Anything Smart: 2022

Saturday, October 22, 2022

Was the 2020 Election Stolen? Or, How NOT to Make a Political Argument

My goal is to be a good thinker and to be able to make good arguments to support my beliefs. Every day I try to learn more about how to be a good thinker. On October 17, 2022 I saw an interview that features a really BAD argument for what someone believes. Let's analyze this terrible argument and see if we can learn how NOT to defend our beliefs.

In this video Dana Bash is interviewing Kari Lake. Dana Bash works for CNN. Kari Lake was a Phoenix news anchor for 22 years and is now running on the Republican ticket for Arizona governor. This clip last for 4 minutes and 15 seconds.

You can see the video here: Click here for the video

At the beginning of the interview Dana says that Kari has claimed the 2020 election was stolen and also says there is no evidence of these claims and that such claims have been debunked. Kari does not deny that she has claimed the 2020 election was stolen and she insists there is PLENTY of evidence. At this point we might expect Kari to present her evidence and persuade us the 2020 election was stolen.

Kari starts her argument by saying that 740,000 votes had no chain of evidence and should not have been counted. Dana asks for evidence of this but Kari does not have the evidence with her. She says she will send the evidence to Dana's staff…. All this happens in the first 30 seconds of the interview.

Now let's pause for a second here because this is an amazing thing for Kari to say. She makes a claim about 740,000 votes that, she says, should not have been counted. Dana asks her to back up this claim with evidence but Kari is unable to back up the claim. Apparently, Kari neglected to identify the source of evidence for her claim BEFORE the interview so she could point us to it IN the interview! Instead, she says that she will have to send the evidence to Dana's staff! That is incredible!

Kari obviously knew she was going to be interviewed on a national TV show. She must have known she would be asked about her claims that the 2020 election was stolen. And yet she came with a claim she could not back up on the spot. That seems like astoundingly incompetent preparation for an interview! One could be excused for wondering if she really FORGOT to bring her evidence or if, perhaps, she doesn't really have any evidence to bring....

On top of that, even if it is true that there are 740,000 votes with no chain of evidence, that would not prove the election was stolen. We would have to know what states these votes were cast in. We would have to know if these votes were Democratic or Republican or a mix of both. We would have to know what Kari means by "no chain of evidence." Is that her opinion or does she have some objective evidence of wrongdoing? Was there any evidence the votes were tampered with? Were any of these claims litigated in court and, if so, what was the result? Kari does not tell us anything except the claim that there are 740,000 votes that should not have been counted without backing that claim up in any way.

As I said, all this happens in the first 30 seconds. For the rest of the interview, another 3 minutes and 45 seconds Kari never even once tries to prove that the 2020 election was stolen, she just keeps trying to change the subject.

First, from 30 to 40 seconds, she says the media does not want to cover evidence that the election was stolen. This is laughably absurd since she is saying this on a media show where she was just asked to present her evidence so the media could cover it, and then failed to present her evidence. It is pretty disingenuous to sit in a media interview where you are asked to present evidence they can cover, fail to present any evidence for them to cover, and then accuse of them of not wanting to cover the evidence. So, that was kind of head-spinning.

After that from about 0:40 to 2:10 in the interview Kari shifts to the claim that people don't trust our elections. This may or may not be true but notice that Kari is now not even trying to defend her claim that the 2020 election was stolen, she has changed the subject to "people don't trust our elections" which is not at all the same as the claim that "the 2020 election was stolen." She talks about the 2000 election, the 2004 election, the 2016 election, the 2018 Georgia gubernatorial election, which are all interesting subjects, but none of those subjects have anything to do with whether or not the 2020 election was stolen.

Near the 2:10 mark Kari tries to change the subject yet again by claiming that she has a 1st Amendment right to question the government and that the media is cancelling people who question the government about the 2020 election. The 1st Amendment claim is one that nobody has denied as far as I know. Within very broad limits everybody in the United States has a right to say whatever they want. We agree on that. The second claim, that the media cancels people who question the 2020 election, is absurd given that she is LITERALLY making this claim during an interview about the 2020 election on a national TV show and has just been given an opportunity to present her evidence and has failed to do so.

From 2:10 to 3:40 Dana played clips of three leading officials from the Trump Administration, including the Attorney-General Bill Barr, all saying there was no evidence the 2020 election was stolen. Kari never addressed these statements at all but, instead, tried to change the subject again. This time she wants to talk about Maricopa County in 2022. Fascinating subject I'm sure, but doesn't have anything to do with whether or not the 2020 election was stolen.

At the end Kari says all she wants is "honesty, integrity, and transparency in our elections." But if that was all she wanted then everyone would agree with her and there would be no controversy. There is controversy because she has claimed the 2020 election was stolen. BUT, when she is on an interview on a national TV show and asked to present evidence the 2020 election was stolen she somehow... forgot to bring the evidence with her. And then she spends the next 3 minutes and 45 seconds trying to change the subject to anything in the world EXCEPT the 2020 election. If Kari, who spent 22 years as a news anchor, and is now running for governor of Arizona CANNOT make a case that the 2020 election was stolen when given an opportunity to do so, why should anyone believe the 2020 election was stolen?

I try to be a good thinker. As far as I can see in this interview Kari did not present any evidence that the 2020 election was stolen. In fact, she spent most of the interview trying to run away from questions about the 2020 election being stolen. Unless someone can do a better job than Kari did here, we should NOT believe that the 2020 election was stolen.

Right?

Finally, can we learn from this trainwreck of a presentation how NOT to make a political argument on national TV? How could we do better than Kari did in a situation like this? Here are some tips:

First: bring your evidence! Don't say there is PLENTY evidence and then be unable to provide it when asked. Looks bad!
Second: Don't keep trying to change the subject. If you want to prove something then PROVE it! You can't prove something by continually jumping to other subjects. Looks bad!
Third: Don't say obviously false things. For example, don't say nobody wants to see evidence when the interviewer JUST asked you to share your evidence. Looks bad!

[Note: I have not yet read the books I link to in this post but I am looking forward to reading all of them. Someday! They all look like important books about recent history. If you read them before I do please leave a comment and tell me about them. If you click on any of these links and then buy these books, or almost anything else at Amazon, Anything Smart will earn a commission. Thanks for your support!]

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If you want to support Anything Smart, please click on the book links in this post and make a purchase. If you buy any of these books through this blog, Anything Smart will earn a commission. Thanks for visiting my blog, and thanks for your support!

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Friday, October 21, 2022

The Long Struggle for Birth Control

In the late 1700s and early 1800s British intellectuals were very worried about overpopulation. Malthus's famous 1798 book argued that the mass of humanity would always be desperately poor because any increase in resources is immediately accompanied by an increase in the number of children born, who will use up the increased resources. He believed the overall level of prosperity could never increase because of population pressures.

There were actually two kinds of population problems. The first was total population of a country or a region. People can reproduce faster than they can increase their food supply so increases in population quickly lead to dangers of famine and mass starvation over a wide area. The second problem was within poor families where the number of children could quickly exceed the ability of the parents to care for them leaving parents with no obviously good solution.

In an article he wrote for the 8th ed. of the Encyclopedia Britannica in 1818 James Mill called population control the most important practical problem of the time.

Some thinkers, like James Mill, started to explore the idea that contraception could help deal with these population problems. They usually were very cautious in their writings because the very idea of contraception was considered scandalous at the time.

One man who wrote about contraception openly was Francis Place. In an 1822 book he wrote: “If, above all, it were clearly understood, that it was not disreputable for married persons to avail themselves of such precautionary means as would, without being injurious to health, or destructive of female delicacy, prevent conception, a sufficient check might at once be given to the increase of population beyond the means of subsistence….”

Mr. Place was quickly condemned for promoting immorality and “good men refused to be introduced to him.”

When James Mill's son John Stuart Mill was a teenager he found a bundle of rags in St. James's Park that contained a strangled newborn child. This terrible crime was probably committed by desperate parents who could not find a way to feed one more mouth. They could have brought the baby to a foundling hospital but the end result would likely have been the same. It is estimated that 80-90% of babies brought to foundling hospitals died before their first birthday due to neglect or maltreatment.

Mr. Place created handbills with information about contraception and then volunteers, including young John Stuart Mill, passed them out to poor families. As a result of this activity John was arrested for distributing obscene materials. The case was dismissed but a professional lampoonist must have heard about it because he published a little poem in the newspaper:
"There are two Mr. M…ls, too, whom those who like reading
What’s vastly unreadable, call very clever
And whereas M..l senior makes war on good breeding
M...l junior makes war on all breeding whatever."

More than a century after these events in England the United States Supreme Court finally decided that "the Constitution of the United States protects the liberty of married couples to buy and use contraceptives without government restriction." This was in the case Griswold v. Connecticut. In 1965.

That took a while!

Griswold v. Connecticut Click here to read more about how birth control became legal in the United States. This article is about the Supreme Court case Griswold v. Connecticut

[Note: James and John Stuart Mill by Bruce Mazlish. I am reading this book now and enjoying it very much. I hope you will read it too and tell me what you think about it. If you click on any of these links and then buy this book, or almost anything else at Amazon, Anything Smart will earn a commission. Thanks for your support!]

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Monday, October 17, 2022

Before Freedom of Religion: The Battle of Muhlberg in 1547

Recently I was studying the Age of Religious Wars in Europe, which lasted from about 1550 to 1650. In particular, I was wondering: what was the first full-scale battle between Catholics and Protestants? I think it was the Battle of Muhlberg in 1547....

The Catholic leader in this battle was Charles V, Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire and also the king of Spain. Must be nice! The Protestant leader was John Frederick I of Saxony.

John Frederick knew the emperor was coming for him so he was on his way to his stronghold in Wittenberg. On the way he set up camp at a town on the Elbe River called Muhlberg. John actually had a larger force than the emperor at first, but he sent many of his troops to Bavaria hoping to encourage a Protestant uprising there. With those troops gone, the emperor had the larger army.

John left only a few guards along the Elbe because he thought it was too wide for Charles to cross. Charles reached the river on the evening of April 23, 1547 and, against the advice of his commanders, decided to attack the Protestants at Muhlberg.

At dawn on April 24, 1547, in a dense fog, some Spanish and Italian soldiers in the emperor’s army were able to swim across the river and eliminate the Saxon guards. At the same time a local farmer helped the Imperial troops find a place where they could ford the river. In a great stroke of luck for Charles his cavalry found a pontoon bridge the Saxons had made and then failed to destroy so they crossed on that.

John was so sure he was safe that he was actually sending some of his commanders to religious services at the very time the bulk of Charles's army was crossing the river. When he finally realized an enemy force was approaching, his first thought was to head for safety at Wittenberg but he decided it was too late to get his army moving. He thought, or hoped, it was only Charles's advance guard attacking him so he decided to fight.

John lined up his army, which was mostly made up of peasant soldiers with little experience, along the edge of a forest. He hoped this would make it difficult for the enemy cavalry to encircle him and also give his troops a safe escape route if they should need it.

Charles arranged his larger and more experienced force with infantry in the center and cavalry on both wings. The Saxons fought reasonably well and repelled the initial assaults. After that the larger numbers and greater experience of the emperor’s army began to tell and John's force was essentially battered to pieces. John himself was in the thick of the battle and received a slashing wound to the face before he was captured.

There are different accounts about the numbers of casualties in this battle. In general, accounts seem to agree that John's Protestant army had thousands killed, wounded, or captured. The Catholic army of the emperor had only about 50 killed.

After the battle John Frederick I was condemned as a heretic and sentenced to death. His sentence was soon commuted to life in prison and he was actually released after five years. He returned to his home territories and died a couple of years later.

Ten years after John died, Charles V, worn out from being an Emperor, retired to a monastery and died a year later.

I think the Battle of Muhlberg was the first full-scale battle between Catholics and Protestants. There would be many more battles in the 100 years of religious wars that followed.

If we just look at the Battle of Muhlberg the Catholics won a crushing victory. If look at the whole bloody Age of Religious Wars... nobody won. Everybody lost.

Finally, in the second half of the 1600s the best thinkers in Europe started to wonder: what if we just have freedom of religion? What if we just let everybody follow whatever religious beliefs they choose for themselves? Maybe we should try that!

That was a good idea!

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Monday, September 26, 2022

Italy Goes Hard Right, and What’s so Bad About Nationalism Anyway?

Giorgia Meloni's far-right nationalist Brothers of Italy party won the most votes in the Italian election: 26%. Combined with two smaller and farther-right parties, Meloni's coalition won 44% of the vote and that should allow her to form a government and become Italy's first female prime minister.

This was the article that brought the Italian election to my attention this morning: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/25/world/europe/italy-meloni-prime-minister.html

I think it is a warning sign that Meloni spent some time during the election trying to persuade people that she will not be like the fascist dictator Mussolini who took power in Italy 100 years ago this year. Even more of a warning sign is that the reason she has to tell people she is not like Mussolini is that, in the past, she has spoken admiringly of Mussolini.

This article says that Meloni "bashes" the European Union, international bankers, and migrants. These are all signs of "nationalism" which I will talk about a little more below. Meloni also supports Ukraine but her coalition members seem more partial to the dictator Putin so we will have to see how that ends up.

Italy has a pretty big "anti-establishment" party called the Five Star Movement which got 15% of the vote in this election. There is also a Democratic party, which refused to form a coalition with other liberal and centrist parties and ended up with 19% of the vote. Even a coalition on the left might not have been able to win in this election but it would have been nice to see them working together anyway.

There was unusually low turn-out in this election....

I wonder why?

So, what's wrong with "nationalism?" Usually when a party explicitly identifies itself as nationalist it also does not like international organizations, it wants to "go-it-alone," AND it usually has some theories about WHICH people belong to the nation: which languages, cultures, religions, races - and which do NOT.

Internationalists believe that the world will be more prosperous, and more peaceful, if countries work together in international organizations.
Nationalists want countries to "go-it-alone" which, internationalists believe is more likely to lead to destructive economic competition, and war.
Internationalists believe that everyone is created equal and that everyone should have the same rights, and that includes people of EVERY language and culture, and religion, and race.
Nationalists tend to think that their "nation" should have just one language, and one culture, and one religion, and one race, and that OTHER people should NOT have the same rights.
Internationalists believe this kind of thinking leads to oppression and, ultimately, to atrocities.

Italy is now going more nationalist. Let's hope they go slow and avoid the excesses we saw from nationalist leaders of the past, like Mussolini.

According to some, the Italian people have not really moved toward nationalism. "The Italian electorate had not moved to the right, political scientists said, but instead again resorted to a perennial desire for a new leader who could possibly, and providentially, solve all its ills."

I hope Italy will remain as free and prosperous as it is now and will increase its freedom and prosperity in the future. We shall see.

This election could have gone differently IF:
If so many people had not stayed home on election day.
If the anti-nationalist parties had not refused to unite against the nationalists.
If so many people were not dreaming of one powerful leader who will solve all their problems....

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Thursday, September 22, 2022

Trump Takes a Legal Battering

I am not a lawyer but it certainly looks to me like Trump took a legal battering yesterday (Sep. 21, 2022). If Trump was a battleship then what happened yesterday would be like taking two torpedoes below the waterline. He might not sink... but he is taking on water.

Torpedo 1

First, the New York Attorney General presented 220 pages of evidence that Trump has fraudulently misreported the values of his assets at least 200 times over a 10-year period. In one egregious case Trump had professionals appraise one of his buildings. They said it was worth just over $200 million. Trump then reported the building was worth over $500 million and even claimed that this figure was from the appraisers!

The New York Attorney General is planning to bring a lawsuit against Trump for these fraudulent reports. She is asking for various penalties including repayment of $250 million.

We don't know how all this will turn out but it is hard to imagine a jury seeing 200 documented cases of false financial statements intended to get loans, or better terms on loans, that would otherwise not have been available, without saying "Guilty!"

Torpedo 2

Then the second torpedo hit.

This one involves the government documents Trump had at Mar-a-Lago.

In this case it certainly looked like Judge Cannon was trying to cut Trump some slack as a former president. Yesterday, three judges from the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals said, "No slack!"

The Department of Justice is clearly working on the assumption that Trump illegally had government documents at Mar-a-Lago. The only obvious defense is to say that Trump had a right to the documents. The 11th Circuit Court of Appeals yesterday kind of blew that up when they said: “We cannot discern why plaintiff would have an individual interest in or need for any of the one-hundred documents with classification markings.”

Trump has been trying several stories lately to explain why he didn't do anything wrong. One of his stories is that he declassified these documents, possibly only in his mind, but declassified nonetheless.

The 11th Circuit Court of Appeals also blew that up by saying it doesn't matter whether the documents were declassified or not: “The declassification argument is a red herring because declassifying an official document would not change its content or render it personal,” the panel said. “So even if we assumed that plaintiff did declassify some or all of the documents, that would not explain why he has a personal interest in them.”

So, two torpedoes yesterday.
Torpedo 1: the New York Attorney General released 220 pages of evidence that Trump committed fraud at least 200 times.
Torpedo 2: the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals said those government documents at Mar-a-Lago did NOT belong to Trump, which is going to leave him hard-pressed to explain why he had them.

Trump has proven himself very good at damage control over the years.
He might not sink.
But he took two torpedoes yesterday.
Under the waterline....

[Note: I have not yet read the books I link to in this post but I am looking forward to reading all of them. They all look like important books about recent history. If you read them before I do please leave a comment and tell me about them. If you click on any of these links and then buy these books, or almost anything else at Amazon, Anything Smart will earn a commission. Thanks for your support!]

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Thursday, May 12, 2022

The Critical Thinker by Steven Schuster

Chapter 1: What is Critical Thinking?

This is a good beginner level book about critical thinking. It is easy enough for anyone to understand, even without any prior studies of critical thinking or logic. Actually, this book doesn’t cover logic at all, but it does discuss some of the basic principles that can help people think better.

One of the important tips from this chapter is SLOW DOWN! Critical thinking is not hasty.

But why do we have to slow our thinking down? What are we slowing down FOR? The answer is, we have to slow down so we can ask ourselves key questions about our beliefs. Questions like: “WHY do you believe that?” or “HOW do you know that?”

This chapter reminds us that the very heart and soul of good thinking involves taking the time to figure out WHY we believe the things we believe. If we don’t do that, we’re not really thinking at all, are we? When we start doing that, we will be taking the first steps on the path to becoming really good critical thinkers.

Chapter 2: “What are the Main Guidelines of Critical Thinking?”

One of the important tips from this chapter is to avoid OVER-GENERALIZATIONS! The whole point of critical thinking is to distinguish what is true, or likely to be true, from what is false, or likely to be false. The problem with over-generalizations is that they are almost always false, so people who use over-generalizations are extremely unlikely to be good critical thinkers.

If you make claims about EVERY member of huge and varied groups like “all Americans” or “all Russians” or “all Democrats” or “all Republicans” or “all Men” or “all Women” or, worst of all “EVERYONE” then you are almost certainly making a false statement, or, at the very least, an unprovable statement. If you use false statements as premises for logical arguments then your argument is automatically going to fail because a sound argument cannot be based on a false premise. If you use an unprovable statement as a premise for an argument than your argument is not going to be very persuasive.

Suppose someone says “anyone who enters the US illegally should be in jail.” If you ask them why they think that, they might reply with an over-generalization like “EVERYONE who breaks the law should be in jail.”

The problem with this over-generalization is that it is almost certainly not true and the person who makes it almost certainly doesn’t even believe it. If we ask them “In 19th century America a person who broke the law requiring them to return a runaway slave should have gone to jail?” Or “In Nazi Germany a person who refused to turn in a Jew so he or she could be sent to a concentration camp should have been sent to jail?” they will probably say “No. I only mean people who break GOOD laws should be in jail.”

Notice that the over-generalization was a sloppy and careless effort to AVOID critical thinking. Once we get to a statement that only people who break GOOD laws should be in jail then we can start some hard critical thinking about what is the definition of a good law and how can we distinguish good laws from bad laws.

We might further ask “Should people who roll through a stop sign be in jail because they broke the law?” Or “Should a hungry old person with no money who steals a piece of bread go to jail?” Most people would probably say “no” to both of these questions which might lead us to modify their initial over-generalization again to something like “Everyone who breaks a GOOD law that is about a SERIOUS issue should go to jail BUT we can also make exceptions for people who break a relatively minor law because they are in desperate need.”

Now again we can do some real critical thinking about what are the serious issues that we should jail people for and what are minor issues that we should not jail people for and what could count as desperate need that would allow us to show mercy to someone who broke the law.

In this example the initial over-generalization was an attempt to avoid thinking about all these important questions. In fact, over-generalizations are often attempts to avoid thinking at all, and people who try to avoid thinking, are NOT good critical thinkers.

So, if we want to be good critical thinkers, we have to be very specific and avoid the kind of sloppy over-generalizations that are intended to prevent thinking instead of aiding it.

[Note: The Critical Thinker by Steven Schuster. I hope you will buy and enjoy this simple introductory book about critical thinking. If you click on this link and then buy this, or almost anything else at Amazon, Anything Smart will earn a commission. Thanks for your support!]

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Time of the Magicians: Wittgenstein, Benjamin, Cassirer, Heidegger, and the Decade That Reinvented Philosophy