Fallacy News

You can't make this stuff up.

I went to a new sandwich place in town and brought my Kindle. I'm reading a book called 42 Fallacies, which has been a great refresher on the basics of logic and argumentation. The book illustrates fallacies in all forms.

This particular sandwich shop chose to play Fox News on its two TVs. They also cranked up the sound pretty loud, so I couldn't ignore the show completely.

It was like listening to my 42 Fallacies book in audiobook form. Specifically, I listened to Megyn Kelly's mid-day show. I lasted 15 minutes.

I was reading about the fallacy of relying on experts outside of their area of expertise while she interviewed Ronald Reagan's son (the conservative one, not the one who rebelled) about something other than being raised as a spoiled rich kid. They actually argued about whether his father would be welcome in today's Republican party. She presented him as an expert, and then she argued with him on his father's views. The questions were really just statements accompanied by opportunities to agree with those statements. ... followed by punishments for failure to agree with those statements.

It was insanity. I was literally reading the perfect fallacy description as I listened. Although, to be fair, that was going to happen eventually so long as I chose to read that book while sitting there.

FLASHBACK: Years ago, I was at Dave's place watching a national title football game (I believe a certain iconic running quarterback was involved) when we decided to switch to Fox News for dumb curiosity. I had never actually SEEN Fox News beyond background noise to that point and proceeded to throw pillows, shout obscenities and lose my lid over what I thought was an intellectually-insulting presentation. On that night, Bill O'Reilly provided the fodder.

That was the night I learned that Fox News cannot be taken seriously. And my memory of that night came back to me at lunch.

BACK TO THIS WEEK: I then listened as Ms. Kelly made leaps in logic that would scare a daredevil while reading about (you guessed it) massive leaps in logic and how they are intellectually lazy.

She interviewed Mr. Bolton (the former ambassador to the UN who was philosophically opposed to the UN) explain how Egyptian extremists are not worried about losing funding for their country by resorting to violence because the "current administration" will just allow that. Her questions were softballs and she injected a "pshhhawww" quality of sarcasm into every sentence to make her disdain for the president clear.

I pushed on in my book to the "fallacy of fear tactics and appeals to emotion" when this happened:

The TV darkened into an ominous teaser on pet snakes that escape. The teaser had a "lock yourself in your house" hysteria feel and featured dramatic music and pictures of gigantic snakes. I started to pack my stuff up during the commercial. As I was leaving, the snake story came on and included the quote (paraphrasing from memory) "they are actually harmless, but they eat a lot and grow quite big."

Wait, what? I was living this book in real time.

Things were getting surreal, and I bolted that place in hurry. I even debated about explaining to ownership that their choice of network damaged my desire to ever return, but then thought I'd leave them to the Social Darwinism they so cherish. The market shall decide that store's fate.

That said, it's not usually a great business model to waive any political flag when your goal is to maximize money people spend on your product. Then again, it's also not a good idea to associate with fools, but there seems to be a pretty big market for that as well.