I'm constantly amazed at how some of the same moronic techniques are used over and over again by bloggers to make their point. Some of them are just poor arguementation, while others are basically forms of propaganda. After seeing them used over and over again (often by major bloggers), I thought I'd start chronicling them. (For now, I'll just monitor some of the major blogs and catch what I can as time permits...but I might dig for classic examples from the past later. I don't have time to catch everything, so readers are more than welcome to submit their own examples from either "side" of the blogosphere. I'm coming at this from a "liberal" perspective, but I'm happy to note if/when major players on the "left" side of the blogosphere engage in similar tactics.)
One technique is to take the opinion of someone on the far-left (think Howard Zinn aficionados, Nader loving pseudo-socialists, Ward Churchill, Cindy Sheehan) or the bad actions of a specific Democrat/liberal (think Clinton/Lewinsky) and try and use it to characterize all Democrats/liberals. This kind of argument will be discussed in a future post. A similar technique is also used by bloggers against other bloggers: find someone considered liberal that says something wrong and/or misguided, and then use it to make a blanket statement about most/all liberals.
Our first example is from Wizbang. Jay Tea (author at Wizbang) notes some author's post on impeaching Bush for the Plame affair. He then lays out how difficult it is to impeach a sitting President. Fine. So what generalization is this used to support? From the first paragraph of the post:
It's been said many times that "liberals feel, conservatives think." While not always true, it has a certain element of truth to it. And I've discovered signs that the stronger the liberals feel, the less they're able to think.
(By the way, Jay Tea of Wizbang has also pushed the "liberals feel, conservatives think" generalization in a previous post.)
The fallacy here is pretty simple. I can find people with conservative blogs/opinions that say things that are erroneous, misguided, deceptive, emotional, etc., and I can fail to report when people with liberal blogs/opinions do the same thing. Does that mean that "liberals think, conservatives feel"? Of course not. Even if I were to make a broad generalization of that kind, I would need some sort of corpus of evidence to compare "liberal" vs "conservative" blogs along various dimensions such as how often they present logical arguments, how often they present legitimate evidence in support of these arguments, if they fairly portray (or even address) the other side of the argument, etc. etc. It would also help to compare blogs of the same stature/popularity in the blogosphere, as I'm sure there are complete nutballs getting ten hits a day on both sides of the blogosphere with opinions that are in no way reflective of "their side".
(Note that someone from Wizbang, #10 in the Truth Laid Bare ecosystem is attacking someone on In Search of Utopia, ranked 299th in the ecosystem.)
We don't have any evidence of Wizbang doing anything of this sort in this post (which I don't expect in one post, considering that this kind of examination would take more than a few posts). But neither do we have any evidence of Jay Tea (or others at Wizbang) trying to examine the other side of the argument by putting forth examples of conservatives not thinking. They can bring up Cindy Sheehan, and I can bring up Pat Robertson (a much viler character than Sheehan). There are mistakes made by both sides, and there are emotional arguments put forth by both sides. Using a few mistakes made by one side to generalize an entire group is just plain illogical. Maybe Jay Tea, you could use your post in support of "conservatives feel, liberals think"?
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