Forum Post: Fallacious Reasoning
Posted 13 years ago on Nov. 9, 2011, 11:31 p.m. EST by Callmetofo
(39)
This content is user submitted and not an official statement
Hello Everyone I'm currently writing a paper on fallacious reasoning and i would like to hear about your view on the Occupy movement, whether positive or negative, pros and cons, i would like to hear more about the fallacies of both the movement and the "1%" and kept in mind i here being neutral. Thanks for your time :D. Also maybe talk about Personal Ethics vs Political Ethics.
Are you operating under the assumption that many of the arguments offered will be unsound? You are probably correct but it seems vaguely insulting.
He didn't say many, he assumes some are. If there weren't any, then people would have no reason to argue. People like David Graeber write books because they recognize the logical fallacies of their predecessors and want to criticize them and offer solutions. The next generation will do the same.
Lol, I know he or she makes that assumption, and many of the arguments made here are flawed, only deal with a portion of the truth, or are incomplete. It still feels a little like he's walked into a room and asked the occupants to start saying things so he can examine how stupid our thoughts are. The forum would seem to be an easily mined resource. Instead of reading through many different articles or blogs, it's all delivered in bite sized bits. I admire his method of doing research actually. I see humans as always looking for an easy way to get things accomplished, it fits one of my assumptions unsound or not.
Perhaps you are right. I guess it depends on the angle of his paper.
Lol thanks for you input, position of this paper is to find the fallacies within the OWS movement, and write whether or not the movement still valid.
i figured due to the wide demands of the OWS movement, there will be many who have fallacious demands, not only that, but since there is no "one voice" anyone who is apart of the movement, speaks for the movement, therefore if i were to talk up to a person who supports the movement, and he said "that woman is wearing red, that baby is wearing red, therefore the 1% is red" then i can take that claim and use it in my essay (of course i would be using the more "educated" claims). But i'm too lazy to go down to the camps, so i figured i would ask here, where i'm sure many well opinionated people would be.
my beef is usually not with someone committing a fallacy, but suggesting a solution without understanding the problem. ie. claiming the 1% should pay for student loans/college education simply because it's expensive. but it's expensive because it's risen faster than inflation, by a lot, for decades. if you examine why, you may very well come up with an idea that has nothing to do with taxation or the 1%.
then comes into the aspect of Ethics, it would be out of personal ethics that it would be "right" from the 1% to help those students with loans and their college educations, but political, its not fair to expect the 1% to help the students. As i understand it, the 1% got rich at others expense but not illegally, just immorally, If banks sent out so many mortgages knowing that people aren't responsible enough to take "personal responsibility", is it politically reasonable to condemn the companies that take advantage of the "irresponsible"? i see this as the case of the 2 girls who sued mc donalds for making them fat, although the 2 girls won the case, people need to take responsibility for their mistakes.
there are many things that funnel money to the 1% - rent seeking and corporatism. but that is not my beef here.
student loans have nothing to do with ethics. the fact is my dad and i could have gone to the same school, went 4 years, earned the same degree, and had the same prospects after graduating, and both worked as waiters. he would graduate with no debt though and i would graduate with plenty. everything else has tracked inflation, but not the cost of school - it has exploded. so all these OWS people are saying rich people should pay for their school. why? because it's expensive. what they should be saying is, why did this get so expensive, and how do we fix that problem?
let's look at housing - 250k homes got to be 500k. rising faster than the rate of inflation (still much less than education, btw.) at 500k was the answer to tax rich people in the 1% to pay for part of our homes? no - it was to let the bubble pop and let homes get back to what their real market values were.
But as well as my views on health care, i do believe that the more you pay the better quality you should get. In a scenario that i were "upper middle class" and i could afford to go to a good college, i would expect better quality education than those of a lower institution. Now I am not saying those who can not afford a good education should not be left in the dust of poor education, but if i were to have money i would want to be able to pay for better, since i have the ''opportunity" to have better
people with more money will always have better. education, health care, whatever. that's just called the real world - there are finite resources in it.
the solution to the education problem is to get government out of the 100% immediate guarantee business. i'd rather see a 0% guarantee personally, but they could change it to 100% after 10 years or 50% after 7 years or whatever. under any scenario the price would come down to a more real value of education's worth - just like homes came from their fake bubble prices down to their real prices. and at their real prices much more people will be able to afford to go to school, or take loans that don't end up creating mountains of debt and burdens for life.
"The people in the OWS movement are violent, mean, and destructive," is an argument I hear on cable news all the time. Notice is doesn't mention any point any segment of the movement has made, or argue against it, but it's all most of the talking heads have to say about it.
well thats more of an opinion not really a fallacy, i was hoping more of the fallacy of the movement of itself, in the past every movement had a Demand, IE civil rights, women's rights, revolutionary war. yet this movement is a movement without a "demand", yes they want a "revolution" but this is only a claim, a demand requires a solution, and i see the current so-called 'solutions' to not be very viable, due to political ethics.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ad_hominem - attempting to argue against the claims of the movement by attacking the people in the movement. If your argument against the claims of the movement is that they don't have any solutions I'm not sure I know where to begin with you. If my claim is "men can make bread" you can't argue against that claim by pointing out that I don't know how to make bread. You should also look up the "strawman" logical fallacy, which is attributing an argument to somebody who did not make it and arguing against that. Not everybody in OWS is looking for a "revolution."
well back to main point. i'm here for the fallacious reasoning, not a debate with you about my argument or whether your statement is valid.
also, the uniqueness of this movement is that it has so many different "demands" but no real concise demand that everyone can agree on. isn't that of it self is somewhat of a fallacy? A movement with such diversity cannot be successful, i think they would be better off with individual movements for each cause
No... having a lot of arguments is not a fallacy of reasoning, you need to focus on one argument at a time and examine how they are made. I don't think you're going to do so well on this paper. You need to start here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logical_fallacy . I already explained ad hominem and straw man.
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You certainly came to the right place.
I wrote a paper once titled "Fallacious Felatio". In it I argued how someone getting a felatio makes more fallacies than normally because blood was quickly being rushed out of his brain and into his penis.
Fallacies in OWS and the 1% are rampant these days because people do their research on the Internet instead of the library. They gather their data from the mouth of fools rather than scholars. For this reason, your article will most likely be sprinkled with one fallacy after another. If you truly care about this issue, I suggest you read David Graeber's books and his critics to understand any logical fallacy that might exist in anarchist thinking. The people here are mostly uneducated.
I have been scrubbed from this site twice for posting criticism of this movement. I may have been confrontational but usually respectful. Questioning or criticizing this movement is frowned upon... and eventually your views are "removed". So I'd love to tell you what I think but won't as I use this site (as well as the General Assembly site) to make sure I know what is going on and don't want to lose my access a 3rd time.