Will-You-Condemn-athon

Ho-hum. We already went through this less than three weeks ago.

Instapundit is so dense that he’s punched a hole in the time-space continuum.
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if you condemn instapundit for his sporting pursuits then you must also condemn Dick Cheney for his..

waitasec, I did that wrong.

FWIW, I sat at a luncheon with Steve Cohen once and I will make the case also that he is sharp and the sort of Democrat the party needs.

That being said, I have to agree that this is typcal of Instapundit.

Instapundit’s strategy is really a remarkable one and I’m glad that it has been identified by the Encyclopedia of Decency. But at this point I think this particular fallacy deserves its own name. What could it be? Perhaps argumentum ad amicum.

Of course, if Obama DID condemn the minister in question, the wingnuts would be trumpeting it as showing his hostility to Christians, wouldn’t they?

McCain’s big appeal — I’m a white candidate who’s not like George Bush! — will prove to be a fraud.

That’s not strong enough.

In New Ulm, Minnesota there is a 102-foot-tall statue the man who defeated the Romans at Teutoburg Forest — Arminius, locally known as “Herman the German”. It was built in 1897 and somehow survived WWI and WWII.

The 2000th anniversary of the battle will be celebrated in New Ulm in 2009. Come one, come all!

http://www.hermannmonument.com/

John Emerson, that’s cheating. If you put a 20 ft statue on a 50 ft pavillion, have him extend his sword 7 extra feet into the air, then put the pavillion on a 20 ft base and put the base on a hill, then the statue is still only 20 ft high.

It’s still too big, and pretty ugly.

Hidari,

They are all examples of affirming the consequent.

Dear Hidari–

You write:

The fact is that ‘will you condemn’ and ‘what about’ and the ‘friend of a friend’ fallacy (Much used by Christopher Hitchens: ‘Adolf Hitler was against smoking. Therefore, if you oppose the smoking ban, you, personally, are responsible for the Holocaust’.) and the ‘if you are against X you must be in favour of Y’ fallacy (‘a few years back, huge numbers of Londoners walked through the streets to support fascism….’) aren’t logical fallacies (or at least aren’t generally identified as such ‘in the books’) and yet they are clearly fallacious.

I wonder what this says about the logic of arguing and the logic of…well, logic? Are there an infinite number of fallacies? Or are these fallacies not logical, but simply unethical? Or something else?

As logical fallacies are the province of informal logic, you’ll find a good deal of variation as to what counts. These arguments are clearly fallacious–egregiously so I think–but they defy immediate classification by most standard accounts. They’re not, as someone above suggested, instances of affirming the consequent (which is a formal fallacy relating to conditional statements). Many logic textbooks will have a kind of catch-all category–some call it “missing the point” others “non sequitur” for just instances like these. This is also the reason people can still publish about fallacies in journals such as Argumentation.

As for the other questions–there may indeed be an infinite number of fallacies–but all of them rest on either the ignorance or deceitfulness of the arguer.

John, that monument in New Ulm looks an awful lot like this one, in Detmold, Germany (where the battle did not take place, according to modern research):

http://www.teutoburgerwald.de/hermannshoehen/hermannshoehen/orte_am_weg/detmold.php

“In New Ulm, Minnesota there is a 102-foot-tall statue the man who defeated the Romans at Teutoburg Forest—Arminius, locally known as “Herman the German”. It was built in 1897 and somehow survived WWI and WWII.”

That survival is interesting. I live in the German Village neighborhood of Columbus, OH. It just about the oldest part of the city, and in the late 19th century the public schools taught auf Deutsch, in part because that’s what was spoken and in part because it was believed that German schools were better. In 1917, however, they burned books in German and — we’re told — slaughtered German Shepherds in Schiller Park.

slaughtered German Shepherds

Dogs or peasants? I need to calibrate my outrage. Of course German Shepherd dogs have been known as Alsatians in Britain since 1914.

I imagine that the Arminius statues had something to do with the Franco-Prussian War.

Barack Obama: Will You Condemn the Weathermen?

Hidari, abb1:

It’s quite definitely a special case of the Fallacy of Association, which itself is a special case of the Ad Hominem. I think the distinguishing characteristic is the “condemnation” part.

Maybe an Argument by Lack of Condemnation?

Don’t know much about New Ulm, Manitoba, or wherever the -u– it was. But may I just point out that the original New Ulm (or “Neu-Ulm”, as the natives quaintly spell it) is a complete shithole.

And, just across a not terribly broad river, Ulm proper is no great shakes itself. Should you find yourself there, though, you can usefully spend an hour or two in the Fishermens’ Quarter, or climb to the top of the Minster for the views.