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Is Trump a Tyrant? IV: Red Herring & Two Bad

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As this was being written, it was announced that the G-7 summit would be held at Trump’s Miami golf resort. Once again, his defenders have been tasked with explaining why this obvious exploitation of his office and clear violation of the emoluments clause is actually perfectly normal and fine. This adds yet another example in support of the claim that Trump is a tyrant. Trump will simply enrich himself and his family at the expense of the public while providing nothing for the public good. This is a clear case of tyrannical behavior. Now back to the discussion of fallacious responses to the argument by definition that Trump is a tyrant.

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Since the Red Herring fallacy is so common, it is no surprise that Trump’s defenders press it into service. A Red Herring is a fallacy in which an irrelevant topic is presented in order to divert attention from the original issue. The basic idea is to “win” an argument by leading attention away from the argument and to another topic. This sort of “reasoning” has the following form:

1. Topic A is under discussion.

2. Topic B is introduced under the guise of being relevant to topic A (when topic B is not relevant to topic A).

3. Topic A is abandoned.

This sort of “reasoning” is fallacious because merely changing the topic of discussion hardly counts as an argument against a claim. This fallacy is often used in conjunction with the similar Two Bad fallacy. This fallacy has the following form:

1. Premises 1: A has done X, which is bad.

2.  Premise 2: A (or a defender of A) points out that B has also done X.

3. Conclusion: A doing X was not bad.

This reasoning is fallacious because the fact that someone else has done the same thing does not make it not bad. This fallacy is like Two Wrongs; in Two Wrongs the “reasoning” is that something wrong is not wrong if someone else would or has done it to you. The difference is that this fallacy does not require that the other person would or has done the action to you. It is also somewhat like Common Practice, which justifies something by asserting it is commonly done. The difference is that Two Bad does not involve saying that the practice is common, just that someone else did it as well.

So, how do Trump and Trump’s defenders use these fallacies to try to defend Trump? To illustrate, I will use the famous Obama Netflix example. Trump is understandably enraged at the Mueller Report—it details his many crimes and misdeeds while carefully asserting that a sitting president cannot be indicted. While the report had but little impact beyond enraging Trump, he has endeavored to distract attention from it to someone else—specifically he has called for an investigation of President Obama for his book deal and Netflix deal. Looked at as a Red Herring, this is simply an effort to switch the subject from Trump’s massive self-enriching corruption to Obama’s profiting from his time in office.

While it is true that Obama has profited nicely from the book deal and will presumably profit from his Netflix deal, these are irrelevant to the issue of whether Trump is engaged in corruptly enriching himself. Trump’s approach can also be seen as a False Equivalence as well: while Obama is profiting from his book deal and will profit from the Netflix deal, both of these are legal and within the moral norms (Bush also signed a book deal). More importantly, while Obama is profiting from being president, he is doing so while he is no longer in office. While there are moral concerns with exploiting past office in this manner, these concerns pale in comparison with corruption while in office. Hence, this is just another attempt at a False Equivalency.

Trump and his defenders can also be seen as attempting a Two Bad here as well; by pointing to Obama’s deals, Trump can try to assert that his financial exploitation of the office for his and his family’s enrichment is not bad. His “logic” would be that his deals are not bad because Obama also did deals that were bad. Even if Obama’s deals were morally wrong, it would obviously not follow that Trump’s corruption is not bad. As such, trying to defend Trump against a charge of tyranny by asserting that other people do bad things as well would commit either a Red Herring or a Two Bad (or both). Thus, this defense has no logical merit. This is not to deny that other people do bad things or assert that there is nothing wrong with people exploiting their office after they leave—but those are utterly different matters.

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Is Trump a Tyrant? Part III: False Equivalency

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Fallacies and rhetoric are common tools in political debates for the same reason hammers and saws are common tools in carpentry: because they work. In the case of politics, “working” means that they enable one to “win.” And “winning” in this context means persuading someone to believe, whether the claim is true or not. Philosophy, in the true sense, has a rather different victory condition: you “win” by having plausible premises and good logic—which tends to lose when it comes to persuasion. Unfortunately, people tend to believe what they are persuaded to believe rather than what has been proven, so it is no surprise that the standard counters to criticisms of Trump (or any politician) tend to be fallacies and rhetoric. I will go through a few of these fallacies to show how they do not refute the claim that Trump is a tyrant.

One common way to reply to this sort of criticism is to make use of a false equivalency. The usual method of this fallacy is to treat a shared quality between two things as showing they are equivalent. This fallacy is very commonly used to argue that because of this shared quality, two things are equal in terms of their degree or magnitude (and this is usually in terms of badness). This fallacy is somewhat like a false/weak analogy in that an inference is made based on an alleged similarity that fails to hold. One way to formalize this fallacy is as follows:

Premise 1: A is X (to degree D) because it has qualities A, B, and C.

Premise 2: B has quality C.

Conclusion: A and B are equivalent, so B is X (to degree D).

This reasoning is defective because it does not follow that because two things have something in common that they are equivalent. To use an extreme example, while it is true that both Hitler and Trump were elected officials, this obviously does not entail that they are equivalent. It also does not follow that they are not equivalent.

 What is wanting is a proper comparison of A and B to determine if they are adequately similar to warrant the inference that they are equivalent—which would be a matter of making an argument by analogy. If a strong argument by analogy can be made, then the equivalence would be a true one and the fallacy would be avoided. As such, the logical defense against an accusation that you have made a false equivalence is to present just such a strong argument.

While people often make use of false equivalency for nefarious reasons, people also fall into it due to good intentions. For example, the American press tends to want to include both sides of an issue. This is laudable when both sides are worthy of consideration and roughly on par. To illustrate, giving pro-tax increase and anti-tax increase proponents a chance to present their arguments is reasonable. But when one side is clearly not like the other to treat them as equivalent is to fall into an error. For example, treating the climate change “debate” as if both sides are equal is absurd: the science is solidly on the side of climate change. So, what about Trump?

In the previous essay I contended that one significant piece of evidence that Trump is a tyrant is that he used his office to try to extort foreign leaders to get them to interfere in the 2020 presidential election. Trump and his defenders followed the usual pattern. They denied anything had occurred. When it became evident that things had occurred, it was claimed that the activity was not illegal or impeachable. Trump’s defenders also tried to use the above-described fallacy: the false equivalence.

As noted above, Trump has been accused of using his office to extort foreign powers to interfere in the 2020 presidential election. In response, his defenders are asserting that Joe Biden is just as bad (or worse) because when he was Vice President he used his office to pressure Ukraine to remove a prosecutor who was investigating his son’s business deals.

As is common with Trump and his defenders, this attack is based on lies and exaggerations. While it is true that Hunter Biden cashed in on the family name to secure a lucrative deal in Ukraine and it is true that this common practice is morally corrupt, all available evidence shows that the prosecutor was removed for being corrupt and this removal enjoyed wide bipartisan and international support at the time. The prosecutor was also not investigating Hunter Biden and there is no evidence that Hunter Biden was ever investigated. As such, the Hunter Biden story is the usual story of how the well-connected elites exploit their elite status to give advantages to their friends and family (essentially the backstory for Trump and his children). As such, the only similarities between Trump and Biden here are that Ukraine was involved in both cases and the power of an office was used. One could also add that both parents have children who are riding their family names. Looking at these similarities, they clearly do not show that Joe Biden’s actions were even close to Trump’s actions.

But a Trump defender might say, what if the conspiracy is true and Joe Biden pressured Ukraine to fire a prosecutor who was investigating his son? Surely, they would say, this makes Biden as bad as Trump. They would, of course, be wrong.

Let us suppose, contrary to all the credible evidence, that Joe used his office to quash an investigation into Hunter’s corrupt dealings in Ukraine. That would obviously be an act of tyranny and corruption. But it would still not be equivalent to what Trump did—Biden would, at worse, have used his office to protect his son and give him a significant financial advantage. But Trump engaged in extortion to get foreign powers to interfere in the upcoming election. Biden’s alleged crime is on par with business as usual in the Trump Whitehouse, such as how he and his children are exploiting the office for their financial gain. But even in the worst case scenario, Biden did not act to corrupt the very foundation of the office and the American democratic process. They are not even close, and Trump’s defenders have nothing to offer but lies, exaggerations and the fallacy of false equivalence here.

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Appeal to Purity Fallacy

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Time to put out another fallacy collection; my goal is to include all major fallacies in this upcoming book. Here is my write up of the Appeal to Purity Fallacy; also known as the No True Scotsman fallacy.

This fallacy occurs when there is an attempt to protect a generalization about a group from a counterexample by changing the definition of the group in an unprincipled way to exclude the counterexample. This is a fallacy because the tactic does not refute the counterexample, but merely it asserts does not apply.  The fallacy is also known as the No True Scotsman fallacy thanks to the philosopher Anthony Flew. The fallacy has the following form:

Premise 1: Counterexample E has been made against Claim C about group G.

Premise 2: Counterexample E does not apply to any true member of group G.

Conclusion: C is true (and E is false).

Like many fallacies, it draws its persuasive power primarily from psychological factors. A member of the group in question or someone who has a favorable view of the group would have a psychological, but not logical, reason to reject the counterexample. Few are willing to believe negative things about groups they like or identify with. In Flew’s example, a Scotsman refuses to believe a story about the bad behavior of other Scotsmen on the grounds that no true Scotsman would do such things. People can also reject such a counterexample on pragmatic grounds, such as when doing so would provide a political advantage.

The fallacy can also be used in the opposite way—to reject positive counterexamples about negative claims. For example, if someone claims that all video games are senselessly violent and rejects counterexamples of non-violent video games, then they are committing this fallacy. This variation is also fueled by psychological factors, in this case negative ones: a person dislikes the group in question and hence is motivated to reject positive counterexamples against negative claims. This can also be done for pragmatic reasons; for example, a politician might refuse counterexamples that go against their negative rhetoric about a group they are trying to demonize.

The main defense against this fallacy is to consider whether a counterexample is being rejected on principled grounds or is being rejected without evidence, such as on psychological or pragmatic grounds. One way to try to overcome a psychological bias is to ask what evidence exists to reject the counterexample. If there is no such evidence, then all that would be left are psychological or pragmatic reasons—which have no logical weight.

Sorting out who or what belongs in a group can be a matter of substantial debate. For example, when members of religious groups do awful things the question often arises as to whether these people are true members of these religious groups. For example, the Westboro Baptist Church is infamous for its slogan “God Hates Fags” and hate speech against a wide range of people. Some might contend that they are not true Christians because their beliefs seem counter to the claimed core values of Christianity, while others assert that they are Christians because they claim to be and back up their views with scripture. Debates over group membership need not be fallacious—if a person claims that true Christians do not hate LGBT people and rejects the counterexample of the Westboro Baptist Church by providing reasons why they do not meet the proper definition of “Christian”, then this fallacy has not been committed. This is because they have provided reasons to support their claim rather than simply rejecting the counterexample out of hand. Providing a guide to settling such disputes goes far beyond the scope of this work, but the above fallacy is not a tool that should be used in rational efforts to address such matters.

While it is an error to dismiss counterexamples out of hand, it is also an error to simply accept that what is claimed about some members of a group applies to all or most members of a group. For example, someone might note that a migrant committed a crime and then assert that most migrants are criminals. As another example, one might assert that most police officers are prone to excessive violence because some have been involved in high profile cases of police violence.  These would be example of the Hasty Generalization fallacy—leaping to a conclusion too quickly from a sample that is too small to support it properly.

Example #1

Bill: “Islam is a religion of peace. No Muslim would harm another person.”

Sally: “What about the Muslims who are fighting in Syria and Yemen right now?”

Bill: “They are not true Muslims.”

Example #2

Bill: “Christianity is a religion of peace. No Christian would harm another person.”

Sally: “What about all the Christians that killed each other in the world wars and other conflicts?”

Bill: “They were not true Christians.”

Example #3

Mark: “Republicans are not racists and certainly not white supremacists.”

Hector: “What about those racists and white supremacists who support Republican politicians?”

Mark: “We don’t accept them in our party; we are not racists.”

Example #4

Mark: “Democrats are not sexists; we are all for equal rights and respect women!”

Hector: “So, what about those Democrats who got outed by #MeToo for assaulting women?”

Mark: “They are obviously not real Democrats; no real liberal would do such things!”

The Value of Mass Shootings

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On the face of it, the value generated by a mass shooting is negative. People are murdered and injured. But it is important to go beneath the bloody surface and explore the depths in terms of value.

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From an economic standpoint, a mass shooting has obvious negative value; but it also has positive economic value for some. Most obviously there is the death cost of a mass shooting. There is lost income, lost taxes, lost consumption of goods and services, and funeral expenses. The injured also suffer economic loss—they typically must pay their own medical expenses and they lose time from their life. But the medical bills they pay are income for others.

While it does not always occur, the building where a mass shooting occurs is sometimes closed and replaced. This comes at a high cost but does generate positive value for those constructing the new building.

A common response to mass shootings, especially those in schools, is to increase security. Guards are hired, people are trained, buildings are hardened, software is purchased—a loss for some, a gain for others.

While it might seem odd, the gun industry can benefit economically from a mass shooting. After the most recent shootings in August, the stock of gun manufacturers increased. This is because people think that tougher gun laws might be passed, so there is a rush to buy weapons and ammunition. However, the long-term impact of mass shootings on the gun industry is likely to be negative. While the above are important (most especially the deaths and injuries) my focus will be on the political value of mass shootings.

Republican politicians clearly recognize the political value of mass shootings—at least to Democrats who favor gun control. When a mass shooting occurs, two standard tactics are to assert that it is not time to talk about gun control and to accuse Democrats of trying to score political points. I will consider each of these in turn.

The assertion that after a mass shooting is not the right time to talk about gun control does have some merit. Emotion driven decisions made in haste tend to be inferior to those resulting from cool and deliberate consideration. A good example of this is the flood of laws passed in response to 9/11. That said, there is also a negative side to waiting for people to cool down: motivation and political will can fade thus leading to nothing being done. When people debated acting against slavery in the United States, there was a similar dispute between those who proposed gradualism and those who demanded action. Those in favor of immediate action often used an analogy to rescuing people from a fire: gradually removing them from a burning house would be a terrible idea. Likewise for addressing slavery and, perhaps, gun violence.

One obvious response to the Republicans who use this tactic is to point out that they do not hold to it consistently—they say it after every mass shooting, but not across the board in situations of intense emotion and calls for hasty action. As such, it seems likely they are using the “not the time” rhetorical device. The goal of this device is not to call for calm deliberation but to delay or prevent action. Since the Republicans tend to not act against gun violence, it seems reasonable to infer that they are using “not the time” rhetorically rather than as a serious call for calm deliberation. Now to the second tactic. To be fair, Democrats who use this rhetorical tactic against Republicans are equally as guilty of using it.

When the Democrats try to act in response to a mass shooting, Republican politicians typically accuse them of trying to score political points (of playing politics). Ironically, people who make this accusation often seem to be trying to score political points by accusing the other side of trying to score political points.

On the one hand, this charge can have merit. If a Democrat is cynically using a mass shooting politically without care or concern for the victims, then they would be acting in a morally problematic way. That said, there is the question of whether a specific accused Democrat is doing this or not—the challenge is to determine their motivation. While this is relevant to the ethics of the person, what is more important is that motivations are irrelevant to whether the person’s claims are true and whether their proposals are good.

Attacking someone for playing politics and rejecting their claims would be to fall into a type of ad hominem which could be called the “accusation of playing politics fallacy.” The form is as follows:

Premise 1: Politician A accuses politician B of trying to score political points by playing politics about subject S.

Premise 2: Politician B makes claim C about subject S.

Conclusion: Claim C is false.

This is obviously bad logic—even if one politician is trying to score political points, this does not prove that their claim is not true. While assessing their motives is relevant to assessing their ethics, their motives have no bearing on their claim being true or false.

The “accusation of playing politics” can also be a rhetorical device—it can be seen as a type of red herring in which one tries to switch the discussion from one issue to another. In the case of mass shootings, the goal is to switch the issue from whether there should be more gun control to whether Democrats are playing politics. The end game is, of course, to keep attention away from the original issue.

This is not to deny that Democrats and Republicans are playing politics. Democrats do try to use mass shootings to get more gun laws passed, Republicans try to prevent this with the two methods described above. Some pro-gun people also try to score political points off mass shootings by appealing to fear that the Democrats will try to do something about mass shootings. But what is important, at least to people who would prefer less mass shootings, is addressing the problem of mass shootings and gun violence. This does require doing politics and the time to do so, as always, is now.

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Event ID 41 Error & Windows 10 Feature Update 1903

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Shortly after I installed the Windows 10 Feature Update 1903 my PC started getting Kernel-Power Event ID 41 errors. This resulted in the PC simply turning off. Not a shutdown, but just a power turn off.

I went through the usual suspects for this error: adjusting the power settings and updating my drivers. Nothing worked. Then I considered that the problem might not have been caused by the update–it might, to use a little causal reasoning, have been mere coincidence rather than causation. Obviously, to simply infer that since the problem arose after the update would be to fall into the post hoc, ergo propter hoc fallacy (to conclude that A must cause B because B occurred after A).

This sort of error is also caused by the failure of a PC’s power supply, so to check this possibility I tested the power supply. Not with the bent paperclip method, but using a proper tester. The supply was fine. On the plus side, I knew it was not an expensive hardware failure. On the minus side, I still had no solution.

Fortunately, all the years of philosophy and tinkering with computers paid off as it always does: I continued to apply the method of difference to test various hypotheses. This method involves comparing cases in which the effect is present with cases in which it is not in order to find the difference that is likely to be the cause.

I noticed that as long as I was actively using the PC, the problem did not occur. But if I was away from the PC, the power would turn off after about 15 minutes. I had checked my power settings–the PC was set to never sleep and I had gone through all the power settings in detail. But I reasoned that something in the update had caused the PC to still try to sleep (or something similar) when it was idle regardless of the setting and this caused the PC to turn off rather than sleep.

I recalled that back when screensavers were a thing, there were utilities that would jiggle the mouse while doing a long PowerPoint presentation to keep that from happening. I found a more recent version of such a utility, the free MouseJiggle I installed it and gave it a try. Problem (sort of) solved. MouseJiggle keeps the PC always active, so it does not trigger whatever causes it to turn off when idle. Another triumph for causal reasoning: going idle causes the PC to turn off, preventing it from ever idling was the workaround solution.

Trump & the Leave It Fallacy

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When it comes to persuasion, logic is one of the weaker tools. This is because the end of logic is truth, not making people believe something—that is the end of persuasion. While the land of logic is a foreign realm to Trump, he seems to have an instinct for using fallacies and rhetoric to persuade people. This has served him well—rhetoric makes the masses clap, logic makes them nap.

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While Trump enjoys the classic fallacies, such as the scare tactic and the general ad hominen attack, he recently made use of a subclass of the ad hominem known to some as the “ergo decedo” (“therefore leave”) and called by Copi the “traitorous critic fallacy.” Since there is no international bureau of fallacy naming, I will call it the “leave it” fallacy.

The Leave It fallacy is a type of ad hominem because it involves rejecting a person’s claim because the “evidence” against a person’s claim is an irrelevant attack on the person. There are two things that distinguish the Leave It fallacy. First, the person is attacked because they are being critical of something. This attack typically takes the form of asserting that the critic is motivated by a secret association or agreement with a disliked group. Second, rather than refuting the criticism, the attacker only tells the target to “leave.” As such, the fallacy has the following general form:

Premise 1. Person A makes critical claim X about Y.

Premise 2. Person B attacks A (usually for an alleged association/agreement with a disliked group G) and says that if A does not like X about Y, then they should leave Y (usually for G).

Conclusion:  Therefore, X is false.

This argument is a fallacy because simply attacking a person and telling them to leave does not prove that their criticism is false. The fallacy draws much of its psychological power from the cognitive bias of groupthink (the tendency to try to minimize conflict and form a consensus by suppressing dissent and avoiding outside influences) and the ingroup bias (the tendency to see one’s own group as superior and outsiders as inferior). Someone who is critical of a group can easily be cast as a threat and hence people in that group can be motivated to reject that criticism out of anger and dislike. These biases do not, of course, have any logical weight.

The defense against this fallacy is to try to reason through any negative feelings one might have and ask if any relevant refutation of the criticism has been offered. If it has not, then the “argument” gives no reason to reject that criticism. This does not mean that the criticism is therefore true—it just means the fallacy does not provide any reason to reject it.

Care should be taken to not confuse the Leave It fallacy with the False Dilemma “love it or leave it.” The idea in this false dilemma is that one has just two options: to love something (typically a country) utterly and never criticize it or leave it. There are obviously many other options. The difference between the two is that the Leave It fallacy involves using an attack on the person to “argue” that their criticism is false while the False Dilemma “love it or leave it” is intended to silence criticism by wrongly asserting that one has only the two choices. It can often be hard to distinguish the two because people often combine them and those attempting these fallacies often do not know what they are doing themselves. Now back to Trump.

Trump recently attacked Democratic Congresswomen with this fallacy, “arguing” that their criticisms of America are wrong “because” they are “from countries whose governments are a complete and total catastrophe, the worst, most corrupt and inept anywhere in the world” and they should go back to these countries.  Trump’s “logic” seems to be this:

Premise 1: The Democratic Congresswomen criticized the United States.

Premise 2: The women are from “from countries whose governments are a complete and total catastrophe, the worst, most corrupt and inept anywhere in the world” and they should go back where they came from.

Conclusion: The Democratic Congresswomen criticisms are not true.

Presented in this manner, the fallacy is even more evident: there is no connection between the premises and the conclusion; Trump is merely attacking the Congresswomen and telling them to leave. While having nothing to do with the fallacy, it is worth noting that all four of the Congresswomen Trump attacks are American citizens and three of them were born in the United States. Some might thus say that Trump is not wrong when he says that they come from a country with a government that is “a complete and total catastrophe, the worst, most corrupt and inept anywhere in the world”—that is, the Trump administration.

In closing, it must be noted that the fact that Trump’s attack on the Congresswomen was fallacious does not prove that their critical claims about the United States are true—that does not follow. Their claims must stand or fall on their own merits.

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