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An Exposition on Political Debates on Facebook: Bad Logic October 18, 2011

Posted by Jeff Lees in Politics.
Tags: Bad Logic, Debate, Facebook, Logic, Political Debate
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So I have a healthy habit of posting a lot of articles related to politics on my facebook page. Many of them are news articles, many are opinion pieces, but most of the time they are related to politics in one way or another. I often post multiple stories/articles a day, and this often draws the attention of my friends on facebook. Particularly, it draws the attention of many of my conservative friends, mostly because the article I post are often coming from a liberal point of view.

However, this practice of posting articles on my facebook wall has become more and more frustrating. Some of my friends, when they respond to my articles, continually employ profound logical fallacies in their rhetoric. They employ bad logic, and while I’m not trained in logic, it’s not hard to see why these comments are totally illogical. Now even though these are often conservative friends, and most of my examples will be from conservatives, this is not a conservative trait. Many liberals make the same nonsensical mistakes and use the same bad logic, but for my purposes I’m going to go from my experiences and use mostly conservative examples.

These types of comments are so common that I’ve been able to categorize them and identify the characteristics of many of them, and below I will go into detail concerning each one that I’ve cataloged.

Bringing up Irrelevant Points: This is an extremely common tactic, and it’s extremely easy to do if you are employing partisan talking points. A good example would be this: Say I post an article about the Wall Street Protesters and how they’re protesting against the growing income inequality. One common response I’ve gotten to articles like this is “Well Obama has received the most donations from Wall Street than any other President, therefor the protestors should be protesting Obama!” This conservative talking point as nothing to do with my article regarding the protest and income inequality, and it certainly doesn’t contribute anything to the discussion. Nonetheless anytime I say “that’s totally irrelevant” I only receive a partisan exposition on how all liberals are a bunch of hypocrites and how Obama is really a corporate shill.

Another example would be this: I post an article about how the prisons in Afghanistan are practicing torture, and the response I get is “Well maybe Obama should send over his drones and kill them all, since he loves using his drones to kill people, especially American Citizens.”

This tactic is often employed when I’m posting articles that present data or statistical facts, and often just seems to be a way of diverting the conversation from the topic at hand to a discussion of shallow, partisan talking points.

And a theme that will be present throughout all these example of bad logic, and that you can see above, is this idea that everything I post/do is partisan and biased against conservatives, and therefore nothing I do is “objective.” Many of the conservative talking points that are thrown at me as distractions seem to be based around this idea that liberals love Obama, and are never critical of him. Besides the fact that this is totally untrue; besides the fact that I personally have never displayed this behavior; and beside the fact that most scholarship shows that liberals are much more tolerant of in-group criticism then are conservatives, the authors of these comments clearly have a belief that all liberal (of which they include me) are biased liars who actively try to subvert the facts for their parisan agenda. This brings me right into the next tactic commonly used.

Accusing Me of Always Being Biased/Opinionated: This tactic is common throughout my ‘debates,’ but it is extremely prevalent when I argue my opponents into a corner. Often I’ll clearly and systematically argue an opponent into a corner, where they don’t have much to counter with, and when I do this, almost invariably the final response I always get is something along the lines of “Well this is all just your opinion, so it not objective, and therefore it can’t be proven true.”

This casual dismissal of any pretense of objectivity is problematic enough, but it is a very common rhetorical device used to discredit me; as a matter of fact it’s the most common I encounter. It is much easier to just accuse your opponent of being “biased” then is it to argue against their points.

And as I’ve mentioned before, this all stems from this idea my opponents clearly have that I am so uncurably biased and ideological that nothing I say can be legitimate. I have actually been directly told that I am always biased while they (my opponent) are very objective. I don’t remember the exact wording, but it was very similar to this: “Jeff, you are obviously unable to look at things objectively and take both sides of an argument. You completely biased, and it shows in everything you do. Unlike you, I am able to assess both sides of an argument, and come to a rational decision. I am able to be neutral in these debates, you’re just so blinded by ideology, you can’t be objective.” This person who said this to me is the same person who said the last two things in my example above. He is extremely partisan, yet sees himself has completely objective, and he sees me as biased.

Another way in which some of my conservative friends try to assert their “objectivity” is to criticizes Bush as well as Obama. They tell me that because they’ve criticized both Bush and Obama they are therefore “nonpartisan” and “objective,” even when spouting some shallow GOP talking point. Most of my attempts to show that merely criticizing both political parties doesn’t make one “objective” are usually dismissed.

Insinuating Something, Then Denying It: This is pretty common among conservative pundits and commentators. This classis example is “we may need a 2nd amendment solution to this problem.” This obvious insinuation is that guns, and by extension violent, is needed. Yet when called out on this obvious insinuation to violence, they’ll deny it, and claim that they didn’t say that.

This will often come up in debates on facebook. Part of it comes from the medium of Facebook, where sometimes it’s understandably hard to discern exactly what someone might be insinuating from written text. Yet often the implication is clear, as in the example above. This also applies to outright denying things that have blatantly been said before. A great example would be someone who refers to Obama and his policies as “socialist.” When I bring that up in future debates, for example when asking the person how Obama can be a Wall-Street shill but also a socialist, they respond with “I never said he was a socialist.” A 3 minute search through my facebook history proved him wrong.

Another example would be saying something like “the poor need to pay their fair share.” This euphemism is used by Republicans to refer to the fact that many poor people don’t pay federal income tax, yet they should (from a conservative point of view). Yet later in the debate when my opponent says that he supports raising no ones taxes, and I point out that earlier he said he supported raising taxes on the poor, he denies it, saying that “well that’s not what I meant,” even though that was the obvious insinuation.

But a Democrat Did It Too: This is another common argument. Often when I post an article, I’ll get a response that says something like “well (democrat X) doesn’t agree with you!” The insinuation is of course that because I’m a democrat (and a biased partisan), I can never disagree with a fellow democrat, or at least I’ll never criticize a democrat. So this is often thrown at with some level of “HAH! Deal with that!,” with the expectation that now I’m somehow uncomfortable. I often point out that I disagree with that democrat, and their response is often along the lines of “well how can your ideology be consistant if you disagree with a fellow democrat?”

Again this is just nonsense, and all stems from the idea that all democrats are just a cabal of conspirators who are all after Republicans. Often when I point out that democrats very often openly disagree with each other, more so then republicans, I get an outright denial of that fact. I’ve been told straight-up that all democrats just vote with each other and never question their own ideology where as conservatives foster debate and discussion among their ranks and never vote along party lines (which, again, couldn’t be farther from the truth).

You’re Suppressing Free Speech/You’re Just Pushing Political Correctness: This rhetorical defense is most common when I call someone out on something bigoted, racist or sexist they say. It’s pretty common among conservative political discourse to accuse their opponent of trying to suppress free speech or being politically correct. They don’t seem to grasp the distinction between a demand that someone not say something for an arbitrary reason and a suggestion that someone ought say something because it is insensitive, insightful to violence, or prejudicial.

This rhetorical defense is just used to try to make me seem like the bad guy, and draw attention away from their prejudicial comments. For example, this comes up a lot in discussion of the Middle East. My conservative friends have a habit of throwing around prejudicial statements about Arabs, many of which are just un-factual, and I will call them out on it. I’ll tell them that they are not only wrong in the ‘facts’ they’re presenting, but that they’re being racist. Often the response I get it “are you trying to suppress my right to free speech!”

Denying Scientific Data: This is pretty straight forward. I will present scientific data, normally social science research on an issue, Racism in the Tea Party for example, and all I get is an outright dismissal. As a social scientist I’m well aware of the danger of over-generalizing particular data and particular findings within studies, but that doesn’t mean they can be dismissed. If any explanation for this outright rejection is given, it is often just “well you see what ever you want in the data, it’s all subjective.” This goes back to the common argument of “well everything’s subjective, it’s all just your opinion.” A general distrust and ignorance of science and the scientific methods I think is also at work among conservatives as well.

So What Do I Do About This? These types of responses are becoming more an more frequent, and they are unintellectual and aggravating. There is one person in particular who is the worst perpetrator of these types of bad logic (most of my examples are from him). It’s often surreal when I’m arguing with two conservative friends, one who is making rational argument, and the other who’s playing these games that I’m describing above. It’s like with one person I’m speaking to a college student, and the other I’m speaking to a 9th grader. But I know this person isn’t stupid. We are friends outside of facebook, and in person he’s perfectly articulate and intelligent, but not so on facebook. It’s frustrating, and it’s discouraging me from posting about politics on my facbeook. What do you think I should do? How should I respond to these types of comments? How to I fight this bad logic?