Logical Fallacies in the News 2

Asshole or son of a bitch? You make the call. 

Let us continue with our discussion of how logical fallacies corrupt our national dialog, shall we?
Special Pleading …sometimes called Moving the Goal Posts , which is more appropriate in this example because it involves Robert Kraft, owner of the New England Patriots and a frequent target of The Nobby Works. As the name suggests, the Moving the Goal Posts fallacy involves extending or altering the distance someone must go to settle an argument. In this instance, it was Kraft’s statement in support of NFL players’ right to protest: “I am deeply disappointed by the tone of the comments made by the President on Friday. I am proud to be associated with so many players who make such tremendous contributions in positively impacting our communities.” I have not been the only one criticizing Kraft--owner in an industry with majority black employment--for his unseemly relationship with a proven white supremacist. However it seems I was among the few who were willing to take his words at face value. On Twitter he was lit up, as they say in the NFL, by a slew of grand inquisitors who objected to his focus on Trump's “tone” rather than content, who demanded that Kraft take back the million dollars he donated to Trump’s inaugural, who charged that Kraft and all his rich buddies in the NFL ownership fraternity were only acting out of expediency. Since these attacks were mostly coming from the political left, I should note that moving the goal posts is a frequent maneuver on the left, which seems to suffer from innate inability to accept wins when they come their way, consolidate them, and move forward. It's the political corollary of nagging: “Okay, so you’re sorry for not picking up my dry cleaning, but what about all those times you left the toilet seat up?” The fact is, given Kraft’s stated emotional reasons for his friendship with Trump, he probably had to cover more ground to get to his statement than did most others who hate Trump instinctively. It was a real Saul to Paul moment (though Kraft, a devout Jew, may not approve the comparison). Moving the goal posts on him wasn’t fair…and it is never a productive move in argumentation.
Composition/division is the logical fallacy where one assumes that if something is true about part of a whole, it must be true of the whole itself. And let’s keep with the football theme on this one. After this Sunday’s rather profound show of solidarity by the players, who either took a knee or locked arms during the National Anthem, Odell Beckham Jr. proceeded to make an absolute ass of himself…or to put it in more Trumpian terms acted like a son of a bitch as illustrated in the photo above. After a touchdown he got down on all fours, pawed around the ground like a dog and then lifted his hind leg to mimic taking a pee. What he did of course was nothing less than piss on the solemnity of the protests that went on before and handed an easy weapon to those who opposed the protesters. Within hours I saw the picture above posted on Facebook with commentary damning all NFL players as overpaid “dickheads”. This is the flipside of the exact same coin that paints all cops as racist killers after one cop has been caught on camera being an actual racist killer. These broad brush smear jobs of entire professions, races, genders, religions based on the aberrant behavior of a few are destroying national comity and making it impossible for us to progress towards being a more perfect UNION! Logical fallacies are not some arcane subject to be confined to a rhetoric class in college…our inability to understand their insidious nature and control them in our dialogs are killing us as a society.     
Sticking with the NFL Players protest, let’s dive into the logical fallacy known as the Loaded Question where the intent of a question is to wound or embarrass rather than elicit information. The person asking wants to suggest something incriminating and force you into an embarrassing answer…often called the “Gotcha question.” The NFL players could not have been more clear and consistent in holding that their protests are about the excessive shooting of young black men by police throughout the country. Yet they keep getting hit by a barrage of loaded questions: Why do you hate the country? Why can’t you honor the military like all good Americans do? What about all those black-on-black shootings in Chicago? The players constantly have to stop and answer these questions: We don’t hate the country; we’re trying to make it better. Our protests have nothing to do with the military; we’re taking a knee to bring attention to a domestic/civil problem. Black-on-black shootings in Chicago are another issue, like missing children, domestic abuse, and opioid addiction. As important as they are, they are not this issue…and by suggesting that our protest should incorporate black issues all across the board you are revealing a subtle form of racism that undergirds the issue we’re talking about. Now let’s not end this particular installment of Logical Fallacies in the News without an example from Donald Trump, who is a walking, talking compendium of logical fallacies. Indeed, you might say logical fallacies are his mother tongue. There’s one called Appeal to Nature, which is an argument based on the naturalness of something. This week when asked why his administration's relief efforts in Puerto Rico were going so poorly, Trump answered: "This is a thing called the Atlantic Ocean, this is tough stuff.”
Alas. This is a thing called humanity. This is tough stuff.