Overwhelmed by the sheer number of fallacies, I thought I’d present just a few common ones. I recommend going to those sites for more types and examples. Remember, the majority of politicians these days are lawyers and lawyers are taught to debate. They may commit any number of logical fallacies and if the opponent in the debate does not point it out, it stands. As Logical Fallacies points out:

Fallacious reasoning keeps us from knowing the truth, and the inability to think critically makes us vulnerable to manipulation by those skilled in the art of rhetoric.

We can lay aside the more formal deductive reasoning errors for the more interesting informal fallacies because we hear a lot of that in political discourse. There are three general types: fallacies of relevance, ambiguity, and presumption. I’ll give some examples of relevance.

One common fallacy of relevance is the ad hominum attack: attacking the person instead of the argument. The perfect example of this is the left attacking Sarah Palin personally because rather than her beliefs. Alinsky takes this further in advocating making fun of someone so that nothing that person says will be believed. They also try this with Glenn Beck and with the Tea Party movement in general. Once you know the game, it’s over: the more they attack someone, the more right that person must be.

Another is the bandwagon fallacy. The mere fact that an idea (or person) suddenly attracts adherents is given as a reason for us to join in with the trend and become adherents of the idea ourselves. Barack Obama’s cult of personality worked in this way. Fueled by social networking tools such as Facebook, it became “cool” to support him. Why? Because your friends did. His real persona and past were–and are–carefully hidden. But as he began to have a track record in public office, his popularity dropped faster than any previous president.

There are many irrelevant appeals as well. An appeal to authority is an argument from the fact that a person judged to be an authority affirms a proposition to the claim that the proposition is true. Since we assume our presidents to be truthful, we expect that when Barack Obama says that the Statue of Liberty was purchased by Americans donating small amounts of money, we assume it to be true. We would be wrong.

An appeal to fear is a specific type of appeal to emotion–an irrelevant appeal sometimes classed as a red herring. This is as much a debating tactic to distract the opponent (or the listener) as it is a fallacy of logic. In the appeal to fear, an argument is made by increasing fear and prejudice towards the opposing side. Examples of this include the classic Democrat strategy of telling the elderly that if they vote for Republicans, they will lose their Social Security or telling legal immigrants that they will be deported if the Republicans win. The left is masterful at playing on emotions. Conservatives are not exempt from this tactic either.

How do you avoid falling into logical traps? It can be challenging. Read, study, listen carefully. Look for the traps and apply what you know to be true. With a good internal moral compass you cannot be led astray.

I’ll bet that unless you are a Service Academy grad and had to memorize all four verses you probably didn’t even know there was more than one. You can find a the lyrics here.

Did you know that the music is the tune of a British drinking song? Other interesting trivia about the song can be found here.

These days the American people are getting serious about holding their elected officials accountable: some officials and parties talk about accountability–here’s an open forum for people to practice it. The site links to he official D38 school board site as well as other Colorado state education organizations. It is very new so I hope to see it grow in the future.

SEIU Rallies High School kids

Notice the astroturf SEIU signs. “We work for SEIU, America” is a good reading of the sign on the right. The “It Stops in Arizona” sign on the left is somewhat humorous: obviously the Arizona state law does stop there but lawyers tell me it is very closely modeled after the federal law that isn’t being enforced. Colorado has a similar state law that isn’t being enforced.

The rally got a lot of press coverage. Looks a lot smaller than any tea party rally I’ve seen:

Hey, it’s better than going to school and free t-shirts, too:

Really engaged in the protest, eh? Well, at least they’re having a good time. I guess their moms weren’t there to pick up after them. Many thanks to mom Laurie Bratten who was there to take the pictures.

I don’t think even the Denver Public Schools Superintendent, Tom Boasberg, was there. Tom is pictured at right in an official photo from the DPS website. I’m sure the photo, like the protest, wasn’t staged and Tom is just popular with the pre-teen set.

He did contribute a policy statement to the effect that DPS employees wouldn’t be allowed to travel to Arizona on official business as a result of this law. I wonder what official business takes DPS employees to Arizona?

I didn’t hear a statement about giving students a skip day.

Was there a statement about the reform of teacher tenure now in the State Senate (SB-191) ?

I guess those educational issues aren’t as important as the party’s cause of the week. In a centralized party like the DNC (Democratic National Committee) or the CPSU (Communist Party Soviet Union) all the direction is from the top and all organs of the party are expected to support the party’s policy agenda.

In case Mr. Boasberg hasn’t looked in the mirror lately, he looks to me just like another liberal white guy trying to provide his bona fides by calling other people racists. Maybe he hopes to continue following in Michael Bennet’s footsteps. I don’t know. I suspect he’s just what Lenin called a “useful idiot.”

The training is billed as a post-party summit.  The point is the same one I and others have been making as well: both parties have failed us. It is time to take back the country by supporting candidates from whatever party who hold our values of Constitutionally limited government, fiscal responsibility, and free market capitalism. American Majority is a good name for them because poll after poll shows that the vast majority of Americans hold those beliefs. They have a cool logo featuring a red and blue bison: what animal better to symbolize this thundering movement?

I won’t recount all the training available or where it is going to be given; you can find that at their website. They have a great lineup of conservative speakers, too.

It is going to take me another week just to unpack and absorb all the information I got this weekend. Ned Ryun says they are coming back to Colorado again this summer and I encourage anyone serious about taking this country back from the failed political class to attend. I’ll announce it here and you can bet I will be at the training, too!

In the essay I’m reading now he describes how Spanish thinkers of the School of Salamanca argued for the personal and property rights of American Indians and how Pope Innocent IV argued in 1250 for those rights for non-Christians in connection with the Crusades.

Have your children been taught in school about the enslavement of native Americans by the Spanish or about those Spanish who advocated for their rights?  Have you heard Islamic scholars advocate for the rights of “infidels” the way the pope advocated for theirs?

We are losing our Western culture and history because we don’t know it. It is being replaced with collectivist thought and manufactured “rights.”  But as the Founders knew,

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

Our rights are God-given. Without God there are no unalienable rights–only rights granted or taken away by the state. Without God there are no unalienable rights–just raw power.

In hoc signo vinces.

In education, it’s the Obama praise songs, the fabricated Obama childhood stories, the Earth Day environmentalist agenda–the list goes on and on.  When I heard Bill Ayers was a professor of English, alarms bells went off.  English departments are hotbeds of radicalism.

You’ve likely also heard about the National Endowment for the Arts phone call, encouraging artists to use their talents to advance the cause of socialist consciousness.  Anyone remember “socialist realism” art?

Hollywood is getting into the act as well.  We record several TV series and in the last week I’ve seen four series inject the message of a broken health care system destroying people’s lives. To recap briefly:

• In CSI:NY, a dying cancer patient wreaks revenge on the nurse, doctor and evil hospital CEO–the hospital is owned by a health insurance company–for cutting off his cancer treatment because his medical benefits have run out.  Please! Where in America would this really happen? Medicare, state mandates or the hospital itself would step in and pay.  Gary Sinise’s character doesn’t give the criminal any slack but the whole premise is flawed.
• In Criminal Minds, a man goes on a killing spree when his prescription runs out and the evil pharmacist won’t give him more.
• On the first episode of SyFi’s new Stargate:Universe series, a main character is coerced into cooperating with the government because his mother is sick and he doesn’t have a job or–you guessed it–health insurance.  By agreeing to work for the government, they in turn agree to take care of his mother.  Although the lack of health insurance puts him into this predicament in the first place, we learn government help comes with a cost.
• The best is Timothy Hutton’s Leverage.  A moonlighting cop driving an armored car is shot during a robbery.  Never mind he fails to follow protocol and gets out of the truck: the result is that he is put on unpaid suspension from the force and he won’t be able to pay his medical bills because the evil insurance company won’t settle the claim for a very long time. (To be clear, it’s a regular insurance company insuring the jewels stolen, but all insurance companies are evil after all.)  For good measure, the cop also says that he was alone in the vehicle because the evil capitalist armored car company only uses one driver to save cost!  But wait! There’s more.  When Hutton’s Robin Hood teams succeeds in scamming the thieves and the claim is settled, they manage to “find” a bag of money to hand to the cop.

Farfetched?  Yes, but that’s precisely the point.  No matter what your profession, you’ve got to do your bit and even create an opportunity to push your socialist agenda.

Conservatives beware: just because you may seem a little paranoid these days, it doesn’t mean they’re not out to fundamentally transform America into their socialist utopia.

The reactions are interesting: Colorado Democratic party chair Pat Waak immediately attributes it to conservative opposition to healthcare reforms. Look at the image and you might agree:

But truth is often stranger than fiction.

It appears that Maurice Schwenkler, one of the two vandals who was caught, was employed by the “Colorado Citizens’ Coalition” last fall–a front group sponsored by none other than SEIU.  The left uses front groups to hide affiliations and appear bigger than they really are.

But wait–There’s more!  This guy apparently works for an organizati0n to the left of Mikhail Bakunin–one of the most radical left Marxists you’ve never heard of.  The Peoples Press Collective has some fascinating details on this whole thing.

So it’s really not an “inside job” designed to make the opposition look bad–although that in itself is another leftist tactic.  It illustrates a point I’ve made on Twitter: the administration is between a rock and hard place on healthcare reform.  Most of the country, now alerted to what’s really in the plans, are vocally opposed.  Yet the far left strongly opposes compromise because socialized medicine is a huge step toward a socialist takeover of the entire country.

Two lessons here:

First, the best thing we can do now is to keep up the pressure.  No compromise.  No further government involvement in healthcare.  Tort reform, insurance portability: things that will free the free market to work cost-effectively while retaining control where it belongs: with the individual.

Second, this whole story unraveled less than twelve hours from when it happened.  Credit goes to the Denver Police for catching one of the vandals in the act, certainly.  Equally impressive is the power of the new media to learn the truth and spread the word almost instantly.  I learned all I wrote above within about 10 minutes.

The old media is dead and with it their ability to manipulate our access to information.  If we use the new media well, another 2008 is impossible.

Is it 2010 yet?

At this point in our country’s history it is vitally important for every citizen to understand what kind of political animal he or she is.

The answers to the following four questions will give you an idea of where you stand.  Ask yourself, ask your elected officials and ask those you think you might want to vote for where they stand.

1. Do you believe that your rights are given to you by God or by nature, because you are a unique human being? Or do you believe that your rights are given to you as a member of a group: a collective, as in the country of your citizenship?

If the former, you are in agreement with the Founders and a conservative (classic liberal) or libertarian; if the latter, you are either a progressive, a modern liberal, a socialist, or a statist.

2. Do you believe in direct democracy: that every person should–even must–have a voice in the government and that the government must be directly responsive to the will of the majority?  Or do you believe that the majority can act too hastily under the influence of demagogues and produce tyranny?

If the former, you are a progressive; if the latter you agree with the founders that there is a tyranny of the majority which needs to be moderated with checks & balances in government.

3. Do you believe that history moves in a particular direction–whether linear or cyclical–and that the condition of mankind generally is constantly improving?   Or do you believe that history repeats itself and that while we can learn from history and despite the constantly improving condition of mankind, human nature itself does not change?

If the former you are a progressive–perhaps an idealist; if the latter, a conservative.

4. Do believe that government is best which governs least and that government is subject to the will of the people? Or do you think that government is the answer and that government can and should be used to shape society?

Again, if the former, you are conservative or libertarian; if the latter you tend towards statism in all of its forms (communism, fascism, democratic socialism)

Michelle Morin (@mom4freedom) showed us how to effectively use this tool for instant communications.  I thought of Twitter as a one-way outgoing broadcast medium.   How useful could that be?  The answer is, combined with a few organizing applications it is an amazing networking tool akin to instant messaging or texting–but better because of the broadcast feature.

But don’t take my word for it: look at Michelle’s  Twitter Notes.  If you’re in the Colorado Springs  area, I would be happy to arrange a demo for your group.