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2,100,446 views Dec 24, 2023 Every Famous Logical Fallacy gets explained in 11 minutes.

Kafka trap The Kafka trap might also be called the SJW trap. Author Eric Raymond coined the term Kafkatrapping in his 2010 article in which he presented a style of argument that is common today with SJW’s, but has it’s origins in The Trial a book written in 1915 by Franz Kafka. In The Trial the protagonist is arrested and accused of serious crimes which are never specified. He receives no explanation or description of the charges, and his refusal to acknowledge that he must be guilty is what makes him guilty. The only way to stop his abuse is...

Good politics is about good arguments that lead to both (or all) sides reaching a compromise they can all live with. It is the process that allows us to not be led by demagogues and achieves the (if not grandest) result that benefits the most people. But what happens when arguments are made that are so flawed, and so false, that they should be rejected out of hand? And what happens when they are not? Regardless one’s position on most areas of political discourse, the rational mind will likely find something of merit in the opposition argument. Yet more and...

Campaign Canards: Don’t fall for these electoral fallacies by Daniel Clark Now that candidates are officially entering the 2016 race, it’s only a matter of time before political pundits and historians start regurgitating every factoid, tidbit and dose of conventional wisdom there’s ever been about presidential campaigns. Unfortunately, most of them will be wrong. In particular, here are some of the most stubborn electoral fallacies that we can expect to hear repeated over the next 18 months: * The New Hampshire primary results are very important. – From a fundraising standpoint, there may be some truth to that, but the...

In my last post I talked about something I’ve been noticing recently, that people, especially pro-life nerds like me, are tempted to talk about logical fallacies all the time in conversation. There are several dangers to this. I’ve argued already that the first danger is accusing somebody of a logical fallacy when they didn’t actually commit one. If you dedicate yourself to educating yourself on what the logical fallacies actually are before bringing them up, you will be a more effective debater. But there’s a good, better, best aspect to exposing logical fallacies while creating good dialogues with people. I...

It occurs that our capacity to converse and to set forth arguments for the truth are often hindered today on account of many factors. One of those factors is a paradoxical relationship between a kind of skepticism and and exaggerated insistence on absolute proof that results. The fact is, absolute certitude in our human condition is rare, and to insist on it is usually unreasonable. This of course does not mean that firm certitude cannot be had in many matters as well as lesser degrees that remain a firm confidence as to the facts in a matter.On Monday there was...

I am looking for the most up-to-date copy of this list I can find, I have a copy of the listing up to # 2099, does anyone have any further from Andrew's list? Since ConservativeAmerican.org, is no longer operational I can't get it from there. Would greatly appreciate any help.

"The possibility of a rapid repair of their disasters, mainly depends on whether the country has been depopulated. If its effective population have not been extirpated at the time, and are not starved afterwards; then, with the same skill and knowledge which they had before, with their land and its permanent improvements undestroyed, and the more durable buildings probably unimpaired, or only partially injured, they have nearly all the requisites for their former amount of production."~ John Stuart Mill, Principles of Political Economy, Book I, chapter 5. The ongoing tragedy in Japan has unsurprisingly generated a great deal of...

We live in times of rank, unchallenged errors of thought forcefully expressed in print and spoken word. Political movements, in particular, traffic in purposeful verbal trickery. In fact, some especially depend upon fallacies to drive their message since their essential convictions are defective or even diseased. Such groups as the Nazis, Fascists and Communists immediately spring to mind here. Barack Obama peppers his rhetoric with a veritable buffet of verbal trickery. But why? If Obamatons are correct, and Barack is one of history’s great speakers, why must he use cheap rhetorical tricks to win support? The answer is Obama offers...

Before we consider what the consequences of inflation are in specific cases, we should consider what its consequences are in general. Even prior to that, it seems desirable to ask why inflation has been constantly resorted to, why it has had an immemorial popular appeal, and why its siren music has tempted one nation after another down the path to economic disaster. The most obvious and yet the oldest and most stubborn error on which the appeal of inflation rests is that of confusing “money” with wealth. “That wealth consists in money, or in gold and silver” wrote Adam Smith...

understanding, we shall go over again some of the ground already covered in chapter fifteen on the price system, but we shall view the subject from a different angle. Profits actually do not bulk large in our total economy. The net income of incorporated business in the fifteen years from 1929 to 1943, to take some illustrative figures, averaged less than percent of the total national income. Corporate profits after taxes in the five years from 1956 to 1960 averaged less than 6 percent of the national income. Corporate profits after taxes in the five years 1971 through 1977 also...

The Lesson Applied Public Works Mean Taxes There is no more persistent and influential faith in the world today than the faith in government spending. Everywhere government spending is presented as a panacea for all our economic ills. Is private industry partially stagnant? We can fix it all by government spending. Is there unemployment? That is obviously due to “insufficient private purchasing power.” The remedy is just as obvious. All that is necessary is for the government to spend enough to make up the “deficiency”. An enormous literature is based on this fallacy, and, as so often happens with doctrines...

1. The foetus cannot be taken seriously as a person An unborn baby in its 7th week after conception Before I knew much about the abortion debate, I was entirely uninterested in the unborn baby. When it was mentioned, I accepted uncritically that the "foetus" was just some sort of overdeveloped sperm of no value or worth. Pro-abortion rhetoric convinced me that the baby in the womb was somehow an entirely different class of human from you or me, as though the mere act of leaving the womb and inhaling oxygen conferred humanity on someone. I'm not sure I considered...

From engine to caboose, the 5-4 Supreme Court opinion on global warming this week was loaded with fantasies and fallacies having no other discernible purpose than to justify an unconstitutional intervention in policymaking. For instance: -- The Environmental Protection Agency has authority to limit carbon dioxide emissions from automobiles, the court said, because of the way a governing statute describes air pollutants. The Clean Air Act says they are "any chemical or physical substance or matter which is emitted into or otherwise enters the ambient air." But as dissenting Justice Antonin Scalia observed, an air pollutant first off has to...

The May Day Moscow, 1935   William Christian Bullitt to Franklin Delano Roosevelt Moscow May 1, 1935 Dear Mr. President: I have just come back from the May Day parade on the Red Square. It has been a great show with tanks galloping across at 60 miles per hour and new pursuit airplanes at 400 kilometers p.h. Stalin came late and left early due, I was told, to a last minute hitch in the negotiations with the French. It was also noticeable that when he walked the short space from the Kremlin wall to Lenin’s tomb he held a...

People are willing to pay heavily for expert advice. Economists are consulted to tell us how the economy will change, stock analysts are paid large salaries to forecast the earnings of various companies, and political experts command large fees to tell our leaders what the future holds. The available evidence, however, implies that this money is poorly spent. But because few people pay attention to this evidence, I have come up with what I call the "seersucker theory": "No matter how much evidence exists that seers do not exist, suckers will pay for the existence of seers."One would expect experts...

Trying to figure out what the name of the fallacy is with this argument: 1) God is love 2) God has declared only one way for salvation 3) Most of the world does not know about that way of salvation 3) Therefore, either a) God isn't love or b)There is more than one way to salvation

After years of having their way in the political arena, public employee union leaders are now on the defensive, victims of their own success. Since given collective bargaining rights in the late '70s, these union bosses have become accustomed to dictating the labor agenda through their use of union dues to elect lawmakers and local officials who would toe the union line. Because of scant opposition to their efforts to guarantee their members "millionaire" pensions at taxpayers' expense, there was little publicity and voters have been slow to catch on. However, the labor bosses overreached. Recent revelations have exposed that...

Referring to the fallacy discussions previously posted (and linked below) may be helpful before beginning. Among the following passages, identify those in which there is a fallacy; if there is a fallacy, analyze it, give its kind (whether relevance, or presumption, or ambiguity) and its specific name. Which is more useful, the Sun or the Moon? The Moon is more useful since it gives us light during the night, when it is dark, whereas the Sun shines only in the daytime, when it is light anyway. — GEORGE GAMOW (inscribed in the entry hall of the Hayden Planetarium, New York...

Composition The term "fallacy of composition" is applied to both of two closely related types of invalid argument. The first may be described as reasoning fallaciously from the attributes of the parts of a whole to the attributes of the whole itself. A particularly flagrant example would be to argue that, since every part of a certain machine is light in weight, the machine "as a whole" is light in weight. The error here is manifest when we recognize that a very heavy machine may consist of a very large number of lightweight parts. Not all examples of this kind...