tisiwoota

Came across several almost painfully illogical arguments in my reading today. In both cases cited below, anecdotal evidence for an effect is used to refute the significance of a statistically much, much larger (and far better-documented) phenomena.

1) A letter to the Economist:

“You ask why we Americans work more hours than do Europeans. While the data does show that Americans work more hours in formal jobs, it doesn’t follow that Americans work more hours in total. Compared with Europeans, Americans have more time-saving appliances and greater access to time-saving amenities such as prepared foods and house-cleaning services. We also have larger homes with more storage space, so we spend less time running to the supermarket. As a result, we work fewer hours taking care of our households and can work more hours earning income.”

In other words… frozen TV dinners are what makes the work/life tradeoff worthwhile– after all, they let us earn money that can presumably be spent on um, more frozen TV dinners… While those poor Europeans are condemned to making and leisurely consuming good food with their families.

Not the mention the more serious socioeconomic flaw of the argument– that the house-cleaning services the writer invokes are not likely to be an affordable option for the vast majority of those having to work longer hours, and therefore most American workers will not see their total workload balance out…

…

2) I should have figured out from reading Tech Central Station’s shrill and shoddy editorial about the movement to integrate a development agenda into WIPO’s work that the site was not so much a newspage as an outlet for, well, shrill and shoddy neocon bombast. That revelation didn’t come until today, when I saw the headline “Shamnesty International” on Google’s News Aggregator.

Still somewhat disbelieving that someone would seriously put forth content to match such a heading, I clicked through and read the editorial. And it was real– the author was actually claiming that because Al Qaeda supplied its members with a manual instructing them to spread false rumors to tarnish the reputation of the US, that fake torture accusations generated by this tactic must surely– obviously– account for most “instances” of human rights abuse documented by Amnesty (”the hand-wringer of the week”) and other organizations (”They’re often well-meaning. But they may be getting wagged by the Al Qaeda training handbook without even knowing - or refusing to believe - it could be so”). No counter-statistics or substantiating details for the author’s contention are provided. Only inflammatory rhetoric.

I won’t link to the piece– it’s easy enough to find from the title, and I see no need to contribute to its connectivity ratings. Anyway, I realize that it’s only a small example of a much-bigger genre– typical of what one might find on talk radio, or in Ann Coulter’s books, or well, too many places. But most of the time, such sloppy and hateful views are just a vague negative abstraction hovering somewhere on the horizon of my political awareness. That makes it just a bit startling to be reminded that such views and modes of expression are real and actively being propagated/consumed by real people. So sad.

On a related note, sometimes I think the greatest problem with politics in this country is the seemingly ever-diminishing respect for the ideals of debate, especially the idea that both sides should strive to engage each other with integrity. A country suffers more from the breakdown of these ideals, I think, than from one side having a preponderance of the power, because it allows the wingnut extremists to have an unhealthy degree of influence over the governing process and resulting decisions. (Of course, one side having unchecked power tends to lead to a breakdown of debate ideals; so it’s tricky to pinpoint one part of the cycle as being definitely the most important for maintaining/
destroying democracy).