Events

Continuing The Daily Parker's occasional series on logical fallacies, let's look at two more fallacies of irrelevant conclusions. Argumentum ad vericundiam An "argument to awe" uses reputation rather than evidence to score a point. The most common example involves a testimonial, either positive or negative, as when someone argues for or against a premise by pointing to the president's endorsement of the premise. A similar, implicit argument to awe occurs when an advertiser puts a famous actor in a...

First, New York Times film critic A.O. Scott takes a second look at the 1999 film Election: The movie has been persistently and egregiously misunderstood, and I count myself among the many admirers who got it wrong. Because somehow I didn’t remember — or didn’t see— what has been right there onscreen the whole time. Which is that Mr. M is a monster — a distillation of human moral squalor with few equals in modern American cinema — and that Tracy Flick is the heroine who bravely, if imperfectly, resists...

These movements crop up from time to time, and it's not going to happen in my lifetime. But the Tribune did a lengthy report on the latest effort to separate Chicago and the rest of Illinois into two states: Over the past two years, the movement to divide the state of Illinois into two states — Cook County in one, the other 101 counties in the other — has been gaining support. In February, as Gov. J.B. Pritzker was pursuing an agenda for Illinois that included new tax and abortion policies, Halbrook...

The journalist believes we need to get our act together: The main point I would make is this: even if you accept the fact that the candidates are currently trying to stake out pluralities among Democratic primary voters and not yet seeking to woo the greater public, they are not doing a very good job of it. And that really worries me. I'm not so worried. We've typically had this sort of circus in the early stages of an election season, and with the actual event more than 15 months way, we've got time.

Yep, one of these posts. Alaska is having its warmest summer ever, and by a lot. Ronald Reagan had not-nice things to say about Africans in a phone call to Richard Nixon. Chicago's new LED street lights could increase the incidence of mosquito-borne illnesses. (Which, by the way, have ended civilizations.) You can run Ruby on Rails natively in the next update to Windows 10. Broadway producer Hal Prince has died at 91. Back to coding...

Everything I'm learning about John Ratcliffe, the president's likely nominee for Director of National Intelligence, suggests he's orders of magnitude worse than the guy he's replacing: The intelligence community will fight hard against a threat to its culture of avoiding open partisanship, former senior CIA operations officer John Sipher told NBC News. "It's all about professionalism and taking the world as it is. There is no such thing as Democratic or Republican intelligence. It is what it is, no...

The Show-Me State recently passed a law creating the specifications for Missouri Bourbon: According to House Bill 266, signed on Thursday, July 11, any whiskey labeled as Missouri bourbon must not only meet the federal standards for bourbon, but also be mashed, fermented, distilled, aged and bottled in the state; aged in oak barrels manufactured in the state; and—beginning January 1, 2020—made with corn exclusively grown in the state. The law goes into effect on August 28. The Missouri Craft Distillers...

I want Wayne LaPierre to apologize, in person, to Alberto Romero: The shooting left three people dead — including a 6-year-old boy — and 12 injured, local officials said. Authorities initially reported that 15 people had been hurt but amended the count early Monday morning. One gunman was killed by officers at the scene, Gilroy Police Chief Scot Smithee said. In an interview with NBC Bay Area, Alberto Romero confirmed that his 6-year-old son, Stephen, had died. The boy’s mother and grandmother were also...

Tonight I'm looking at the resignation of Dan Coats and the likely appointment of John Ratcliffe for the office of director of national intelligence (DNI), and struggling to understand how narcissism survives. I don't really give two cents about either Coats or Ratcliffe, other than to say they're both well-established toadies and lickspittles. Ordinarily I would make an obscene gesture at either's appointment and move on with my life because, after all, Republicans are always going to prefer toadies...

Yesterday, this nitwit described a couple of logical fallacies that everyone raved about. For day two of my series on "how not to argue," I present two more of the most common fallacies of irrelevant conclusions. I'd feel bad for you if you got taken in by either of these. Argumentum ad ignoratiam An "argument to ignorance" relies on a lack of evidence against your proposition, and hoping your opponent doesn't have any. For quite some time, the President used essentially this fallacious line of argument...