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A False Dichotomy: Be Patsies, or Be Like Them
I’m pretty much a broken record on the theme of speaking out, arguing that conservatives have to express conservative ideas boldly, and as clearly and with as much grace as we can muster. One common response to this is the claim that we’ve tried that and it hasn’t worked, and that now we have to adopt the techniques of our opponents.
I ran into this just today, when I suggested on another thread that the woke practice of “doxxing” (publishing personal information about private citizens) and getting people fired for the things they say or do on their own time was something we conservatives should not embrace. I’ve tried to make the same point on other occasions about such things as violating people’s first amendment rights, electoral cheating, and lying to further the conservative agenda. These are all things our opponents do. I don’t think that we should do them.
A lot of people seem to be of the opinion that we really have tried boldly speaking out, and that that’s now been proven to be inadequate. I don’t believe that. I think that the majority of conservatives are “normal” Americans (which Old Bathos very competently described in this comment), and normal Americans are reluctant to counter the prevailing media/academic/entertainment narrative that ever-faster seeps like a miasma into every facet of our lives.
Most of us don’t want to be the cranky relative at the family gathering arguing that mask mandates probably do more harm than good. Most of us don’t want to be the one who points out that BLM is a fraud. Most of us don’t want to be the insensitive so-and-so who argues that the “trans” movement is a dangerous fad, that America is as far from a racist country as one is likely to get, and that what torments our black communities is bad policies and broken culture, not anti-black bigotry.
So most of us don’t speak out. Many aren’t equipped — with information, temperament, or opportunity — to express those views. Others are worried about the professional or social blowback. There are lots of reasons why conservatives tend to be quiet, but the reality is that we do.
Pay attention to how free progressives are to give vent to their opinions. People who parrot the conventional leftist narrative clearly feel safe repeating what they hear on the radio and television, read in the paper, learn in school. It’s the air they breathe — that we all breathe. It takes no boldness or real conviction to go along with what looks like the majority view — even if it isn’t really the majority view.
Those of us who can speak up without endangering our livelihoods have to do so, and do so in ways that other normal people find persuasive and inspiring. We have to be reasonably well informed, well self-controlled, and understand that others need our example so that they, too, feel more free to stand up and be heard.
We have the advantage that we make sense and they do not. Most Americans still believe the things we believe. They just don’t realize that they’re in the majority, and that, if they speak out, they’ll be joined by others.
Published in Culture
Sure. But it also divides the two things.
Work with the dictionary. If the argument doesn’t falsly separate the two options, it’s not a false dichotomy. It’s a different kind of fallacy.
This, I think, is how you appeal to the majority that does not pay strict attention to every battle large and small, and does not center their lives around politics, or hunch over Twitter all day. The people who regard a presidential vote with the same intensity they use to putting their new tabs on their license plate: there, that’s done, won’t think about it much until it’s time to do it again. Why might it work? Because it’s not red-faced spittle-flecked throbbing-vein hectoring. It’s not a struggle session. It’s normal.
That’s not the same standard. The same standard is this: if Antifa can riot, the Proud Boys can riot. If Antifa can burn down neighborhoods, the Proud Boys can burn down neighborhoods.
There are better things to do. They involve the budget and the hill that is not the hill to die on.
Yes, it would be a bad idea. The moment we do it, we give up our right to criticize court packing. And so, the next time that we are not in control, we have nothing to say to the American people to encourage their resistance to Democratic court packing.
That’s always the problem with adopting your opponent’s bad behavior. Most of America does not like that bad behavior, and if we become like the minority that does we drive away most of America. We have to do the opposite: communicate to most of America that we represent them, rather than communicating to them that we are as bad as the other guys and nobody represents them.
Predict the future, be specific. Decide how to get control of the board of directors for General Motors in a hostile take over. How should I know? No one knows.
What I do know is that we cannot continue to accept control of society by the worst elements. We cannot allow communists and anarchists to continue to have any sway. To me, this means the destruction and arrest or killing of all of Antifa, and any other rioting, violent organizations. Violence has begun and so far we have been letting the communists win. People who have no business being alive in a free society have been controlling cities and neighborhoods with no consequences, putting people in fear, threatening them, and sometimes killing them. On a supporting level, academics and “woke” companies have been canceling people’s livelihoods and disrupting their incomes. This is behavior that a free people cannot condone.
So what do we do? What you do when burglars come into your home? What do you do when terrorists take down your sky scrapers? Bush invaded Iraq and Afghanistan and tried to reform them. My preference would have been to reform Iraq and punish and depopulate Afghanistan.
I don’t think we can do that to the communists among us, but they do need to be stopped, their influence needs to be ended, and we need to restore our uni-culture, resume our shared love for our history and ideology, and end this communist take over.
I’ll grant this, HR: It’s not crazy to call an argument a false dichotomy on the ground that it separates only two options when it should separate [more than] two.
But that only works as a proper term if the argument separates the two options.
It looks like you’re thinking that a false reduction to two options is a sufficient reason to call an argument a false dichotomy. It’s not. It’s still necessary that the argument divides the choices. If it doesn’t divide the choices, it’s not any kind of chotomy at all. Not by the dictionary anyway. And if it’s not a chotomy at all, it’s not a dichotomy.
Meanwhile, we have a perfectly good term to cover any argument that falsely limits our choices to two. It’s the term false dilemma fallacy, and this is the definition you’re sure to find in any textbook that uses that particular term.
I prefer if Antifa can riot, we can kill them. If the Proud Boys riot, we can kill them too.
Edit: I should have said, “hunt them down and kill them like vermin.”
I appreciate your feelings. I am similarly frustrated.
What I am saying is that we should act within the law and consistently with the principles we value. We should speak out, firmly and boldly and loudly. We should be willing to cause offense when it seems productive, but recognize that being the sober and serious people in the room will win more to our cause.
Above all, we should behave in such a way that others feel encouraged to stand up with us. Those others will include a great many who simply want peace and sanity, and the preservation of long cherished values.
Threaten?
And you may be correct. You certainly have far more experience in this field than I do. I am somewhat handicapped in that the only reference either of us has bothered to cite contradicts you and supports my view. But, in the interest of comity and getting a good night’s sleep, and in deference to your superior scholarship, I will concede the point. You’ve been a good sport about it. Your students are fortunate to have you as a teacher.
And it abandons the dictionary you cited.
Amen!
What scholarship?
Thanks!
And while we follow rules, they break them, corrupt the election process, ruin people’s lives. Your method works when we have the rule of law, and we don’t have that. We have lawlessness. When a burglar comes into your home at night, I don’t recommend a debate. Shoot him. Don’t call the police until after you are safe. No one is coming to help. Is this an appropriate analogy? Can we compare a burglar to what is happening to our government and society? No, the burglar is nowhere near that bad.
When there is corruption of the ballot box, we need to recognize that the Romney/Bush faction favors that corruption to oust Trump, whom they regard as a threat to their power. We need to be much better organized, much more active and much more confrontational about denouncing that fraud. We need to mock and condemn people saying that black people can’t find an ID. We need to punish people for doxxing our allies or other innocents. We need to drive their people out of work.
Why was a communist the head of the CIA during the Obama administration? Why did no one object? Why is still no one in jail for giving the Chinese our data base of security clearances and all the deepest personal secrets of every American with a security clearance?
We don’t fight. We certainly don’t frame the argument. This is what made Trump so exciting, but even he didn’t go far enough. I think he didn’t really recognize how entrenched America’s enemies are in all levels of government.
The next Republican President, either Trump of someone of his mind, needs to fire everyone in civil service, by hook or crook and put loyal people in place. Governors need to clean up state universities of their policies and leaders. There is so much we can do.
What can an individual do? Nothing. Never could. It requires leadership to move the agenda. Trump let the Bush/Romneys take him out. We can’t let that ever happen again if we ever are allowed any control again.
I wouldn’t prefer that. They are human beings. Very bad people, but still human.
Are you two really arguing about the connotations and contexts of “dichotomy”? This is rare example of denubbience (look it up — it means to remove even the nub of a rationale for a disagreement or of a wart).
Dichotomy in a nutshell: division of a whole into two parts, binary classification; phase of the moon in which half is lighted; a form of branching in which each axis divides into two.
Pretty cut and dried.
I think individuals can do quite a lot, actually. But not if we are quiet and meek. Some of what you say resonates with me, the bits about being loud and direct and calling out the nonsense when we see it. I like that stuff and I have been calling for it for years. And it’s happening. We need to do more of it.
You stop short of calling for lawlessness and violence. That’s good. Somewhere between speaking boldly and being violent is where we should draw the line. I would draw it short of adopting leftist tactics of personal destruction. I think those ultimately work against us.
Yes.
Hence it’s better to use the term “false dichotomy fallacy” when the division of the whole is inappropriate, and to use the term “false dilemma fallacy” when the reduction of options to only two is inappropriate. Some arguments are bad enough to involve both mistakes.
Yeah, this semantic argument about angels dancing on the head of a pin or top of a pin is more than played out.
Did I? I said we should kill antifa. I think that is a level of violence that is absolutely required.
Ah. I must have missed that detail. I will blame the lateness of the hour.
I am in favor of prosecuting criminals. I think extrajudicial killings, other than in immediate self-defense, is a bad idea, and I think our side should not call for it.
So I guess you and I differ on that detail.
What would be the purpose?
It also tells the left that if they go ahead and pack the court, we’ll leave it packed. Is that a good idea?
I’m not going to get into any highfalutin argument about logic, or math… or maps. If I cut off the ends of a baguette, and eat the center, is what’s left a dichotomy? Or a false dichotomy. Ha! It’s leftovers.
But, yes, I think that technically the “false dichotomy fallacy” is appropriate. But colloquially, we all know exactly what Hank intended: a choice that is falsely presented as only having two options.
So, as grudgingly as I have to say this, you’re both right. One needn’t be pedantic. Though, this is Ricochet.
Strictly speaking, this isn’t true.
I didn’t say extrajudicial, but when we go to root them out, they will resist and we should kill them.
They would be dead?
Why? Because it takes two to argue and so two needn’t be pedantic? Or is pedantry in the DNA of each Ricochetto?
Dennis Miller used to say, more or less, “You know what else stops child-molesters from re-offending? Burials!”
(I think it was a joke.)
We all know exactly what he intended? Heavens, no!
If the meaning of dictionary words is so hastily to be abandoned (even if we can cite a critical thinking textbook that joins in), I don’t know how we can hope all to know exactly what is intended.
I am only moderately confident that he meant something along those lines myself, and it took me a long time to get that way.