Accidental Historian

Things That Annoy My About the Internet, Part 2

One of the things that occurred to me at some point during my random diatribe against triggers is that the people who run around talking about trigger warnings and how everything needs to have one don’t really seem to understand how the human mind works.  A trigger, at its most basic, is simply something that causes a strong emotional response.  The language center of the brain, meanwhile, isn’t the most closely connected bit to the emotional center.

I’m not saying that people don’t have emotional responses to words.  I’m saying that setting out to police words to keep emotional responses from happening is probably a fool’s errand.  That’s not just how the brain works.  Emotional reactions are far more closely connected to nonverbal cues.

Take the two stories I told about triggers in the Being Me posts.

The first one didn’t happen because of the words used.  It started because the tone of voice used offered a cue that this was being said specifically to be overheard by others.  Even that was okay until someone else laughed.  The short, sharp laugh set off a cascade of memories and emotions that basically said, “Oh, my, god, I can’t believe this is happening again.”

The second one was actually even more interesting on some level.  The thing that got me was the way he leaned in real close and called me an asshole in a quiet voice that no one else could overhear.  It was a low-level threat delivered in a way that felt isolating.  I mean, you could yell, “Hey, you’re a total asshole!” at me from across the room and I’d probably say, “I know, right?”  So there was absolutely nothing in the message he delivered that bugged me.  The way it was delivered, though, left me feeling alone and vulnerable.

So…yeah.  That’s relentlessly anecdotal, but I think it’s worth pointing out.

Also, it occurred to me after I wrote the first post that I don’t really see trigger warnings or overly serious discussions of triggering and trigger warnings anymore.  I think part of it might be that I don’t frequent the same places anymore.  I also think it’s possible that we’ve kind of stopped talking about it obsessively.  That latter option would be nice.

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There’s another thing that annoys me that I still see on a regular basis.  One of the phrases that gets tossed around on the internet a lot is, “intent is not magic.”  For those who haven’t run into that, it’s basically a pithy way of saying, “You said something wrong and hurtful and it doesn’t matter that you didn’t mean to and/or you didn’t even know that it was wrong and hurtful.  So fuck you, troll.”

It’s somewhat more complicated than that, actually.  Mostly it comes up in a situation where Person A says something hurtful to Person B and Person B says, “Hey, that hurt.”  Any response from Person A that doesn’t start with, “Oh, I’m so sorry, I’ll never say that again,” tends to start with, “I didn’t intend to cause any harm in saying that.”  This, then, results in, “Intent is not magic, asshole!”

The primary issue I have with anything that starts with “intent is not magic” is that it often starts with a presumption of bad faith.  Please allow me to offer a real life example:

I used to spend a rather large amount of time with a sign language interpreter.  I was talking to her once about something or other involving people who totally didn’t get something or other and I said to her, “People like that are culturally deaf.”

She got visibly pissed at me and said, “What did you just say?”  I repeated my statement.  She then asked me where I got off making fun of deaf people and saying they didn’t have or couldn’t connect to culture (I don’t remember what the specific response was).

I was utterly baffled.  To me the word “deaf” had multiple definitions and connotations.  In calling the people we were both in agreement about “culturally deaf” I was simply saying that they lacked the ability to understand and absorb whatever it was that culture referred to in that context.  It was, in short, a metaphor.  It also had absolutely nothing to do with any actual deaf people and it certainly wasn’t an attempt to mock their ability to interact with or contribute to the larger culture.

I, being an idiot, attempted to explain all of these nuances.  That just pissed her off more.  It finally ended with her telling me to never use that term again and me agreeing because it just wasn’t worth it to have that argument anymore.  In short, she informed me that intent wasn’t magic and that she wasn’t going to listen to what my intent was, nor was she going to entertain any interpretation of my statements outside of her own.

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This is bad enough when dealing with someone you know and who, theoretically, knows you enough to give you the benefit of the doubt.  On the internet nobody gives the benefit of the doubt.  Anything that seems even remotely like the worst possible thing that could have been said receives that interpretation.  Any follow up response that’s anything other than, “You’re right, I’m worse than Hitler and Caligula combined,” is then taken as an indication that the person making the original statement is, in fact, worse than Hitler and Caligula combined.

It’s even worse when the second person completely and totally misinterprets the original statement.  It seems like one of the rules of the internet is, “Never admit you’re wrong.  Double down.”  Since this rule applies to both sides of the argument…well…you can see where it’s going.

And now I feel like I’m repeating myself.  I’m also really tired of this line of thought, so I think I’ll spare myself and anybody else any further ramblings.  Should you want any more thoughts on the subject, though, I'd recommend this bit that vorjack put up over at Unreasonable Faith yesterday.

Things That Annoy My About the Internet, Part 1

There’s a follow-on thought to my last post that I simply didn’t have time to explore properly.  I figured four thousand words was more than enough for everyone for one day and the only way to get into the issue while still pretending to care about economy of words would be to say something extremely flip that would make me look like an ass.  I try to avoid looking like an ass, especially in situations where I’m not even trying to be an ass but have a pretty strongly held opinion.  So let’s to it, then.

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I started the Being Me posts on a story that the kids on the internetz would refer to as “triggering.”  I would, in fact, say that it was triggering.  I pretty much admitted to being triggered in the very next post when I pointed out that it was still bugging the hell out of me twenty-four hours later.

I also ended the Being Me posts on a story that was triggering.  The outcome of that story was very different, however.  It is in the space between these two stories that I want to discuss why I think the whole trigger warning thing on the internet is good but can also get completely and totally out of hand.

Mostly I’m going to tell stories.

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Triggers are simply a way to register mental pain.  They mean that something has happened and that thing needs to be dealt with.  There’s really no other, additional magic in the whole thing.

Let’s say your friend breaks his leg.  You go and see him a week after the leg breaking incident and he’s sitting on his bed with his obviously broken and unset leg propped up in front of him.  You’re concerned and confused.

You say, “Hey, haven’t you gone to the doctor to fix that broken leg?”

He responds with, “Hey, man, don’t talk about the leg.  You’re reminding me about the pain.”

You’re taken aback, but you try again.  “The pain will go away if you get it fixed, you know,” you tell him.  “And unset broken bones can cause all kinds of other problems, like gangrene.  If you leave it long enough they’ll probably have to amputate and that’ll be even worse.”

“Hey!” he says, “What did I tell you about talking to me about broken legs?  Don’t you know that it hurts me to have to talk about this broken leg?”

At this point your buddy is cutting off discussion.  Specifically, he’s cutting off a discussion that he really needs to be having.  There might be some sort of valid, underlying reason why he’s not going to the doctor.  Maybe he doesn’t have insurance.  Maybe he had a pediatrician who was a real dick.  Maybe he broke his leg in high school and some kid drew a penis on the cast and everyone made fun of him for it.  All of these things might be a valid reason to have trepidation about a visit to the doctor’s office.  None of these things are a valid reason to not get his broken leg fixed.  Further, there’s absolutely no reason to allow that underlying shit to keep the thing that needs to get done from getting done because it will be so, so much worse later.

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This is the root of my discomfort with the whole trigger warning thing.  For the most part I think the triggering events are a sign that something or other is going on that needs to be fixed, so running around and saying, “Hey, you can’t talk about this!” or, “Hey, warn me before you bring this up!” is really just a way of publically not fixing a problem and making it someone else’s fault that you’re not doing so.  It’s also a really good way to wallow in misery and try to drag other people into your misery, too.

I was in my first car accident my junior year in high school.  I worked at a shop at the time and that was the shop that I had my car towed to.  When I got there everything was pretty busy, so my boss said to me, “Hey, since you’re not doing anything can you take that car over there and [whatever, test drive, part pickup, I don’t remember]?”  I got into the car and for a moment had this, “Oh my god, I can’t do this,” response.  But I did whatever needed to get done and spent the entire time worried that I might get in another accident because I’d just gotten in one.  I doubt I’ve been more careful and alert while behind the wheel of a car since that afternoon.

Nothing happened.  Well, nothing bad happened and certainly nothing memorable beyond the thing itself.  So I got on with my life and I’ve been driving ever since.  I even drove tow trucks for a while and often found myself at the scene of an accident that was much, much worse than the one I’d been through.  I never even thought of my own accident during those calls.

This is, admittedly, a pretty minor thing.  But what if I hadn’t gotten into that car that afternoon?  What if, instead, I’d had a panic attack and then refused to drive for the rest of the year?  What if I’d used that to fuel a massive fear of driving cars and even now, a decade and a half later, I was still completely and totally sans automobile?

It might make perfect sense to me.  To an outside observer, however, I’m just some dude totally overreacting to a minor fender bender from a really long time in the past.

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This isn’t to say that there aren’t major traumatic life events that have far-reaching consequences.  I think it’s important to be sensitive to that and not increase anybody’s pain unnecessarily.  As such, if I know I’m going to be talking about something that can be a pretty big deal I’m now in the habit of trying to make sure I point that out.  I think, though, that the entire trigger warning thing, at least in the places I tend to frequent, tends to tilt in the direction of over the top unintentional self-parody.

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When I was in college I had a friend who had a really long last name.  I was hanging around with her one day right after I’d been listening to the Singles soundtrack and, specifically, Paul Westerberg’s “Dyslexic Heart.”[1]  There’s a line in the song that goes “Is that your name or a doctor’s eye chart?”  One thing led to another and I nicknamed my long-named friend “Eye Chart.’

A couple months (weeks?  I don’t know) later I was hanging out with some other people and Eye Chart wasn’t there.  I made a reference to her and one of our mutual friends ripped into me.  She informed me in no uncertain terms that Eye Chart hated that nickname and I needed to stop using it because I was being a total ass.

This surprised me, as I hadn’t gotten the impression this was the case.  So the next time I saw Eye Chart I said, “Hey, I just found out that you don’t like it when I call you Eye Chart.  I didn’t know.  I’ll stop.”

Her response was a blank stare and a, “Who told you that?”  I told her and she said, “I never told her that and I don’t know where she’s getting it from.  I don’t have a problem with you calling me Eye Chart.”

I later figured out that the person who jumped all over me had a whole lot of issues and apparently a lot of them were specifically with me for reasons I couldn’t really understand.  Actually, I kind of knew it at the time, but it didn’t sink in until later.  She accused me of shit I didn’t do on several occasions and eventually precipitated one of the worst evenings of my life.  I started trying to avoid her within about six months of meeting her.

I offer this as a cautionary tale.  It’s a good idea to listen to people and take them seriously.  It’s also a good idea to be aware of the fact that some people have agendas or a skewed view of reality or might just fucking hate you for no discernible reason.  C’est la vie.

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I tend to think of that story whenever I see the, shall we say, sillier trigger warning arguments.  Somebody on a blog says something.  Someone else pops in and says, “You shouldn’t say that, or if you do you should really put a trigger warning on it because it might bug someone.”  The whole thing then devolves into a bizarre argument about triggers wherein absolutely none of the people involved have actually been triggered by the theoretically triggering passage and no one can present anything other than anecdotal evidence about a former acquaintance who had to deal with something that was kinda-sorta similar.

It’s basically a derailing or a heckler’s veto.  And I think it goes back to my general theory of the shortcomings of Web 2.0 and the fact that people read things that have comments and all they can think about is what they will say at the end.  The trigger warning warner, then, is just someone who wants to make the conversation about them and only them and make sure that they educate everyone else about how awesome and inclusive they are and how much of a rotten jerk the person who wrote the original post is.[2]

This is also where it’s hard to talk about much of anything as a straight, white male without knowing someone, somewhere, might stumble upon this post and say, “You just don’t get it, you privileged, mansplaining jackass!”[3]  In and of itself that’s an internalized derailing or heckler’s veto, I suppose.  That’s part of the reason that I’ve had thoughts on this subject for a while but I never managed to bring myself to write them down.

On one level that doesn’t matter.  I’m not going to change the world for better or worse with this post, mostly because nobody’s gonna fucking read it.

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[1]I’m listening to it right now.  It’s kind of a terrible song.  Apparently Paul Westerberg was the early ‘90s secular Rick Cua.



Don’t watch that.  It’ll fuck your earholes up.

[2]This is not to say that everyone who pops into the comments and says, “Really? I can’t believe you just said that,” is wrong or just trying to get attention.  As an example, Ed Brayton recently wrote a column about Chuck Norris’s reality-free fantasies about going underground to start some secret project to save the country from the godless libruls with a joke about Norris infiltrating a cocktail party in heels and a dress.  Someone in the comments asked why he’d make such an insensitive joke.

I had pretty much passed it over, but the comment got me to stop and think and I realized that, yeah, that joke was pretty insensitive.  It plays off an old trope of men dressing as women in movies and TV shows and whatnot to infiltrate things.  That trope, though, plays off of the, “Ha, ha!  Look at that big, manly man in a dress!  Isn’t that so hilariously funny?”  The reason it’s funny, though, is because men aren’t supposed to dress like that and anyone who does dress like that is to be mocked.  On one level that’s an insult to cross-dressers and transfolk based on strictly enforced gender norms.  On another level it serves to reinforce gender norms and conformity.  So for someone who claims to not like that sort of thing to make the joke indicates that either they’re not actually as open-minded as they thought or that they have a blind spot that ought to be examined.

Further, in the first paragraph of this footnote I used the phrase “or just trying to get attention.”  The more common vernacular for that is, “or is an attention whore.”  I’ve waded through a metric shit-ton of posts and comments arguing on the appropriateness of the term “attention whore.”  Mostly it boils down to an argument of “it’s a gendered insult directed primarily at women” against “it’s such a common phrase in English that it’s been stripped of all connotation about how whore is usually synonymous with women.  It’s like sinister.”

On the one hand, I tend to side with the folks who say it’s been stripped of most of the connotations from a gender perspective.  That’s the side I tend to come down on for certain other debates, too.  “Hysterical” comes to mind, but I know there are a few others floating around out there.  On the other hand, I’ve pretty much stopped using the phrase “attention whore” and I don’t really use “hysteric” in any of its myriad forms anymore.  On a purely functional level it’s just easier.  On a deeper level, though, I recognize that terms like that do actually hearken back to a time when those words very specifically referred to women and were used to marginalize them.  So I’m forced to ask myself whether my belief that men and women should be treated equally is more important to me than my continued ability to make unfettered use of words or phrases with a specific bias against the female gender?  The answer to that is pretty simple.  It’s no, by the way.

My turning point on this, by the by, was the use of “gay” as a pejorative.  My use of that term as an insult was vanishingly small to begin with, but hearing other people use it never really bugged me.  Then one day it occurred to me that I knew a bunch of gay people and I liked them or, at least, had fond memories of them even though I hadn’t talked to them in a long time.  It also occurred to me that I thought that gay people, my gay friends included, should be treated the exact same way as I am treated.

I imagine that I would feel pretty bad if some dingus on the internet replied to a bad beat in the multi-player mode of First Person Shooter Oh-Thirteen with, “Aw, man, that’s totally Geds.”  I also imagine that I’d feel bad if they did so with something that I consider an integral part of my personality, like, “That’s totally writer, man!” or, “What kind of person-who-finds-Louise-Post-insanely-attractive-in-the-‘Volcano-Girls’-video cheating motherfucker are you?”  So why the hell would I condone someone using the word gay in that fashion?

And, yes, I just tossed that bit about the “Volcano Girls” video in the last one as an excuse to link to the “Volcano Girls” video.  But that’s just because I want to retroactively declare that the song of the year for the last fifteen years.  And that’s a really hilariously super specific insult.  I also chose it mostly because I couldn’t take myself seriously turning, “That’s so heterosexual,” into an inverse of, “That’s so gay.”

This whole thing is insanely selective and pretty arbitrary, though.  Like, I’m totally okay with calling someone a giant bag of dicks.  A few years ago I randomly coined the word “dickshitter” to yell at people who were being total idiots while driving.  I intend to continue yelling, “Dickshitter!” at idiots in BMWs.  If someone were to show up and call me a dickhead I’d be fine with that.  Okay, I might not be fine with it, but I’d take no issue with the choice to use “dickhead.”  And why is that?  Fuck if I know.  I’m guessing it’s a privilege thing, but operating in reverse.  Basically, I’m a middle class white dude, which means that I’m going through life on easy mode so I can afford to not worry about insults that also serve as reminders that I’m operating on easy mode.  It’s kind of like a double-standard, I guess.  Maybe.

[3]Is that an insult against our donkey brethren and sistren?

How Not to Argue, An Introduction, Part 3

Last time, on this series about whatever it is this series is about I took MovieBob to task for engaging in a whole crapload of logical fallacies in an attempt to argue that The Simpsons is still funny.  We discussed poisoning the well, ad hominem, and even the rarely-seen-in-the-wild-but-often-mentioned begging the question.  And I managed to make two posts where I only intended to have one.  Those two posts didn’t actually get to the end of the two video segments.

And now, for the thrilling conclusion…

I left the end of part 2 on a cliffhanger, specifically with this:  “In the context of Part 2 what he’s actually saying is, “It doesn’t quite occupy the same market niche it used to occupy and, as such, has changed.”  That’s not a value judgment at all, but an argument for modified utility.”  Anyone who watched the video to the end knows that this is exactly what happened, as MovieBob then goes on to make that argument in basically so many words:

Notice that I’ve chosen my words carefully.  I.E. I did not say that it wasn’t as good as it used to be, just not that it’s not precisely the same creature.  After all, what is The Simpsons?  This is actually harder to answer than it seems, because the show has existed and been a major pop culture force for so long that it’s more of an institution unto itself.

You know what I hate about this line?  It comes 45 seconds in to the second video in a series after I’ve already been listening to six minutes of being browbeaten and told what I think.  This, right here, is a decent introduction to an argument for The Simpsons still being funny.  It even serves as a lead right in to a rather good thesis statement.

But originally, in the before time, the long, long ago, it had a pretty specific identity.  The Simpsons was an absurdist parody.  My contention, then, is that the reason it’s different now is less because the show itself has changed, but that the world around it has changed, to the extent that almost everything it first existed to skewer, satirize, and parody, doesn’t exist anymore.

This, right here, is an interesting argument.  It even works with the original line of, “The Simpsons is still funny, you just haven’t been looking at it through the correct lens,” idea MovieBob was working with.  If he had simply started with the above quote instead of the histrionics and telling his audience what their personal histories were without having any backing for his statements, he could have made an interesting and thought provoking video or two.  He, of course, did no such thing.

And that’s why I wanted to use this video to talk about how people argue on the internet.

See, there’s something weird about how people argue on the internet.  Or maybe it’s just that the internet shines a spotlight on a weird tic in how humans have always argued.  Maybe it’s a little from Column A and a little from Column B.  Basically, though, there’s something about putting thoughts out on the internet that starts out with a person thinking, “I need to tell other people how and what they think, and then I need to tell them why they’re wrong.”

It doesn’t really matter who is doing it.  Members of various fandoms explain why other people don’t have the same level of taste they do.  People who like (or hate) a certain band or type of music tell other people why they’re idiots for not liking (or disliking) the same thing.  Religious people explain to unbelievers why they hate god.  Non-religious people explain to religious people why they hate logic.

It’s an endless cycle of solipsism.  It’s not enough for a fan to like something.  They have to explain to everyone else why they’re an unwashed Philistine with no taste, too.  The preferred way of doing this seems to be, “Start by telling a complete stranger what they think and why it is incorrect.”

So you get MovieBob telling you why you stopped watching The Simpsons.

The awkward thing here is that, really, from the one minute mark to the end of Part 2, MovieBob makes a really interesting and compelling point.  It basically boils down to, “The Simpsons were created to satirize an American entertainment monoculture that no longer exists.  Since it no longer exists, The Simpsons have had to become something else.”

Now, the problem is that he still runs his argument off the rails.  He basically says that since The Simpsons were designed as absurdist parody of a specific world, they couldn’t hack it in a larger world than the one they were originally intended to occupy.  The problem here is that The Simpsons have an advantage that no other show can possibly have: as a cartoon they can add new sets and new characters any time. So if they need to make a parody of something, all they have to do is draw a new picture or create a new character.

Not so long ago I was watching an older episode of The Simpsons that involved Kent Brockman.  For those who don’t know, Kent Brockman is the news anchor on the show and he’s a totally over-the-top parody of a news anchor…or, at least an over-the-top parody of a news anchor from the late-‘80s or early-‘90s.  I was watching the episode and all of the sudden a lightbulb went off and I realized that Kent Brockman is no longer over the top because the rest of the world has either caught up with or surpassed him.

That was the secret of The Simpsons.  They were hilarious, but they were also ahead of the curve.  Since they functioned as an absurdist parody of the real world that was still firmly grounded in reality they could (and often did) predict the trajectory of reality.

There’s the problem, though, that as reality itself has become more fragmented and absurd, it’s become hard to impossible to stay ahead of the curve.  MovieBob could have explored that angle, but he didn’t.  He was too busy insulting his audience.

There’s another point to be illustrated here, too.  MovieBob is trafficking in black and white thinking.  Either The Simpsons is still funny or it isn’t.  He kinda-sorta acknowledges that it doesn’t have to be an either/or at the very end of the video, but for the most part he ignores the possibility.  Notice that he can’t actually admit that The Simpsons might not be as funny as they once were.  He has to say that they’re different, then even say that they’re not as “relatable” or “vital” as they once were, but that’s okay, because they’re still funny.  Again, too, he’s arguing against straw opponents who think that anyone who dares say that The Simpsons are still funny is, on some level, a Josef Stalin apologist.

Moreover, I don’t know if anyone else noticed this, but at no point during his eleven minutes worth of arguing that The Simpsons are “still funny” did MovieBob ever try to prove that the show was ever funny.  He didn’t illustrate his point with a single joke or set piece or anything else.  As such, the entire thing has one giant [Citation Needed] hanging over its every word.

So remember this the next time you get involved in an internet argument.

Also, for those who are wondering, I’ll be starting up my series on Lee Strobel’s Finding the Real Jesus this week.  This little primer on how to argue might just come in handy…

How Not to Argue, An Introduction, Part 2

So we’re back to MovieBob and The Simpsons.

For those who don’t remember, I started in on a new tag called “On Disagreement” last Wednesday.  My goal in doing this is to tie in my various other new projects on apologetics, perspective, and history to a larger concept on how to make arguments.  MovieBob afforded me a perfect opportunity to start this off with how not to make an argument.

If you recall, the video in question was called “Why the Simpsons are Still Funny,” but rather than argue that point he set up a strawman argument of Simpsons fans who stopped paying attention and are now just being dicks about it.  Because it’s apparently cool to hate on The Simpsons.  Or something.  We’re all hipsters now, I guess.

Anyway, MovieBob starts out Part 2 on exactly the same foot.

The Escapist : The Big Picture : The Simpsons Is Still Funny, Part 2

Last week I said that the Simpsons was still funny, a phrase which, on the internet anyway, is right up there with saying, “Y’know, that Stalin wasn’t that bad of a fellow,” or, “Minecraft is overrated,” or offering up for discussion whether Friendship is Magic or Adventure Time is the better show.

That’s right.  He got 17 seconds into the video before he Godwined himself.[1]  Now the obvious counter-argument to my point is that he was playing off the Stalin reference for laughs.  This counter-argument is technically correct.  I have absolutely no doubt this was a joke and since it is the internet there is a cadre of people who will immediately compare anyone who disagrees with them to Hitler, Stalin, or Pol Pot.

Except there’s that corollary to Godwin’s Law that’s basically achieved a level such that it’s indistinguishable from the Law itself: the first time someone invokes the Nazis the discussion is over and that person automatically loses. Invoking Stalin is Godwin by proxy, while accusing you opponents of immediately Godwinning your argument is basically the same as invoking the Nazis by proxy all on your own.  Does that make sense?  No?  Crap.

Comparing someone disagreeing with you about something inherently meaningless to Hitler, Stalin, or Chairman Mao is a failure of an argument.  So in immediately saying, “My opponents are undoubtedly comparing me to Stalin apologists right now,” MovieBob starts off his video by saying, “My opponents are unreasonable and should not be listened to.”  This is what is known as poisoning the well.

I’m going to ignore the Minecraft and FiM/Adventure Time thing, by the by.  There are two reasons for this.  First, they’re proportional arguments.  Second, I don’t play Minecraft or watch either show and don’t intend to change that any time soon, so I don’t care.

Anyway, now that MovieBob has established that his opponents are unreasonable people, he goes back to his main argument.

Though I stand by my overall premise that the widespread disillusionment with this particular series has more to do with a change in the audience’s habits and expectations than it does with some consistent drop in overall quality I do agree that The Simpsons isn’t quite what it used to be.

I’m going to break my response in to three parts.

1.  “Though I stand by my overall premise that the widespread disillusionment with this particular series has more to do with a change in the audience’s habits and expectations than it does with some consistent drop in overall quality…”

This is problematic, since he never actually proved his original premise.  This is what is known as argument by assertion.  It is also a rare example of an actual case of begging the question.

Begging the question is right up there with ad hominem on the “misunderstood logical fallacies” scale.  I tackled the ad hom in the footnotes last time around and DagoodS chimed in with a more directly useful example in the comments.  I will refer you to those for that discussion.  Begging the question is a similar beast since people tend to get bogged down in the actual name and miss what it means.  In common parlance the term “begging the question” has come to refer to what is actually closer to an argument by assertion: Person A makes Unsupported Argument B, so people say, “Hey, that begs the question of where that argument comes from.”  This is wrong.  Worse, sometimes Person C says, “We’re stuck in this cave without a rope or a flashlight.  This begs the question of how we’re going to get home in time for dinner.”  This is atrocious.  If you do that, stop it.  Stop it right now.

MovieBob’s case to make is that The Simpsons is still funny.  Or, at least, that’s what he claims.  As such, the part of the quote I’ve broken in to part 1 up there serves as MovieBob’s summary of Part 1 of the video titled “The Simpsons is Still Funny.”  As such, MovieBob’s argument in Part 1 can be summed up as, “The Simpsons is still funny because it hasn’t actually stopped being funny.”  At that point it’s basically a circular argument, which is also often mistaken for begging the question without actually being a case of begging the question.  In this case, though, the bit where MovieBob found it necessary to take us through the series of steps about how the fans have changed and expectations have changed in order to argue that The Simpsons is still funny without ever actually offering a single shred of proof that The Simpsons are still funny is why this is a case of actual begging the question.[2]

Or, in plain English, MovieBob went from Point A of “The Simpsons is still funny” to Point C of “The Simpsons hasn’t gone downhill” through Point B of “people just have incorrect expectations of the show.”  All three of these are offered as self-evident and mutually supporting facts even though none of the facts can stand on its own or is even remotely shown to be fact.[3]

2.  “…I do agree that The Simpsons isn’t quite what it used to be.”

After arguing that his opponents are irrational actors with ridiculous expectations, MovieBob moves to take the excluded middle and become the voice of moderation.  This, for the record, is exactly the same tactic I pointed out PZ Myers used in attempting to make his assertion that being an ass is actually a more reasonable position than being polite.  It’s a tempting position to take, but it’s also a bad faith argument.

MovieBob is basically setting a dichotomy.  There are people, he’s saying, who say that The Simpsons are still funny and, by definition, they’re saying that The Simpsons are still as funny as they’ve ever been.  There are also people, MovieBob is saying, who say that those people are total assholes who probably loved them some Josef Stalin.  MovieBob, however, is not one of those extremists at either end of the spectrum.  No, Sir.  MovieBob still enjoys The Simpsons because, goshdarnit, they’re still funny, but he wishes they were still as funny as they used to be because, hey, wouldn’t that be great?

The subtle trick here is that he’s ascribing both extremist positions to his opponents.  The assertion that anyone who disagrees with him is being irrationally prejudiced against new Simpsons episodes puts all his opponents on one end of the spectrum.  He then creates a space at the other end of the spectrum where they have put him that is, “Person who thinks that The Simpsons hasn’t changed at all.”  How do I know this?  Is it because I think I can read MovieBob’s mind?

Nope.  It’s that, “…I do agree…”  See, everyone?  Your old buddy MovieBob is totally reasonable here and he’s willing to listen to your assertions that The Simpsons is terrible and meet you somewhere in the middle in the, “Yeah, they’re not quite so good anymore.”  In short, MovieBob is saying that you are not making a reasonable argument and, further, you are ascribing an unreasonable position to MovieBob, making you a big ol’ poopyhead.

This doesn’t work, though, since MovieBob’s original premise is fallacious question begging based on a strawman argument.  How do I know this?  Because MovieBob hasn’t even bothered to defend his thesis and instead attacked a ridiculous position he ascribes to every single person who no longer likes The Simpsons.  I’m just re-stating this in order to keep myself honest and remind everyone of why I’m talking about this, lest someone accuse me of doing exactly what I’m accusing MovieBob of.[4]

3.  …Oops.

…

Oh, man, that one will never get old.  Unless it does.  And, actually, it kind of is getting old.  Ah, well…

3.  In the overall context of the video, MovieBob isn’t actually making an inherently consistent argument here.  His supposed reasonableness at the end with the “…I do agree…” clause is also not actually as reasonable or agreeable as it would seem.  This requires me to unpack a bit.

“I do agree that The Simpsons isn’t quite what it used to be,” sounds, at first, like MovieBob is acquiescing to the point that The Simpsons isn’t as good or as funny, for whatever values you want to use for “good” and “funny” as it used to be, for whatever value of “used to be” you want to use.  However, with this statement in its contextual place as the fulcrum between Part 1 and Part 2 it becomes readily apparent that “isn’t quite what it used to be” is not synonymous with value calls on “funny.”  In the context of Part 1 what he’s actually saying is, “It isn’t quite what you think it used to be,” since he’s already argued for a nostalgia-tinted look back on the part of everyone who doesn’t like the show anymore.  In the context of Part 2 what he’s actually saying is, “It doesn’t quite occupy the same market niche it used to occupy and, as such, has changed.”  That’s not a value judgment at all, but an argument for modified utility.

I do believe, however, that I will have to punt that argument in to a Part 3.  Why?  Because I managed to spend over 2,000 words dissecting 41 seconds of video that contained two run-on sentences.  In case anyone is wondering, this is why I can never finish a goddamn series on this goddamn blog.

Bleh.

---------------------------

[1]And it’s not even creative.  C’mon, people, choose Slobodan Milosevic more often.  Or go with Caligula, for the lulz.

[2]The absolute closest he came in Part 1 was to say that Season 14 had some good episodes.  Season 14 aired nine freaking years ago.  How “a decade ago” and “still” are even remotely congruent in the internet age is beyond me.

[3]And I now know why it’s so hard to distinguish begging the question from a circular argument.  Basically, if MovieBob’s argument was that The Simpsons is still funny because The Simpsons’ writers  still write funny jokes that would be a circular argument.  Moreover, it would not be a logical fallacy, since the circular argument isn’t actually a fallacy, it’s just an argument that relies on its own inherent truth to be shown to be truthful.  At least, for the value of The Simpsons actually still being funny due to the quality of the writing.

Or, to put it another, another (another?) way, MovieBob is making a circular argument with a logical fallacy thrown in the middle and it’s the fact that his entire premise relies on a faulty argument that anyone who disagrees with him is acting in an irrationally prejudiced way that makes this a begged question rather than a circular argument.  I think.  I’m still not 100% sure I’m making the correct argument here.

[4]This is one of the problems with any sort of argumentation.  It’s really easy to lose track of why you’r doing it in the first place.  In this case I don’t have to show that MovieBob is wrong, I just have to show that MovieBob isn’t making an appropriate argument.  However, in order to make the argument that, say, he’s projecting a fallacious position I have to show that he’s both making a projection and that the position isn’t one that’s reasonable.  In order to make a correct assertion that, yes, he’s begging the question I have to show that the premise itself is a self-supporting argument built on a fallacy.  That does require me to show my work.

In which PZ Myers illustrates Geds' point for him...

I stuck a YouTube of Phil Plait's "Don't Be a Dick" speech in to the footnotes of Part 3 of the Perspective and Apologetics series.  Watch it if you didn't before and if you have time.  It's good stuff.

PZ Myers wrote up a response to the talk (and other responses to the talk) right after it aired.  His post included this bit:

One recent flashpoint in this argument was Phil Plait's talk at TAM 8, in which he asked a rhetorical question, "How many of you … became a skeptic, because somebody got in your face, screaming, and called you an idiot, brain-damaged, and a retard?" And the Pharyngula switchboard lit up. Lots of people wrote to me via email or twitter, some gloating, some just unhappy, stating that Phil had just called me out.

No, he didn't. He didn't mention me at all. He opened up against a strawman New Dick, which is unfortunate, because there isn't anyone who fits that description in the skeptical movement. There are people like that elsewhere: drill sergeants and televangelists come to mind.(Emphasis mine.)

Here we cut to the core of the apologist problem.  Plait made the extremely reasonable observation that people don't like being called idiots and it's not a good strategy for encouraging change.  PZ's response was to say, "He's attacking someone who doesn't exist on my side.  But you know where those people do exist?  Over on the other side.

Plait's comments were pretty obviously rhetorical and intended to illustrate a certain type of exchange.  Just because there's no proof that anyone has ever walked up to somone and literally said, "You're an idiot, brain-damaged, and a retard," doesn't mean that they don't convey that exact message.  Saying, "We don't do it, but the other guys sure as shit do," is rather, well, hypocritical.

Meanwhile, PZ put up a couple of posts today on Muslim and Jewish treatment of women.  In a post about women being segregated due to ultra-orthodox pressures at a conference on women's health he concludes with this:

Isn’t that typical? Whether it’s Jewish, Muslim, or Christian, the exclusionary extremists all rise to prominence and start imposing their superstitious nonsense on everyone else…while the more numerous moderates tremble and hesitate to speak out against folly, and start looking for compromises. You cannot build a better world when you start by compromising with idiocy.

This follows a quotemine from the original linked Globe and Mail article:

To be sure, not all sectors of the ultra-Orthodox community support these exclusionary tactics, explains Nachman Ben-Yehuda, a Hebrew University sociology professor and author of the recently published book Theocratic Democracy. “But most people are too afraid to speak out.”

That was the very last paragraph in the article, which also included these bits:

Several Israeli human rights groups have protested the men-only nature of the conference. While it is considered a private rather than a public forum, and therefore not subject to Israeli policies against discrimination, Puah receives considerable funding from the Health Ministry, these complainants point out.

and

At least two male Israeli doctors have withdrawn from making presentations at this week’s Puah event once they were made aware of the exclusion of women, or at least once public outrage over the exclusion became apparent.

I find it extremely hard to square this notion of a trembling mass of wimpy, frightened moderates afraid to speak out against the loud-mouthed extremists and the words "Several Israeli human rights groups have protested" and "public outrage over the exclusion became apparent."

Then again, that piece I linked to on Phil Plait's talk contained this bit:

There is a fair point being made, that there are multiple strategies that work to convince people to rethink bad ideas, and they don't all involve punching people in the face…and many of the best strategies do involve politely listening and criticizing. But I think the best ideas involve a combination of willingness to listen and politely engage, and a forthright core of assertiveness and confrontation — tactical dickishness, if you want to call it that.

This sounds extremely reasonable.  I think, too, that it's something Phil Plait would agree with, seeing as how he finished his speech with an illustration of dealing with a creationist student being argumentative, then politely listening to her arguments and telling her that her sources were based on false and/or outdated information and directing her on where to go to find scientifically rigorous info.  So I actually have no fucking clue why PZ had a problem with it, other than the perception that possibly a moderate wasn't trembling and hesitating to speak out against a loud-mouthed, exclusionary extremist in the atheist movement.  But, y'know, I could be wrong about that one.

And then there's his conclusion:

I don't, actually — it also seems like a dick move to try and associate a strategy with gender, since some of the most wonderfully dickish skeptics I know are female. But that's a separate issue.

Classy, PZ, really classy.  Way to redirect the conversation to an accusation of sexism because Plait used a common, colloquial term.  It's funny how at no point did he engage the substance of Plait's talk, choosing instead to assert that Plait was unfairly targeting a non-existent strawman and that the real, honest atheists/skeptics would never, ever egregiously misrepresent the words and attitudes of another person or group of people just to score a cheap shot and win applause.

Nope.  PZ Myers would never do anything like that...

Perspective and Apologetics, Part 3

I love Christmas.  Okay, the last couple of years it kind of sucked on the “in 2010 I was stuck in Dallas and in 2011 I was living with family and holyfuckI’mtiredoflivingwithmyparents” levels.  But Christmas, in general, is something for which I profess a great deal of appreciation.  This is why I get annoyed with a certain sub-set of Christmas displays.  You know the kind.  They get displayed on public property and end up being the subject of all kinds of controversy and frothing at the mouth.




Yeah.  This kind.

Now, I have absolutely no problem with the idea of atheists, y’know, doing stuff in the public sphere.  I’m supportive in all ways (except monetarily) of a large number of the atheist billboards and bus ads I’ve seen.  The ones that I support are generally the, “Hi, we’re atheists and we’re your neighbors,” subset of the atheist ad campaign.  I consider something like this to be pretty innocuous and an overall good effort:




I consider something like this, on the other hand, to be a load of bollocks:




I separate all publicity in to three basic categories: awareness, advocacy, and apologetics.

Awareness, in this context, can be a net neutral or a net positive.[1]  Basically, I consider the net neutral to be things like, “Wear pink to fight cancer,” or anything involving setting your picture on Facebook to something else.  It’s just a silly thing that people do to make themselves feel better that doesn’t change reality one bit.  It can be a net positive, however, in the situation where someone who feels different and outcast can see an announcement that says, “You’re not alone,” and feel better.  I am all for this kind of awareness.

Advocacy can run the gamut.  It’s basically awareness with an agenda and the moral viability of the advocacy is directly related to the goals of the agenda.  I am, in short, in favor of atheists working to keep the Establishment Clause in full force because the state has no business in the activities of religion.  If atheists were advocating to push religion entirely out of the public sphere so as to outlaw religion and hunt down the religious, however, I would be against that particular ridiculous strawman.

Apologetics, in my humble opinion, are almost wholly negative at almost all times.[2]  Apologetics work to do three things: 1. establish in-group/out-group thinking, 2. establish superiority for the in-group, and 3. set up the opportunity to play the persecution card.  The persecution card, for the record, works in both directions.  If everyone dogpiles on you, you get to cry about being persecuted.  If everyone dogpiles on the now-Othered, you can use this to push that Other around.

This is the key place where the issue of perspective makes an impact on the question of apologetics.  In order for apologetics to ultimately work in the sense the apologist claims to want things to work everyone needs to share a perspective.  If they don’t it just becomes a masturbatory exercise in trying to call the other person a bigger idiot.

As much as the atheist movement, such as it is, wants everyone to believe they don’t engage in the same activities they decry, there’s plenty of assholery coming from godless apologists.  I’ve got a few theories as to why that is, too.

Most atheists who are prone to want to be involved in atheist outreach have three qualities in common: they’re intelligent, opinionated, and intellectually arrogant.  Arrogance is a requirement for all apologists.  If you’re going to go up to strangers and tell them, in effect, “You’re a fool for not agreeing with me about this issue,” you have to be arrogant.  Someone who lacks arrogance is going to lack to motivation to tell strangers they’re morons.  It’s that simple.

In general, too, atheists have reasoned themselves out of religion.  The average atheist’s backstory is, “I was a believer, then I started to study it and I realized it was crap.”  That’s an abbreviation, for the record.  My own backstory for this is a series of events over the course of a couple years.  The fact is, though, that to this day I know more about the Bible and Christianity than most people who would come to me and tell me I really need Jesus in my life.  I know what the Bible says.  I know what the history of Christianity is.  I know what the history of the Bible is in context.  I didn’t wake up one morning and say, “You know, I don’t believe this anymore.”  I spent a long time learning and studying and eventually drew a conclusion.

For a believer, then, to come up to an atheist and say, “You just need to read the Bible more/the right way/after praying for the proper perspective,” is incredibly arrogant on the part of the apologist.  The would-be atheist apologist, however, needs to realize that this exact same dynamic is going on from the other direction.  Regardless of the reality of, well, reality, the average Christian knows the Bible is real.  They know this as either a form of intellectual assent to an idea or a matter of default assumption, but reality as understood by your average Christian includes the fact of god and Jesus and death on the cross and that entire flibbertigibbet.

So to just walk up to a Christian and say, “Hey, you believe something stupid, you stupid stupidhead,” is incredibly annoying, offensive, and ineffective.  The terrible thing about that is that your average atheist knows this.  Why?  Because your average atheist has been bombarded by that exact message from the opposite direction.

Some atheist sign makers get this.  The Freedom from Religion Foundation tends to put out signs that stay on the awareness and advocacy end of the spectrum.  I’m totally on board with this one, for instance:




And I find this one amusing as hell:




Anyway, where was I?  Oh, right, intelligent, opinionated, and arrogant.

This is a toxic brew when it comes to any public discourse.  Someone who possesses all three of those qualities will tend to not give a shit about what other people have to say and instead just assert reality as he or she understands it and leave it at that.  I think that the fact that atheism is, by and large, a movement of the internet doesn’t help.  Atheists hang out on atheist blogs and discuss atheist things and make fun of the random wannabe evangelists who pop by from time to time to try to witness and then eventually they get out in to the real world and think the same exact style of argumentation and discussion that works on the internet will work with people in the street.[3]

The irony, of course, is that churches facilitate that exact same attitude among the faithful.  I knew a lot of people who literally did not know (or know they knew) a single non-believer.  They’d sit around talking about god and Jesus and how great the Bible was and theorize about how to get those non-Christians to admit they believe what they know to be true.

Then they’d find out that the vast majority of the time all their techniques didn’t work when confronted with an actual, honest-to-nothing non-believer.  Why?  Because they didn’t understand that, “You know the Bible is true, you’re just rebelling against god/still feeling hurt because of something/an unfortunate soul who hasn’t met the right kinds of Christians,” doesn’t actually make a lick of sense in reality.

Atheists need to realize this cuts both ways.  Nobody’s ever changed their mind when confronted by condescending, arrogant assholes who tell them what they actually know about the world.

One of the problems that then comes up, though, is that this idea gets wrapped up in a larger fight amongst atheists: the question of accommodationism.  Folks like PeeZed and the commenters over at Pharyngula tend to decide that this is a binary issue: either you’re an out, proud, and in-your-face atheist or you’re just bending over backwards to let the religious people have their say.  This is absurd.

It’s possible to be accommodating without being an accommodationist.  The issue boils down to what Phil Plait talked about in his now-internet-famous “Don’t Be a Dick” speech.[4]  It’s possible to stand up for science, rationalism, and truth without being a dick about it and if you manage to not be a dick about it when confronted with someone who disagrees you might just make some headway.  He came to this brilliantly obvious realization when he realized that he doesn’t like it when people are dicks to him and he doesn’t listen.

It’s…it’s not that hard, really.

It also helps to realize that perception and perspective matter far more than reality.  If you attack someone they’ll just dig in and fight back.  Quite frankly, atheists don’t need that.  They get enough crap in America as it is.

We need fewer apologists and more advocates.

-----------------------

[1]It can also be a net negative, but that largely depends on who is running the campaign.  The Nazis ran an incredibly negative awareness campaign on the Jews, to pick an easy example.

[2]I’m willing to accept an extremely wide definition for apologetics that can include any form of sales-related activity: ergo, if I tell you that Roger Clyne & the Peacemakers are an awesome band and you should listen to them that can be considered a form of apologetics.

[3]The two big counter-arguments that I know will come against this one are, “But we’re surrounded by Christians every day,” or, “But you just pointed out that most atheists were Christians in the past, so what the fuck, dude?”  That’s quite true.  But most people simply don’t talk about religion openly.  I had an entire conversation with a table full of religious people yesterday and we didn’t mention religion once.  Politics came up, but that’s because IT’S IMPOSSIBLE TO NOT TALK ABOUT POLITICS IN AMERICA ANYMORE.  Bleh.  Religion, however, did not come up except for a guy who knows my parents asking, “So where do your parents go to church now?”  He didn’t even ask me where I go to church.

[4]Three-part YouTube of the speech.  It’s a half-hour, but it’s totally worth it:

How Not to Argue, An Introduction, Part 1

The internet was made for arguing.  Wait, no, the internet was made for porn.  Arguing just came later.  I’m assuming a bunch of people had a disagreement about porn and someone said, “Hey, wait, I haz an idea!”

These days the internet is primarily used for arguing.  It’s also primarily used for arguing poorly.  These two things tend to go hand-in-hand for reasons I’m planning on exploring in depth in my new series called On Disagreement that I introduced in my first State of the Blog post.

For the record, I’m not some sort of master of rhetorical studies, so I don’t really have the ability to identify every single rhetorical trick or fallacy and throw around the Latin terms for whatever the fuck somebody just said.  I’m not a lawyer, so I’m not an expert at eviscerating the complex defenses offered up by those denizens of the courtroom who are paid to argue one point or another day in and day out.  I’ve spent a lot of time discussing rhetoric and internet-based fallacy over at Slacktivist.  I read blogs that do tend to talk about argumentation as courtroom method.  I find the discussion of the nature of argument and fallacy and rhetoric fascinating, but I also find that discussion of argumentation tends to obfuscate the nature of the argument and makes it much harder to get to the actual point, especially when someone who can toss around Latinized rhetorical vocab starts arguing with someone who can’t.

I do come from a background based on argumentation, however.  For those who have forgotten (which seems to include me, too), I’m trained as a historian.  History is nothing but a progression of hypothesis, research, argumentation, counter-hypothesis, further research, more argumentation ad nauseum.  Settled history, for the most part, isn’t.  Common knowledge can be turned on its head in a moment with a tiny discovery.  In some cases, too, that common knowledge and those world-changing discoveries are anything but cut and dry, leaving nothing for the historians but the argument itself.

Most of the time historians focus less on the argument itself than the underlying data.  There are plenty of areas of history where the underlying data simply doesn’t support one viewpoint over another, however, which means that there’s plenty of room for subjective argument in a theoretically objective field of study.  That combination of research skills and pure ability to formulate and defend a theory makes a good historian a born arguer.

So, basically, what I’m saying is, “I want to talk about how people argue and I think I know enough to do it in an interesting and useful way.”  And if you don’t like that, screw you, hippie.

For my introduction to this series I want to talk about a subject that’s truly important: The Simpsons.

MovieBob first entered my life as a reviewer of, you guessed it, movies on The Escapist.  He’s one of those guys who’s really good at the five- to six-minute video format, as he’s pretty good at getting a coherent point across in a short period of time.  I often disagreed with his movie reviews, but I always enjoyed them and, more importantly, he often made me think differently about movies.  For instance, I basically bought Inglourious Basterds on DVD sight unseen because of MovieBob’s review of the movie wherein he discussed how Quentin Tarantino thinks.  I don’t much like Tarantino movies, but I now love Basterds because I was looking for the things MovieBob was talking about and I found the entire exercise fascinating.

After he’d been reviewing movies for a while, the Escapist added a new MovieBob feature: The Big Picture.  That was more, “MovieBob spends six minutes talking about the shit on his mind.”  A bunch of episodes are fun but ultimately asinine.  Some of the episodes are really, really interesting.  As with anything else, I agreed with some things he’s talked about and disagreed with others.  I hadn’t completely disagreed with him until last week, however, when he did part 2 of a two-parter on The Simpons called “The Simpsons is Still Funny.”

The great thing about the two videos I’m about to show you, though, is that they’re not just bad rhetoric, they’re instructively bad.  Let’s queue up Part 1 first:

The Escapist : The Big Picture : The Simpsons Is Still Funny - Pt. 1

The first thing I have problems with is the tagline under the video on the Escapist site itself.  It says, “The Simpsons isn’t bad, you just grew up.”  Right here we’re starting with a disagreement with the initial premise: the video is called “The Simpsons is Still Funny,” but the tag is, “The Simpsons isn’t bad.”  So which is it?  Is “bad” the opposite of “funny?”

This is the first issue with argumentation, by the way.  Develop a coherent thesis and defend it.  That’s Writing History Papers 101.  Or, more likely, writing history papers in high school.

The first minute or so is setup.  You can safely ignore it, as you would an introductory paragraph in your average history paper.  It’s just flowery prose to distract everyone, set the scene, and make the paper longer, but not in that order.  Basically, Bob watched Season 14 of The Simpsons and wants you to know that it wasn’t a waste of his time.

Now, I suppose I should back up a step.  For those who don’t know what The Simpsons is, I’d like to start by saying, “Hello, non-alien, welcome to Earth.”  Or, alternately, I’d like to say, “Greetings, how’ve things been under that rock for the last 21 years?”  The Simpsons is a television show, but more than that it’s a cultural force that has been an integral part of the American psyche almost since the moment it launched in 1989.  The show is in its 23rd season and apparently has at least two more to go, which is, in a word, fucking crazy.  Okay, that’s two words.

Anyway, The Simpsons is basically regarded as having made its best episodes in the ‘90s and for the last decade or so those of us who were watching it back then have argued when, exactly, it jumped the shark and whether or not it should have been canceled last week or last year.  This is awkward, since The Simpsons has been on the air for nearly a quarter of a century and, like anything, has ebbed and flowed in quality.  Even in the decade or so since the perennial arguments as to whether or not it should still be on the air began the show has been the best thing on TV at several points.  The show has also managed to put several really good episodes on the air each season.

But here’s the problem: all of that is wibbly-wobbly and fuzzily subjective stuff.  That’s the difficulty of the entire premise of “The Simpsons is Still Funny” and it’s associated, “The Simpsons isn’t bad.”  How do we define “funny?”  How do we define “bad?”  More interestingly, how do we define “still?”  MovieBob doesn’t bother to tell us how that’s going to work.

Instead he starts with saying he watched Season 14 over the holidays and then immediately stops (1:14) talking about The Simpsons to start talking about how you and I are in disagreement with him.  This is a problem, since he mentioned a bunch of episodes that, while they weren’t classics, certainly weren’t bad.  Hell, the episode where Homer and Sideshow Bob teamed up to take down Frank Grimes, Jr. was actually pretty damn good.

He then mentions a bunch of episodes from around Season 9/10 that people argue are the great episodes and the last time the Simpsons was good and hits his actual thesis statement.  “Or whenever it is that you went off to college and/or otherwise found something else to do on Sunday night and were no longer obsessively following it week-to-week.”(1:23)  This, basically, is the crux of his argument: the Simpsons is good, but you stopped giving a shit so you haven’t noticed.

This is an absolutely atrocious argument.  It assumes a certain attitude on the part of his audience.  It then goes to further assume that said attitude fuels the opinion.  It’s entirely subjective, can’t be backed up by facts, and, even worse, can be pretty easily refuted.

Season 14 came in 2002/2003.  I can assure you that I, personally, was still watching The Simpsons every Sunday night back then.  Moreover, I was in Chicago.  This is a data point that matters.  For those of you who don’t know, ever since the golden age of The Simpsons the FOX Chicago affiliate showed The Simpsons three times every weekday, week in and week out, at 5, 6, and 10 except for short stretches when they tried to show, like, Seinfeld or something and got yelled at.[1]

It’s safe to say that I, as a Chicagoan, a Simpsons fan, and someone who was often near a television between 5 and 11 on weekdays, have probably seen more Simpsons than, well, pretty much anyone who wasn’t also living in Chicago for the last 20 years.  I can tell you two things based on my experience: MovieBob’s argument as to why his audience thinks The Simpsons has gotten bad is wrong from the very start.  He has already lost me and I am now prepared to disagree with him on principle.

The sad thing about that is he then goes on to completely make the counter-argument that he should be focusing on.  “See, the whole notion that The Simpsons has somehow suffered some directly identifiable downward tumble in quality has always mystified me.  I mean, has it perhaps been on the air for a little too long?  Probably.  Have certain characters and/or traits become somewhat overworn now that the show has effectively outlived the entire late-‘80s/early ‘90s it was intended to parody?  Absolutely.”(1:31)

I’m reasonably certain there’s a logical fallacy to explain this one.  I believe his initial, “You stopped liking The Simpsons because you went to college,” is a strawman[2] argument, while the follow-on aside is, um, something.  Whatever it’s called, it’s a pretty transparent dodge.  MovieBob sets up a completely subjective space to make an argument that makes no sense but also can’t really be easily refuted, since it’s something closely approximating an ad hominem,[3] anyway and there’s a reasonably good chance that at least someone will hear that and think, “Y’know, I really haven’t been watching The Simpsons much lately, he might have a point.”

He then piles on the bad arguments.  “But where everybody else seems to see a series that used to be perfect gone to crap, I see a show that has always had a certain amount of ups and downs but has stayed pretty consistently above average.”(1:50)  He uses weasel words in, “everybody else seems to see,” and then tries to set himself up as the champion of the sadly excluded middle ground.

This is followed by questioning whether or not those of us who watched the Simpsons back in the day are making the mistake of over-appreciating the old episodes and under-appreciating the newer episodes.  He then goes on to dissect the so-called “Golden Age” and point out that the episodes those of us who are MovieBob’s age and were fans from the start appreciated so much have changed because we’ve gotten a different perspective on life.  This would be a great argument if it weren’t for two things: first, it totally ignores the fact that there might well have been people who were, like, 20 years old watching the show in 1991 who are now saying, “Man, the show was way better then,” and second, it ignores the fact that those of us who were watching back in the day can still go back and watch the old episodes.  Hell, it also completely ignores the Chicago fans who were basically watching the DVD boxed sets on the local FOX affiliate starting in about 1998 or so, anyway.[4]

Since I’m already at 2,000 words on this subject I think I’ll leave Part 2 of his video for next time.  Stay tuned, since MovieBob will demonstrate the exact wrong way to make a pretty defensible argument.  Hopefully we’ll all understand the internet a little better when all is said and done…

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[1]In the interests of full disclosure: I do not know if they’re still doing it that way, as I was in Dallas for a year and a half and I haven’t really spent much time watching TV since I returned.

[2]Strawman argument: setting up a fake argument that can be easily defeated and attributing it to your opponent.

[3]Ad hominem: making personal attacks in lieu of actual supported arguments.  This is the most oft-misused logical fallacy, as everyone seems to think that any line of attack that includes the word, “You,” and is followed by something negative is an ad hominem.  Example: “Newt Gingrich probably shouldn’t be a spokesman for marital fidelity since he is on his fourth marriage and has a well-documented history of extramarital affairs.”  This is not an ad hominem.  “We shouldn’t listen to Newt Gingrich’s ideas on the country’s financial state because he’s a cheating, womanizing asshole.”  This is an ad hominem.  Note that the difference isn’t the truth of the nature of the allegation.  It’s not even the tone of the attack.  It’s the relevance.  In the context of MovieBob's argument I say it approximate's an ad hominem because he's really not making personal attacks, but the line of thought skates awfully close to, "You just don't like The Simpsons anymore because you're a poopyhead.

Also, I've now looked it up.  This is pretty close to "poisoning the well," which is basically a sub-ad hominmen argument.  Go me, I guess?

[4]I’ll give him a pass on that one, since I doubt he’s spent a lot of time reading Chicago TV listings.

 

The 2012 State of the Blog: Preview Time

So let's start up my Nook and see what sort of books Geds has on his mind these days.




Ah, this is quite the lovely mix.  There's Killing the Buddha: a Heretic's Bible, Bram Stoker's Dracula, The Great Gatsby, a random book about Byzantium, Craig Ferguson's Between the Bridge and the River, Dave Eggers' Zeitoun and...

Oh my god, what's this?  Four Lee Strobel books on apologetics?  What the...?  What are you and what have you done with Geds' Nook?  Quick, someone go find Geds and tell him someone else has been stealing his Nook and buying Christian apologetics books, possibly in an attempt to ambush him in to the faith or something.  This is bad.  This is really bad...

Actually, it's not.  And I'm sure you already knew that my first two paragraphs are a transparent and pointless jibber-jabber that were intended to operate as an awful introduction BECAUSE YOU'RE SMART, THAT'S WHY.

Anyway, in my first 2012 State of the Blog post yesterday I mentioned that I'd be spending more time talking about apologetics and starting up a new series I call On Disagreement.  My first On Disagreement post will be hitting tomorrow morning, so be looking forward to that (or, y'know, don't).  It occurred to me that discussions of apologetics and disagreement might just dovetail nicely.  So I decided that this year I'm going to spend some time looking at Christian apologetics.

This, admittedly, is something that's been done to death.  For the most part, at least where I've seen, it's always been as part of an argument against the apologetics themselves.  My goal is to try to look at the apologetics in terms of what they tell us about how the apologist sees the world.  One of the things that tends to get missed in a lot of these discussions, at least that I've noticed, is the realization that Christian apologists actually believe what they say.

I chose Lee Strobel to start this project on the basis that he was the first person I thought of after C.S. Lewis.  Back when I worked at a Christian book store Strobel was a big hit with his Case for Christ book and his schtick of being a skeptical journalist using all of his mad newspaper reporter skillz to find the actual truth of the whole Jesus story.  Since I stopped working at the Christian books store about ten years ago he's apparently gone on to repackage his Case for... book some nine times.  He's turned it in to a kids book or three.  He's split out shorter versions like, The Case for a Resurrection, The Case for Christmas, and The Case for Easter.  The nice thing about those shortened versions is you can now get the Nook version for, like, 2 bucks.

I downloaded a bunch of samples last night and will probably eventually look at The Case for a Resurrection in full.  But here's a gem from the sample, y'know, to whet your appetite:

It didn't take long for me to conclude that the truth or falsity of all world religions -- and the ultimate meaning of life itself -- comes down to just one key issue: did Jesus, or did he not, return from the dead?  The answer to that fundamental question would settle everything.

It's gonna be a bloodbath.  Stay tuned.