A Guide on How to Achieve Dysfunction through Logical Fallacies
Welcome one and all. We are here today to teach you how to screw up your life. We hope you will apply the lessons you learn here to destroy your health, your marriage, every positive relationship, and make you poor, needy and dependent. Don’t worry, you can live on the government dole and someone else will do the work that you are unwilling and will soon be incapable of doing. It’s really a simple, step-by-step process. Here’s how it works.
Step One
We will convince you that you are number one! How does that sound? You are the only important being in the world. Others exist to meet your needs. When they stop doing this, their being is no longer necessary. They owe you. You need higher self esteem. You need to be the center of your own universe. You da man! The special fallacies that you will need to show your proper place relative to others are,
- Ad Hominem
- Straw man
- Appeal to misleading authority
- Appeal to force
- Well Poisoning
- Tu Quoque
- Appeal to Nature
With these fallacies well mastered, you will be able to manipulate others into getting what you want from them. Time for…
Step Two
Because you are special and unique, the laws of logic, economics and statistics do not apply to you. You are truly exceptional. That which signals failure for most is mere noise for you. You will learn the proper use of the following fallacies:
- Anecdotal fallacy
- Texas sharpshooter fallacy
- Fake precision
- Slippery slope (Semantic and causal versions)
- Question begging
- Hasty generalization
- False dichotomy
Just to give you and idea of how this works, let’s take a closer look at a few Step One fallacies.
In Step One we teach you a host of Red Herring fallacies. This is done so that you will be distracted from real issues and and focus on irrelevant things instead. It’s like flipping channels to see what Spongebob is up to at the expense of the History Channel presentation on the American Revolution or foregoing a slice of homemade wheat bread in favor of a Twinkie.
Red Herring fallacies are similar in that they all deflect attention from the real issue. The name of the fallacy came from the ancient and effective practice of confusing hounds by dragging a stinky fish across the scent trail. The Red Herring fallacies include the following,
- Straw man
- Bandwagon
- Two wrongs
- Appeal to consequences
- Appeal to emotion
- Guilt by association
- Ad Hominem
- Tu Quoque
- Poisoning the well
- The Hitler card
- Appeal to celebrity
Let’s look at Two Wrongs, Tu Quoque, Ad Hominem and Guilt by Association.
The Two Wrongs fallacy will come in handy when you do something bad and you want to deflect blame. There is really no need to own up to your wrong when all you really have to do is point out someone else’s worse wrong, thereby making what you did seem good by comparison. For example, If your mom catches you drinking, you could say, “Well, at least I’m not smoking dope. You should be happy that drinking is all I’m doing.” This is a classic Two Wrongs fallacy and works well on bad parents. You may even get a really bad parent to believe that they are lucky you are getting drunk on a regular basis.
If you really want to make an impact, bring your mom’s family into it. Say something like, “Yea, you should be glad I’m not an alcoholic like uncle Bob.” The two wrongs fallacy will get you out of responsibility while you are young. If you keep practicing, you can use it on your wife or girlfriend and your obnoxious kids that you have to see every other weekend.
The Tu Quoque fallacy is similar to the Two Wrongs fallacy but with a twist. Instead of deflecting blame by pointing at a wrong that is worse than yours, you accuse the person that is accusing you of being just as bad as you are or worse. For example, let’s say a girl at your school accuses you of being mean to your girlfriend. You could say, “Oh, yea, maybe I should treat her the way you treat Becky, idiot.” Adding the word “Idiot” to the end brings in the next fallacy to be discussed, Ad Hominem.
An Ad Hominem (Attack against the man) attack is an attack against the man instead of the woman, just kidding. It is an attack against the person instead of their argument. It’s so powerful, it’s almost like a Jedi mind trick. It works great against weak minded people. They will be so focused on answering your attack that they will completely forget the logical merits of the discussion. Here is how it works…
Friend 1: Hey, you are pushing a few pounds there, dog.
You: Oh yea, well, you are stupid and ugly and I can lose weight.
See how awesome that is? You just dragged a stinky old fish across the scent trail about your needing to lose weight. At this point, your friend will probably fall for your Jedi mind trick and say, “Oh, you mean stupid and ugly like your mama?” This could lead to tons of other fallacies like Appeal to Force.
The last fallacy to discuss in Step One is the Guilt by Association fallacy. This one is used to shut people up by saying that they could not have anything intelligent to say because of the group they run with. You can attack their heritage, their religion, their political party, their family, just about anything.
It makes sense to study the Red Herring family of fallacies. You can deflect blame and put others in their place quickly. Remember, you are number one. People and organizations are useful only if the benefit you!
Once you have learned and practiced Step One fallacies, you will be ready to move on to Step Two fallacies. Let’s look at the Anecdotal Fallacy and the Hasty Generalization fallacy.
The Anecdotal fallacy is a favorite among the dysfunctional, a group that you will soon be joining if you stick to the lessons. It consists of carefully selecting the more emotional and more immediate data from a mountain of evidence. Here is an example. Let’s say that you are a 28 year old female who saw every Twilight movie and read every Twilight book three times. One Friday you decide to have lunch at the park in hopes that your Edward might come by and swear that he is addicted to you like a drug. As you bite into your pita sandwich a guy in stylish yet shabby clothing asks if he can share the bench. He tells you that he is not sure why he had to sit by you but that there is something intoxicating about your vibe. Flash forward two weeks. You learn that he has been imprisoned for drug use, he beat up a former girlfriend, he goes to a clinic to get checked once a week, and he works at the adult book store. He says that he is over the drugs, that the girlfriend was psycho and that he was only protecting himself, that he has been scab free for a month and that he is looking for a different job. In order to join the dysfunctional group, you need to commit the Anecdotal fallacy by ignoring the evidence that this guy is a loser and will hurt you now and in the future and go with the emotional evidence that he makes you feel special and would never hurt you. You can increase the speed and intensity of the dysfunction by allowing him to use you to create progeny. You go, girl!
Las Vegas is built on the success of this fallacy. The evidence that you will probably lose money, pollute your mind, over-eat and leave dumber than you were when you came is extremely high. But if you merely rely on the Anecdotal fallacy, ignore statistical realities and economics, you can confidently go and share in the mystique.
Few things will propel you to dysfunction faster than the Hasty Generalization fallacy. It is committed when you conclude something from a data set as small as one. For example, you may conclude that smoking really doesn’t hurt you much. After all, your friend’s uncle started smoking at 14. He is 86 now, still smokes and is still going strong. Instead of looking at all of the available data on the pro’s and cons of smoking, you draw a conclusion from a single data point.
Related to the Hasty Generalization fallacy and something that will aid in deepening your dysfunction is the notion that you are a statistical exception. It is the conviction from deep in our soul that although others have failed doing what you do and have suffered pain and humiliation, it won’t happen to you. You are special. You are different. You are unique. There is no one quite like you (remind you of anything?). Here are some examples:
“If you try it once, you have a high chance of becoming an addict.” If someone says this to you, you need to respond, at least in your head if not out loud, “I am special, I am unique, there is no one quite like me. Therefore, what you say does not apply to me.”
“If you are intimate with him this soon, you will end up hurt or worse.” If someone says this to you, you need to respond, at least in your head if not out loud, “I am special, I am unique, there is no one quite like me. Therefore, what you say does not apply to me. There has never been a love like ours. How could you know possibly know what is going to happen to me.”
Finally, you need to ignore history. At least ignore history before President Hayes and for dysfunction’s sake, under no circumstances study Plato, Aristotle or any other weirdos in togas…unless one of them is John Belushi.
That Which We Call a Rose
“How many legs does a dog have if you call the tail a leg? Four. Calling a tail a leg, doesn’t make it a leg.” — Abraham Lincoln
But political rhetoric would have you believe that it is not a tail but a leg. It’s time to apply the potent laxative of logic to constipated political spin. Your life (freedom) depends on it. Skeptical? Read on.
The political correctness movement was not the beginning of linguistic spin intended to get you to first believe, then to swear that the excrement you consume is really organic delicacy. The un-duped would say, “Eh Gad, Man. You are eating a steaming pile of dog feces!” but if you dupe enough people over enough time, dogs become the world’s most important commodity and Mastiffs the greatest breed.
Dung devourer creation is profitable enterprise. Solitarily standing in the way of obscene windfall is a skeptical populace armed with logic and motivated by freedom. Linguistic codification, the marketing wing at Excrement Eaters Unlimited, enjoys a remarkable history of obscene profits and of death and debauchery desensitization.
Spin Tutorial
Spin takes on several forms. The two most popular are Euphemisms and Dyseuphemisms. When there is an attempt to make a word or idea sound better than it is, a euphemism is created. The opposite is true for a dyseuphemism. Here are some examples:
Insect Extermination
Alexandr Solzhenitsyn makes the case that post revolution communists co-opted euphemistic phraseology to disguise a reality that would have ensured an early end to both empire and existence for Lenin groupies. Here are some examples:
Euphemism: Pacification
Reality: Defenseless villages are bombarded from the air, the inhabitants driven out into the countryside, the cattle machine-gunned, the huts set on fire with incendiary bullets. If people cause trouble, you can create peace by getting rid of them.
Euphemism: Transfer of Population or Rectification of Frontiers
Reality: Millions of peasants are robbed of their farms and sent trudging along the roads with no more than they can carry.
Euphemism: Elimination of Unreliable Elements
Reality: People are imprisoned for years without trial, or shot in the back of the neck or sent to die of Scurvy in Arctic labor camps.
Solzhenitsyn painstakingly documents several other euphemistic reality incursions. “Thus the death penalty was rechristened ‘the supreme measure’ — no longer a punishment, but a means of social defense. (Gulag pg 436) In 1927, the benevolent Russian Central Committee abolished capital punishment except for crimes against the state and army, including “banditry.” In time, the revealed reality was that “every armed nationalist who doesn’t agree with the central government is a ‘bandit,’ ” and, similarly, “any participant in an urban rebellion is also a ’bandit.” (Gulag pg 436)
Lenin expressed his sinister intent from the beginning when he said, we must go about “purging the land of all kinds of harmful insects.” The “insect” classification grew progressively larger.
“Insects” included not only all class enemies but also “workers malingering at their work.” George Douglas of the Foundation for Economic Education said, “It is not possible for us at this time to fully investigate exactly who fell within the broad definition of insects; the population of Russia was too heterogeneous and encompassed small, special groups, entirely superfluous and, today, forgotten. The people in the local zemstvo self-governing bodies were, of course, insects. People in the cooperative movement were also insects, as were all owners of their own homes. There were not a few insects among the teachers in the gymnasiums. The church parish councils were made up almost exclusively of insects, and it was insects of course who sang in church choirs. All priests were insects — and monks and nuns were even more so. (Gulag pg 27 -28)”
So far, political attempts at euphemization in the United States have not been as toxic as they were in Russia in 1927. George Orwell is erroneously credited with originating the term Doublespeak from his book, 1984, in which the term never appears. Regardless, Doublespeak refers to Euphemism and Dyseuphemism. Doublespeak examples span all levels of comedy and severity. Both sides of the political spectrum employ Doublespeak for rhetorical advantage. But before dung-heap diving, peruse Doublespeak’s lighter side:
Euphemisms for someone who has died:
passed on, checked out, bit the big one, kicked the bucket, bitten the dust, popped their clogs, pegged it, carked it, turned their toes up, bought the farm, cashed in their chips, fallen off their perch, croaked, given up the ghost, shuffled off this mortal coil, assumed room temperature.
On the heavier side, politicians are notorious Doublespeakers, yet both are pot and kettle. Consider, first, the liberal point of view:
Doublespeak: Abortion
Real meaning: Killing and removal of a human fetus from its mother’s womb.
Doublespeak: Affirmative action
Real meaning: An attempt to achieve equality of outcome by favoring women and non-white males.
Doublespeak: Working Americans
Real meaning: Non-professionals who may or may not work harder than professionals and other wealthy people, and probably have invested less in schooling and training than professionals but should view themselves as oppressed by lazy, greedy professionals and entrepreneurs and vote for their liberal advocates.
Doublespeak: Community organizing
Real meaning: Do whatever you can, including lie, miscount, cheat, fudge and threaten, to give your group more than one vote per person (See Acorn).
Doublespeak: Affordable Healthcare
Real meaning: Shifting healthcare costs away from near-term voters and burdening the next two or three generations.
Doublespeak: Social Justice
Real meaning: Using the word “justice” implies that subsidy is deserved as a matter of justice. Therefore, the taking from one and giving it to another is authorized by morality and law and should not be questioned. Socialism.
Doublespeak: Planned Parenthood
Real Meaning: Promote abortion and undermine traditional families.
And on the conservative side,
Doublespeak: Strong National Defense
Real meaning: Meddle in world affairs, in campaigns with dubious gains and huge loss of fortune and life.
Doublespeak: Neo-conservatism
Real Meaning: Dupe the base, pacify the independents and get some libs to believe that you will somehow spend money like a drunken sailor and still ensure prosperity.
Doublespeak: Operation Iraqi Freedom
Real Meaning: Wow, no WMD’s. Let’s re-brand the war to be about freedom and not defense.
Please add some of your own in the comment section. I love ‘em. If I were a doublespeak consultant, I would advise the following…
The NEA (National Teacher’s Union) should change its name to, “Society to Protect the Future of America’s Children.” Any critic would be going up against three sacred untouchables, Children, America and Future.
The Communist Party should change its name to, “The American Institute for the Promotion of Compassion.”
Truly the emperor is naked no matter what you hear from congress, Hollywood and the media. Calling a thing by its name has liberating power in thought and action.
With the exception of comedic and artful uses, if doublespeak is not confronted, it will get passed off as reality. When this happens, life, freedom and goodness are sacrificed. Solzhenitsyn says of most of his countrymen who allowed Lenin to exist and thrive, they “didn’t love freedom enough” to fight for it from the beginning.
If you choose not to engage, the question becomes, “how would you like your excrement served, madam?”
So, you want to start an internet business…
I got a call from my dentist a few months ago asking for an appointment. He had heard from another patient that I had some small business expertise and wanted to improve his business. To his credit, he saw his practice as a business and actively looked for ways to improve his revenue, efficiency and profitability. I always thought it would be cool to set up an education forum just outside a dental school campus and offer classes on small business essentials. Every dentist that I have polled has said that, looking back, they would have spent a small fortune to learn in advance what business hard knocks had taught them over the years.
My dentist arrived just after lunch on a Friday. After the customary exchange of pleasantries, he got right to the point.
“Here is my problem. I am not number one on a google search. I am number two.”
He meant that if a potential customer were to type in “(his city) dentist,” google would display several pages. Being ranked number one, or being the first, non-paid google entry can be valuable. SEO (Search Engine Optimization) amateurs generally assume that a number one ranking is automatically worth the time and money it would take to achieve.
Statistically (averaged), you will see, the following click distribution for respective ranking:
Position #1: 45.5% of all clicks
Position #2: 15.7% of all clicks
Position #3: 10% of all clicks
Position #4: 5.5% of all clicks
Position #5: 5.0% of all clicks
My friend believed that by getting from #2 to #1, he would see %30 more clicks that would result in more patient visits and therefore, more money. Makes sense, right?
Wrong
When I asked him why he wanted to be #1, he looked at me as though I had asked him what was so good about electricity. ”#1 is better, right?” he asked.
I explained the percentages and click domination above which solidified, in his mind, his resolve to get to #1 until I said, “so you will see, on average 30% more search engine generated traffic to your site at #1, but 30% of zero is still zero. we need to see how many people are actually searching for a dentist in your town on the internet.” He had not considered that and asked how we could find out.
There are several tools available, my favorite is www.seobook.com. You will need to register to access the good stuff on the site. If you go to tools, then to keyword search tool, you will find a glorious database of searchable searches on the major search engines. If you are like me, you will spend a lot of time testing theories and assumptions. There is also great trending analysis, key word suggestions, etc.
The search revealed that there are exactly zero daily internet searches for dentists in his city. To make the point clearer, I showed him a search for “New York City dentist” The stark population difference, community characteristics and behavior, and internet capability should indicate whether or not the ‘zero’ finding was realistic. Here is the finding.
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Given population and other differences, a local dentist is going to get an abysmal return on his investment buck by attempting SEO optimization. Assuming that there are around 10,000 dentists in NYC, competing for a few measly clicks is a waste of time.
Without any data to fall back on, I surmised that people make dentist selections from mailers, radio adds and especially word-of-mouth referrals. Investment into some combination of these makes more sense. He thanked me for saving him the time and money he would have spent on SEO optimization and left.
It should be noted that there are ways to create traffic independent of SEO. These ways will be covered in a later post.
What if there had been a large number of searches. Is that the end of the story? Should he invest in SEO? There are three other questions that need to be answered.
The first is to determine market trending. Suppose that you want to start a business that sells educational accessories to home schoolers. After determining the interest through the key word search (10000 daily searches on average for ‘homeschool’ and ‘home school’ combined), your next step is to pull up a google trends report. In the homeschool case, we see,
Some interesting things to note are the seasonal dips in trending during the summer months and during Thanksgiving and Christmas. You would certainly want to create buzz during the hotter search times (more on that in a different post). Also noteworthy is the breakdown of cities and states. I’m really not sure how to read this, but, given the relatively small population densities, and political demographic of the states and cities listed, you are dealing with geographically concentrated groups and across the political spectrum. That information should be useful in your marketing.
The second question to answer is, “how many sites compete in my space?”
To find this out, do a google search for your search term and look at the total number. In the case of “home school,” there are 7,200,000 competing sites. Discouraged? Don’t be. The third question to ask is, “How good is the competition?” for that, you will need to get into the guts of the competing websites to determine their quality (an issue for another post).
The internet can be a lucrative place to do business. If you choose to go forward, it will require a significant time investment in staying on top of all of the changes that rock cyberworld on a regular basis. Social Media, which we will soon explore in depth is world rocking stuff.
Please leave a comment below. I would be interested in what you think I should cover next.