{"id":8869,"date":"2013-04-08T12:24:29","date_gmt":"2013-04-08T12:24:29","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/2013\/04\/08\/liberals-love-straw-men\/"},"modified":"2013-04-08T12:24:29","modified_gmt":"2013-04-08T12:24:29","slug":"liberals-love-straw-men","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/2013\/04\/08\/liberals-love-straw-men\/","title":{"rendered":"Liberals and Straw Men"},"content":{"rendered":"

Here is a particularly egregious example of a liberal straw man argument.  In a New Yorker piece<\/a>, Margaret Talbot writes:<\/span><\/p>\n

\n

As a nation, we\u2019re a little vague on what the Second Amendment\u2019s protections of  a citizen militia mean for gun ownership today. The N.R.A. insists that they  mean virtually unlimited access to firearms for every American. . . .<\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Note the weasel word 'virtually' that pseudo-qualifies Talbot's falsehood, and allows her to pass it off with a show of plausibility.  Or is Talbot flat out lying?  A lie is not the same as a falsehood, the difference being the intention to deceive which is necessary for an utterance to count as a lie.  I am not in a position to peer into Talbot's soul, so I hesitate to impute a lie to her.  But if she is not lying, then she is ignorant, indeed culpably<\/em> ignorant since on a minimal understanding of journalistic ethics one ought to become informed of the positions of an outfit such as the N.R.A. before confidently reporting on them.<\/span><\/p>\n


\n
\n<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

\"Strawman\"<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

<\/a>How does the Straw Man fallacy come into this?  The fallacy is committed when one (mis)represents one's opponent as holding a position he does not in fact hold and then attacking the position he does not hold.  So Talbot falsely represents the N. R. A. has advocating the nonexistent right of all Americans, including felons, the mentally unstable, and the underaged, to keep and bear all types of firearms. Having set up the strawman, Talbot then earnestly argues against it.<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

I exposed another example the other day<\/a> when I refuted the Wolff-Obama  "You didn't build that!" argument.  <\/span><\/p>\n

A third example is the liberal complaint that conservatives are anti-government, as if advocating limited government makes one anti-government.  Such a willful misrepresentation speaks volumes about the moral character of the ones who make it.<\/span><\/p>\n

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Here is a particularly egregious example of a liberal straw man argument.  In a New Yorker piece, Margaret Talbot writes: As a nation, we\u2019re a little vague on what the Second Amendment\u2019s protections of  a citizen militia mean for gun ownership today. The N.R.A. insists that they  mean virtually unlimited access to firearms for every … Continue reading “Liberals and Straw Men”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[112,163,113],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8869","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-alcohol-tobacco-and-firearms","category-leftism-and-political-correctness","category-logica-utens"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8869","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8869"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8869\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8869"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8869"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8869"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}