Asinine Adams At It Again

AFTER much ministerial bungling and bureaucratic buck-passing, Amandatory Detention Vanstone had urgent changes made to her rules and regulations lest there be another Cornelia Rau row. Can’t have blonde, blue-eyed locals, least of all ex-Qantas hosties, caught up in Australia’s razor-wire net, mixed up with those pesky Muslims.

Before I look at the specific fallacies Phillip Adams makes in his opinion column A comparatively brief internment, one could be forgiven for making the following inference given the above statement. That Adams has no problems with Australian citizens being locked up in detention centres for illegal immigrants.

I'd say that this probably isn't Adams' position - after all, I don't want to make the same fallacy he does - False Positioning. Adams paints the picture of detention centres as places which the Australian government uses purely to lock up Muslims (though they might be okay if they're blonde and blue eyed?). This is clearly untrue and would be a reprehensible thing to do – and as such an easily defeated position. Thus Adams has built a 'straw man' of the government's policy so he can easily knock it down. Detention centres are for illegal immigrants. Perhaps he finds it difficult to engage and take on the government's actual policies regarding asylum seekers and illegal immigrants?

…the media and my fellow citizens go stark raving bonkers over the plight, the comparatively brief internment, of one white woman. Her suffering, her torments are regarded as a national scandal whereas the stories told by enraged health workers and refugee advocates about families fleeing the Taliban and Saddam Hussein are brushed aside. They’re old news. Could there be more dramatic evidence of the underlying racism of our response to the people we’ve rounded up for mandatory detention?

(Let's ignore the fact - as Adams conveniently does - that if he ever had his way regarding the Taliban and Saddam Hussein, they would all still be in power.) Apparently people are racist because they were upset that an Australian citizen was detained in a facility for illegal immigrants. The most obvious fallacy by Phil is Personal Abuse. Using the term 'racism' to describe our (all Australians besides Adams?) response to the Cornelia Rau episode is an attempt to malign all those who are in favour of mandatory detention and - given he has no actual evidence of racism - is clearly Personal Abuse. This is Adams' 'pre-emptive strike' against those who would disagree with him. If you were upset over the mistaken custody of Cornelia Rau, but don't object to mandatory detention of illegal immigrants, clearly you must be a racist and all of your arguments must be dismissed out of hand.

Besides the obvious Personal Abuse, Adams' risible reasoning continues. His hypothesis is that people who were upset over Cornelia Rau but not refugees in general, are racist. His argument? She is white and (by implication) the refugees are not (they are Muslim). Of course, he fails to cite any actual, verifiable evidence of this. But even if we are to magnanimously grant him this point, his 'argument' is one of Stacking the Deck - deliberately ignoring counter arguments (and evidence) to his point. The only evidence he cites as indication of the underlying racism of Australians is the above. He conveniently ignores an obvious (substantial) counter argument – Australia's large (and always getting larger) number of immigrants, as well as the unflinching acceptance of multiculturalism by most Australians. Further to this, no matter what one's position is regarding refugees, most would agree it's a bad thing to lock Australians up in detention centres for illegal immigrants (by definition).

In the end, this is merely another LAME (Look At Me Everybody) piece of Sanctimony by Adams.

Haiku - an Ode to Phillip Adams

I naturally turned to Phillip Adams for inspiration when I prepared to make my first post (on Humbug - or fallacies in thinking) to this site. I read his column in last Saturday's Australian in order to pick out a few choice and obvious fallacies for comment. However I found the multiple fallacies too densely packed and multi-layered to isolate a "clean" example for analysis.

So instead, I wrote this Haiku... and I offer it as an oblique tribute to the at times breathtaking unreasoned reasoning skills of the Grand Master of Humbug.

Unreasoned reasons...
Flatulent Phil thinks he thinks,
but thinks not, I think.

Michael Moore kindly provides an example of observational selection

Love him or hate him, one thing cannot be disputed; Michael Moore's search for the truth is (intentionally) awful. This will not be my last example of the deliberate fallacious reasoning he uses, designed to win regardless of the truth; but the following from Fahrenheit 9/11 is a nice little example of Observational Selection.

Ironically, Moore tends to bash his countrymen for ignoring the rest of the world – yet here is his mocking 'role call' for the 'coalition of the willing' in the Iraqi war: Palau (little girls in grass skirts), Costa Rica (peasant pulling an ox cart), Iceland (Vikings), Romania (Dracula), Morocco (who, one report said, offered to send 2000 monkeys to blow up landmines), Netherlands (Drug addicts), and Afghanistan (Poppy growers).

Hence Observational Selection. Apparently the following countries in the 'coalition of the willing' don't rate a mention: Australia, Denmark, Hungary, Italy, Japan, South Korea, Poland, Spain, Turkey and of course the United Kingdom. We actually see this inconsistency later in the film. He shows three Japanese who are kidnapped by Iraqi insurgents. He tells us how they are threatened with beheading unless Japan withdraws its troops. Oops!


More Moore:
...pseudologia fantastica
...Handsome-ature
...the Awful Truth

Race doesn't exist, because if it did, that'd be bad!

The following is a Letter to the Editor of the New York Times:

To the Editor: Race is not a fact rooted in nature, but an ideology that justifies treating people differently based on the meanings we attribute to physical differences. When people are subjected to poor treatment, diagnostic delay and unhealthy environments because of the color of their skin, "race" impairs their health. The ideology of race can have real biological consequences.

Lynn M. Morgan
South Hadley, Mass.
March 15, 2005
(The writer is an anthropology professor at Mount Holyoke College.)

This is a clear case of an Argument to Consequences. In fact, she herself says so: "Race is not a fact rooted in nature, but an ideology… The ideology of race can have real biological consequences." Maybe it can have biological consequences, but this is evidence of bigotry, not evidence against race as a 'fact' rooted in nature. If people attempt to use any 'fact' to justify racism - they are making the Naturalistic Fallacy - attempting to derive ought (as in 'we should') from is - and should be vehemently rebutted on this ground. But the perceived risk of bigotry 'justified' by scientific discovery is not reason for arguing that the discovery is false.

She also has engaged in a few more fallacies in this letter. She makes an anthropological Factoid Propagation with race is: "…an ideology". And shows her Simple Minded Certitude with the statement: "Race is not a fact rooted in nature…".

Here are some extracts from the article she was responding to:

…a 2002 study by scientists at the University of Southern California and Stanford showed that if a sample of people from around the world are sorted by computer into five groups on the basis of genetic similarity, the groups that emerge are native to Europe, East Asia, Africa, America and Australasia - more or less the major races of traditional anthropology.

Ironically, the acceptance of the genetic basis of race will have, if anything, positive consequences. It's not racist to individualize the treatment and prevention of disease based on race, if there are clear differences in the efficacy of these treatments and prevention techniques between racial groups. To do anything but would be sheer folly:

…the recognition of race may improve medical care. Different races are prone to different diseases. The risk that an African-American man will be afflicted with hypertensive heart disease or prostate cancer is nearly three times greater than that for a European-American man. On the other hand, the former's risk of multiple sclerosis is only half as great. Such differences could be due to socioeconomic factors. Even so, geneticists have started searching for racial differences in the frequencies of genetic variants that cause diseases. They seem to be finding them.

Race can also affect treatment. African-Americans respond poorly to some of the main drugs used to treat heart conditions - notably beta blockers and angiotensin-converting enzyme inhibitors. Pharmaceutical corporations are paying attention. Many new drugs now come labeled with warnings that they may not work in some ethnic or racial groups.

The author of this article is careful to qualify all of the above with the following caveat, thus avoiding any Unfounded Generalizations:

Such differences are, of course, just differences in average. Everyone agrees that race is a crude way of predicting who gets some disease or responds to some treatment. Ideally, we would all have our genomes sequenced before swallowing so much as an aspirin. Yet until that is technically feasible, we can expect racial classifications to play an increasing part in health care.

Ignoring scientific discoveries to (falsely) feel morally superior does no-one any favours. We need to deal with reality, not fantasy.

McCrann's False Analogy

Looking through some past opinion columns I came across this beauty of a False Analogy by Terry McCrann in the Herald Sun - Global warming's core flaw.

GLOBAL warming – or `climate change', as it now tends to be called by its acolytes, in case it inconveniently cools things along the way – is as theological as any religion.That's to say, it rests on a series of beliefs, which might or might not have some relationship to objective fact. But in any event, the key is the belief.

Now I don't wish to Appeal to (lack of) Authority, make an Unfounded Generalization, Impugn his Motives, use Special Pleading or engage in Personal Abuse – but generally, asinine and opinionating economists such as McCrann lack any expertise (authority) in matters of science and theology. Not only that, they are always motivated by money. Whereas, given my background in philosophy of science, my expertise as a science teacher and the fact that my first name is Theo, I can claim insight into both Science and Theology!

McCrann's analogy is inept. (This is not to say everything he says is inept - though he does engage in other fallacies in his opinion piece such as false positioning.) Scientific knowledge is a set of beliefs, but it is belief based on physical evidence and repeatable (thus verifiable) experiments. The domain of science is physical. Given the right education and required mental faculties – anyone can comprehend and access the evidence for scientific claims. Religious knowledge is a set of beliefs, but it is belief based on revelation. The domain of religion (should be) non-physical. But religious belief is not based on any physical evidence – it is a matter of personal faith.

Thus his comment: " But in any event, the key is the belief." is without any foundation. The key is empirical data. Different theories for the data will be proposed and argued over, but this is how science proceeds. New experiments, studies and procedures will eventually resolve which theory "wins".

If I were an economist, the last area of human inquiry I would compare something to is religion. Economic "science", playing the stock market etc., conforms much more closely to this description than does science: "…it rests on a series of beliefs, which might or might not have some relationship to objective fact. But in any event, the key is the belief."