I'm nominating this one over my own protest, because it's too funny not to:

Parents Upset After School Yearbook Lists George W. Bush, Dick Cheney as Worst People of All Time

Just saw the Republican debate on CNN. I wouldn't think much of this only once, but Cornell Belcher was apparently very unhappy that the candidates were so civil to each other. So upset in fact, that he said four times in the space of 2 minutes of comments that the candidates needed to cut each other and make them bleed. One time, I thought nothing, twice I raised an eyebrow, but four times with that same metaphor in 2 minutes, and I start to think that this guy is a little too obsessed with causing bodily injury to people. Since it's undeniably worse than the two parties using bullseyes in campaign ads, it deserves a nomination.

This morning CBS was running some sort of town hall meeting with a handful of politicians responding to questions. Not clear on the purpose but I did hear one interesting comment from the Governor of South Carolina in my few minutes of listening:

"Businesses are hiring because the unemployment rate is dropping."

Hmmm. So if we classify people as "not in the labor market" which reduces unemployment we will increase hiring?

Sounds like he phrased it badly, and meant to say "Businesses MUST be hiring, because the unemployment rate is falling". In that case, he simply forgot to take the people falling off the rolls into account.

That struck me as a possibility as well so I went looking for the video and found a transcript.

From the transcript:



So I appear to have misheard the conversation.

She attributes the upturn in the local economy to lower unemployment. That seems reasonable--more people working, more money to spend.

The video is here and I found the transcript here.

Clearly the phrase "And the reason it's going up is because unemployment's down for the fourth time in the row" is fallacy of confusion of cause and effect. The rest of the passage is not well said either.

In Logic Class, we called that the Fallacy of False Causation. But there's nothing fallacious about claiming that lower unemployment is what's boosting the economy. It's a reasonable enough view, it's just not a proof, but the whole thing is so casually stated that it's not clear if he's claiming a proof, making a theory, or talking out of his hat.

The fallacy only results when we claim a proof along the lines "B happened after A, therefore A must have caused B". The example we had in Logic Class was the medicine man saying "Every time I beat my drum during an eclipse, the sun comes back, so the drum must have caused it." But there's nothing fallacious in thinking that the drum might have caused it. Fallacies are about faulty proofs, not faulty beliefs.

Cause and Effect is different. It is where you mean to have things the other way around: he means to say that unemployment is down and therefore the economy is better (evidence before event) rather than saying the economy is better because the unemployment is down (event before evidence). I think False Causation is also propter hoc fallacy.

That's my two cents, anyway.

Here's a good one, where Joe Nocera at the once-great New Zork Times has a tantrum that has to be seen to be believed over the very idea of getting the budget under control, tacitly taking the view that we can overspend forever with no consequences, and labeling anyone who wants to get the budget under control as jihadists and terrorists. (The joke is that Joe doesn't even consider terrorists to be terrorists, so what kind of insult is that coming from him?)


Tea Party's War on America


This one's so over the top that it calls for a new thread, devoted to the most outrageously hateful rants made specifically in the name of demanding somebody's cash. I've already got a name for it...

German keyboard layout?

Btw (you will absolutely kill me for this one) but this article appeared to be the first reasonable statement about the problem I've read from a US citizen so far. Maybe the comparison with terrorism is a bad choice, but the idea points to the right direction in my opinion.

Now just keep in mind that I'm a f#@$ing European...

I just hope for the world economy that there'll be a US president soon again who can claim a balanced budget (or whatever this is expressed in English). As far as I remember, Clinton was the last lucky one who could do so.