Spot check: BBBBBBB inductee Karen Street

Karen Street of the "Politi-Psychotics" blog is already on the Bad Blogs Blood Bloody Bad Blogs Blogroll, but since her kooky arguments directly concern the work I do at my main blogs, I have reason to revisit her insane domain from time to time.

And do we have a classic.

At Sublime Bloviations I criticized PolitiFact's fact check of a claim that Florida shark attacks occur more commonly then voter fraud.  Statistics like that are supposed to show that voter fraud isn't really a problem and therefore legislation that is supposed to keep ineligible voters from voting is about disenfranchisement of legal voters.

Later, also at Sublime Bloviations, I took note of a television news story that discovered non-citizens on the voter rolls in Florida.

Karen Street found the supposed flaw in my argument:

But a recent youtube video from “Liberal Viewer Presents” (see below) and a follow-up post from Grading PolitiFact made me realize that Grading PolitFact’s basis for saying this Mostly True ruling was in the “wrong” and should be “False” was a, pardon the pun, felonious one, and did something it often accuses others of, that is, it built a “felons voting” straw man around the voter fraud (in this case, third party voter registrations).

Neither of my posts was about third-party voter registration.  Street's tieing an extraneous aspect of the new Florida voter law to my arguments.  Perhaps Street reasons (using the term advisedly) that since the Colbert Report segment was about application of the Florida voting law to entities engaged in third-party registration of voters therefore my criticism of PolitiFact was a red herring or something.  But the ACLU spokesperson was making the point that the law was a solution to a non-existent problem.

Street wisely discounted her own initial impulse in response to my first post.  It really isn't relevant to the issue of voter fraud whether states other than Florida allow felons to vote.  Unfortunately good sense departed for the sake of her new argument (italics for emphasis in the original):

But the “democracy” argument is not the right one for this case. That’s because Grading PolitiFact cannot add these felons to the count as voter fraud to compare to shark attacks. The reason it cannot add them is because the new law does not prevent felons from voting.

Sometimes I literally have to blink while reading this stuff from Street.

In my original post I pointed to evidence from the Miami Herald that thousands of felons may have voted in the 2000 election.  That's the Bush/Gore election.  It was illegal at that time for felons to vote in Florida.  No question about it.  As for my follow up post about the television news story, that wasn't about felons at all.  It was about non-citizens voting.  Non-citizens aren't allowed to vote whether felons or not.

Street's entire premise for her post is entirely wrong, and wrong to an amazing extent.
Street (bold emphasis added):

A person’s driver license does not indicate if they are a felon. Often the police can only see that a person’s drivers’ license is legitimate and hasn’t expired along with traffic charges, and the only way to know whether the driver is a felon is to have police access and be able to look at the person’s arrest record. One can possibly have a felony conviction with traffic charges from being at fault in a deadly traffic accident, but there are many more felonies outside of that. In some cases the police access is restricted (there has to be “cause”): Is it a “cause” to check every person’s driver license for a felony when they vote? In the case of the teacher helping her students register to vote, I’d say the felon question applies in the same way. When filling out the application you must confirm that you are not a felon without “civil rights restored.” The article in the Tampa Bay Times as well as the PolitiFact ruling was not about felons found voting; it was about the rules for third party voter registrations.

To assist Street's memory:  The PolitiFact item to which I replied was a fact check comparing the frequency of voter fraud in Florida to the number of shark attacks in Florida.  Street might as well complain that PolitiFact in its exhaustive research counted all the claims of voter fraud that the State of Florida chose to investigate regardless of whether they stemmed from third-party registration.

There's no logical criticism of my work at all in Street's post, yet it flies under the banner of "Lil' White Lies."  Cute name, but misleading.  A lie unto itself.

Producing a post of considerable length based on a fallacious impetus is alone worthy of note, but this case is even better than that.  I've been dropping hints for over a week in the comments section letting Street know that there was a big error in her post.  Street has bravely returned to her former policy of screening comments, of course, and none of my comments were fit to publish (not because of any excess of coarse language).  I have a good number of screen caps available for documentation if any should doubt.

Thanks so much for the reminder of how thoroughly you've earned a spot on the BBBBBBB, Karen Street.

"The Propaganda Professor" pt. 2

Another technique:
Throw crap, force you to dig out;
They hope you get tired
--CheeseFlap


A big part of the attraction of doing a more detailed take down of "The Propaganda Professor" comes from the absolutely staggering irony that gushes from his posts.  I've heard it called "log-eye syndrome."

In the post welcoming "The Propaganda Professor" to the Bad Blogs' Blood Bad Blogs Blogroll, I reviewed a promise from the professor to demonstrate my supposed inclination to box in Jon Stewart with an unlikely interpretation of his claims about the supposedly misinformed Fox News audience.  If I insisted on an unlikely interpretation of Stewart then a straw man fallacy would result.  Let's let "Professor Thynzcken," as I've dubbed the professor for the purposes of these posts, explain how it works, from the commentary section of his post on Jon Stewart:

Note: This individual wants you to believe that Stewart’s claim should only be interpreted comprehensively rather than (as obviously intended) cumulatively. If you’re not sure what I mean by that, stay tuned.

And the August 7 update in that same thread:

Okay, the new post on Stewart/ PolitiFact/ Fox is up. And by they way, here’s my tally of Bryan’s rhetorical sins above:

False Conclusions: 9
Misreading: 7
Patronizing/ Presuming Control: 7
Tangents/ Straw Men/ Red Herrings: 9
False Claims: 8
“Witty” Juvenile Ripostes: 4
Projection/ Transference: 3

(There is some overlap.) There are probably more that I overlooked, and if you’re a serious student of forensic flimflammery, you might find it useful to do your own tally. Some of these tricks are tried and true propaganda tactics that we’ll be examining in more detail in the future.

My heart fairly fluttered in the anticipation that Thynzcken would attempt to provide specific evidence in support of each and every claim made above about my supposed rhetorical sins.

No such luck.  The cupboard of evidence was again left bare.  But it's worth looking at what Thynzcken put in the cupboard instead of evidence.

Shooting the Messenger: More on Stewart/ PolitiFact/ Fox

That's just the title.  As a result, we'll be on the lookout for Thynzcken's evidence of attacks on Stewart rather than attacks on Stewart's message.  Pop quiz to follow.

One of the occupational hazards of telling people what they don’t want to hear is that it invites attacks. Particularly if you’re telling them that certain beliefs they cherish, and perhaps have cherished for years, are erroneous. I’ve already fielded a few attacks on this rather young and mild-mannered blog. So as you can imagine, a public figure like Jon Stewart is going to receive his share of harsh backlash. And when he dared criticize fairandbalanced Fox “News”, it’s not surprising that there were people out there who wanted to question his credibility. It’s worth taking a look at some of the techniques they used, since this is by no means the only time you’ll ever see them.

Yeah, not much evidence in this section, but at least we're additionally cued to look for "attacks" and "harsh backlash" as well as supposed efforts to question his credibility.  Let's move straight on to those techniques:

The Singular Standard
For one thing, some of his critics seem to have forgotten that Stewart is a humorist, and instead treated him like a journalist. Which is to say that rather than looking at his larger point that Fox “consistently” misleads viewers, they focused on whether his claim that this is reflected in “every poll” on “every issue” is literally accurate. Perhaps this is because they were under the mistaken impression he was speaking on a bona fide news program, rather than as a guest on Fox, where anything goes. In any case, fair enough, I guess. After all, Stewart, though he (to the best of my knowledge) has never painted himself as a journalist,  is considerably more accurate than many who do. And if you think I’m nodding in particular toward the TV network he was commenting on, you must be psychic.

I'll give points for the alliteration in the section title.

Poor Jon Stewart is supposedly treated as a journalist instead of as a humorist and the manifestation of that harsh treatment is the fact that they check Stewart's statement as to its literal truth, particularly his words citing "every poll" in support.

I'd call Thynzcken's distinction here silly.  Regardless of Stewart's job designation, the context suggests that he was making a serious statement of truth.  In newspaper reporting we might expect a journalist to adopt the objective voice.  But during an interview with Fox News' Chris Wallace we appropriately place the same standard for truth-telling on everyone regardless of profession.  We just need to maintain our sensitivity to differing modes of expression (genre, if you will).  A joke is a joke.  A statement of fact is (we hope) a statement of fact, and we can certainly allow latitude for differing levels of precision (don't tell PolitiFact!).  But even a journalist can tell a joke, so the standard of judgment is actually the same.

The section from Thynzcken ends up not really having much to it.  But it's interesting that Thynzcken ended up making a comment somewhat parallel to something I wrote a few weeks ago:

Hey ... maybe Stewart spoke false because he was appearing on Fox News ... ?

As defenses of Stewart go, this is pretty weak.  If it's fine for Stewart shed his dedication to the truth while on Fox "News" then by the same token the supposed non-journalists on Fox "News" should receive the same allowance.  If Thynzcken makes the argument seriously then it probably suffers from a problem of internal consistency.  We will charitably take the argument as snark.

Bait and Switch
Trouble is, PolitiFact’s criticism didn’t exactly address the same thing that Stewart’s remark did. Stewart said Fox’s viewers were the most MISINFORMED. Politifact

Stewart's defenders can put whatever spin on his words they like.  No reasonable interpretation of Stewart will allow him to claim reasonable support from existing poll or survey data.  The misinformed/uninformed distinction is weaker than Stewart's defenders would make it (look it up in a dictionary/thesaurus), but it's fine by me that they make the attempt.  I'll accept it as reasonable, if tad strained.

Oh, and if you were looking for evidence from Thynzcken that I was guilty of any of this bait-and-switch behavior, look elsewhere.  The most likely spot you'll find it is in Thynzcken's imagination.

Selective Reading
In addition to a misreading of the word “misinformed” there was a selective reading of the word “every”, which can be interpreted in at least a couple of different ways. I call them the comprehensive (Every state has its own flag.) and the cumulative (Every time I forget my umbrella, it rains.).  In other words, “every” may mean either “all” or “each”. Did Stewart mean all polls on all possible issues? Not bloody likely, since he surely realizes that it would be virtually impossible to devise a poll covering every possible issue – and if you did it would be so damn lengthy no one would sit still to answer it. Most likely, he meant that each poll conducted reveals Fox viewers to be among the most misinformed on each topic covered. But some, apparently having intimate knowledge of the inner workings of his psyche, insist that not only did he mean the first sense, but he was deliberately misrepresenting the facts; in other words HE was the one lying! It’s somewhat like saying, “Every skunk I smell causes me to throw up”, and then me saying, “Liar! You haven’t even smelled every skunk.”

The above section was apparently designed to fulfill the promise of showing that I insisted on understanding Stewart's claim in Thynzcken's "comprehensive" sense. Certainly between his comment in the first Stewart post and this one Thynzcken unmistakeably implies that I insist on the "comprehensive" sense. Unfortunately for that argument, my approach has consisted of taking the arguments liberals use to defend Stewart and showing that they fail even granting different ways of interpreting Stewart's claim. True to form, Thynzcken provides no evidence that I insist on the comprehensive understanding of Stewart's claim. The reader is left to trust in Thynzcken's accusation sans the supporting evidence.

As for the idea that those who attack Stewart accuse him of lying, the good professor appears to have succeeded in expunging the following from memory:

Your question offers an irrelevant premise (a time-honored propaganda technique in its own right). It isn’t that Stewart is lying for claiming that Fox News has knowingly and/or deliberately repeated lies. He’s lying because he claims poll support that doesn’t exist. Or, more properly, he’s just wrong.

The comment remains visible under the first Stewart post, at least until somebody decides to delete it.  That won't be me.

Sleight of Hand
As you well might expect, another ploy has been to question the credibility of the polls themselves. Well hey, that’s not such a bad idea. Sometimes polls are untrustworthy because of faulty methodology or deliberate bias or both. But this becomes considerably less likely when a number of polls stack up in the same direction. One critic of Stewart found one poll particularly questionable because it gauged Fox viewers’ misinformation on the presence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. But, notes this commentator, Iraq did possess such weapons once upon a time, and furthermore, they still had some just before the U.S. invasion. (How do we know this? Because he says so!)

My apologies.  I forgot that this piece of common knowledge isn't as prominent for those who do not regularly consume Fox News.  We know that Iraq possessed WMD at one time because UNSCOM and UNMOVIC documented their destruction (I did touch on that fact in my post).  We know that not all of the WMD were destroyed because at least one deadly munition survived to be used in 2004:

The statement by the US military spokesman in Iraq that an improvised bomb made up of a shell containing nerve agent was discovered by an American convoy raises some disturbing questions.

BBC News

I don't always provide documentation for statements that amount to common knowledge.  If the sarin bomb was not present in Iraq when the invasion occurred then we have to assume it was either smuggled into the country or manufactured within Iraq subsequent to the invasion.  I can't imagine Thynzcken wants to go there.  My thanks to the professor for helping to make my point.

We haven't quite exhausted the "Sleight of Hand" section ...

It turns out, however, that the poll he references actually asked whether WMD’s were FOUND in Iraq AFTER the U.S. invasion. The correct answer, I suppose, is that it depends on what the definition of “is” is.  I suppose that if the Iraq Survey Group had found thousands of skeletons in body armor, Fox could have argued that they constituted a mighty army. What they found was nothing that qualified as an active WMD, nor as evidence that a WMD program was still in place. They only found impotent remnants of chemical weapons that had been stashed for a decade or so, and which the ISG and the CIA determined were of no military value. But Fox, of course, knows better, and so do its viewers.  Just as they do on numerous other issues, including some covered in that very same poll.

Speaking of "Sleight of Hand," I did not reference any particular poll when I made the observation about the ambiguity of questions about WMD in Iraq.  Rather, I was dealing with the way Chris Mooney phrased the issue during his defense of Stewart:

Mooney:

What Stewart obviously meant—and what I mean—is that when it comes to politicized, contested issues where the facts have been made murky due to political biases, it is Fox viewers who are the most likely to believe incorrect things—to fall prey to misinformation. A quintessential example of such an issue is global warming, or whether Saddam Hussein’s Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction or was collaborating with Al Qaeda. There are many, many others.

I suspect that the segue from "politicized, contested issues where the facts have been made murky" to "most likely to believe incorrect things" is not as clean as Mooney appears to suggest. The WMD issue serves as a case in point. It is absolutely undeniable that Saddam Hussein's Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction. Possessing them was one of the prerequisites for the ceasefire condition requiring their destruction.

What? Mooney is talking about immediately prior to the invasion? Even then, Iraq unquestionably possessed weapons of mass destruction, albeit old, small in number and of very questionable effectiveness.

It is exactly that type of ambiguity that renders the PIPA studies and their like relatively worthless as a measure of individual and group misinformation

Thynzcken succeeds in producing the false impression that while I was talking about the ambiguity of claims about WMD in Iraq that I was applying that principle specifically to the PIPA study that asked the question about the discovery of WMD during the period after the invasion.  Instead, I was making a point about ambiguity in survey questions generally and applying it to both of the PIPA studies and similar ones cited by Mooney.

Quite the sleight of hand by Thynzcken, and we can also count the attempt to hand wave the ambiguity problem by assuring all of us that any WMD found subsequent to the invasion were useless.  I'm pretty sure I had already conceded that point (third paragraph in the green box just above) but Thynzcken found it better for his argument to present it as his fresh observation.

Bottom line, Thynzcken failed to address my point about ambiguity, though arguably an attempt was made to bury it under a pile of thrown crap.

Next:

Red Herrings and Straw Men and Tangents, Oh My
Oh yes, and there was even the suggestion that Fox shouldn’t be given credit for the lies it relentlessly promotes if someone on its payroll didn’t actually originate them. C’mon, do I really need to comment on that??? True, Fox didn’t invent the Death Panel rumor. Nor, for that matter, did one of Fox’s specific components, one Sarah Palin. That honor apparently belongs to Betsy McGaughey, a former director for (Surprise!) medical supply corporations. But she only said it a few times, and how many people have even heard of Betsy McGaughey? Fox has repeated it dozens if not hundreds of times, and how many people are familiar with Fox?

Again, Thynzcken has succeeded admirably in veiling the truth.  I'm fine with letting Fox News have the blame for any falsehood that it transmits.  Thynzcken is producing his own red herring in order to try to protect Stewart from my charge that his "New England Patriots of lying" line was itself a lie.  Stewart gave PolitiFact's annual "Lie of the Year" awards to Fox News and proclaimed Fox News a repeat champion.  As I've said before, call it funny if you want.  Just don't call it true.  Fox News has never been awarded PolitiFact's "Lie of the Year" award.

I realize that's some harsh backlash to throw Stewart's way ...

Just one more bit from Thynzcken:

This is probably not an exhaustive list of the smear tactics used against Stewart, mind you. It’s just a suggestion of a few things to look for as you hear this thing they call a debate.

Time for the pop quiz:  Was anyone able to detect evidence in Thynzcken's piece of anybody "shooting the messenger"?

There's no smear of Stewart anywhere in there.  Thynzcken made it up.  PolitiFact may be guilty of interpreting Stewart too narrowly.  That charge doesn't fit my criticisms.  But even if PolitiFact interpreted Stewart too narrowly it remains an attack--albeit a slightly misguided one--on Stewart's argument rather than a "smear tactic used against Stewart."

This exercise reveals Thynzcken as a spectacular hypocrite, creating varieties of false and misleading statements in a misguided attempt to tar others with the charge of producing false and misleading statements.

And CheeseFlap helps out in the irony department.  We have this string of haiku poems trailing the "Shooting the Messenger" post:

Another technique:
Throw crap, force you to dig out;
They hope you get tired
--CheeseFlap

That’s a frequent nail
you’ve hit squarely on the head.
Remember Bryan?
--P.O.P (aka Thynzcken)

One question remains
What better propaganda
Than your voice alone?
--Bryan


"The Propaganda Professor" is propaganda.  One of the favorite tools of the propagandist is the ability to silence dissenting voices.  There's a good chance my poem will join other comments I've made in censorship oblivion.  I likewise doubt that any of the many points where I've shown Thynzcken flat wrong will last for any substantial length of time in visible form at "The Propaganda Professor."  The threat of censorship has been made and carried out, though it seems I can still get comments to appear for a limited time.

"The Propaganda Professor" would more aptly wear the name "Professor Propaganda."

Bad Blog: "The Propaganda Professor"

Yes, folks, it's been awhile since I've needed to make use of  Bad Blogs Blood for anything other than preserving discussions that otherwise get obliterated from the 'Net.  But we may have a live one, here, as in a well-deserving inductee for the Bad Blogs Blood Bad Blogs Blogroll.

The potentially special occasion arises thanks to the blog "The Propaganda Professor."

The professor does not reveal their name, so for the sake of convenience I dub them "Professor Thynzcken" for the sake of posts to this blog.

I stumbled across Thynzcken's blog while doing my scans for PolitiFact material.  It turned out that somebody is still writing in defense of Jon Stewart over the PolitiFact/misinformed Fox News viewers squabble.

Thynzcken's presentation:

Recently, Stewart was a guest on Fox “News” and pointed out that Fox’s viewers are the most misinformed segment of the American population. Host Chris Wallace naturally  protested. And he received some backup from a rather unlikely source: the nonpartisan fact-checking organization PolitiFact. They said Stewart was wrong, because Fox viewers rate supremely ignorant only in some studies, while in others they’re just somewhere near the bottom – which even if perfectly accurate doesn’t negate the observation that they’re the most misinformed overall.

Thynzcken omitted at least one salient fact, that PolitiFact hit Stewart specifically for the nature of his supposed evidence.  Stewart said "every poll" "consistently" showed Fox News viewers as the most misinformed (or every poll showed Fox Viewers as "consistently" misinformed--neither variant helps Stewart):

The way Stewart phrased the comment, it’s not enough to show a sliver of evidence that Fox News’ audience is ill-informed. The evidence needs to support the view that the data shows they are "consistently" misinformed -- a term he used not once but three times. It’s simply not true that "every poll" shows that result. So we rate his claim False.

And there's your first hint right there--the tip of the iceberg.   How does a professor end up omitting such a key detail about the PolitiFact rating?

Two views at PolitiFact's FaceBook page (Updated)

Either the FaceBook interface is wonky or else PolitiFact has shenanigans going on other than inferior quality fact checking.  Check this out.

Logged in:

Logged out:

Interesting, no?

I know for a fact that my latter two posts in the top image have embedded links.  Well, the first one did, anyway (see update below).  The top post in that image contains no link.  There may be some default filter that removes some posts from the normal view, perhaps depending on whether they contain such links.

Makes for a great way to carry on a sham debate, doesn't it?

I'll be looking into this.


Update:

My first guess was wrong.

While logged out at FaceBook, I am able to find posts containing embedded links, including, at least on occasion, those authored by me.

So we're back to the wonk or shenanigan dilemma.

It's not a blog as such, but ...

There's a YouTube video purporting to demonstrate that god does not exist. The argument in the video, created by Dr. Lynne Atwater (or Lynn Eatwater depending on how you wish to break down her name) is hilariously inept and many people have tried to explain that to Atwater in the commentary section.

Thing is, Atwater either doesn't get it or is in denial. Here's a post she made a few minutes ago:

 Background:  I have patiently presented the criticism of Atwater's argument over a period of weeks.  We have an established pattern where I post criticism and then she asks where various part of the criticism are located or asks me to repeat myself.  It gets funnier every time, but this last one where she suggests that my failure to repeat the straw man description for the umpteenth time supposedly demonstrates that it does not exist definitely takes the cake.

It takes mere moments to find multiple instances where I identified her straw man. These are not necessarily in the order posted but rather in the order they occur at YouTube from top to bottom:

You say there is a self-evident contradiction when the chair appears from nothingness. Where is this supposed contradiction? What contradictory state of affairs occurs?

You've got the only straw man argument in play, here. Christian theism does not teach a god that suddenly appears from absolutely nothing nor a cosmos that springs from absolutely nothing (the latter is created the former, who exists eternally). Your argument represents theism otherwise (straw man).

Are you intentionally playing a *stupid* word game? We agree only that something cannot spring from *absolute* nothingness. That is, we agree that your straw man is easily destroyed if we discount the position of science that the cosmos arose from literally nothing. That still leaves us to deal with the theistic position of an eternally existing creator who creates out of not quite absolute nothingness but without using transformation.  That's left standing when strawman falls.

How many more times to you want me to point it out? A thousand? A million?

"I mean, how can you create anything if you can't be around to create it?" It's at about 4:09 mark in the video for which you've claimed responsibility.

It does not follow from my agreement that nothing can come from absolute nothingness that a creator cannot bring something into existence from nothing. Absolute nothingness means there's no god there in the first place--your straw man. Remember?

Liar or lunatic?

Spot check: Politi-Psychotics (Updated)

Karen Street has continued to publish what I trust is predominantly a load of nonsense at her "Politi-Psychotics" blog.  Since she's made a bit of noise at FaceBook on the topic of PolitiFact's Lie of the Year (2010), I'm giving her another chance to show that she can treat a topic without turning it into an offering to the gods of idiocy.

It's a good idea to read PolitiFact's story about its "Lie of the Year" for 2010 as well as my critique of it prior to considering Street's critique critique.

True to form, Street gets off on the wrong foot:

But what is precisely meant by “government take-over” according to PolitiFact? Bryan dismissed PolitiFact’s evidence with “PolitiFact has no fact-based case for the importance of its chosen ‘Lie of the Year’”, but never really provided his own, instead, offering his own opinion: “The claim that increased government control does not constitute a government takeover amounts to Reinhardt's opinion” or “Private insurance will come under greater government control through the new legislation, and it is fair to call newly instituted regulatory powers as a taking.”

It's irrelevant whether I provide any meaning to "government takeover."  My purpose isn't to prove PolitiFact wrong about its findings but to show how PolitiFact errs in reaching its conclusions.  PolitiFact needs the evidence, not me.  Compounding the error, Street confuses the issue of the definition of "government takeover" with the issue of the importance of the alleged untruth.  PolitiFact claims it chooses the "Lie of the Year" based on its relative importance ("We're examining claims we've rated False or Pants on Fire and will choose the one that played the biggest role in the national discourse in the past year"), and that's a separate issue from the nature of the supposed lie per se.  This type of thing serves as an excellent example of why I do not regularly waste my time replying to Street's blog posts.  Fish, barrel, shoot, repeat.

Midway through the morass, Street attempts to re-establish PolitiFact's false dilemma (either socialism/single payer or "takeover" isn't even partly true), quoting me at the start:

“Private insurance will come under greater government control through the new legislation, and it is fair to call newly instituted regulatory powers as a taking.” Increased government control as government takeover is opinion, and it’s fair to call new regulatory powers as taking? No, it’s not fair to call new regulatory powers as taking. Takeover is not even a good term for other countries’ healthcare systems regarding the government’s role (although I'd bet Bryan would have you believe all other countries that have universal healthcare have government “takeovers” of it).

The mind boggles at Street's brand of nonsense.  When a government takes new powers to itself, those powers are taken.  And they are taken away from whatever entity formerly exercised them.  It's not a matter of opinion.  It's the factual conventions of language.

Note how easily Street segues from ""taking" to "takeover."  "Takeover" carries the stronger connotation of a seizure, and if I had made it my business to determine the truth of PolitiFact's charge rather than simply criticize PolitiFact's methods, I'd have called the term hyperbolic, though hyperbolic with a  solid foundation in truth based on the way people use words like "take."  It's not whether "takeover" is a "good term," as Street puts it.  It is whether applying the term is fair according to the conventions of language.  I'm reminded of my own lampoon of PolitiFact's methods, when I suggested that PolitiFact investigate the use of "nuclear option" since considerable doubt exists that changing the the application of the filibuster technique in the Senate is even a tiny bit radioactive.  Language is more flexible than many people appear to realize.

Back to Street's illegal torture of innocent logic:

(T)o answer two of the questions he put forth: “Does the legislation provide for increased government authority as he appears to grant?” No, not necessarily, because the new legislation doesn’t change things much for those already covered (which is the majority). The purpose of the insurance mandate, the crux of the bill, was to find a way to provide coverage for those who could not get insurance by mandating everyone get it, which was the insurance companies’ proposal to begin with. “And isn't an increase in government authority a takeover of that realm of authority, given that the authority came into existence with the passage of the legislation?” No, because an increase in governmental authority is not the same as a takeover. Bryan created a false choice here.

1)  "Not necessarily"?????  Street's reply is a blatant non sequitur.  It doesn't matter whether the legislation "doesn't change things much for those already covered."  So long as it changes something and that something represents an increase in the government's regulatory role, the legislation does necessarily increase government authority.  And though the degree of change isn't even important to the logic I presented, the degree of change is drastic with respect to the insurance industry.  Eliminating insurance companies' ability to refuse coverage based on pre-existing conditions, for example, fundamentally alters the very nature of health insurance.

2)  Karen's supposed answer to the second question begs the question.

All this error in the space of two paragraphs is kind of impressive, in a way.

From there, Street argues by analogy that increased regulation does not constitute a takeover.  Setting standards for the auto industry, she says, does not represent a takeover.  But why not?   Prior to national standards, the auto makers set their own standards.  The government took over that role.  And if the government took over that role then what is supposed to prevent it from being a takeover?  Without explicitly deferring to PolitiFact's argument, Street simply clones the PolitiFact mistake of insisting on a rigid definition of what constitutes a takeover.  Presumably if the government does not meet some arbitrary standard of control that Street finds suitable, then the government has not performed any sort of takeover.

I skip Street's digression into blaming insurance companies for the health care bill and Republicans for the health care reform bill's particulars.  Neither is relevant to my arguments about PolitiFact.

But I'm always interested when Street thinks she's caught me in a fallacy:

The other logic fallacy Bryan employs is to claim PolitiFact created a “straw man” of “government takeover” by equating it with socialized medicine, because “it makes little sense to charge that Republicans were working to mislead people into thinking that the reform bill instituted a single-payer system or socialized medicine.” Really?

 It's laughable, really.

I did not say that PolitiFact created its straw man because "it makes little sense to charge that Republicans were working to mislead people into thinking that the reform bill instituted a single-payer system or socialized medicine."  Street's sentence doesn't even make sense.  I charged that PolitiFact had created a straw man because PolitiFact failed to produce a shred of evidence that people understood "government takeover" in the sense that PolitiFact insisted it had to be understood.   And I had natural insight into PolitiFact's straw man fallacy through my own thought process when I heard the term "government takeover."  I never thought it meant either socialized medicine or a single-payer plan.  Street ends up with a straw man of her own as her reward for trying to catch me with one.

Street provides a "Fox & Friends" transcript in which the hosts compare the Democrats' health care reform to the British and Canadian systems.  That's fair enough, but anecdotes can't float PolitiFact's claims, particularly when the transcript offers no evidence at all that "government takeover" was taken to mean a plan like the British or Canadian ones.

Fast forward a bit past more cereal filler ...

Well, it’s just another Lil White Lie “Even Though” scenario—what Bryan White expects you to believe “even though”: ANY Democrat version of healthcare reform is a government takeover of healthcare, even though the same type of reform was prior promoted by Republicans, even though it only affects a small percent of people without insurance, even though for most people their coverage won’t change, even though Republicans wanted more strenuous "government control" in healthcare via their own tort reform proposals.

 I'd have been all for a Democrat health care reform plan that focused on tort reform and an erosion of the third-party payment dynamic that is so poisonous to cost containment.  Contrary to Street's assertion, tort reform is not a goverment takeover.  It is an adjustment of something the government has always held in its domain in our country:  the court system.  Setting award limits for damages does virtually nothing to affect the delivery of medical care except provide additional freedom for health care providers.  It's the opposite of a takeover.  It's a giving back.

 And even though dozens of well-known conservative pundits/politicians call it socialized medicine, they couldn’t possibly be trying to mislead people. And if a poll shows the majority of people believe the government has taken over healthcare (btw, isn't that called argumentum ad populum?), how did they arrive at this conclusion....could it be, could it be that it's due to hearing those dozens of well-known conservative pundits/politicians who are calling it socialized medicine?  And any increase in government regulation IS a government takeover, even though it’s been done for years without takeover, even though the regulation is often done for the collective good (as in the healthcare reform, covering people who might not be able to get insurance). Along with death panels, even though….need I go on?

1)  With dozens of "well-known conservative pundits/politicians calling it "socialized medicine" you'd think Street would have thought to give an example or two.  Oh, well.  She probably just copied the PolitiFact method.  Simply stating it makes it sufficiently true.

2)  The appeal to popularity fallacy doesn't apply to things where majority opinion actually does determine the truth of something.  For example, 90 percent of teen girls think Justin Beber is fabulous" actually does, if true, establish as true that Justin Beber is thought fabulous by a majority of that group.  Additionally, my use of the polling data was not for the purpose of establishing that the health care reform act was factually a government takeover, but to help expose the fact that PolitiFact was ignoring the way people understood the term.  As I have said before, people determine how words are understood by how people understand the words.  Dictionaries follow where common usage leads.  If people say "texting" as a verb then pretty soon it's a verb whether Merriam-Webster likes it or not.

Has anyone else noticed that Street hasn't struck upon a single valid criticism thus far?

3)  It's not a takeover because it's not a takeover begs the question.

4)  It's funny that Street should mention death panels ...

Don't go on, Karen Street.  Go on sabbatical until you've honed your critical thinking skills to the point where you don't embarrass yourself persistently.


Afters:

Street ended with what she felt was an effective critique from FaceBook commenter Bill Benson.  Her introduction is worth quoting for the sake of its subsequent comeuppance:

He obliterated Bryan's 3,000+ words with about 50, I'd say--and he probably never read Bryan's blog critique, it was just based on his Facebook comments.

 Priceless.  If Benson did read my blog post then he understood it no better than my FaceBook comments.

 Reformatting my response:

@Bill Benson, who wrote:

Feel free to argue with the weakest arguments (technically, she suggested that it could NEVER happen, and in debate class, they taught us to pounce on NEVER because that's easy to argue against).

I'll credit you, Bill, with at least not sending Carina's remark entirely down the memory hole.

Let's take what you (apparently) think may be a stronger version of Carina's argument and see how it works out:
 
"Since when does regulation equate to takeover, exactly? Oh, right (hardly (-n))ever."

Once Carina admits that it's possible for regulation to constitute a takeover, her argument is so weak as to be better left unstated. There's nothing in it to suggest that the present instance doesn't present one of the exceptions for which she allows. And *any* reasonable possibility that the present case counts leaves us reasonably questioning PolitiFact's "False" and "Pants on Fire" ratings.
 
Your pivotal argument: lotsa' people say so. Even better, lotsa' people say so after they were ...relentlessly told so by a pervasive, well-funded campaign designed by Frank Luntz.

Bill, you're missing the central point of my argument. It isn't merely that many people disagree with PolitiFact on this one. The point is that it would be very difficult for PolitiFact to show that the high number of those who agree that the reform bill amounts to a "government takeover" correlates with PolitiFact's insistence that "government takeover" means either a single-payer plan or socialized medicine. It isn't that the GOP misled people into believing the latter (no evidence was produced for that) but rather that the term "government takeover" was used to effectively communicate regarding portions of the bill that people did not like.
 
Your arguments amount to: 1) it's a takeover because it seems like one to me, 2) it's a takeover because it seems like it to other people who have been subjected to a propaganda campaign to convince them that it is, and 3) well, even if it isn't, it could/will be someday.

I've never made the first argument. Rather, I argue against PolitiFact simply assuming based on its straw man understanding of "government takeover" that the term can only reasonably mean socialized medicine or a single-payer plan. Their reasoning made use of a false dilemma. The second argument is perfectly legitimate. If a majority of people think a term means something then a critic ought to have a spectacularly good argument that the term cannot mean what those people think it means (language works based on what people perceive things to mean). PolitiFact flunked on that.

I didn't use the third argument, either. So you're one out of three and you have no good attack on my use of the one argument you correctly identified.

Street said she wishes she could have expressed her criticism like Bill did his.

This is the right place for your blog, Karen Street.


Update 9/7/2011

It turns out Karen Street wrote up a response to my critique, claiming that she gave examples of the "dozens of of well-known conservative pundits/politicians" who call(ed) ObamaCare "socialized medicine":

Yes, I must admit Bryan was absolutely right and I just copied the PolitiFact method and simply stated it (not really, he ignored my examples, see below).

Obviously we can't allow Street to get away with providing examples today while claiming credit for those examples yesterday.  Read charitably, we cannot take Street to refer to the Bachmann example as something I ignored in her post.  Any such examples need to come from the original.

So ... are there any legitimate examples in Street's original?

Of course there are!  All you have to do in order to see it is realize that the hosts on Fox News programs are well-known conservative pundits/politicians.  The co-host of Fox & Friends, Steve Doocy, is a well-known conservative pundit/politician.  So is Fox & Friends guest host Steve Johnson Jr. 

Host Brett Baier of Fox's "Special Report" program is likewise a well-known conservative pundit/politician.

I'm not sure if the quote of Media Matters is supposed to indicate if Street believes that the AP's Charles Babington is likewise a well-known conservative pundit/politician.

But at least we can add one more Fox host to the list of well-known consevative pundits/politicans:  Sean Hannity.  He said President Obama is obsessively trying to push socialized medicine, and we know by extrapolation (and maybe a little magic dust thrown in) that he means that the ObamaCare bill itself is socialized medicine.





If you believe that Sean Hannity is a pundit/politician then maybe you can believe Karen Street's claim that I ignored her examples.  But if, like me, you thought the list looked a whole lot more like a list of Fox News personalities then you'll agree that Street made her assertion without supporting evidence.

Interpretations that make a speaker or writer look silly do not ordinarily constitute charitable interpretations.

One last word regarding the meat of the argument:  Note that Street responds to a point about the way the general population understands "government takeover of healthcare" by focusing on what some Fox News personalities said and wrote--and even in those cases there was no overt description of ObamaCare as being socialistic?

Such is the way people produce evidence when the conclusion precedes the collection of the evidence.

Let's Make a (formal debate) Deal (about free will and foreknowledge)

I've recently been trying to coax "dbes02," a YouTube identity who finds omniscience and free will irreconcilable, into a formal debate.

It's not easy.

It's not enough to have the debate at a skeptical forum (my suggestion from the outset).

Dbes02 has all manner of reservations about the debate, such as asking what's the point if there is no arbiter.  So I tell him he can choose the arbiter, even suggesting that his mother could fill the role if available.  I was assuming she would be well disposed toward her son.  He doesn't care to look like the one reluctant to debate, so he tries to make the arbitration thing look like a holdup from my end:

Just to (publicly) remind you: My formal debate challenge (from Sept. 23) remains open. The Freethought and Rationalism Discussion Board remains my recommendation as the forum. You can pick the arbiter if you insist on one--that's not a concern of mine.
("I challenge you to a formal debate in that forum where you support the proposition that foreknowledge and/or predictability is fatal to libertarian free will.")

To publicly remind you - if YOU find a FRDB person to adjudicate.

If he's eager to debate then why put it on me to find the adjudicator?  I don't care who adjudicates it, so how hard can it be for me to find somebody to judge it and declare a winner?  His comment referred to a series of private messages we exchanged about the debate idea.  I challenged him to the debate and told him I wouldn't hold my breath waiting for his reply.  He counter-challenged (I guess, in a way) saying he wouldn't hold his breath waiting for me accept an adjudicated debate challenge.  Yes, his response was a bit incoherent (the debate challenge is mine to him; he had yet to make any debate challenge unless we count this one from his reply).  And why phrase it as a counter-challenge in the first place?  What's so hard about "I'll accept your challenge if the formal debate will be adjudicated" other than the commitment?

I'll offer two compatible guesses:  First and already mentioned, he doesn't want to look craven.  Second, he's a tad smitten with the idea of turning the arguments of others against them.

Turnabout can be a good technique when it is well executed.

The remainder of his above reply:

We've been 'debating' here - in a public forum. This type of debate (and even the formal ones with the likes of Craig, Hitchens, Dawkins, Lennox, etc.) is pointless - people disagree with each other. You say Swartz is right, I put a position down he's wrong. You disagree. Where's it get us?
If the world's best can't agree... what's the point. (But it's good to see you've dropped the schoolyard loutishness.)

Again, it seems tough for dbes02 to appear eager for debate when he thinks debate is pointless. It makes him look like he's readying his next excuse. So I made that clear to him:

This forum allows you too much leeway in playing games. You'll behave yourself better in a formal debate or suffer the consequences. Are you saying that you will accept the debate if *I* find somebody to arbitrate? After I gave *you* the opportunity to choose the arbiter?  If that's all that's stopping you then go register now. Or is "This type of debate ... is pointless" waiting in the wings as your next excuse?

You should know a lot about game playing. Yes, this type of debate is pointless - everything is already in writing on the internet.

His reply allows me to segue smoothly into counting his reply as a reason to engage in the debate:   He can stop my game playing in the formal venue, or at least expose it through his persuasive rhetoric to the detriment of my side of the argument.

He can't be thinking I'll be so reluctant to debate him that I will decline to find an arbiter.  Can he?