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 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.
At least he picked a strawman that we know exists: the Worst Episode Ever guy. I've seen him on the internet. (1) And I thought MovieBob made one good point, even if he kind of obscured it: since the show's place in culture is unprecedented, who's to say how long it lasts. I'm rooting for a season where "Wedding after wedding after wedding!" and other preposterous promises from the show's history are fulfilled in every episode. Then it can die.
(1) I'm not Worst Episode Ever guy because I have a number of favorite episodes from the 2000's, well past "When It Was Good". Thanks to FOX Chicago, it really didn't matter that I usually wasn't in front of a TV on Sunday night for a few years.
Posted by: The Everlasting Dave | 01/04/2012 at 05:17 PM
I get tired of hearing about the ad hominem fallacy. At times I think people unfamiliar with arguing learn this wonderful thing called “fallacy” and believe it sounds as if they are making a counter-argument (even maybe an intelligent one, because it is in Latin and italicized and stuff) simply by tossing out “that is an ad hom argument.” (The cool people shorten “ad hominem to ”ad hom” ‘cause we know what it means, and if you don’t, then you aren’t cool. It is all very technical.)
So if I say, “Bob is an idiot, and here are the 12 reasons he is wrong…” they scream out, “Ad Hom! Ad Hom!” simply because I used the word, “idiot.” Actually, I am simply proving two things:
1) Their argument is wrong;
2) Bob is, by definition, an idiot.
Posted by: DagoodS | 01/06/2012 at 07:53 AM
DagoodS: Yeah. I decided to avoid discussing the people who just use ad hom to be tone trolls. I wanted to present two ways of making an argument from a factual standpoint to highlight the difference.
But, believe you me, I'm totally in agreeance on that one.
Posted by: Geds | 01/06/2012 at 08:42 AM