird shit happened and we started feeling so lost.

Shower The People --James Taylor

Today's Wingnut

hat tip = Addicting Info

I guess Lil Donny is off his meds again - railing against the docs who contracted Ebola Fever while trying to be professionals who actually give a fuck:


"People that go to far away places to help out are great-but must suffer the consequences"

That would certainly help explain why Trump and his fellow-traveler "conservatives" are so dead-set against trying to make the VA a better place.  Soldiers who go to far away places to help us out are great, but they knew the risks when they signed up, so if they don't have sense enough to die over there, fuck 'em(?)

How is it that these guys are always making stoopid general pronouncements, and nobody "on their side" ever seems to get wise to it?

And then there's RushBo:



Be afraid.  C'mon guys - if I'm wrong about y'all being a buncha whiny-butt pussies who're frightened by every shadow and every fleeting glimpse of anything you can't either immediately identify as friendly (aka "exactly like you") - or anything you're not allowed to shoot 47 times with your 50-calibre manly inadequacy compensator - then ya gotta be able to recognize that you're being played for suckers.

And now I'll trot out the old standby (Groaner Alert):  These "Thought Leaders" on the far right must think you're all mushrooms - why else do they keep you in the dark and feed you a steady diet of shit?

Aug 3, 2014

Huh?

As if anybody needed another indication that DumFux News is a bad place to get anything but dumber.


Cuz everybody knows Murica has to be 110% against that sub-human mongrel in the White House.

hat tip = Democratic Underground

Aug 2, 2014

Connections

I wonder if this:




...might hook into this:



Big O has been really really careful never to say the word 'torture' in any public setting - not that I can recall anyway (update*).  So I have to wonder why he's saying it now, and I don't think it's solely because it's come up and he's trying to do the damage control thing by blaming Bush or whatever.  That said, tho', the guy can be crazy stupid good at political judo, and keeping in mind that it's never just about what they tell us it's about, here's a few possibilities stumbling thru my brain clutter today:

  • he's floating the torture thing to counteract the impeachment thing.  "you fuck with me on impeachment, and I'll fuck you back even harder by arresting Bush and Cheney and Rumsfeld and a hundred others and I'll personally deliver 'em all the The Hague to face charges for their war crimes". (you'll notice Liz Cheney popped up on DumFux News almost immediately to slag the Prez for a good 4 minutes - talking about torture and making no mention of her dear ol' dad - of course)


Anyway - back to stumbly thingies:
  • he's angling for better support from his own wingers.  The guy does an awful lot of Hippie-Punching, and so he's throwing a bone to the Left Wing to get 'em all out to the polls this fall.
  • he's finally getting around to addressing the post 9-11 madness.  And so this is all about trying to signal an attempt to make up for doing nothing about it; or he needs to move a little closer to traditional foreign allies in order to get something from them(?) - maybe shore up support for sanctions on Russia and Iran and/or slapping Israel(?)
Dunno, but things happen for a reason, and maybe this happened late on a Friday so it wouldn't get much coverage, which means it'll generate very little heat, which means  everybody's expecting the Press Poodles to keep it on the down low because there's a coupla dozen trainloads of politicians and operatives and bureaucrats and Press Poodles who should rightly be in prison because they took an active part in the shittiness or they actively avoided doing anything to prevent it, or they made sure we didn't notice or whatever.

As long as you can make it look like everybody's responsible, then nobody can hold anybody accountable for anything - ever.  Welcome to America's Imperial Era.

*Update = From Little Green Footballs:

Obama’s statement on torture wasn’t really news; in May 2013 he said pretty much the same thing: Remarks by the President at the National Defense University | the White House.
Meanwhile, we strengthened our defenses — hardening targets, tightening transportation security, giving law enforcement new tools to prevent terror.  Most of these changes were sound.  Some caused inconvenience.  But some, like expanded surveillance, raised difficult questions about the balance that we strike between our interests in security and our values of privacy.  And in some cases, I believe we compromised our basic values — by using torture to interrogate our enemies, and detaining individuals in a way that ran counter to the rule of law.
Still seems kinda odd to me tho'.

The Challenge

On the The Professional Left podcast this week, Bluegal referenced the video below (Samuel L Jackson saying motherfucker - 171 times)...



...and then issued a challenge:  Somebody should do something similar with Chuck Todd and Cokie Roberts and any other Press Poodle who draws a paycheck for being adept at Pimping The Horserace - ie: making sure that whenever Ted Cruz walks across the rotunda and publicly skull fucks John Boehner, what we hear at the end of the TV segment is, "Yeah, but the Democrats..." and "Both sides..." and "There's plenty of blame to go around..."

Once you know what to look for, it's easier to find.

Today's Eternal Sadness

International Edition:

Not Equal: Gaza in Over 1000 Frames from MarkFiore on Vimeo.