Wooly rhetoric

Butterflies and Wheels offers a helpful guide to deciphering the debating tactics of folks who aren’t critical thinkers, who embrace fallacies, who spout nonsense (yes, very much like soon-to-be-former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin). My favorite:

Be dismissive

Go on, don’t hesitate. Brush people off, especially if they know about something you don’t know about. If they later turn out to be Nobel economists or widely-read philosophers, just pretend you’ve forgotten the whole episode.

But really, it’s hard to pick a favorite. Go ahead, scroll through the entire list. See how many you’ve heard Palin use in the less-than 12 months she’s traipsed across the national stage.

Then, if you want to read a good book on how to think and debate logically, try Being Logical: A Guide to Good Thinking by D.Q. McInerny.

Puh-lease: Widespread lack of logic

It’s time for another roundup of items that make me roll my eyes, shake my head, and utter a two-syllable puh-lease.

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Gilroy City Councilman Dion Bracco generated an eye roll with his ridiculous prediction that if Gilroy doesn’t offer stipends and benefits for part-time City Council members, just “rich conservative white guys” will run for council seats.

City Council service is not something that anyone should do because they need the stipend or the benefits, which Bracco described as “measly.” Instead, it should be considered volunteer community service; stipends, if they exist at all, should just cover expenses. Benefits are completely unjustifiable.

It’s not just “rich conservative white guys” who volunteer for other community organizations — groups that offer no pay and no benefits in exchange for volunteer service — so there’s no reason to think that pay and “measly” benefits are necessary to attract poor or middle class, moderate or progressive, non-white, female council candidates. That Bracco is trying to make that ridiculous case makes my eyes spin.

Sen. Al Franken

It’s another “only in America” story; Al Franken goes from brilliant satirist to United States Senator:

RIP CompuServe

Ars Technica reports that CompuServe, the information service that “offered a data connection to people across the globe, a connection that few had previously had at home” was quietly shuttered by AOL late last week. I worked at CompuServe as a customer service representative in the mid 1980s. Time for a trip down memory lane:

I remember asking people who called with technical problems if they used MS DOS or PC DOS.

I remember thinking of the 2400 baud modem users as big spenders.

I remember checking out complaints about obscene handles and traffic on CB, and learning a lot of blue terms that I had missed during my fundamentalist Christian sheltered youth.

I remember sysops, and text-based games, and the Executive News Service.

I remember a subscriber who was offended by the “invalid entry” error message that appeared when a user name and password didn’t match, reading the first word as a synonym for “handicapped” instead of as “not valid,” which was the intended meaning.

I remember a customer who tried to tell me that swear words — which he was using liberally during our telephone conversation –  were offensive only if I chose to interpret them that way.

I remember retorting that he was choosing them because he knew that’s how they’d be received, foreshadowing my inability to let flawed logic go unanswered.

I remember starting  a customer service newsletter with a few other reps, foreshadowing my future careers in journalism and technical writing.

I remember the creator of the GIF graphics format (and I remember that the “g” in GIF is a soft g; the acronym is a homophone for the peanut butter brand Jif).

I remember call quotas, feedback quotas, and how generous the $5.80 an hour I was earning to meet those quotas seemed compared to the $3.35 an hour minimum wage I had been earning at the Lazarus department store chain.

And, CompuServe is where I met my husband.

And all this happened far away from Silicon Valley, in office buildings off Henderson Road in Columbus, Ohio. And, here I am, more than 20 years later, working in high tech in Silicon Valley, after having worked as a newspaper journalist.

Most folks don’t even remember CompuServe, or the important role it played in the early days of the Internet. I remember all of that and, even more, the important role that CompuServe played in my life.

The fundamental faculty

Lera Boroditsky has a fascinating article on Edge that documents the ways languages “profoundly shape the way we think, the way we see the world, the way we live our lives.” Key quote:

I often start my undergraduate lectures by asking students the following question: which cognitive faculty would you most hate to lose? Most of them pick the sense of sight; a few pick hearing. … But what would your life be like if you had never learned a language? Could you still have friends, get an education, hold a job, start a family? Language is so fundamental to our experience, so deeply a part of being human, that it’s hard to imagine life without it. But are languages merely tools for expressing our thoughts, or do they actually shape our thoughts?

Language shapes us in ways we’re just beginning to understand. Read the entire article to get an idea of how much your mother tongue affects the way you perceive and interact with the world around you.

Tortured logic

Slate’s Bruce Reed points out Sarah Palin’s tortured logic in her attempts to justify her decision to resign her office 18 months shy of completing the commitment she made to Alaskans when she sought the governorship:

“It may be tempting and more comfortable to just keep your head down [and] plod along,” Sarah Palin said Friday, in an attempt to suggest that serving her full term as governor would add to the nation’s apathy. “That’s the worthless, easy path; that’s a quitter’s way out.” Sarah Palin is no quitter. That’s why she’s quitting. [emphasis mine]

Whenever I see logic this flawed, I take it as a sign of dishonesty. (My other option is that it’s evidence of stupidity.) In this case, I suspect that it shows that Palin doesn’t want to tell us the real reason she’s quitting. I still think it’s either to make more money as a lecturer, radio host, or television host, or because a big scandal is brewing. Politico has more on the latter possibility, via an “extraordinary four-page letter” from Palin’s attorney to “the media.”

Does she think we’re stupid?

Probably.

Extreme right-wing Sarah Palin announced today that she’ll be resigning later this month, well before the end of her first term as Alaska’s governor. She said that she doesn’t want to be a “lame duck” governor. Here’s what she said, according to the New York Times:

“As I thought about this announcement that I would not seek re-election, I thought about how much fun other governors have as lame ducks: They maybe travel around their state, travel to other states, maybe take their overseas international trade missions,” she said.“I’m not going to put Alaskans through that,” she continued. “I promised efficiencies and effectiveness. That’s not how I’m wired. I’m not wired to operate under the same old politics as usual.”

I have two theories:

1. She sees lots more money from the lecture/television/radio circuit that she cannot take advantage of as governor.

2. A scandal is brewing that she hopes to circumvent by resigning.

But I do not for a moment believe this” lame duck” hooey. Palin committed to serve Alaska for four years. Every elected official has a time frame in which they’re in office but not running for re-election. It’s part of what you sign up for when you seek elected office. She knew that — or should have — going in.

Good news for those of us who have not drunk the Palin Kool-aid: Many observers, including Republicans, see this as political suicide. Maybe we won’t have to worry about seeing Sarah Palin on the national stage much longer.

Update 7/4/09:

So far, my favorite reaction to Palin’s resignation comes from Jed Lewison:

She’s quitting as a one-half term governor. And she’s quitting after less than a year on the national stage.

Unless she’s a total moron, there’s no way she’s running for president. Then again, maybe she is a total moron.

Bans don’t work

We learned that during the Prohibition — or should have — but continue to ignore the lesson by waging a “war” on drugs. Need another example? Try The Life of Brian.

The BBC reports that Glasgow, Scotland, has lifted a ban of the movie that it enacted when the movie was released in 1979. That ban was really effective in squashing the Monty Python flick about a man who’s mistaken for Jesus and crucified, wasn’t it? Just think about the careers those Monty Python fellows might have had if only Glasgow hadn’t banned their film.

That close

Conservative blogger Andrew Sullivan reviews the new profile of onetime Republican vice presidential candidate Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin written by Todd Purdum and published in Vanity Fair. Key quote:

[Palin's] narcissism, the pathological and incessant lying, the viciousness, the delusions of grandeur, the vindictiveness, the fathomless and proud ignorance, the opportunism, the vanity, the white trash concupiscence and fraudulence in almost every respect: these are now indisputable. How an advanced democracy came that close to having this farce of a candidate running the most powerful country on earth reveals how deep the corruption of our politics and especially our media are. …

… in Washington even those who seem able to put principle before partisanship are all liars and hypocrites in the end. Chief among these goons is John McCain, a man whose reputation should never, ever recover from this act of wanton irresponsibility and cynicism.

Exactly.

Drip, drip, drip

Following up on news from The State regarding allegations that South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford (R) had affairs with three other women, the AP interviewed the disgraced and hypocritical extreme-religious-right-wing governor today and learned the following:

South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford said Tuesday that he “crossed lines” with a handful of women other than his mistress — but never had sex with them. The governor said he “never crossed the ultimate line” with anyone but Maria Belen Chapur, the Argentine at the center of a scandal that has derailed his once-promising political career.

Sanford also admitted that he lied during his news conference when he claimed he’d seen Chapur three times:

Sanford also admitted he saw Chapur more times than previously disclosed, including what was to be a farewell meeting in New York chaperoned by a spiritual adviser soon after his wife found out about the affair.

He described five meetings with Chapur over the past year, including two romantic, multi-night stays with her in New York before they met there again intending to break up.

Why, exactly, are we supposed to believe anything this guy says? And after he went AWOL for five days, why are we supposed to trust his judgment? And after disclosure after disclosure relating to this scandal, does anyone believe this story is done with yet?