Motte-and-Bailey Feminism

Reason suggests that the retreat from the 'believe all women' position to 'believe women who accuse Republicans' is an example of an informal fallacy.

In truth, believe-victims activists have been making generous use of the motte-and-bailey fallacy. This is a form of argument in which a person makes a strong, unreasonable, and indefensible claim—the bailey—and then falls back on an uncontroversial claim—the motte—when challenged. With "believe victims," the bailey position was something like what Biden and Clinton said: Presume that each and every alleged victim is telling the truth. The motte position is closer to this: Respect and support alleged victims, and don't automatically discount what they say. In the wake of Reade's allegations against him, Biden has unsurprisingly retreated to the motte.

This is a topic that Slate Star Codex has treated repeatedly over the years.

I'm not sure it's properly speaking a fallacy so much as an objectively dishonest rhetorical strategy. A fallacy is an error in logic; informal fallacies occur in ordinary rhetoric, which isn't usually amenable to the strict logic in which formal fallacies occur. You can get a formal fallacy in rhetoric, it just doesn't happen much: but if I make a claim that P -> Q, !P, therefore !Q, I've made a formally fallacious argument. If I argue that you're a bad person therefore you can't be right, that's informally fallacious. In both cases, I'm making a claim that doesn't follow from the premises.

The motte-and-bailey is only an error if you don't notice that you've shifted your goalposts substantially. Otherwise, it's a lie. Reason also uses the term 'gaslighting,' which I learned from Tex, and which is a form of intentional deception.

So the question is whether or not they notice their own shift. Maybe not; progressivism is based on fervently asserting beliefs in things that you probably have to know are not true, e.g., that all people are per se "equal" (rather than possessing one form of political equality). Maybe at some point you just don't notice that you've shifted from really saying 'believe all women!' to 'don't just dismiss women'; or from 'it is sexist not to build systems biased in favor of women' to 'feminism is just about equality!' (And which equality, again?)

Eric Hines accuses me of being too generous to my opponents. Perhaps I am; but I do see a lot of self-deception in humanity. I think many of these people really are in error rather than intentionally lying; I think they really can't see outside the lies on which they've founded their lives and their vision of justice. It's a big problem. It's hard to reason with someone who is lying to themselves all the time about the very questions you're treating, especially when (as here) they have gigantic social support systems to reinforce the lies and to protect them from having to grapple with the fact that they are engaged in a (self?) deceptive practice.

Home cooking

I made chicken and dumplings this week, loosely following a recipe from my late aunt's elderly East Texas housekeeper. The soup is simplicity itself: boil the chicken until the meat is barely done, then remove the pieces, debone whatever comes off easily, and set the bite-sized meat aside. Throw the bones back in and boil some more, adding salt and, if you like, mirepoix (diced carrots/onions/celery). This part takes an hour or two, depending on your patience and how intense you like your broth to get. Reserve the skimmed schmaltz, not worrying about snagging some broth with it. You'll want a cup or so of a roughly half-schmaltz/half-broth mixture for the dumplings.

The dumplings are the pie-dough sort, not the biscuit-ball sort. The old recipe called for flour, Crisco, and hot water, but I always use the skimmings from the boiled chicken instead. They're full of flavor now, so why waste them? The proportions aren’t critical: just add enough to make about two cups of flour squishy but just firm enough to roll out on a large floured board. Adding an egg is nice. This week’s improvement was to roll out the dough as thin as I could, then cut it into small squares and stretch each little square with my fingers before I tossed it in the soup to boil. Adding the egg may have helped with the stretching, which got them thin enough for the first time: nearly translucent. They sort of spring back in the boiling stage, but when they’re done they have a nice texture, not thick enough to be doughy in the middle.

While the dumplings are boiling, which doesn't take long when they're thin, maybe 10-15 minutes, add the cooked bite-size chicken back in, with a bit of vinegar to taste. Lacking vinegar, you can substitute anything sour you have handy, such as lemon juice. Just balance the salt and acidity until it tastes rounded. I didn't mention pepper because I don't care about it, but it wouldn't hurt to add some. Ditto herbs if you like them. Tarragon is good. Skim the soup again once the dumplings taste done, as they will have yielded up most of the schmaltz you mixed into them.

Some people like chicken and dumplings to be creamy, so you can add milk or cream. I don't, but I don't see how it could hurt.

The whole dish takes only chicken, water, flour, and salt, plus some kind of tartness from anything handy, an optional egg, and optional onions/carrots/celery or pepper and herbs. As a bonus, I can usually get a couple of bowlfuls of over-cooked chicken shred from the bones after their second boil, which the dogs love, or you could feed it to whatever foxes or raccoons may live nearby. The dogs like the schmaltz, too.

Right on Schedule

They need to get started now to have the impeachment trial in late October.

A Gym in New Jersey

Opening in defiance of the governor's order, a gym is visited by the police.



Well done.

An Interesting Challenge

A vacation from politics.

‘Off the Books’ Spying at Treasury Dept

So reports The Ohio Star.

President Barack Obama’s Treasury Department regularly surveilled retired Army Lt. Gen. Michael T. Flynn’s financial records and transactions beginning in December 2015 and well into 2017, before, during and after when he served at the White House as President Donald Trump’s National Security Director, a former senior Treasury Department official, and veteran of the intelligence community, told the Star Newspapers....

Only two names are listed in the whistleblower’s official paperwork, so the others must remain sealed, she said. The second name is Paul J. Manafort Jr., the one-time chairman of Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign.
The other names include: Members of Congress, the most senior staffers on the 2016 Trump campaign and members of Trump’s family...

The whistleblower also claims the Justice Department didn’t go through the formal steps to authorize this.

Vulnerable hardest hit

It occurs to a Guardian pundit that, just as COVID-19 hurts the vulnerable the most, so does the lockdown.  Duh.  Everything harms the vulnerable the most; that's what "vulnerable" means.

It doesn't necessarily follow, as the writer argues, that "vulnerable" is best defined as his favorite SJW categories:

This pandemic is an X-ray, exposing the racial and class inequalities of our society.

It's fair enough to note that people without safety margins of all kinds are far more likely to be swallowed up in severe disruptions. COVID-19, however, is unusual in its extreme focus on the elderly, which, unfortunately for the Guardian, can't easily be shoehorned into the SJW worldview. No amount of Marxist thinking will solve the problem of a disease whose median age of case fatality is around 80, or whose deadly impact falls in over 99% of cases on a group comprise of the elderly and/or those with fairly severe medical challenges. At most, the carnage in nursing homes might make us want to re-think how we warehouse the elderly of all races and classes.

You can make a class argument out of the disparity in certain kinds of illnesses, especially those related to obesity (such as heart disease and diabetes), but the argument isn't as persuasive as a lot of people seem to think. When you have to blame "food deserts" for obesity among people who supposedly are too poor to eat, you're really reaching.

Turns out I'm a guy

I know, these studies are about averages and can't be expected to apply to every individual, as I'm always saying.  But everything on the man list rings bells with me, while I can barely hear the siren song from the woman list--though most of the latter began to have more appeal to me after the age of about 60:

Vanderbilt University psychologists, studying middle-aged men and women who were high achievers in math, having an IQ of 140+, received quite different responses from males and females to statements about preferences: Men emphasized freedom of expression and ideas, merit pay, a full-time career, invention, taking risks, working with things, lots of money, stating facts in the face of resistance. Women emphasized part-time careers, for a limited time, working no more than 40 hours a week, flexibility in work schedule, friendships, community service, socializing, and community.

Beethoven on a 15 String Harp Guitar

We haven't had much music lately. Here are some lovely pieces on an unusual instrument.

Siberian Unicorns

An interesting beast that I had not heard of before.

Created Equal on PBS Tomorrow

The documentary Created Equal: Clarence Thomas in His Own Words will be showing and streaming on PBS May 18 at 9 EST / 8 CDT.

I saw this in the theater when it came out and really loved it. It is a biography of Thomas, but as the title implies, he does a lot of the talking himself.




Although the whole documentary was interesting, one of my favorite parts was seeing then-Senator Biden try to spar with Thomas during the confirmation hearings. It was comical.

Reynard

A neighbor has been feeding a gray fox, or perhaps I should say a vixen.  We saw her taking food from the neighbor's hand.  She comes every evening.

Gray foxes can climb trees as readily as a cat.  We have few if any red foxes here.

Killed by Bureaucracy

They were taught all through their educations and careers that the most important thing was not to discriminate. So when the moment came when the most important thing of all was to discriminate....

Epidemiologist Knut Wittkowski: Open Up & Forget the Whole Thing

A contrarian view from the 20-year head of the Biostatistics, Epidemiology, and Research Design at The Rockefeller University’s Center for Clinical and Translational Science.  One might even say a curmudgeonly view.

"You're no friend of this court!"

I'm so old, I can remember when federal courts didn't think it was a good idea to troll for issue advocacy in the form of amicus briefs.

Some of you may recognize my title from a Heinlein novel.  He had a good grasp of the law, and liked to set up vignettes in which an honest judge lost patience with conspiracies and courtroom shenanigans, especially when officious intermeddlers were shown the door.  In the scene I'm remembering, an oily legal hanger-on type is asked to explain his presence at a trial, and answers, "Who, me?  Amicus curiae, Your Honor."

The Costly Failure to Update Sky-Is-Falling Predictions

Sean Trende over at RCP has a very good article looking at coronavirus predictions that didn't pan out and the social cost of the failure of experts and media sources to acknowledge and update their reporting.

As part of this, he covers predictions on the re-opening of several states, including Florida, Georgia, and Wisconsin, and how they were wrong.

It's a good one-stop page for showing people the facts of the case as well as how predictions were wrong, and would be useful for arguing for opening up. I'll be sending the link to people I know, so thought I'd share.

David Reaboi on America

As part of an interview he's given, some thoughts on America:

America’s weakest national security link is our disunity. We’re no longer in agreement about the most fundamental questions underpinning the regime—including who we see as allies and who we consider adversaries on the world stage. While there was always an insistent and vocal part of the American Left that agitated for our enemies during the Cold War, the mainstream debate consisted of how best to deal with the Soviet Union as an evil rival.... [But now] I don’t think another nation in history has been so thoroughly despised by its own elite class. Now, because these are our society’s elites, they have the power to change the character of the country, to finally wrest it from both the traditions of its founding and the citizens who still believe in those traditions. And they’ve largely done that; they’re just now trying to neutralize the last holdouts. That struggle is the disunity we’re seeing....

There’s an essential question many friends and I ask, when discussing a potential ally: “Does he know what time it is?” That is, does one have the ability to be unsentimental and realistic in assessing our current situation. Does he understand the predicament we’re in, with a left that’s already marched through the institutions? Does he accept the impossibility or the extreme unlikelihood of “returning” to anything resembling even the America of the 1990s? I think that grappling with these questions is a prerequisite for more than leadership, going forward; it really should be the minimum of what makes someone a political voice worth hearing at this point.

I know Dave, who is something of a pessimist (as he would admit himself). That predisposition is worth keeping in mind when you ponder his thoughts. But he's also both a 'wise guy' and a smart guy, who definitely does 'know what time it is.' Watching the Flynn story, and the larger Trump/Russia story unfold, it is clear that the institutions of this nation have been turned against it. Perhaps that started during the Obama administration; perhaps that was the point of acceleration. I wonder how right he is that it just won't be possible to fix.

UNICEF: Expect 1.3 Million Child Deaths From Economic Shock

There’s no real reason to think that this model is any better than the climate models; it’s possibly no better than the coronavirus models, although the virus was novel and this problem is old. For what it’s worth, though, it is another consideration.

Why are you conservatives so obsessed with Russia-Russia-Russia-Russia-Russia?

Brian Stelter wonders.

A Debt Repaid

The Irish answer their history.