Arguments made of straw

By Chris Kelly

As a young beat reporter, I covered a Pennsylvania school board that included a member who was opposed to spending money on any educational advance newer than the blackboard. He was especially disdainful of computers, which he characterized as expensive toys that promoted laziness, liberalism, and pornography.

"When I was in school, we didn't have no damned computers," he once said at a public meeting. "We had to use our noodle."

It wasn't clear if there was just the one noodle for the whole school, or if each kid got one. What was clear is that this dolt had no business visiting a school district, let alone running one.

His statement is a classic example of the "straw man" fallacy, in which a debater creates a caricature of his opponent's argument and attacks it. This way, the dolt was able to sidestep the real problem, which was that the district had fallen behind its peers in acquiring computers. The more sentient school board members recognized that this would put students at a disadvantage. The computers were bought, but the dolt was reelected.

We are loath to admit it, but facts and critical thinking, the bedrock of cogent, honest argument, have never been particularly popular in America. We are a nation of consumers who see facts as a commodity to be processed, packaged, and presented according to our tastes. Any fact that leaves a bad taste is rejected; any half-truth or bald-faced lie that conforms to our preferences is gobbled up without question.

The Internet has only amplified the din. Even the most specious arguments are granted legitimacy simply for having been made. Every opinion, however uninformed, is seen as inherently valuable. No argument is too preposterous or dishonest to share. If you are shameless enough to stand up and say it, someone is bound to agree and pass it along.

It's how Rush Limbaugh, who recently signed a $300 million contract to build and destroy legions of straw men every day, can claim he is a spokesman for the working class. It's how Sarah Palin can be talked about as a serious candidate for president, and how a weepy basket case like Glenn Beck can be held up as the "only sane voice in the media."

It's how so-called conservatives can insist that the Wall Street bankers who crashed the economy should keep their astronomical bonuses, but unionized public employees should give up their hard-won pensions. It's how President Obama can tap General Electric CEO Jeffrey Immelt to help "reform" the corporate tax structure, even as the New York Times reveals that GE - with worldwide profits of $14.2 billion last year - paid zero U.S. taxes.

And it's how Gov. Corbett (R., Drillers) can stubbornly cling to his preposterous claim that multibillion-dollar energy corporations will walk away from Pennsylvania if he dares impose even a modest tax on extracting our treasure.

Japan's nuclear crisis has unnerved the world and raised serious questions about how to balance the benefits and risks of nuclear power. Thank God Sen. Lamar Alexander (R., Tenn.) was handy to pretend to address them.

Alexander - who is pushing a plan to build 100 nuclear plants in the United States over the next 20 years - stood up on the floor of the Senate and said: "We don't abandon highway systems because bridges and overpasses collapse during earthquakes. The 1.6 million of us who fly daily would not stop flying after a tragic plane crash. We would find out what happened and do our best to make it safe, and that's what we need to do here."

If you're not really paying attention, it sounds like common sense. Inject a few facts, however, and Alexander's comparisons are revealed as patently absurd.

For example, an average of just 100 people are killed in traffic accidents daily in this nation of more than 208 million licensed drivers, according to the U.S. Department of Transportation. A catastrophic meltdown at just one of the California nuclear reactors sitting atop a fault would put 300,000 people at risk before the jet stream carried radioactive particles across the breadbasket of the nation.

Has anyone, anywhere, ever suggested that we abandon the highway system because bridges and overpasses sometimes collapse during earthquakes? Or that we close the world's airports because three people are killed for every 10 billion passenger miles?

Hell, no. And none of those things could ever happen anyway. Neither could the abandonment of the thousands of nuclear reactors operating worldwide. In light of what's happening in Japan, however, many people are saying that perhaps it's not the best idea to build nuclear reactors on faults.

To hear Alexander tell it, they may as well be arguing that since heart disease kills 2,200 Americans every day, we should rip the hearts from our chests before it's too late.

Who wants to go first?