Tag: General

Cholera is interesting…

Whatever you think of Socialism now you would have been very hard pressed to have argued against it in Victorian London. The `let the market sort it out’ line of thinking resulted in child poverty, new forms of indenture and outbreaks of cholera, a disease that is really only most effective in large population centres where people regularly consume each others faeces. Without advocates for large-scale government intervention, such as Edwin Chadwick, London might well have ended with the fate that its numerous detractors felt it deserved.

The only problem was that Chadwick was a miasmatist. (more…)

01/11/2007

The Hollow Man

John Dickson Carr’s `The Hollow Man’ is a locked-room murder mystery with a difference (cue the music from track 3 of ‘The Soundtrack of the Trailer of the Film of Monty Python and the Holy Grail’). The book, aside from being a good example of the form, has the protagonists knowingly discuss locked-room murder mysteries; they either know that they are in a piece of fiction or that the case they are investigating is fiction-al (either interpretation works) and so Dr. Fell et al go out of their way to fill the reader in on what exactly is going on, whose testimony we can trust and, possible most importantly, just how many variations of the locked-room murder mystery there are. (more…)

01/03/2007

Cost/Benefit Analysis

Another strange inference form I’m finding in the 911 Truth Movement is the seemingly borrowed from Economics idea that every event must benefit a person in a postive way. I’m actually hesitant to explicate this properly because the terminology is always going to be loaded. What is a ‘positive beneft?’ How do we measure outcomes? And so forth. Perhaps an example will help.

The designated scapegoats of 9/11 gained nothing positive from it. On the other hand, even the hardliners in Washington themselves agree 9/11 boosted their agenda. Who benefits from more of the same? The fear campaign, always resting on the official 9/11 story, looks deliberate. be attacked, is the fastest method for these rulers to get their way when they want war.–Transcript of ‘The Great Conspiracy: The 9/11 News Special You Never Saw’ hosted by Barrie Zwicker

(more…)

10/19/2006

It has always been this way

So, as part of my academic masochism I have been reading a whole host of 911 Truth Movement-related articles (links here, here and here). Seeing that they are mostly comprised of Strawman Arguments (always fallacious) I’ve found myself groaning so often that my co-workers think I must have stomach troubles. I’m sure that I will get ulcers from this project, if only because my paranoia (a post for another time; it’s utterly irrational paranoia and its completely due to reading too much paranoiac material) is at an all time high.Still, there is profit to this, for I seem to have discovered (although not necessarily a novel discovery) that there seems to be a rather constant use of what I will call, for the time being, a post hoc fallacy, which is that behaviour now is inferred to be true of the past as well. (more…)

10/16/2006

Sloping Burdens

Over at Brainstab we’ve been having a bit of a debate on the nature of certain slippery slope arguments. The slippery slope argument is one of those ‘sometimes fallacious’ lines of reasoning. The actual structure of a slippery slope is what is called an hypothetical syllogism (or chain argument) which looks like:

P1. If A then B
P2. If B then C
Therefore,
C. If A then C

It is a perfectly valid argument form, but that doesn’t mean much at all, because the premises themselves can be implausible (more…)

10/09/2006

A conspiracy to believe in

There aren’t many things happening today I would label as being properly conspiratorial (where by ‘properly conspiratorial’ I mean ‘something like a malevolent, all-embracing conspiracy (theory)) but the Intelligent Design Movement gets my vote in that category. It’s just that when pressed I can’t really condemn it as a great, singular evil but more the garden-variety maliciousness that is the old-school-bully-turned-politician. (more…)

09/21/2006