Terrible Arguments from the Left

I was going to write a post about the truly horrible argumentation techniques on display at Echidne of the Snakes' site. Now, Dana must have read my mind, because he wrote about the completely phony-baloney argument techniques of Amanda Marcotte.

While I'm anxious to comment on the ridiculous post by Amanda, I'll start with the Echidne post first.

The post "American Life League and Poverty" isn't terrible in and of itself. It's more of the typical "abortion is the only cure for poverty" argument you see a lot on liberal blogs (particularly feminist ones). One terrible argumentation technique used by the left is to find a fringe organization and then plaster all persons with a belief as being just like that.

American Life League believes in no abortions. None. Not for health, life, incest, rape, or any of the other sorts of hard exceptions most Americans agree with. Naturally, Echidne (and Jill at feministe) take the extreme position of American Life League and plaster all pro-life supporters with it. I'm a little surprised there wasn't a reference to wanting to bomb abortion clinics. After all, Echidne claims "the extreme fringe of the Republican party does offer more legitimization to misogyny".

What interested me about the post today wasn't so much the post itself. It's more of the usual yadda yadda yadda pro-lifers-want-to-kill-women meme that's quite prevalent on the left. No, what interested me was the comments to this post.

A few excerpts:

--In the past, the people (so, so family orientated) who advocated these policies made sure that women were locked up, hidden away and deprived of their children for getting pregnant.

--If a woman choose (sic) to have sex, then chooses an abortion for whichever reasons she so chooses, that’s OK by me. Nor do I pretend that abortion is something other than it is – a choice to end a pregnancy and possible future life.

--Anything that interferes with a woman's right to choose should be as illegal as it is immoral.

But the comments got uglier quickly. What I noticed is that pro-abortion supporters end up with three arguments, two of which are based on the idea that if one is pro-life, one is a hypocrite.

1. You can't be pro-life and for the death penalty.

And

2. You can't be pro-life unless you want to adopt every child waiting for adoption.

Both arguments were on display at Echidne's site.

--you seem to be implying that you're "pro-life". Does this mean you're against the death penalty and against the invasion if Iraq? Or are you a hypocrite?

--If anti-choicer's walked their talk, there should be zero children awaiting adoption because they would have been snapped up immediately if not sooner by the anti-choice zealots. Until every child is wanted and loved and not in languishing in poverty, the anti-choicer's glib slogans ring hollow.

--People like you give Christians a bad name. When I tell people I'm a Christian I have to specify that I'm not one of the fake ones like you. I was just stating facts. It's not name-calling when it's the truth.

You get that? If you are pro-life but support the death penalty, you are a hypocrite, and if you don't adopt every available child, you can't be pro-life. Occasionally, I link to this site which discusses logical fallacies, most of which are plainly on display during any "debate" (I use the term loosely) with liberals.

In the above quoted examples, we have argumentum ad hominem, dicto simpliciter, red herring, slippery slope, and straw man on display. The arguments spun out of control after some poor guy asked what an "economic hardship" was. Having read enough feminist blogs, I can assure you that an "economic hardship" is whatever the woman decides it is at the time she wants to get her abortion.

The third argument used by pro-abortion supporters is the long, involved, agonizing hypothetical.

--If the choice of abortion is not up to the woman and her physician, sansort, then whe gets to say? If I find out I'm pregnant tomorrow, to whom do I need to go make my justifications? What level of risk is adequate for me to be allowed to not have a third child? Is a 10% chance of death sufficient, or does it have to be 30%? How about if I just go blind? Is needing to sell our house and move to an apartment, sufficient? Or is that just convenience? Does it make a difference that we'd have to move out of the only school district that gives adequate PT and OT to our youngest, or is he just screwed?

--What is your opinion in the recent case of a 9 year old child, just starting the onset of puberty (not that rare now), who was raped by her abusive father and made pregnant?

What about women who are even now being forced to work on the streets and kept obedient with a forced drug addiction? Can you say that they "chose" to have sex? Shouldn't they have the choice to abort rather than possibly suffer a painful and traumatic miscarriage due to drug-induced complications or a particularly aggressive beating? Or giving birth to a child that would be addicted to drugs and possibly suffering, from birth, from any number of serious STDs?

How about this- I live with my partner. We have been together for almost 5 years and intend to spend our lives together. Due to personal issues which both of us have suffered we do not, ever, want to have children. Not ever. We use contraception, obviously, and are very careful. My partner has asked doctors for a vasectomy but, because he's only 25, they won't operate. Neither will they let me tie my tubes. If I get pregnant, why shouldn't I have the right to have an abortion? I don't want to have one, I would never want to be faced with that choice. But I should have the right to, since I apparently don't have the right to end my own fertility. Oh, and we're on minimum wage, in massive debt and regularly go 2-3 days without eating in the run-up to payday. So yes, poverty DOES still exist in the Western world. We couldn't afford childcare, nor could we afford for one of us to quit work to care for a child.

The reason people like to make up hypotheticals is that they are virtually impossible to answer because the person asked is at the disadvantage of not having all the information necessary to make a decision. In the examples given above, for instance, the commenter unreasonably assumes that all things are static and that the birth of a child wouldn't be added incentive to do better for oneself. Nor does it acknowledge the fact that no one will remain the same age forever, or that the people involved have already determined that pregnancy is an acceptable risk (they choose to have sex, after all).

If I were still allowed to comment (I am, after all, banned), I would ask these same people at what point a woman's right to choose gives way to the child's (or fetus', if you will) right to life? After all, in Planned Parenthood v. Casey, the court explained that there is, indeed, a point when potential life takes priority over convenience. I wouldn't expect these hard-liners to answer. Their belief is that the right to abort one's offspring is absolute; there's never a time in their way of thinking where the child is more significant than an appendix (and, yes, I've seen this argument before).

At least I don't accuse them of lying about their own motivations as does Amanda Marcotte.

As I’ve mentioned a gazillion times before, the main obstacle with debating a lot of conservatives is that most conservatives rely on so many bad faith arguments. So you’re not really arguing about ideology, but end up mostly trying to get them to admit to come out and argue their actual position. To make it even more complex, while the conservative talking points that get passed around are created in bad faith, they do tend to get their hooks into people who are too dumb or scared to look deeper and find out that their own opinions that have been handed to them by conservative media have been created in bad faith.

That’s the central issue in the “but some anti-choicers really do think they care about babies!” non-starter of a debate. Yes, some people in non-leadership roles have convinced themselves of their own bullshit, but that doesn’t obligate anyone to play along with it. In fact, as many people here and on other feminist boards will tell you, they used to be “pro-life”, and the only way they started to shift their opinions was to have someone call out the anti-woman, anti-sex agenda of the anti-choice movement until they had to admit that they were participating in a bad faith movement.

As I pointed out at CSPT, Amanda not only argues that conservatives don't mean what they argue (but have "pernicious motives" for opposing something), but that they are too stupid to know that they don't mean it and need liberals to point out their racist, sexist, homophobic motivations. Naturally, this line of bullshit was well received at Pandagon, where conservatives are constantly accused of hatred towards (pick your group) and stupidity in what they believe.

What the examples from Echidne's commenters and Amanda's post show is how weak the arguments of our liberal friends are. But don't expect that to stop them. But what's a little petitio principii between "friends"?

UPDATE: More of that "nuance" and "understanding" the left are so well known for from the Echidne comments:

i think the only way to argue with the "abortion = murder" position in such a way as to not go insane, is to respond: "i know you don't really believe that - you just think that women don't know what's best for them and should be controlled by men." because that IS what every "abortion = murder" person i have ever talked to believes. then again, i have no idea how to argue that point with those people either.

Because, once again, the "abortion at all costs" crowd knows all pro-life supporters think women should be controlled by men. Golden! You can't make this stuff up.

They Want to Control the Media and They Have the Army to Prove It

Weston Kosova has this fascinating piece in Newsweek about what was the Don Imus Show and why he was fired.

The reason he was fired is nestled about 1/4 of the way through the article.

In fact, unknown to Imus, one of his most loyal listeners in Washington, D.C., was watching, and taping, the show every day for just that reason: to make a record of everything Imus said. But 26-year-old Ryan Chiachiere wasn't a fan, and he wasn't tuning in to be entertained. Chiachiere is one of a handful of young activists who spend their days wading through hours of radio and cable shows for Media Matters for America, a liberal group whose sole purpose is rooting out and "correcting conservative misinformation in the U.S. media." Wired on coffee, Chiachiere was watching a recording of Imus's show when he noticed the "hos" remark.

It was a big hit at the group's morning meeting...

The group posted a video clip of the exchange on its Web site and put it up on YouTube. It sent e-mails to journalists and civil-rights and women's groups.

The word, and the outrage, spread quickly. A week later, Imus was gone, banished from his multimillion-dollar television and radio show even before he had the chance to complete the all-too-familiar cycle of public penance that high-profile sinners are usually granted.

In short, this was a hit by the wiseguys of the left, Media Matters.

I've written before about the lies and obfuscations of Media Matters. Media Matters is a PR whoring operation for the left, determined to find "conservative misinformation."

Of course, I've found lots of liberal misinformation from sites like Media Matters and F.A.I.R. I've even e-mailed them when they had inaccuracies in their stories, not that they ever issued corrections or anything.

The laughable part is that now that Media Matters brought down Imus, who was anything but conservative, they have put up this post on their website, showing that they clearly aren't interested in misinformation or "hate speech." They are interested in stifling any and all conservatives who say things they dislike.

But as Media Matters for America has extensively documented, bigotry and hate speech targeting, among other characteristics, race, gender, sexual orientation, religion, and ethnicity continue to permeate the airwaves through personalities such as Glenn Beck, Neal Boortz, Rush Limbaugh, Bill O'Reilly, Michael Savage, Michael Smerconish, and John Gibson.

If Media Matters were really concerned with bigotry and hate speech, why not start by perusing Pandagon and Daily KOS? At Pandagon, Amanda doesn't want to talk about the Duke lacrosse players falsely accused of rape (I guess because she can't bash white men as much since these guys were innocent) and at KOS, you have Markos saying women bloggers should just put up with threats of violence because, gee, everybody gets some whacky e-mails.

Media Matters could also spend some of its hours recording what the nuts on Air America say, but I guess since there's only four people listening, they aren't very concerned about that hate speech.

No, we can't expect Media Matters to actually be concerned about hate speech, given that so much of what they write either defends hate speech (as long as it comes from the left) or borders on the trivial (such as the story they had about advertisers not wanting to advertise on Air America shows). No, that would detract from the point...which is to silence conservatives.

UPDATE: Michael Smerconish answers the Media Matters calls against him.

Pearl-Clutching from the Left

The other day, Ann Coulter called John Edwards a faggot. Since then, every leftist blabbermouth has been crawling out of the woodwork demanding that conservatives everywhere denounce Ann. I did so, largely because it was a good opportunity to state my growing distaste for Coulter's brand of humor.

Coulter's intemperate remarks have allowed liberals to trash CPAC and label anyone there (particularly anyone who clapped) as homophobic haters who "showed their true colors." Of course, such blather is complete nonsense, but that doesn't stop the left from using the fodder.

Now, the left isn't merely asking conservatives to denounce and shun Coulter, they have the audacity to say that there's nobody on the left to compare, and that liberals never condone violence against their enemies. Gosh, I guess they don't watch Bill Maher, who thought the assassination of the Vice President would be a good thing.

Or listen to Julianne Malveaux, who said about Justice Clarence Thomas,

"The man is on the Court. You know, I hope his wife feeds him lots of eggs and butter and he dies early like many black men do, of heart disease. Well, that’s how I feel. He is an absolutely reprehensible person."

Maybe they don't read. That would explain why they've forgottenNicholas Baker's book Checkpoint, which has two characters discussing assassinating the POTUS. I guess that's not violent.

I'm sure that when the St. Petersburg, Florida Democratic Club took out an ad advocating assassination of former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, it wasn't nearly as viscious as Ann Coulter saying a baseball bat is the most effective way of talking to Democrats these days.

What about Charles Brooker of the Guardian who said we "need" for someone to assassinate President Bush?

"John Wilkes Booth, Lee Harvey Oswald, John Hinckley Jr - where are you now that we need you?"

Ah, but those are just isolated crackpots, the moonbats would say. They aren't anybody big among liberals, selling millions of books like Ann Coulter does.

Well, there's NPR's well-known Supreme Court reporter Nina Totenberg, who said "[I]f there is retributive justice [Sen. Jesse Helms] will get AIDS from a transfusion, or one of his grandchildren will get it." Is that violent enough? But it's not like that's the only thing Totenberg has said. She also said of General Jerry Boykin "I hope he’s not long for this world."

And let's not forget Ward Churchill, who said the people killed on 9/11 were "little Eichmanns" who deserved it.

There's also the numerous lies perpetrated by Michael Moore, his labelling terrorists in Iraq "freedom fighters," and that he sat with Jimmy Carter at the 2004 Democratic National Convention.

How about celebrities? We have Al Franken joking about the execution of Scooter Libby and Karl Rove. There's Linda Ronstadt saying after the Republican victory in 2004 "We have a new bunch of Hitlers." There's Cameron Diaz, who thought rape could be legalized with a Republican victory. There's Richard Dreyfuss calling for the president's impeachment because he disagrees with various policies. And there's Alec Baldwin, who called the vice president a terrorist.

Is that enough?

This, of course, isn't including the numerous comparisons of Republicans to Nazis (see here, here, here, here, here, and here for a tiny sampling of the 1,370,000 hits one gets with "Republicans" and "Nazis").

I'll stop here. The pearl-clutching by lefties over Ann Coulter is both ridiculous and hypocritical. They cry, they whine that a guy did a survey that showed liberals use vulgarity 18 times as much as conservatives, they point fingers at Ann Coulter and compile convenient lists of offensive remarks by her (would that they did the same to any liberal), but they turn around and call Republicans every vile epithet possible. They accuse Republicans of wanting to starve children, of approving of rape, of terrorism, homophobia, racism, sexism, and global warming. It's inane for liberals to complain that "conservatives are worse" in the war of words when they pile on the overheated rhetoric to such a degree.

Cross-posted at Common Sense Political Thought.

UPDATE: Patterico lists more than 20 examples of leftist hate speech. But don't expect them to admit to any of this.