How about this poll question, in the Globe and Mail today? It's an example of 'begging the question', a fallacy, where you FIRST have to accept an internal-to-the-question opinion, before you can answer the question.
Here's the question:
"Will President Obama convince Americans to make the hard choices necessary to change the Bush administration's often-failed foreign policies?"
Heh. There are actually multiple fallacies in this esteemed, impartial, unbiased, truth-seeking newspaper's question.
First, there's the basic begging, where you have to accept as truth 'the Bush administration's often-failed foreign policies'. Notice that the question didn't FIRST ask you if you thought these policies were failures. No way. Truth is, according to the G&M, theirs and theirs alone.
Then, how about 'alleged certainty', where it is accepted as beyond question that Obama's actions will be 'necessary'? Oh? This assumes that any of his foreign policy actions will not be subject to criticism because they are already correct and are thus deemed 'necessary'.
Notice also yet another unquestioned assumption; the descriptive evaluation of Obama, i.e. that Obama KNOWS what is necessary and correct.
All of these fallacies, all in one G&M question.
By the way, not a mention of Obama's naive hug-a-terrorist actions, in his letter to Iran, suggesting that all is needed is to 'get along'.
How about his administration's change of definition of a terrorist action to a 'man-caused disaster', which removes all intentionality of that uh, terrorist, to uh, terrorize and reduces the action to pure accident.
How about his insults to the UK PM, to Sarkozy of France, to the Italian PM?
His Afghanistan agenda? Straight out of Bush's agenda in Iraq, which saw, after the surge had gained control of the country, the new agenda of empowering the local population to themselves fight back against Al Qaeda. The G&M seems to have forgotten this Bush strategy of creating a democracy and then empowering the people.
The Globe & Mail newspaper published an "interesting" poll on their website today. Read over the question carefully. How would you vote?
How about this poll question, in the Globe and Mail today? It's an example of 'begging the question', a fallacy, where you FIRST have to accept an internal-to-the-question opinion, before you can answer the question.
Here's the question:
"Will President Obama convince Americans to make the hard choices necessary to change the Bush administration's often-failed foreign policies?"
Heh. There are actually multiple fallacies in this esteemed, impartial, unbiased, truth-seeking newspaper's question.
First, there's the basic begging, where you have to accept as truth 'the Bush administration's often-failed foreign policies'. Notice that the question didn't FIRST ask you if you thought these policies were failures. No way. Truth is, according to the G&M, theirs and theirs alone.
Then, how about 'alleged certainty', where it is accepted as beyond question that Obama's actions will be 'necessary'? Oh? This assumes that any of his foreign policy actions will not be subject to criticism because they are already correct and are thus deemed 'necessary'.
Notice also yet another unquestioned assumption; the descriptive evaluation of Obama, i.e. that Obama KNOWS what is necessary and correct.
All of these fallacies, all in one G&M question.
By the way, not a mention of Obama's naive hug-a-terrorist actions, in his letter to Iran, suggesting that all is needed is to 'get along'.
How about his administration's change of definition of a terrorist action to a 'man-caused disaster', which removes all intentionality of that uh, terrorist, to uh, terrorize and reduces the action to pure accident.
How about his insults to the UK PM, to Sarkozy of France, to the Italian PM?
His Afghanistan agenda? Straight out of Bush's agenda in Iraq, which saw, after the surge had gained control of the country, the new agenda of empowering the local population to themselves fight back against Al Qaeda. The G&M seems to have forgotten this Bush strategy of creating a democracy and then empowering the people.
Posted by: ET at March 28, 2009 12:14 PM