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POPSbringing the world out of denial this began by saying-------"Santiago never realized that people are capable, at any time in their lives, of doing what they dream of." -Paulo Coelho "The Alchemist"
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POPSPinups for Peace - Reclaiming the Bombshell “Since the dawn of time, the promise of our charms has been used to urge our men into battle. We are called up to rally behind our troops, and to give the boys something to take their minds off their job: WAR. Those times are over.” ~Pinups for Peace
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POPSWhen All Else Fails, Cry "Racism!" We are outraged because the Obama administration wants to utterly transform America by ripping the Constitution to shreds. We are outraged that he has nationalized the auto industry and financial institutions.We are outraged at the most despicable congress of all time and we don't see a lot of Blacks there. It's not race America is concerned about; it's radical leftism that has taken over Washington D.C. That's why America is outraged! Sorry, the racist charge is illegitimate. It doesn't hold water and only serves to prove the vacuity and fallacy of left-wing ideology.
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POPSJustice begins at home
The main thing to keep in mind here is that Goldstone is not lying. Everything he says is true. It should be obvious to anyone who has followed this situation that the IDF's so-called "serious violations" of the laws of war are truly nothing of the kind. Even if one hasn't been following the situation, simple rhetorical analysis will show then the utter fallacy that underlies Goldstone's sentence: notwithstanding his pro forma nods to Hamas violations, he's obviously telling only one side of the story, Hamas's side. His version implies that the IDF was indiscriminately bombarding hospitals, schools and other typical civilian sites to sow terror as part of a campaign to subdue the Resistance. This is just a fairy tale. For example, ask yourself why Israel attacked the civilian structures. It was because they couldn't fairly be considered civilian if they were being used as firebases by Hamas. But the essential point is this: there would have been no IDF attacks whatsoever,
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POPSTypical rebuttal to Cheney/CIA documents Peter Bergan, of the left-wing New America Foundation provides the main talking points behind the continued criticism of Bush/Cheney's authorization of so-called torture. This is effectively countered by the WSJ editorial today: Some will argue that these details could have been elicited without enhanced techniques. We'll never know. The question is whether Attorney General Eric Holder and his new special counsel intend to second-guess the decisions of CIA officials who were operating in the shadow of 9/11 and who, we now know, successfully unraveled terror plots and saved lives... These plots were "just talk." Nothing to worry about, then. Let them talk. They're Muslim fanatics and that's what they do. Why worry? Be happy! Left-wingers, like Bergan, will seize upon this argument to salve their own consciences as to the coming witch-hunt against the CIA by Obama. It seems convincing today but it's obviously an argument by hindsight"the worst kind of historical fallacy. If we'
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POPSMoney For Nothing Incredibly, the lesson Obama draws from history is that past administrations didn't spend enough..."The real problem was that Roosevelt slowed down on public spending in the first two years," the president said, according to one congressman who was in the room. "If he'd just kept on spending that money, we'd have gotten out of the Depression quicker."
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POPSAre Republicans More Likely to Have Affairs and Get Divorces? No. We see the ecological fallacy appear here on Clipmarks all the time 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 ] usually by people who want to say "conservatives are more/less _____ because red states are ______, liberals are less/more_______ because blue states are ________." Here is an example of how that logic can result in the WRONG conclusion.
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POPSFree Will – Really? Great essay discussing the fallacy of ‘free will’. Some interesting US history thrown in to illustrate how oppressive our government has become. She also touches on how the medical profession has been poisoning us by making us believe we need them.
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POPSYouTube Blocked In China More: "While most of the rest of the world thinks of the Dalai Lama as a peaceful leader in exile, the official view in China is that he hides behind a facade of non-violence while inciting the same in Tibet, in an attempt to achieve Tibetan independence and restore the old feudal system. They paint the latter as a theocracy with serfdom, diametrically opposed to Democratic Reform. Maybe it’s just me, but I have a hard time believing any talk of “democracy” from a government that suppresses the free expression of ideas. Whom do you believe?"
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POPS The Zero-Sum Fallacy I picked up a handful of sand, and said “this is almost pure silicon, virtually identical to what powers a computer. Take as much labor as you want, and build me a computer with it — the only limitation is you can only have true manual laborers - no engineers or managers or other capitalist lackeys”. She replied that my request was BS, that it took a lot of money to build an electronics plant, and her group of laborers didn’t have any and bankers would never lend them any. I told her - assume for our discussion that I have tons of money, and I will give you and your laborers as much as you need. The only restriction I put on it is that you may only buy raw materials - steel, land, silicon - in their crudest forms. It is up to you to assemble these raw materials, with your laborers, to build the factory and make me my computer.
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POPSIntelligence failures crippling fight against insurgents in Afghanistan, says report Counterinsurgency efforts are also shown as being at the mercy of local contacts peddling identical "junk" tips around various intelligence officials, with the effectiveness of the intelligence effort being quantified by some senior officers solely in terms of the amount of "tip money" disbursed to sources. The report describes a rigid reliance on economic, military and political progress indicators regarded by the authors and interviewees as too often lacking in real meaning. Its sources complain of commanders who have slipped into relying on "the fallacy of body counts", discredited after the war in Vietnam as a measure of success.
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POPSWhy Atheists are So Smart Thus when Christopher Hitchens and other atheists routinely dismiss religious claims on the grounds that "what can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence," they are making what philosophers like to call a category mistake. We learn from Kant that within the domain of experience, human reason is sovereign, but it is in no way unreasonable to believe things on faith that simply cannot be adjudicated by reason. When atheists summarily dismiss the immortality of the soul or the afterlife on the grounds that they have never found any empirical proofs for either, they are asking for experiential evidence in a domain which is entirely beyond the reach of experience. In this domain, Kant argues, the absence of evidence cannot be used as the evidence for absence. Notice that Kant's argument is entirely secular: It does not employ any religious vocabulary, nor does it rely on any kind of faith.
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POPSThe Illustrated Road to Serfdom ~ Friedrich Hayek (Short Cartoon Describing Planned Economies) Mises.org ^ | 1944 | Friedrich Hayek What You Must Read About the Great Depression In the present recession, advocates of government intervention often evoke the specter of the Great Depression. Unless the government intervenes massively, we are told, we risk an economic collapse comparable to that of the 1930s. To see the fallacy of this claim, it is imperative to understand that government intervention both led to the Depression and prevented recovery from it. The following books, I hope, will assist those interested in grasping what happened in this vital historical era. When it appears, Robert Murphy's forthcoming The Politically Incorrect Guide to the Great Depression and the New Deal will no doubt be a notable addition to the list below.
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POPSAfrican-American Transgender History - 50s Style From the comments: Monie wrote: The interesting thing is that Jet/ Ebony covered the LGBT community in the 50’s but they aren’t covering it at all now. It seems that Ebony/ Jet and many in the Black community are less accepting now than 50 years ago. I wonder why that is? Yes, I wonder too.
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POPSThe Fallacy That Government Creates Jobs The theory of government-instigated job creation overlooks the loss of resources available to the productive sector of the economy. Frederic Bastiat, the great French economist is well known for many reasons, including his explanation of the "seen" and the "unseen." If the government decides to build a "Bridge to Nowhere," it is very easy to see the workers who are employed on that project. This is the "seen." But what is less obvious is that the resources to build that bridge are taken from the private sector and thus are no longer available for other uses. This is the "unseen." So-called stimulus packages have little bang for the buck. Harvard Professor Greg Mankiw filled in the blanks and calculated that each new job (assuming they actually materialize) will cost $280,000. In reality, the cost of each government job should reflect how that $280,000 would have been spent more productively in the private sector.
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POPSEnergy Independence: The Solutions Limousine Liberals Don’t Want You to Hear
will legally be allowed to sell their wind or solar power to their neighbors. Contrary to popular belief, large energy companies want the market to be regulated thereby guaranteeing them with a monopoly over the supply of energy. Big oil continues to be “Big Oil” because nobody can enter the marketplace and compete with them due to governmental imposed barriers to entry. Deregulation would change that. The next aspect of this deregulation plan would be to allow new refineries to be built. This would also include oil drilling off the coast of Cuba, California, and in Alaska. If we do not do this soon, China will drill near Cuba and we will have to clean up after them. The next time someone tells you that Brazil is energy independent, tell that person that Brazil has only 5% of the energy needs as America. The limousine liberals perpetuate the fallacy that nuclear energy is dangerous simply because a rundown plant in a communist country had a meltdown many years ago.
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POPSCorn Ethanol’s Promise is Evaporating
Increasingly more subsidies are given to the production of corn ethanol at the expense of a diversified and sustainable energy future. Ethanol lobbyists are pushing for more ethanol to be put into America’s gas powered vehicles which will require fuel system modifications. Fuel mileage improvement is negligible and does not reduce our dependence on fossil fuel. http://www.americanfuels.info/2008/03/ethanol-and-fuel-mileage.html Ethanol fuel mileage http://www.satireandcomment.com/sc0308ethanol.html The Ethanol Fallacy Leadership in sustainable energy needs to: # Phase out tax credits for corn ethanol and subsidize other biofuels only if they show clear promise to meet strict climate and environmental protection standards # Rebalance the U.S. renewable energy and energy conservation portfolio to favor options that do the most to reduce fossil fuel use, safeguard the environment, spur more widely-shared economic development and increase energy security I don’t see that lea
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POPSLogical Fallacies and the Art of Debate More: In general, of course, it's a good idea to avoid logical fallacies if at all possible, because a good debater will almost always catch you. It is especially important to avoid obvious logical fallacies like the one above (argumentum ad populum), because they are vulnerable to such powerful (and persuasive) refutations. But sometimes, a logical fallacy -- or at least an unjustified logical leap -- is unavoidable. And there are some types of argument that are listed as logical fallacies in logic textbooks, but that are perfectly acceptable in the context of the rules of debate. The most important guideline for committing such fallacies yourself is to know when you are doing it, and to be prepared to justify yourself later if the opposition tries to call you down for it.
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POPSThe Taxonomy of Logical Fallacies The Taxonomy is in table form and wouldn't clip coherently. Click through to see it. Warning: you can lose a lot of time on this site, clicking from one to another to another... :-p
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POPSList of logical fallacies (nizkor.org) It's very useful to be able to identify errors in reasoning and logical flaws when discussing (or arguing) about idea – your own argument will be stronger if you eliminate fallacies before you make it, for one thing. And, of course, being able to point out the places where someone else's argument breaks down is the quickest way to be able to refute it. Here's one list of 42 of the most common logical fallacies.
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POPSLogical Fallacies - an Encyclopeda of Errors of Reasoning A logical fallacy is, roughly speaking, an error of reasoning. When someone adopts a position, or tries to persuade someone else to adopt a position, based on a bad piece of reasoning, they commit a fallacy…Some logical fallacies are more common than others, and so have been named and defined. When people speak of logical fallacies they often mean to refer to this collection of well-known errors of reasoning….
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