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.
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.
