Via erstwhile debate compatriot turned awesome academic Steve Maloney, I discover the “weak man” argument, which actually seems far more prevalent than the better-known straw man. Making a straw-man argument, of course, involves misrepresenting a position opposed to your own so that you can beat up on it easily. The Internet makes it somewhat harder to do this credibly because people expect that you actually link to an instance of the argument you’re attributing to your opponents. With a “weak man,” you don’t actually fabricate a position, but rather pick the weakest of the arguments actually offered up by people on the other side and treat it as the best or only one they have. As Steve notes, this is hardly illegitimate all the time, because sometimes the weaker argument is actually the prevalent one. Maybe the best arguments for Christianity are offered up by Thomas Aquinas or St. Augustine, but I doubt there are very many people who are believers because they read On Christian Doctrine. Probably this will be the case with some frequency, if only because the less complex or sophisticated an argument is, the easier it is for lots of people to be familiar with it. On any topic of interest, a three-sentence argument is unlikely to be very good, but it’s a lot more likely to spread.

“Weak man” arguments also seem much easier to make in good faith. If you’re having a friendly debate, and someone offers up three arguments, and one of them has glaring problems, then of course that’s the one you jump on first. But it also meshes with an unfortunate psychological bias that I’m finding more and more grating lately: It seems that most people genuinely have no idea what people with very different views actually think. A shocking number of folks on the left seem to be under the impression that apparently well-educated libertarians have somehow never encountered the idea of a “collective action problem” or “imperfect information.” And in fairness, you run into libertarians who think that progressives are all just innocent of elementary microeconomics. This is one reason I’m not entirely persuaded that norms of cross-linking will keep online discussion from devolving into a series of echo chambers: There’s strong incentive to link the other side’s worst arguments. (Scroll down to that post from earlier—if you’ve got ten minutes to write, the easiest thing to do is beat up on the dumbest, most outrageous thing you heard today.)

A related pet peeve: Watch your media stream for rhetorical questions where the upshot is “but where do you draw the line?” or “then doesn’t this unsavory implication logically follow from my opponent’s position?”  In 9 of 10 cases, I’ll wager the person making that move hasn’t made any kind of serious effort to think about how a partisan of the view being critiqued might actually draw the line or resist the unsavory implication. I’m not talking about subtle, nuanced arguments that you’d encounter reading a book by someone defending the position. I mean, stuff any ordinary person ought to come up with immediately if they sincerely ask themselves “what does a sane defense of this view look like?” One reason we don’t do this is the tendency to make ideology and identity. So “pro-life,” “environmentalist,” “conservative,” “foreign policy realist,” stop being “positions I might hold if I were convinced of such-and-such” but inscrutably different types of human being, to be studied with the tools of anthropology or pathology if at all.

Addendum: The debate over Sotomayor, incidentally, is a good example of why “weak manning” isn’t necessarily fallacious or disingenuous. There were some thoughtful critiques of her approach to judging getting made by some of the conservative lawbloggers, but they didn’t have a great deal of currency.  What you did see people repeating over and over again was profoundly confused nonsense about how Sotomayor had a “60 percent reversal rate.”  So you had people patiently (and then not-so-patiently) explaining, for the millionth time, that the “60 percent reversal” was based on the tiny fraction of her opinions to be reviewed by the Supreme Court, and that this was actually a below-average ratio for cases that make it before the Court. Stuff like this wasn’t the best argument anyone had against Sotomayor, but it certainly made sense that people wanted to get this kind of confusion out of the way before tackling any of the more intricate arguments.

Richard Posner is catching flak for his suggestion that copyright law be expanded to cover paraphrase in order to save journalism from fierce digital competition. Thing is, that’s arguably the current state of the law. There’s a little known “hot news” doctrine that dates from the early 20th century and gives news agencies a very brief quasi-property right in their original reporting. The idea was to deter free riding on the significant investment wire services made in news gathering—free riding that didn’t require literal copying. Follow the link above and you’ll see that the Associated Press has been expressing interest in reviving this idea and pursuing “hot news” actions more aggressively. I don’t think this is a good or workable idea, but technically that’s where we already are. The odd thing is that Posner, who surely knows this, didn’t make any mention of the hot news doctrine.

My friend Michelle Minton argues that high tech firms trying to do business in censorious China ought to take their ball and go home in principled protest against the Green Dam Youth Escort program. It seems extraordinarily unlikely that any of them will do so, which is good, because it strikes me as a pretty bad idea. There’s a good case to make for coordinated, principled pushback on particular points—and that’s a lot of what the Global Network Initiative is about—but a a robust and growing new media market, even one hobbled by the government, seems like a much more plausible accelerant of democratic change than playing chicken with the CPC. And a lot of the specific points here seem especially  off-base:

If they really want to protect their ability to make long-term profits, they should stand on principle and demand the Chinese government respect their right to be the sole decision maker on how they operate and serve their consumers. They should demand that in every country and every instance it becomes an issue.

If they had held fast to that principle from the beginning, businesses would have never entered the Chinese market. Alas, the size of that market was too tempting for the short-sighted, and in pinning their success to China they bound themselves to an irrational and inconsistent regime and enslaved their business to the whim of a dictator.

If we take this literally, nobody does any business anywhere, because no government literally lets businesses be the “sole decision maker on how they operate.”  Also, tempted as I am to pass over this with a “forget it, she’s rolling,” I think it’s hard to argue that power is sufficiently concentrated in the presidency in China to qualify it as a “dictatorship” (Mao’s fondness for the term notwithstanding).

Signatories in the letter to the Premier complain that the green dam-youth mandate will hurt their ability to profit in China. In reality, they are done for whether the mandate goes into effect or not. If it does, a black market offering customers what they want will spring up and severely undercut the profit of those companies that choose to comply with the mandate. If it is shelved, businesses might continue to make a profit in China, but not for long. It’s only a matter of time before the unpredictable government comes up with another plan that interferes with their ability to compete in the market.

So, details matter. The mandate requires that computers come with filtering software installed; it doesn’t actually require people to make use of it. Even if it did, it seems wildly implausible that you’d get a separate black market in separate filter-free devices rather than just seeing instructions (or, if necessary, uninstall software) circulate that allows people to disable the filters. At most, you might see a second-hand market in “unlocked” devices, but there’s no reason to expect this to actually involve  separate manufacturers. Unlike, say, a bag of pot, a computer is something you generally expect to have and use for a while, and which may well require some kind of extended relationship with the manufacturer, which makes black market production signally unattractive. As for the next mandate down the road, it’s always possible that any government will impose some new and more onerous regulation. But for the argument here to work, you have to believe that the government is not only likely to impose stricter requirements in the future than they’re contemplating now, but that they’ll be less deterred ten years down the line when those foreign companies are still more integrated into the economy and the daily life of Chinese Internet users. The historical trajectory generally seems to be the other way. Empirically, what we know so far is that plenty of U.S. companies are not only enjoying abundant profit in the Chinese market, but once there they form an organized lobbying constituency. Certainly it’s possible that future impositions will, despite this, be so crushing that firms’ dramatic losses will swamp their gains up to that point—it’s possible that a meteor will wipe out all the foreign-owned factories in China too—but I don’t see why this should be considered likely.  If anything, a more heavily regulated market should be more attractive to incumbents, because it’s less likely that your product or business model will be rendered obsolete by some spry innovator, which is probably a more pressing danger for many firms than anything the government is doing.

I was expecting to have turned on Barack Obama more strongly by now. I knew for the first few weeks—perhaps even a couple months—I’d just be reveling in the thought that George Bush was no longer president. But soon enough, I felt sure, I’d be attacking Obama almost as vigorously for a totally different set of awful policies—not necessarily because he’d be as bad on net as Bush, but because he’d be setting the agenda. By all rights, it should’ve happened long ago. I expected not to care much for his positions on economic issues, but I hadn’t anticipated the sheer size of the spending and debt levels we’d be staring down. Perhaps more importantly given my own idiosyncratic concerns, he hasn’t been all that much better than Bush in some of the places where I really was hoping we might see dramatic improvement—state secrets, detention policy, gay rights. Many have remarked on the number of legal briefs coming out of the Obama DOJ, on a range of issues, that you’d be hard pressed to distinguish from his predecessor’s. I’m not happy about any of this, yet I don’t find myself thinking and writing about it daily. Looking at what I’ve written both here and at The Economist since January, there are plenty of posts defending the administration to some extent or another, and many fewer directly attacking. Is this proof of the vaunted hypnotic power of The One?

Could be. But here’s what I think is actually happening. I pull up my feed reader in the morning and get the political news of the day as seen through the prism of two-party political conflict. These fall into two central categories. First, there are issues where Obama is only marginally more sane than Bush, but conservatives are outraged that lip service is being paid to sanity. Second, there are issues where Democrats are grinding along with some well-intentioned but probably harmful plan, and the Republican response is shrill, dishonest, offensive, and—if those fail—flat out psychotic. The latter end up grabbing my attention and provoking me to respond.

Now, I realize this is somewhat irrational. Per Jane’s Law, conservatives are angry because they’re irrelevant, and it’s hard to justify spending more time writing about their impotent rage than the actions of the people running the country. Moreover, this is the first step toward the sort of tribal thinking that our two-party system uses to cement coalitions that don’t make any intrinsic sense. There’s no a priori reason that someone’s position on the morality of abortion or the desirability of single-payer health care ought to correlate with their assessment of the threat of anthropogenic global warming—unless it’s that there’s a correct set of positions that the wise and good will converge on, while the stupid and wicked are either duped or malicious enough to get it uniformly wrong. (I shouldn’t caricature too much here: there are plenty of moderately prevalent views that you have to be a little dumb to hold, but they don’t necessarily track any partisan split.) Sooner or later, discrete issues blur into the territory of opposing teams. So while I know I won’t be able to entirely restrain myself, I’m going to make a conscious effort to pay attention to actual policy developments rather than the daily rage against the dying of the right.

Matt Continetti finds Sarah Palin quoting Plato, but notes in passing that the line is “perhaps apocryphal”:

We like to have other people participate in these activities with us because, as Plato said, “You learn more about a person in an hour of play than in a year of conversation.”

It’s been a while since I read the dialogues, and I couldn’t swear with certainty I’ve read every one, but that sure doesn’t ring any bells—and, more to the point, doesn’t really sound like the kind of thing Plato would say. The guy wrote dialogues, after all. A quick Google shows it cropping up on quotation pages, but never actually soured to a text, which makes me suspicious. Anyone?

In case anyone’s interested, I’m joining a bunch of other mostly-political blogger friends who are reading (and writing about) David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest this summer over at A Supposedly Fun Blog.

I’ve already written about this at some length, but I see that one of the bogus charges against prospective OIRA director Cass Sunstein is actually holding up his confirmation:

Sen. Saxby Chambliss (R-Ga.) has blocked President Obama’s candidate for regulation czar, Harvard law professor Cass Sunstein, because Sunstein has argued that animals should have the right to sue humans in court. [...]

But Chambliss worries that Sunstein’s innovative legal views may someday lead to a farmer having to defend himself in court against a lawsuit filed on behalf of his chickens or pigs.

Chambliss told The Hill that he has blocked Sunstein’s nomination because the law professor “has said that animals ought to have the right to sue folks.”

Once again, this is profoundly bogus. First, while it sounds insane when you frame it as the idea that “animals ought to have the right to sue folks,” what Sunstein has actually proposed is actually a pretty tepid reform. The idea is this: We already have animal cruelty laws in most states, but it falls to the discretion of government prosecutors when to actually pursue them. Sunstein proposes that people concerned about the mistreatment of animals should be able to bring civil suits seeking the enforcement of those existing statutes, with liability for attorney’s fees as a deterrent against frivolous litigation.

Now, this seems reasonable enough to me, but maybe you think it’s a terrible idea. Well, fortunately or unfortunately, it doesn’t matter because the director of OIRA has no power to make this happen. Weirdly The Hill fails to point this out, conveying Chambliss’ “worries” without contradiction, and later describing the position as one with “sweeping authority” over new regulation. That’s true, but misleading: The authority is the largely negative power to block regulation, or to resolve conflicts between agencies with overlapping jurisdiction. Sunstein can’t actually impose regulations of his own—and he certainly wouldn’t have any ability to create new classes of legal standing.

Now, Chambliss has to know all this, so I think we can safely assume that this animal rights stuff is largely pretextual—an excuse for the senator to grandstand a bit, slow things down in the upper chamber, and maybe get a bargaining chip with which to extract some minor concession on another issue. That’s all in the game, I suppose, but I wish the handful of outlets reporting on this would make clear that’s what’s going on.

Yglesias has a good point on the proposed French burqa ban:

[T]his sort of ban seems extremely unlikely to actually help anyone who’s genuinely in need of help. A woman whose husband and/or other male relations have enough power over her to force her into a burqa against her will is only going to be forced by those same men further underground by this sort of rule. The only kind of person who would be genuinely unveiled by this kind of legal measure would be someone with enough autonomy to be in a position to choose compliance with the law over compliance with tradition.

That reminds me that here, as with most forms of paternalistic legislation, there’s that tricky question of penalties. If the premise is that women who wear the burqa are being robbed of their agency and dignity—and that even those who protest that they wish to wear it are victims false consciousness—how is the ban supposed to be enforced? By fining or detaining or otherwise harassing the very women who, on this theory, are the most oppressed? By barring them access to public places, government buildings, maybe even courts and police stations? I suppose you could direct the penalties toward their male relations, but that hardly seems like a good way to reinforce the concept of the equal agency of women.  The only way this seems to actually work—and by “work” I mean “severely hamper religious freedom without still further harmful consequences”—is if it’s like smoking bans, where you see rapid norm changes and widespread compliance with very limited need for actual sanctions. Except there’s very little historical reason to expect it to go that way. After all, one of the reasons liberal democracies often carve out a special protected space for religous practice—and try to avoid burdening it even with facially neutral laws—is that serious believers often won’t comply even in the face of sever sanctions, and it’s bad for the legitimacy and stability of the secular state to set up an irreconcilable tension between civic and religious obligations. As a little thought experiment, picture the streets of the banlieues after the uploading of the first YouTube clip showing some overzealous official roughly unveiling a woman in violation of the ban.

So, obviously it’s never a good sign for democracy when the president is bustled out of the country under military guard. But I’m nevertheless a bit perplexed about the univocal condemnation—and simliarly one-sided coverage—of the  ouster of Honduran president Manuel Zelaya. Without pretending to any expertise on the Honduran political scene, here’s what I’ve gathered to be the context: Zelaya was pushing for a national referendum on whether he should be able to seek reelection, though the constitution limits him to a single term due to end in January. The country’s Supreme Court declared this move illegal, and the congress recently passed legislation similarly barring any such plebiscite, but Zelaya was apparently undissauded. This weekend, under an order from the Supreme Court, the military spirited Zelaya off to Costa Rica. The line of succession was observed, and the president of the congress, a member of Zelaya’s own party, ascended to the presidency with the confirmation of the legislature.

Grant that this is a mess either way, that this is hardly an outcome that a liberal democrat should feel comfortable with, and that there are almost certainly aspects of this that I’m missing. Is it actually obvious that Zelaya is on the side of “democracy” here?  It sounds like he’s the one trying to circumvent the law to extend his own power, and that his removal had the backing of the other legitimate branches of government. That’s not to say I think the United States ought to support the coup—again, I don’t really understand the details of the situation, and I don’t know that it would be our affair in any case—but since we’ve been hearing a lot recently about the virtues of remaining netural on the internal power struggles of sovereign nations, a principle I think is generally a sound one, I’d think it behooves us to follow the same policy here.