This appearance was yesterday, House Whip Scalise was shot today. You will hear why Leftists want to shoot conservatives and Republicans — small government, low taxes, power to the people. Socialism (the shooters political position) wants the opposite of these.
Author: Papa Giorgio
Mollie Hemingway Discusses #NeverTrumpers and James Comey
Dennis Prager interviews Federalist contributor, Mollie Hemingway. She discusses her life in a liberal neighborhood, the conservatives who hate Trump, and their hypocrisy in not acknowledge all the good Trump has thus far achieved. Here is her article:
➤ “James Comey Has A Long History Of Questionable Obstruction Cases“
Molly’s articles can be found HERE.
We Call Them Snowflakes, They Call Us NAZIs
That sums up the rhetoric of the Left/Right distinction in dialogue. Two segments from Larry Elder, the “Prince of Pico-Union,” about the rhetoric of the Left when they say — “yes, the tone in politics is out of control… BOTH sides are to blame.” Not. In “Sage” fashion Larry points out the gap in civil dialogue. (See this earlier upload as well.) The “thumbnail” art piece is Norman Rockwell’s Saturday Evening Post cover art entitled, “Breakfast Table Political Argument,” or, “Dewey Vs Truman.”
Trump Supporter Smashes Liberals/Identity Politics
Language Warning
Shame, Shame On The New York Times
David French over at the NATIONAL REVIEW has an excellent article on this topic, and is the one Prager is reading from:
The New York Times published its editorial in response to yesterday’s vicious, violent, and explicitly political attack on Congressional Republicans — an attack that wounded four and left Representative Steve Scalise in critical condition in a Washington-area hospital — and it is abhorrent. It is extraordinarily cruel, vicious, and — above all — dishonest. The editorial doesn’t just twist the truth to advance the board’s preferred narratives; it may even be libelous, a term I choose carefully.
Yesterday’s shooter, James Hodgkinson, left little doubt as to his political leanings and his political motivations. He was a vocal Bernie Sanders supporter, belonged to Facebook groups with names such as “Terminate the Republican Party” and “The Road to Hell is paved with Republicans,” and he was constantly sharing angry anti-GOP messages and memes. Before opening fire, he reportedly asked whether the players on the baseball field were Democrats or Republicans. In other words, all available signs point to an act of lone-wolf progressive political terror.
How does the Times deal with this evil act? The editorial begins innocently enough, describing the shooting and even forthrightly outlining Hodgkinson’s politics. But then, the board says this — and it’s worth quoting at length:
Was this attack evidence of how vicious American politics has become? Probably. In 2011, when Jared Lee Loughner opened fire in a supermarket parking lot, grievously wounding Representative Gabby Giffords and killing six people, including a 9-year-old girl, the link to political incitement was clear. Before the shooting, Sarah Palin’s political action committee circulated a map of targeted electoral districts that put Ms. Giffords and 19 other Democrats under stylized cross hairs.
Conservatives and right-wing media were quick on Wednesday to demand forceful condemnation of hate speech and crimes by anti-Trump liberals. They’re right. Though there’s no sign of incitement as direct as in the Giffords attack, liberals should of course hold themselves to the same standard of decency that they ask of the right. (Emphasis added.)
Let’s be blunt. In its zeal to create moral equivalencies and maintain a particular narrative about the past, the Times flat-out lied. There is simply no “link to political incitement” in Loughner’s murderous acts. The man was a paranoid schizophrenic who first got angry at Gabby Giffords years before Palin published her map….
Robert Mueller Needs to Disqualify Himself from Special Counsel
Gregg Jarrett: If you look at the special counsel statute it says you cannot serve as special counsel if you have a personal relationship with someone who is central to the case. If this Washington Post story is true, it’s now Trump against Comey. Comey is now the star witness, the key witness against Trump. Well, guess what? Comey and Mueller are longtime close personal friends, partners, allies. They were joined at the hip at the DOJ and FBI. It’s a mentor-protege relationship. How is this fair to Donald Trump because Mueller is now going to decide whether to believe his good friend or the man who fired his good friend…This is the kind of stuff over which lawyers get disbarred. (GATEWAY PUNDIT)
#FakeNews: The New York Times Connects Scalise to Palin
What was unbelievable is that the NEW YORK TIMES tried to connect this to Gabby Gifford’s in some comparative manner!
The New York Times corrected an editorial on the GOP baseball shooting Thursday that baselessly accused Sarah Palin of inciting the 2011 shooting of Gabby Giffords.
“An earlier version of this editorial incorrectly stated that a link existed between political incitement and the 2011 shooting of Representative Gabby Giffords,” the correction reads. “In fact, no such link was established.”
The editorial initially stated there was a “clear link” from Palin’s rhetoric to Giffords’ shooting, as a means of justifying the board’s decision not to place the same kind of blame on Democrats for the baseball shooting.
“In 2011, when Jared Lee Loughner opened fire in a supermarket parking lot, grievously wounding Representative Gabby Giffords and killing six people, including a 9-year-old girl, the link to political incitement was clear. Before the shooting, Sarah Palin’s political action committee circulated a map of targeted electoral districts that put Ms. Giffords and 19 other Democrats under stylized cross hairs,” the board wrote, later adding: “Though there’s no sign of incitement as direct as in the Giffords attack, liberals should of course hold themselves to the same standard of decency that they ask of the right.”
As The Daily Caller’s Peter Hasson pointed out: “There is no evidence to support the conspiracy theory that Loughner, a schizophrenic, was at all inspired by Palin’s electoral map.”
HOT AIR also notes that “[i]ncredibly, despite the addition of a second correction, the Times tells CNN their argument hasn’t been undercut or even weakened.” Continuing, they go for the jugular:
[….]
Not all the details are known yet about what happened in Virginia, but a sickeningly familiar pattern is emerging in the assault: The sniper, James Hodgkinson, who was killed by Capitol Police officers, was surely deranged, and his derangement had found its fuel in politics. Mr. Hodgkinson was a Bernie Sanders supporter and campaign volunteer virulently opposed to President Trump. He posted many anti-Trump messages on social media, including one in March that said “Time to Destroy Trump & Co.”
Was this attack evidence of how vicious American politics has become? Probably. In 2011, Jared Lee Loughner…
Having corrected their errors, the line about this being a “sickeningly familiar pattern” no longer makes any sense. There were only two data points in this pattern, Alexandria and Tucson. Now that Tucson does not fit the pattern (it never did but now the Times admits it) we’re left with is a “pattern” with only one data point: James Hodgkinson.
I believe the reason the Times editorial board introduced the subject of Tucson (as they misunderstood it) was to soften the blow for their progressive readers. If the Times was going to admit that a left-wing nut shot a congressman after mainlining Rachel Maddow, they wanted to at least spread the blame a bit. So in their published draft, the connection of Tucson to the right was a sure thing while the connection of Alexandria to the left was still a bit vague. Maybe, the editorial seemed to be saying, the left is now as bad as the right was six years ago.
Only, as the Times now admits, that’s not at all how it happened. There is no familiar pattern here and thus no way to spread the blame to more familiar political targets.
Why Are Bernie Bros So Angry?
Larry Elder takes on a tour de force of the Left’s proclivity to mainstream violence in political language/life. Lots of audio (and edited in video) of many of the examples that were presented in yesterdays show. I cannot count how many times conservatives (myself personally), and Republicans have been told they are going to bring the human race to extinction. Most recently in a conversation the children of the person discussing the issue and my own were mentioned as having their lives gambled with by pulling out of the Paris/Kyoto Agreement.
I also noted on my FB this:
➤ If Republicans are “worse than terrorists”… why wouldn’t Leftists shoot them [us]? Yes, the Democrats (Bernie Sanders intimated this as well as others) say we are worse than ISIS due to rejecting the idea that mankind is driving in a significant manner climate change. The shooter had many posts on climate. I mean Democrats are seriously considering jailing Republicans for denying AGW (anthropogenic global warming).
This is crazy, and Democrats need to stop it. Period.
Scalise Shooter A Radical Leftist (Eliminationist Rhetoric)
- When you do nothing but call your opponents racists, Nazis, homophobes, Islamaphobes, Uncle Toms, xenophobes, sexists, etc. as a matter of course, you have zero right to be surprised when violence is used against the same opponents by the fringe. Rhetoric like that can never relieve the shooter of ultimate responsibility, but it lays the foundation for violence like what we saw today. There is a lot of screwiness on the “right” side of politics, these days. But it has NOT become violent. — Josh Charles
A few excerpts from James Hodgkinson’s (the shooter) letters, in his own words, via TWITCHY:
“As for my loving President Obama, I say when people look at the other side, the choice is obvious. I don’t want a president who won’t even keep his money in American banks. I don’t want a president who will lower taxes on the rich and raise them on the other 99 percent.”
“These men are trying to buy our country. You know they expect something for all this money. That something is that Mitt Romney and a Republican Congress won’t raise their taxes. We all know that the rich don’t pay enough taxes.”
“If the rich paid their fair share of taxes today, we wouldn’t be in this predicament. We need to vote all Republicans out of Congress. We need to demand Congress add 10 or more brackets to the existing tax code. We need 20 brackets to $20 million, and a 60 percent top marginal rate.”
“We can get our country back if we all vote the right way.”
[….]
“Let’s vote all Republicans out of Congress, and get this country back on track. We need 10 more tax brackets for income over $1 million, $2 million, $3 million, $4 million and $10 million.”
‘These guys are cheating everyone in this country while telling us all the time that they are broke when it is the super rich with all the money.’
[….]
“A strong middle class is what a country needs to prosper. The only thing that has trickled down in the last 30 years came from Mitt Romney’s dog.”
The Shooter of Rep. Steve Scalise is a radical Leftist. He was deeply involved in the Occupy Wall Street movement. He railed against the one-percent. Was a long-time fan of Bernie Sanders years before he ran for election. Mind you. the media has a role in egging people on that may have these radical tendencies. On my Facebook, I noted this:
- If Republicans are “worse than terrorists”… why wouldn’t Leftists shoot them [us]? Yes, the Democrats (Bernie Sanders intimated this as well as others) say we are worse than ISIS due to rejecting the idea that mankind is driving in a significant manner climate change. The shooter had many posts on climate. I mean Democrats are seriously considering jailing Republicans for denying AGW (anthropogenic global warming).
These are some of the group the Shooter belonged to (BELLVILLE-NEWS DEMOCRAT):
- “The Road to Hell is Paved with Republicans”
- “Donald Trump is not my President”
- “President Bernie Sanders”
- “Illinois Berners United to Resist Trump”
- “Boycott the Republican Party”
- “Expose Republican Fraud”
- “Terminate the Republican Party”
This shooter was also egged on by Democrat politicians (the following is adapted a bit from FRONTPAGE MAGAZINE):
…What made James Hodgkinson believe that stopping the repeal of ObamaCare was a matter of life and death? Or, as he put it, “Republicans Want to Deny Most All Americans Health Care”?
It was Bernie Sanders who claimed that “thousands of Americans would die” if Republicans repealed ObamaCare. “Families will go bankrupt. People will die,” Elizabeth Warren had tweeted.
James Hodgkinson was a big Bernie supporter. And he was a fan of Elizabeth Warren.
- Virginia Governor Terry McAuliffe — “People are going to lose lives.” Instead of trying to push gun control, he might have revisited his own rhetoric.
- Congressman John Lewis claimed that the repeal would kill.
- Congressman Ruben Gallego insisted that he didn’t have to be civil to Republicans because their “policies that are going to kill people”.
It’s a short step from accusing Republicans of killing people to suspending civility to wishing them dead.
[….]
And Democrat politicians were downright restrained compared to some of their media allies.
- Newsweek’s Kurt Eichenwald wanted to see every Congressional Republican who voted for ObamaCare have a family member perish. “It should be their loved ones who die,” he ranted. “The goprs in congress didn’t just send out a tweet wishing for me to face my own death. They actually voted to do it. If people don’t give a damn about the consequences of what they do, they should face those consequences,” Eichenwald wrote in a statement.
James Hodgkinson was a fan of the Rachel Maddow show. Eichenwald was an MSNBC contributor and his work had been touted by Rachel Maddow.
Calls for violence against Republicans had become normalized.
- A few days before the attack, the Huffington Post ran a piece calling for executing Trump “and everyone assisting in his agenda”. It has since come down, but a similarly themed piece defending a “violent response” to President Trump is still up.
- Julius Caesar reimagined as Trump and leftist activists as his heroic assassins made headlines. “Killing Republicans” in neighboring Brooklyn did not.
- “They should be lined up and shot,” Professor John Griffin posted of Republicans over the ObamaCare repeal. Professor Lars Maischak at Frenso State proposed “the execution of two Republicans for each deported immigrant.”
And it didn’t end after the shooting.
- “If the shooter has a serious health condition then is taking potshots at the GOP house leadership considered self defense?” Malcolm Harris, a regular at the New Republic, whose work has appeared at the Washington Post and Salon, inquired.
[….]
- “Noam Chomsky calls the Republican Party the Most Dangerous Organization in Human History!” was one of the messages on his Facebook page. According to Chomsky, appearing on Democracy Now with Amy Goodman, Republicans are committed “to the destruction of organized human life on Earth.” Forget health care. Republicans are actually trying to wipe out the species by denying Global Warming.
James Hodgkinson participated in the People’s Climate March. Its theme, like Chomsky’s, was that Trump and Republicans were a threat to the entire planet.
If that’s true, shouldn’t someone save the planet by doing something about those Republicans?
Hodgkinson was taught by the left that all problems were reducible to Republican evil. He quoted Robert Reich, a Sanders Institute fellow, claiming that the poor economy was due to tax cuts for the rich.
[….]
“Trump is a Traitor. Trump Has Destroyed Our Democracy. It’s Time to Destroy Trump & Co,” Hodgkinson ranted. Trump isn’t destroying our democracy. The leftists trying to bring him down are.
The left has whipped up an angry mob and promised them that if they scream and shout enough, President Trump will be forced out of office. They manufactured a crisis and now it’s exploding on them. If they can’t deliver a coup, there will be more shootings like this one.
The Democrats are sleepwalking into a civil war. They want power, but like leftists from Russia to Cuba, they haven’t seriously contemplated the price that will have to paid for their bloody utopia.
In her “Resistance” video, former Attorney General Lynch spoke of blood, marching and dying….
Mind you, Loretta Lynch was not calling for people to be violent… but if Sarah Palin was the reason (according to Democrat politicians and the media) for Gabby Giffords being shot because of rhetoric… here is Paul Krugman’s viewpoint:
When you heard the terrible news from Arizona, were you completely surprised? Or were you, at some level, expecting something like this atrocity to happen?
Put me in the latter category.
It’s true that the shooter in Arizona appears to have been mentally troubled. But that doesn’t mean that his act can or should be treated as an isolated event …
There isn’t any place for eliminationist rhetoric, for suggestions that those on the other side of a debate must be removed from that debate by whatever means necessary.
And it’s the saturation of our political discourse — and especially our airwaves — with eliminationist rhetoric that lies behind the rising tide of violence.
Where’s that toxic rhetoric coming from? Let’s not make a false pretense of balance: it’s coming, overwhelmingly, from the right …
So will the Arizona massacre make our discourse less toxic? It’s really up to G.O.P. leaders. Will they accept the reality of what’s happening to America and take a stand against eliminationist rhetoric? Or will they try to dismiss the massacre as the mere act of a deranged individual and go on as before?”
…then why not in this case? IN other words, the Left (politicians, the media, the culture, entertainment) has an extreme amount and acts of violence against conservatives, Trump supporters, as well as violent language (rhetoric). Jared Loughner was not a “Righty,” but James T. Hodgkinson was a “Leftist.” Many of the recent violent acts in fact are by person’s from the Left:
- Elliot Rodger (“UCSB” shooter): Fan of the left-wing political talk show, The Young Turks.
- James von Brunn (Holocaust Memorial Museum shooter): von Brunn hated Rupert Murdoch, Fox News, George W. Bush and John McCain.
- Nidal Hasan (Ft Hood Shooter): Registered Democrat and Muslim.
- Aaron Alexis (Navy Yard shooter): black liberal/Obama voter.
- Seung-Hui Cho (Virginia Tech shooter): Wrote hate mail to President Bush and to his staff, registered Democrat.
- James Holmes: the “Dark Knight”/Colorado shooter: Registered Democrat, staff worker on the Obama campaign, #Occu¬py guy, progressive liberal, hated Christians.
- Amy Bishop: the rabid leftist, killed her colleagues in Alabama, Obama supporter.
- Andrew J. Stack (IRS bomber, flew plane into IRS building in Texas): Leftist Democrat, hated Bush and capitalism.
- James J. Lee (who was the “green activist”): leftist took hostages at Discovery Channel – progressive liberal Democrat.
- John Patrick Bedell: (Pentagon Shooter) registered Democrat, talked about economic justice.
- Nkosi Thandiwe (Shooting spree targeting white ppl): Accepted “white priveledge.”
- Floyd Corkins (LGBT Chic-Fil-A shooter): hated conservative and Christians.
- Karl Pierson (school shooter): loved communism, self-avowed Keynesian, hated Adam Smith and supported gun-control.
(For a list of LEFT-WING murderers/killers, see this article.)
THANKFULLY, the shooter will be added to the “Failed assassins (whose politics we know)” column:
…Even I initially thought that whoever did it was either a Republican or some backwoods, tinfoil-hat-wearing pseudo-Libertarian. Now that it’s come out he is a Democrat/Independent, it’s no surprise; virtually every assassin or would-be assassin of American presidents, both Republican and Democrat, have been leftists (to the extent that their political views are known). Successful assassins (whose politics we know): Failed assassins (whose politics we know): The only individual whose political motivations can be deduced as coming from the right side of the political spectrum is Francisco Martin Duran, who claims he was “incited” by conservative talk-show host Chuck Baker, but also claimed that he was trying to save the world from an alien mist which was connected by an umbilical cord to another alien in the Colorado mountains. So there’s that…. [fbvideo link=”https://www.facebook.com/LevinTV/videos/1933638746921893/” width=”690″ height=”400″ onlyvideo=”1″]
[fbvideo link=”https://www.facebook.com/LevinTV/videos/1933637890255312/” width=”690″ height=”400″ onlyvideo=”1″]
Is Special Prosecutor Mueller Showing His Bias?
I was asked the following by a friend:
- If Trump fires Mueller, would you still support Trump? It’s not a trick question ;-)
I responded with this:
- I support Trump till he is out of office. Like I supported Dubya. I think it would be a bad decision personally, but Gingrich makes some good points here:
I then linked to an article that notes this about some of Mueller’s choices for his team:
Justice Department Deputy Solicitor General MICHAEL DREEBEN donated in 2008 to a political action committee for then-Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama as well as a PAC for Hillary Clinton in 2006. Jeannie Rhee, who previously served as a deputy assistant attorney general and now works as a partner in the investigations practice at WilmerHale, donated to the Democratic National Committee as well as campaign PACs Obama in 2008 and 2011, and Clinton’s campaign in 2015 and 2016.
My friend then humorously said this:
- How about if he shot somebody on 5th Ave?
To which I asked:
- Lol. No. I just have a funny feeling that Comey leaked on purpose to get a guy to investigate (his words), and it happens to be his golfing partner who then hires persons closely allied with the DNC and Obama/Hillary.
I then linked to this article mentioning another couple hires by Mueller:
One of the hires, JEANNIE RHEE, also worked as a lawyer for the Clinton Foundation and helped persuade a federal judge to block a conservative activist’s attempts to force Bill and Hillary Clinton to answer questions under oath about operations of the family-run charity. Campaign-finance reports show that Rhee gave Clinton the maximum contributions of $2,700 in 2015 and again last year to support her presidential campaign. She also donated $2,300 to Obama in 2008 and $2,500 in 2011. While still at the Justice Department, she gave $250 to the Democratic National Committee Services Corp. Rhee also has contributed to a trio of Democratic senators: Mark Udall of New Mexico, Chris Van Hollen of Maryland, and Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island.
JAMES QUARLES, who worked on the Watergate investigation as a young prosecutor, has an even longer history of supporting Democratic politicians. He gave $1,300 to Obama in 2007 and $2,300 in 2008. He also gave $2,700 to Clinton last year. He has supported a number of other Democratic candidates, including Van Hollen, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.), Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.), former Rep. John Spratt (D-S.C.), former Vice President Al Gore, 2004 presidential candidate John Kerry, former Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-La.), and Colorado congressional candidate Gail Schwartz. In addition, Quarles gave money to former Sen. John Walsh (D-Mont.) and three current Democratic senators — Ron Wyden of Oregon, Ed Markey of Massachusetts, and Robert Menendez of New Jersey. He chipped in $300 to the DNC Services Corp. $300 in 2012. Quarles did donate to a couple of GOP politicians — $250 to then-Sen. George Allen (R-Va.) in 2006 and $2,500 to Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah) in 2015.
ANDREW WEISSMANN, a former Justice Department lawyer who now is at Jenner & Block, contributed $2,300 to Obama in 2008 and $2,000 to the DNC Services Corp. in 2006. Weissmann served as chief of the Justice Department’s criminal fraud section and worked on the Enron fraud case.
I then asked: “That doesn’t raise any flags with you?” Of course it doesn’t. That is because he is not a Republican with the interests of protecting conservatism.
He also thinks Comey has “an incredible reputation for integrity.” WRONG again… he broke the law, in the least
- Besides being subject to nondisclosure agreements, Comey falls under federal laws governing the disclosure of classified and unclassified information. Assuming that the memos were not classified (though it seems odd that it would not be classified even on the confidential level), there is 18 U.S.C. § 641, which makes it a crime to steal, sell, or convey “any record, voucher, money, or thing of value of the United States or of any department or agency thereof.” ~Professor Turley
Here is a devastating tour of the case against Comey:
Nobel Laureate Ivar Giaever Deconstructs Global Warming
Nobel laureate Ivar Giaever’s speech at the Nobel Laureates meeting 1st July 2015. Ivar points out the mistakes which Obama makes in his speeches about global warming, and shares other not-well known facts about the state of the climate.
Professor Ivar Giaever, the 1973 Nobel Prizewinner for Physics trashes the global warming/climate change/extreme weather pseudoscientific clap-trap and tells Obama he is “Dead Wrong”. This was the 2012 meeting of Nobel Laureates.
Political Correctness vs. Philosophical Fallacies
I will put the WIKE article opening here… as it may change in a couple years as PC moves from ideology to government force:
STRAW MAN
…..A straw man is a common form of argument and is an informal fallacy based on giving the impression of refuting an opponent’s argument, while refuting an argument that was not advanced by that opponent. One who engages in this fallacy is said to be “attacking a straw man“.
The typical straw man argument creates the illusion of having completely refuted or defeated an opponent’s proposition through the covert replacement of it with a different proposition (i.e., “stand up a straw man“) and the subsequent refutation of that false argument (“knock down a straw man“) instead of the opponent’s proposition.
This technique has been used throughout history in polemical debate, particularly in arguments about highly charged emotional issues where a fiery “battle” and the defeat of an “enemy” may be more valued than critical thinking or an understanding of both sides of the issue.
Allegedly, straw man tactics were once known in some parts of the United Kingdom as an Aunt Sally, after a pub game of the same name where patrons threw sticks or battens at a post to knock off a skittle balanced on top.…
Also, here is some excellent information via the STANFORD ENCYCLOPEDIA OF PHILOSOPHY:
8. The fallacy of ignoratio elenchi, or irrelevant conclusion, is indicative of misdirection in argumentation rather than a weak inference. The claim that Calgary is the fastest growing city in Canada, for example, is not defeated by a sound argument showing it is not the biggest city in Canada. A variation of ignoratio elenchi, known under the name of the straw man fallacy, occurs when an opponent’s point of view is distorted in order to make it easier to refute. For example, in opposition to a proponent’s view that (a) industrialization is the cause of global warming, an opponent might substitute the proposition that (b) all ills that beset mankind are due to industrialization and then, having easily shown that (b) is false, leave the impression that (a) too is false. Two things went wrong: the proponent does not hold (b), and even if she did, the falsity of (b) does not imply the falsity of (a).
There are a number of common fallacies that begin with the Latin prefix ‘ad’ (‘to’ or ‘toward’) and the most common of these will be described next.
[….]
2. History of Fallacy Theory
Isaac Watts in his Logick; or, The Right Use of Reason (1724), furthered the ad-argument tradition by adding three more arguments: argumentum ad fidem (appeal to faith), argumentum ad passiones (appeal to passion), and argumentum ad populum (a public appeal to passions). Like Locke, Watts does not consider these arguments as fallacies but as kinds of arguments. However, the Logick does consider sophisms and introduces “false cause” as an alternative name for causa non pro causa which here, as in the Port-Royal Logic, is understood as a fallacy associated with empirical causation. According to Watts it occurs whenever anyone assigns “the reasons of natural appearances, without sufficient experiments to prove them” (1796, Pt. III, 3 i 4). Another sophism included by Watts is imperfect enumeration or false induction, the mistake of generalizing on insufficient evidence. Also, the term ‘strawman fallacy’ may have its origins in Watts’s discussion of ignoratio elenchi: after having dressed up the opinions and sentiments of their adversaries as they please to make “images of straw”, disputers “triumph over their adversary as though they had utterly confuted his opinions” (1796, Pt. III 3 i 1).
[….]
3. New approaches to fallacies
3.6 Dialectical/dialogical approaches to fallacies
Walton divides fallacies into two kinds: paralogisms and sophisms. A paralogism is “the type of fallacy in which an error of reasoning is typically committed by failing to meet some necessary requirement of an argumentation scheme” whereas “the sophism type of fallacy is a sophistical tactic used to try to unfairly get the best of a speech partner in an exchange of arguments” (2010, 171; see also 1995, 254). Paralogisms are instances of identifiable argumentation schemes, but sophisms are not. The latter are more associated with infringing a reasonable expectation of dialogue than with failing some standard of argument, (2011, 385; 2010, 175). A further distinction is drawn between arguments used intentionally to deceive and arguments that merely break a maxim of argumentation unintentionally. The former count as fallacies, the latter, less condemnable, are blunders (1995, 235).
Among the informal paralogisms Walton includes: ad hominem, ad populum, ad misericordiam, ad ignorantiam, ad verecundiam, slippery slope, false cause, straw man, argument from consequences, faulty analogy, composition and division. In the category of sophisms he places ad baculum, complex question, begging the question, hasty generalization, ignoratio elenchi, equivocation, amphiboly, accent, and secundum quid. He also has a class of formal fallacies very much the same as those identified by Whately and Copi. The largest class in Walton’s classification is the one associated with argumentation schemes and ad-arguments, and these are the ones that he considers as the most central fallacies. Nearly all the Aristotelian fallacies included find themselves relegated to the less studied categories of sophisms. Taking a long look at the history of fallacies, then, we find that the Aristotelian fallacies are no longer of central importance. They have been replaced by the fallacies associated with the ad-arguments.
[….]
4. Current issues in fallacy theory
Recently there has been renewed interest in how biases are related to fallacies. Correia (2011) has taken Mill’s insight that biases are predisposing causes of fallacies a step further by connecting identifiable biases with particular fallacies. Biases can influence the unintentional committing of fallacies even where there is no intent to be deceptive, he observes. Taking biases to be “systematic errors that invariably distort the subject’s reasoning and judgment,” the picture drawn is that particular biases are activated by desires and emotions (motivated reasoning) and once they are in play, they negatively affect the fair evaluation of evidence. Thus, for example, the “focussing illusion” bias inclines a person to focus on just a part of the evidence available, ignoring or denying evidence that might lead in another direction. Correia (2011, 118) links this bias to the fallacies of hasty generalization and straw man, suggesting that it is our desire to be right that activates the bias to focus more on positive or negative evidence, as the case may be. Other biases he links to other fallacies.