Fallacies of Argument: STD Identification card

Every individual should carry an ID card that clearly states all the sexually transmitted infections and diseases he or she has. Something along the lines of, “Joe Bake, 25 years old, Positive for Herpes”. It would follow you wherever you went, just like a Driver’s License, and would be issued by an official health services branch of the government. If everyone knew what viruses and/or bacteria were inside their partners’ bodies, no one would ever be contaminated again. Yes, privacy would be sacrificed in this scenario, but that is the necessary price to pay if we want to avoid entire populations infected with Herpes, Chlamydia, AIDS, etc. The people I have heard about who are positive for an STD or STI were not aware their partner was infected at the time of intercourse, so it was not a conscious decision to “run the risk” in the name of good sex (or true love). These people would not be infected today if their partners had been carrying the proposed ID card then. It is important to note that those already infected might be subjected to a bit of discrimination (even though they would only show their ID card upon consent), but if they are good people in the first place they would want to share the knowledge of an STD or STI with their sexual partners anyway, because good people are considerate. A person whose ID card contains an embarrassingly long list of diseases and infections should not be pitied for being obliged to publicize it: if someone is that promiscuous then he or she does not care about privacy anyway.

Merrill Lynch "punishes" its CEO...

This political cartoon refers to the firing of Merrill Lynch’s CEO Stan O’Neal, this past week. Despite having been let go, O’Neal, who was the highest-ranked African American in Wall Street, is still walking out with a humble $161 million.

The cartoon exposes the irony of the situation. O’Neal was fired six days after Merrill Lynch suffered a $2.2. billion quarterly loss— the worse ever since the bank’s founding. The cartoon depicts Merrill Lynch’s board as giving a harsh treatment to O’Neal: they scream “And stay out!” while kicking the former CEO’s butt. By making it so, the cartoon is criticizing the bank for not realizing that O’Neal is in fact in a very good position. He has been let go, indeed, but with a prize no smaller than 160 million dollars to be added to his (already quite consecrated) fortune. Also, since much of this prize is in stocks in Merrill Lynch, if the next chief executive brings better tides to the bank, he will add even more millions to his fortune (as was the case with former CEO of Walt Disney Co.). No, I do not think Stan O’ Neal is getting too harsh a treatment...I certainly would not mind being in his shoes.

The cartoon also makes a more general point: it is a common trend for these multi billion Wall street companies to “punish” their CEOs by letting them go when the bank suffers a great loss. But truth be said, these CEOs will still be doing incredibly well, and are perhaps treated too nicely once they are fired. The people who actually get hurt are all the other hundreds of employees who also get fired, but who do not happen to walk out with a few million in their pockets.

The cartoon’s purpose is to entertain and to humor, but also to express the “public’s” perspective on the whole ordeal. The cartoon shows the common American’s view on the whole situation. For a start, it is a rather absurd amount of money we are dealing with. At least for me, the thought of any individual single-handedly receiving more than one hundred million dollars is just absurd in itself! And the fact that receiving such a large quantity of money is being perceived by Merrill Lynch as a punishment is even more startling. In fact, it is almost offensive to everyone else out there who survives with much less.

Ultimately, I think Daryl Cagle, the author of this cartoon, does a good job in taking a humorous look at the situation, pointing out its absurdity—an absurdity which we have grown immune to. The cartoon urges us take a step back and reconsider the whole scenario.

An overly simplified view of the World

Based on the blog entry by David Sedaris for The New Yorker, found in http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2007/02/19/070219fa_fact_sedaris?currentPage=2

David Sedaris is most famous for his collection of essays and memoirs, where he recounts episodes of his life that would be seemingly ordinary, were it not for his original and humorous approach in telling them. The case is also so for this blog article Sedaris wrote for The New Yorker. The article's socially aware humor and argumentation will be discussed in the following paragraphs.

It took me a second read to identify the author's actual purpose for writing the entry. Sedaris criticizes the human need to continuously use stereotypical labels to assort roles for people in society. When dealing with homosexual couples, however, the relationship dynamics is suddenly not so familiar, and identifying "who's the man" becomes a tricky ordeal. Sedaris claims this is particularly hard because we "can't imagine any system besides [our] own". And he deems it almost pathetic that many people (supposedly) spend hours contemplating the dynamics of a homosexual relationship attempting to classify the individuals as something they can relate with.

The tone of the text suffers slight changes as the text develops. The first three quarters of the piece take on a humorous approach to the "water problem" in Normandy: they do not warn you when the latter is being shut off. Sedaris makes the reader at least chuckle as he describes his ways around it: "a saucepan of chicken broth will do for shaving", and "a lesser champagne" can be poured into the toilet tank. Unfortunately (or fortunately, for humor's sake), finding a way around making coffee proves to be a harder task: "a sort of Catch-22, as in order to think straight I needed caffeine, and in order to make that happen I needed to think straight."

But to humor us with the water problem is far from being the purpose of the piece. In order to ease into the ultimate point he wants to make, Sedaris tells a story about "a couple he once met." At this point it is interesting to note his assumption of a specific audience: the reader must be liberal enough not to be offended by Sedaris' blatant allusions to smoking weed, nor to the ubitquitous references to his own homosexuality (as retrograde as it sounds, admittedly not everyone is okay with gays).

We get a feel for the type of humor the story employs once Sedaris mentions what his first priority when visiting his hometown of Raleigh, North Carolina is: to "get high and stay that way." It is in this quest for marijuana that he, together with his brother Paul, meet the dealer "Little Mike" and Beth (the couple originally alluded to). Dysfunctional in all possible ways, the couple subjects Sedaris to a series of absurd witnessings, such as hearing a remote control being casually referred to as "Nigger." When Beth finds out Sedaris is gay, however, she finally takes on an interest in him and asks the question that wraps the entire story with his argument:
" 'So this boyfriend,' she said. 'Let me ask, which one of you is the woman?' ” ..

With the end of this story, Sedaris takes on a different tone and becomes a more serious narrator, having concluded the background information he wanted his audience to have. He uses the woman's genuine (but perhaps exceedingly blunt) question to make the more broader statement that people in general "seem obsessed with the idea of roles, both in bed and out of it." Indeed, it need not be an uneducated drug dealer's wife to have this doubt. Her query represents that of an entire population of individuals who seem to rely on this simplistic view of people and relationships in order to organize the world in their own heads. For homosexual relationships, learning "who cries harder when the cat dies" or "which one spends the most time in the bathroom" seems to (erroneously) suffice many people who attempt to understand the relationship dynamics.

A matter of definition: what makes me stupid?

Based on the Youtube video that can be found on: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fJuNgBkloFE&eurl=http%3A%2F%2Fcrazy%2Espray%2Ese%2Fshowframed%2Easpx%3Fid%3D4ef658b5%2D77b5%2D48c9%2D9567%2D8e330f42af62%26url%3Dhttp%3A%2F%2Fwww%2Eyoutube%2Ecom%2Fv%2FfJuNgBklo>



Although this video needs to be taken in very skeptically, it undeniably provides ground for substantial discussion. Unfortunately, it remains virtually anonymous.

The argument this collection of street interviews is essentially making is the disseminated ignorance of Americans nationwide, not only about the rest of the world but about their own history and country as well.

Posting a video on Youtube, especially one compiled of simple short interviews as this one, makes the target audience essentially anyone with an Internet access. Yet, it should be said that the humor employed demands a particular audience and context. The context is the world post September 11, post Invasion of Iraq, and the United States post- George W Bush . The War in Iraq contributed to an increasingly unpopular and critical view of America worldwide. Further, the president, notorious for his unitelligent remarks, inevitably personified an image for America: that of being utterly oblivious to the world around them and, worse even, of being so deliberately, and too bluntly to be forgiven. As to the audience, if the author wishes to persuade anyone, this someone will have to overlook many fallacies of argument, and thus this video is targeted for people who already share this image of Americans, and who thus need not to be convinced but simply humored.

One of the basic assumptions the author makes throughout the video is that whoever is watching it knows the answer to all the questions the interviewer is asking. That is necessary because otherwise, the viewer will cease to find it funny and feel insulted and possibly embarrassed for belonging to the same category of supposedly ignorant people the movie is making fun of.

The video is substantially composed of humour that appeals to Superiority: we find the interviews funny and laugh at those people because it is good for our self esteem: we deem them ignorant and stupid, and perhaps without noticing, suddenly feel a little smarter.

The argument in the video holds innumerous fallacies and is by no means successful in its persuasion. The sample the interviewer chose to represent America is what most comes out to me. It is not too hard to notice the prominent Southern accent of the majority of the people. Picking a random sample in New York or Philadelphia, say, will vary drastically from a sample chosen in a small southern town, where people are notoriously conservative and where the culture is traditionally "turned inwards". If the sample is manipulated rather than picked arbitrarily, the entire argument loses its ground.

Another fallacy to consider is the fact that many of the questions asked don't necessarily reflect ignorance, let alone irgnorance particular to the United States. Not knowing who Kofi Annan or Tony Blair are is much more common than one might be conforted to think. Insinuating Americans are dumb because they didn't answer "United States" when demanded about a country that began with the letter U is also fallacious. The reasoning doesn't follow! The very way the question was phrased compelled people to think about faraway countries, so that their mind wasn't "set" to consider their homeland in the first place. That certainly does not make them dumb or ignorant. It is ultimately a matter of defining those terms.

On the other hand, not knowing what a Mosque is, or what is the religion in Israel, or even more shockingly, being oblivious to whether America even fought in the Vietnam War is a bit more unforgivable. The latter, for a most trivial reason: it is a fact pertaining to their own history, and one that did not happen so long ago. But nonetheless, we know not if those people even went to High School- and if that was not the case than we cannot compare what they know to what we know - there is no fair basis for the comparison. As to what a mosque is, and to the religion in Israel, not to know them translates, to me, in a degree of alienation too high to be excusable. After all, the media has been unceasingly spotlighting the Middle East for the last few years.

Let's all engage in a Patriotic Duty

Written on: Bill Maher's Editorial "Mocking Bush is my patriotic duty," found at http://www.salon.com/opinion/feature/2006/09/08/maher/ .


In this humorous editorial, Bill Maher argues that incessantly mocking and criticizing the President isn’t anti-nationalistic, as many would say. Quite on the contrary, it is his (and should be any American’s) patriotic duty!

President Bush’s foreign policy has generated such a negative and hostile attitude towards America worldwide, that by letting people out there know that not all Americans agree with the government’s current war efforts and that many of us are – indeed!— embarrassed by his notoriously stupid remarks, Maher is helping to attenuate the animosity towards our nation, so prominent since the invasion of Iraq. It might even make people sympathize with us, because they will realize that we, too, are victims of a nonsensical president.

Maher certainly makes use of rhetoric to convince his readers. Because he is not dealing with something that can be factually proven (i.e., it would be quite hard to objectively account for the exact effect that mocking the President has on foreigner’s perception of the country), his argument is based on what is probable and contingent— one’s view on the subject will essentially depend on how well Maher can construct his argument.

Emotional persuasion in this editorial is perhaps the most prominent among the three types. After all, humor is ever-present in his paragraphs, embedded in every small claim. Directed at the general American public, Maher connects with his audience by using a very particular sense of humor that is nonetheless common to both him and the audience. For example, he compares Bush to leg warmers and ‘Hootie and the Blowfish’ (for being “really popular for a few years and then almost overnight becom[ing] completely embarrassing”). The audience knows what he is alluding to and understands the joke: the author has formed a common ground with them. This is especially so because these allusions are so particular and non-universal. Maher assumes, for instance, that he shares with the reader a set of accepted truths (e.g.,that leg warmers are embarrassing, but were once admittedly fashionable).

And why is a common ground something important to establish? Well, for starters, it engages people in the writing, as if signaling that the article is directed to them. Further, it creates empathy between the audience and the author, making the former more likely to trust the latter’s claim. Finally, because the ability to make people laugh is, essentially, a gift, employing (good) humor in a piece of writing often generates admiration towards the writer, which potentially could make his claims more credible.

Maher makes use of analogies to prove a few of his points. In arguing that the invasion of Iraq benefits none of the parties involved and is not a solution to either country’s problems, he writes, “OK, my boot is in your ass, but I can't get it out, so I'm not happy, and it's in you, so you're not happy -- there's no exit strategy.” In another instance, he retorts Bush’s notorious belief that anyone who doesn’t support the war is supporting the terrorists by comparing the President to an exterminator who believes that anyone offering an alternate way to kill the vermin is instantly “for the rats”. These analogies are a useful tool because they provide a very visual imagery. And besides, they're awfully funny.