"I’m just thinking: There’s more there! She’s got more to offer. I mean, come on, dudes."

"You know what I’m saying? But hey, sin: It’s not logical, my man. It’s just not logical."

"Duck Dynasty" star Phil Robertson talks about sin and logic. The line before the one quoted above is more graphic (and I didn't want to put it in the post title): "It seems like, to me, a vagina — as a man — would be more desirable than a man’s anus."

I note the ambiguity in what Robertson says about logic and sin. At first, I thought he meant that when he thinks about anatomy, the vagina makes more sense as a place to put a penis, if one has undertaken the reasoning task of determining the most desirable orifice. But there's nothing logical about that. There are unexamined premises: 1. that the penis be inserted somewhere, and 2. that the place should be the most desirable place. Even assuming those 2 premises, there's the obvious problem of the subjectivity of what is desirable, and Robertson admits that by saying "to me" and "I'm just thinking." In this interpretation, the word "logical" is effectively jocose.

Then, I saw an alternate meaning: The prefatory clause "But hey, sin" gives meaning to the repeated phrase "It's not logical." Sin is not logical. What impels us toward sin and what constitutes sin? These are not matters for logic. Perhaps we could reason logically about what sin is, but Robertson's approach is to accept the traditional Christian beliefs and this faith is not acquired through logic. In this interpretation, there's no logic in defining sin, and, too, there's no logic in a person's feelings that draw him into doing things that fit that definition of sin.

Of course, Robertson is getting criticism for these remarks, which are called "anti-gay," but he's rejecting all of what is traditionally understood in the Christian religion as sin, including adultery and fornication. In the process, he talks about his own natural sexual orientation and seems perhaps to concede that it's easy for him to avoid one sin that he knows other people feel drawn toward. But overall, his effort is to call people into traditional religion and to save them from what he believes is sin. Myself, I support gay rights, but I do not like the simple portrayal of traditional religionists as mean or bigoted (even though I do understand that it may be the most effective way to defeat them politically).

"When it comes to writing about anorexia, the only truly radical move, as far as I can tell, would be to show clearly just how profoundly boring it is..."

"... not sad or prurient or overdetermined," writes Alice Gregory in "Anorexia, the Impossible Subject," in The New Yorker (reviewing "How to Disappear Completely: On Modern Anorexia").

The very premise is an unappealing one: we’d like to believe that such unhinged myopia would have psychological roots in trauma or in some sinister personal history, but usually it doesn’t.... [A] voluntarily isolated person choosing not to eat until she’s addicted to not eating doesn’t make for a very good story....

If we really wanted to protect our supposedly susceptible youth, we’d paint anorexics as they are: slowly suicidal obsessives who avoid other people and expend ninety-five per cent of their mental energy counting the calories in green vegetables. We wouldn’t see them as worth reading about at all.

But readers choose books because they are interesting, and so whatever is written about well enough to attract readers is going to make the subject absorbing, exciting, glamorous. What things other than anorexia are actually quite boring but written about in books as if they were not boring? When else do we worry that readers will be tricked into doing things they should not do because the book failed to depict the activity as boring?

And yet... isn't Gregory is falling prey to the imitative fallacy?

Imitative fallacy is this: the mistaken notion that creating the feeling in the reader that is the same as the feeling in the character is the worthy intention of a story. That is my loose paraphrase of what is probably a lot of technical ancient Greek.  Which means, we create an imitation of life, not a story.  So, for example–if the character is bored, you bore the reader.  Or the character is confused, you confuse the reader.

The example of writing boringly to express boredom is such a typical way to explain the imitative fallacy that Christopher Lehmann-Haupt found this amusing and not boring way to talk about the imitative fallacy:

[T]he fallacy of imitative form... is the error of, say, writing chaotic prose in order to convey a mood of chaos: we were forever vigilant against this fallacy, although we often committed a variation of it, by writing boringly about interesting subjects!

What are some interesting books about boredom? I think of Kierkegaard’s "Either/Or," written about and quoted here by Roger Kimball:

He was... an unusually exuberant writer, by turns gripping, caustic, and sentimental. He could be extremely funny: “All men are bores,” he wrote in “The Rotation Method” (a key essay in Either/Or).

Surely no one will prove himself so great a bore as to contradict me in this... . The gods were bored, and so they created man. Adam was bored because he was alone, and so Eve was created. Thus boredom entered the world, and increased in proportion to the increase of population. Adam was bored alone; then Adam and Eve were bored together; then Adam and Eve and Cain and Abel were bored en famille; then the population of the world increased, and the peoples were bored en masse. To divert themselves they conceived the idea of constructing a tower high enough to reach the heavens. This idea is itself as boring as the tower was high, and constitutes a terrible proof of how boredom gained the upper hand.

If everyone is boring, then all the characters in all of the books are boring, anorexics and overeaters alike. The authors may strain to depict them as interesting, but there are exceptions, where the author clearly shows you that the characters are boring, but the book is not boring. I'm sure you can name a few. I thought of "Madame Bovary." And so, I think I've established that Gregory was wrong to call anorexia "the impossible subject." I hope you won't be so boring as to contradict me. Eat a sandwich!

"So... we should all just be thankful we don't live in France, right?"

"French pharmaceutical company HRA Pharma has just released a warning stating that the morning-after pill 'Norlevo' is completely ineffective for women weighing over 176 pounds. The pill even begins to lose effectiveness for women weighing 165."

The effort at humor in the headline deploys a logical fallacy that has a name. Can you name it?

It's the Fallacy of Accent. The fallaCEE of acksSAHN.

(To learn the names of 76 fallacies, get "76 Fallacies," which only costs 99¢ in Kindle. (Also in paperback.)

Juan Williams reveals that the White House is calling the Republicans' opposition to Obamacare "the original sin."

Here's Juan Williams this morning on "Fox News Sunday":

Well, you know, I got to go talk with the president and senior officials at the White House this week...

Access!

... and this topic came up. Their position is, look, ObamaCare inherits all the problems of health care generally, but no one was promising that everyone was going to be [in the] executive suite at the Mayo Clinic. 

We paused right there and discussed logical fallacies. We've been reading "76 Fallacies," and it makes you want to name the fallacy, which I'm sorry I can't do.

But look what Williams did there (purporting to convey the White House message). Obama made promises he knew he wasn't going to keep, and he did it to get the law passed, and people are outraged over that.  The White House talking point is to state a promise that Obama didn't make, as if to shift responsibility to the imaginary people who imagined they'd get that imaginary promise met.

The idea is that you had people who were uninsured, people who were underinsured, and what the Affordable Care Act does is it sets minimum standards for networks, to make sure people have someplace to go, and there were so many people who had no place to go, and that's what they were addressing in trying to put in place this program.

Yeah, so they had a problem they were aiming at, but they caused havoc throughout the system even for people who were not part of the problem. The White House message is that we should only judge their actions by the effect on what they targeted, even though there were big spillover effects.

Also, they're saying they only tried to ensure "someplace" for everyone to go, and "place" meant a place with "minimum standards," but those "minimum standards" are actually rather high (higher than those plans that you might have liked and believed you'd be allowed to keep).

And yet I mean, the attacks, I think this is just, again, more attacks coming from Republicans who don't like the plan. 

Come on! I know the name of this fallacy. It's ad hominem. The attacks should be disregarded because of who is making them: Republicans. And, too, the attacks aren't just from Republicans.

Guess what? I've gotten that message. 

Williams is saying "I," indicating his oneness with the administration, which had him over to receive an injection of talking points. I think he noticed that slip with the pronoun "I," because the next thing he said was:

I think the president and the White House has gotten it, they don't like it.

See how he restated who's gotten the message? It's the White House. They don't like it. Williams's "I" is repositioned in front of the verb think, which I find humorous, since he's not thinking for himself. He's delivering talking points.

It's what the White House now calls the original sin. They cannot work or expect Republicans to work with them to fix the plan.

Wow. The Republicans are exiled from the Garden of Legislating. They cannot be worked with, for they have committed The Original Sin.

The hell?!

"Centrists Should Mourn the Demise of the Filibuster: Only the extremists win—and in the end, mostly the Republicans."

A Slate headline, quoted in its entirety at Instapundit, as if he's not seeing the snark.

To see the snark, examine the logic

1. After the filibuster, only the extremists will win.

2. Most of the winners will be Republicans.

3. [Unstated.] Most of the extremists are Republicans. 

What counts as "extremism"? In this context, it has to do with how we think about judges. (And executive nominees, but I'll leave them to the side for simplicity's sake.) The "extreme" should be understood as the more ideologically slanted or threateningly powerful individuals that the President would otherwise have refrained from nominating. But even with the minority party disabled by the inability to filibuster, there are political constraints.

Obama can't just nominate, say, Bill Ayers.
He won't want the criticism, and there will be pressures on members of his own party to say no. The old game of letting the minority party do the dirty work has changed. The other party will still do what it can to trash the reputation of the nominee, but the President's own party will have to vote that nominee down or take the political heat for voting for this awful character.

I suspect that the political check will be more of a constraint on Democrats, because it seems that American voters perceive conservative judicial ideology as more conventional, proper, and neutral than liberal judicial ideology. And this is essentially the insight in the Slate article (which is written by Eric Posner). And by essentially, I mean subtract the subterfuge in the part I've boldfaced:

Next time Republicans control the presidency and the Senate, they will appoint ideologically extreme judges. True, Democrats could cancel out this effect by appointing extremely liberal judges when they are in power, but recent history suggests that Democrats do not care as much as the Republicans about appointing ideologically extreme judges. Unless this changes, picture a federal appellate bench composed of numerous Antonin Scalias and Clarence Thomases, not fully offset by Elena Kagans and Stephen Breyers.

Let me restate the boldfaced part to say what I think is true:  Democrats know that the vigorous left-liberals they'd like to see on the bench would be viewed by the American people as ideologically extreme and unsuited for judicial work.

The reason the Republicans seem to get away with leaning further toward conservatism than Democrats can lean toward liberalism is that conservatism better comports with the people's idea of the role of the judiciary.

Removal of the filibuster helps conservatives not because they are more "extremist" than Republicans, but because the political check on nominating strong judges operates more forcibly on liberals. 

"Why don't you ask me next time before writing that I'm either malicious or dumb?"

Asks Charles C. Johnson, the Daily Caller writer whose article I critiqued yesterday in a post titled "Young Cory Booker — groping women or appeasing women?"

Here's the point in the comments where Johnson shows up. I answer him, he responds to that, and I respond.

Just thought you might like to know about the action in the comments.

Scrutinizing the logic of Obama's to-do list.

Email, received just now, from Obama with the subject line "My to-do list."

Ann --

I keep a to-do list in my desk.

It's ambitious, but you and I didn't set out to do easy things.

As long as I can count on you to be a part of this, we will find a way to make progress on all of it -- continuing to create good-paying jobs, fixing our broken immigration system, finding a common-sense way to reduce gun violence in this country, and more.

No president can do it alone.

Say you're in:

http://my.barackobama.com/Are-You-In

There's a lot of work to do -- thanks for doing your part.

Barack

So... as long as you can count on me to be a part of this, we — not just you — fill find a way to make progress on all of it. I'm contemplating the consequences of my noncontribution. Sounds like he'll still make progress on some of it. If I do contribute, he — or, that is, we — will make progress on all of it. Yet still, it will only be progress, not actual goal achievement. He's cagey about what he's promising in there with his guilt-tripping.

Also, in case you didn't get enough of this topic a month ago: He said "good-paying jobs."

ADDED: That email makes me want to quote Bob Dylan:

Half of the people can be part right all of the time
Some of the people can be all right part of the time
But all of the people can’t be all right all of the time
I think Abraham Lincoln said that

"There’s a new stigma in town: guns + mental illness = violence."

Says Scott Bryant-Comstock, president of the Children’s Mental Health Network, "And it should break the hearts of advocates nationwide."

Quoted in the Capital Times (a Wisconsin newspaper) under the headline "Some say efforts to boost mental health treatment to combat gun violence are misguided." Also quoted, Jeri Bonavia, director of the Wisconsin Anti-Violence Effort:

"We know that there are some problems with getting mental health records into the background check system, and I think that needs to be addressed," she says. "But it can’t be that we turn our attention just to mental health issues related to gun violence because people suffering from mental illness make up a very small percentage of the perpetrators of gun violence."....

A poll this week by Quinnipiac University shows that more than 90 percent of American voters support background checks for all gun buyers, which would close the so-called gun show loophole. And that's where Bonavia says Wisconsin should be focusing its effort. Her group is currently in the midst of a petition drive to urge Walker to propose background checks. 

So first Bonavia implies that we ought to make policy based on the percentages. But then she says, make a pervasive law that applies to everyone, without mentioning the very small percentage of perpetrators of gun violence within the truly vast category of Americans who buy guns. And by the way, the category "gun violence" lumps things together. Gun control has become a hot issue because of a few massacres. If you make a category out of the set of incidents that has inflamed present-day opinion, people suffering from mental illness seem to be 100% of the perpetrators! You only get your very small percentage if you throw in other types of incidents, such as gangsters wiping each other out. Wake me up when 90% of Americans want to do something about that. And explain to me how background checks have any curative power over that problem.

The appeal to statistics and reason falls flat when you shape it to suit the policy you already want.

"Only 4 to 5 percent of violent crimes are committed by people with mental illness," Dilip Jeste, the president of the [American Psychiatric Association], says in a statement. "About one quarter of all Americans have a mental disorder in any given year, and only a very small percentage of them will ever commit violent crimes."

See what I mean? Questions for Dr. Jeste: 1. What percentage of school shootings are committed by persons with mental illness? 2. If we cut the category "violent crimes" down to massacre-type shootings where the motive isn't robbery and the victim isn't someone with whom the shooter has a personal dispute, what percentage of those crimes are committed by persons with mental illness? 3. If we break the category "mental disorder" into subparts, so that depression and schizophrenia aren't lumped together, is there any category within which you cannot say that only very small percentage will ever commit violent crimes? 4. In your effort to shield the mentally ill from unnecessary stigma, are you giving cover to a set of persons who could and should be identified as dangerous? 5. What are the interests of the psychiatric profession that could affect whether you are giving truly honest answers to all of these questions, including this one?

"What is the gun community going to do about this tragedy?"

"I dunno. What is the gay community going to do about Penn State?”

"The hereditary link of homosexuality has long been established..."

"... but scientists knew it was not a strictly genetic link, because there are many pairs of identical twins who have differing sexualities."

"Concealed carry in a gun free zone really makes it safe."

"What are the odds that two people have a gun in a gun free zone? It's the old bombs on an airplane trick. Always pack a bomb in your luggage."