The Week has a columnist named Matthew Walther. He fills the role that many news sites increasingly reach for: that of the smart, conservative millennial thinker.

There are fewer in circulation these days. As the right wing ages and splits along Trump-ian lines, many people under 40 are fleeing conservatism like the last days of disco. So publications awash in baby boomers have gotten increasingly eager for anyone who’ll write about the perils of big government without collecting a Social Security check.

Now, Walther is a strong writer, both eloquent and intelligent, and when he writes about humanity his work is truly outstanding. However he also has a tendency to write about economics and technology. These pieces are far, far weaker. They frequently make misleading claims based chiefly on the author’s misunderstanding of some technical concept, but which come across as a reported truth.

This is a problem endemic to much of modern journalism. (I call Walther out because spotting problems in work as well written as his can be particularly difficult.) As internet publication closes the once-inviolable distance between news, analysis and opinion, it has become increasingly important for readers to distinguish good and bad arguments for themselves.

In service of that, here are three key rhetorical devices to keep an eye out for. When a writer falls back on one of these tropes, it’s often because they don’t have a better case to make.

Appeals to Absurdity

 

Here is Walther commenting on net neutrality:

[A]t least not since education as we know it and freedom of speech disappeared in an instant following the FCC’s decision to abandon net neutrality.

Here he is again:

The idea that internet service providers should be forced to provide unlimited access to content transmitted indiscriminately whether it is old episodes of Sesame Street, pornographic videos of simulated rape, or a column at The Week…

Appeals to absurdity are how writers avoid the weakness of their own logic. In the passages above, Walther is discussing net neutrality. But you’ll notice that he doesn’t actually debate how much authority Comcast should have over which sites you visit online. Walther entirely elides that question. Instead he throws around intentionally charged comparisons to pornographic rape (surely no one can be in favor of that!) and a smirking confirmation that the world didn’t end when net neutrality did.

Of course, no one taken seriously has ever argued that upon net neutrality hinged freedom of speech and education as we know it. Nor did anyone suggest that this was about ensuring a high-speed supply of sexually charged violence. Yet by pretending otherwise Walter manages to avoid defending his actual, quite unpopular, position.

This is an appeal to absurdity. Instead of defending its own argument an appeal to absurdity falls back on an indefensible premise and proceeds to knock that down. In Walther’s articles he suggests that advocates of net neutrality are on the side of doomsday cults and rape pornographers. As the world didn’t end with the FCC’s decision, he continues, the pro-net neutrality position must clearly have been wrong.

By doing this, Walther avoids having to defend the scant merits of his own position. He never engages with the actual pro-neutrality argument, that it will create business preferences based on rent seeking rather than consumer oriented competition. He simply summons up, then declares victory over, rapists and pornographers; an argument no one was making.

Personal Experience

 

Here is a comment which ran next to a recent New York Times op-ed regarding the Sarah Jeong controversy:

I’ve spoken with colleagues about these tweets. My white male coworkers found them to be #1) Hilarious #2) Understanding of where they came from #3) Opening their minds to the experiences of a woman from another minority group. I’m sure Sarah will do a great job with her new role and I will truly appreciate her contributions!

And:

[W]henever I see Ms. Jeong’s name on anything, as an older white woman, I’ll be thinking, “Oh, there’s that writer who hates whites, who especially hates white men, who really and truly hates old white men. That woman hates my aging relatives, my neighbors, and most of the people I do business with, and I can’t believe she doesn’t hate me, too, just because I’m pale.”

How do you debate this? You can’t tell the first writer that they’re wrong without questioning their honesty; they personally talked to white men about this racial issue.

You can’t tell the second writer that they’re wrong without saying that their feelings don’t matter; they personally feel attacked.

Notice what these writers have done? By linking their position to lived experience both commenters made this about the speaker, not the issue. Someone can’t argue against Jeong without calling the first commenter a liar, or at least attacking her friends. Equally, one can’t argue in favor of Jeong without dismissing the second commenter’s pain. In both cases, we’ve long since moved on from the underlying issue to the rhetoric of personal feelings.

This is the same rhetorical device as someone who says, “speaking as a woman/man/Christian/etc.” or who claims “I personally saw the data” or “this happened to my friend.” They immediately claim personal legitimacy over the issue that can’t be attacked without attacking them. You can’t say they’re wrong without making it a personal attack, allowing the speaker to shut down an argument without having made one.

Data Without Context

 

You may have seen the National Review’s frankly idiotic attempt to argue fiction against fact on the issue of global warming. (I have tried to upload it three times, but keep getting WordPress errors. Follow the link to see its original form.)

For those who haven’t seen, it’s a graph arguing that global warming is a myth by showing that the average temperature on Earth has remained flat over the past 100 years. As many, many writers have since pointed out, the National Review’s staff did this by simply changing the scope of the graph. They zoomed out so much that any change vanished in the depth of the data.

This is called changing the context, and it is a hallmark of bad arguments.

Here, the National Review reframed context in which they set global warming data, knowing that a crisis measured in individual degrees looks meaningless when set against a 110 degree Y-Axis. By giving the data too much context, they made it look meaningless.

Then there are writers who strip information of its context. A quote given without the rest of the speech, or one riddled with ellipses, is an example of data without context. Financial information without explanation is another. When someone suggests that China could “call in” America’s debt, this is an example of an argument without context. Understanding this relationship requires a complicated discussion of currency value, trade gaps and interest rates, none of which can be summed up in two words.

Writers who leave that context out do so because they know it makes their argument weaker.

The core of all three of these techniques is the same: distraction and delegitimization. Writers fall back on these rhetorical devices when they don’t have a better case to make. Instead of making their case on the merits, they try to make it impossible for anyone to do so.

Whenever you see someone doing this, click on.

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