Not Arguing

Via Isaac Chotiner, Matt Continetti busts out what's rapidly becoming my least-favorite argumentative tactic. He says that in response to the Pollack/O'Hanlon op-ed, "Antiwar Democrats immediately started dancing the Iraq shuffle, in which you ignore your opponent's arguments, shift the terms of the debate, and attack his motivation and character." He then supports that contention by . . . ignoring all the counterarguments that have been offered.

It's a big, bad internet out there and it'll always be possible to find all kinds of responses to any widely discussed event. And, yes, if you deliberately ignore the more substantive responses in favor of purely focusing on the derision -- derision that will often be motivated by the fact that substantive responses are already widely circulating -- you can "prove" that nobody's grappling with the arguments easily.

Comments

Good GAWD!
Can you say PANDAGON, BITCH, Phd (aptly named and other extreme 'feminist' sites that promote the "patriarchy" conspiracy theory over certainly more substantive and likely responses?

Posted by Fred Jones | August 5, 2007 8:28 AM

Yup -- which is why I didn't want to bother with the character assassination of O'Pollahan. The 'left-leaning' meme isn't going anywhere, as its the comfiest pair of jackboots the Republican noise machine owns. Sorry, MY, but there was a substantial amount of noise made about the politics of the authors, which easily drowned out those talking about the substance of their recent piece. You also fell into this same trap, brother, so your disdain seems a tad misdirected.

Posted by EpicureanQuaker | August 5, 2007 8:29 AM

Ah, Matt Continetti, the young whippersnapper. He's never done the Iraq shuffle himself.

Both sides apparently think the other is ignoring reality. Democrats think Republicans are ignoring a disturbing and tragic reality in favor of a rosy one. Republicans think Democrats are ignoring a rosy reality because, you know, they just would rather be negative. Logical conclusion: they're "praying we lose." La la la. Republicans bravely face down the positive, and Democrats cravenly lick their imaginary wounds. Gee I wonder which sounds more absurd on its face.

How bout this? Matt Continetti is a smarmy little college Republican douche. Or is that attacking his character and being negative. Fuck! I can't win against the forces of optimism! DAMN YOU RONALD REAGAN!!!!!!!!!

Posted by Bill | August 5, 2007 8:39 AM

Well, there is a degree to which many of us are tired of having crappy propagandistic hawk screeds proclaimed to be "studies," and then suddenly it's somehow our responsibility to take these freakish pseudostudies Very Seriously.

There comes a point at which, no, I don't have to take some new, supposedly ground-breaking 'study' from the Flat Earth Society in a Very Serious Manner.

You have a bunch of people who have been doing nothing but handing out sh*t and being taken seriously by dupes and idiots.

Why is it my responsibility to take this sh*t seriously too?

Why do I have to waste my time on obvious frauds and idiots?

As much as we forget it, you know, there really are experts and academics and journalists out there, and maybe they merit some time, instead of the latest puff piece from cheap ideologues.

Posted by El Cid | August 5, 2007 9:26 AM

RE "EpicureanQuaker's comment: "Sorry, MY, but there was a substantial amount of noise made about the politics of the authors, which easily drowned out those talking about the substance of their recent piece."
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It is NOT an ad hominem argument to point out that Kenneth Pollack urged this country into the disasterous IRaq War in 2002 with claims subsequently revealed to be FALSE. If you are trying to evaluate the credibility of a source, you look at his past history.

It's difficult to argue with the SUBSTANCE of O'Hanlon-Pollack's recent piece because there was NONE. Traveling under heavy guard to hear canned presentations by advocates and saying you got a nice warm and fuzzy feeling is NOT SUBSTANCE!

Especially if you crawdad back away from even those vague claims when put under oath before Congress.

With DAYS of Pollack's Op-Ed, a major Sunni faction withdrew from the Iraq cabinet and the Iraqi Parliament voted to recess for a month with major issues unresolved and an acknowledgment of deadlock. A huge setback.

And if the security situation is so damm great, why did the Iraqi Minister of Electricity just acknowledge that the Iraq power grid is near collapse -- with water supplies endangered and Baghdad getting power only a few hours a day?

Posted by Don Williams | August 5, 2007 9:36 AM

Here's another way of putting it.

If we were academics and we were editing some academic journal, and various people handed in articles they called "studies" and which they wished to get published, how far would this O'Hanlon and Pollack nonsense have gotten?

Not far.

We would have asked questions like, 'What were their research goals? What was their methodology? What evidence did they gather? What was analyzed, and what analytical tools were used?'

Using such basic tools of review, we would obviously have concluded that these weren't "studies" of any sort worthy of the name, and that maybe if anything they should be published in brief form as letters.

Posted by El Cid | August 5, 2007 10:08 AM

Let's recall that Pollack and O'Hanlon didn't offer much in the way of argument. They offered a series of assertions and subjective observations, many qualified with "seems" and "appears". In most cases, the only evidence offered for such sweeping assertions as "morale is high", "reliable police officers man the checkpoints in the cities," "no more whack-a-mole" was their own eyewitness and earwitness testimony. This observational evidence was gathered over only 8 days during an itinerary which Pollock later admitted was largely planned by the military.

I think the most fundamental challenge to be posed to Pollock and O'Hanlon's assertions is that, given the scope of their claims concerning complex conditions involving millions of people populating a rather large country, then even if one credits their veracity and the reliability of their judgment, direct observational evidence collected by a total of four pairs of eyes and ears over eight days is bound to be a grossly inadequate basis for supporting these claims. This is especially the case when there is an observation selection effect based on the fact that the observations are accumulated during an itinerary that was planned by people with a stake in the conclusions drawn by the observers.

For example, suppose Congress appropriated a lot of money for an expensive new national teacher training and placement program. And suppose we were reading an op-ed making claims about how well this program was working. Suppose those conclusions were based on nothing but eight days of discussions of two individuals with teachers and students at a series of schools on an itinerary drawn up by the NEA. I don't think our right-wing friends would have any difficulty in this case in understanding the weakness of this method of assessment.

But apart from the issue of the adequacy of the observational basis, and the sampling method that produced it, there is another issue. Where the case for some claim is based only on observer testimony, and on conclusions drawn intuitively from these observations without systematic analysis, questions about the veracity of the observers and about the reliability of their judgment are evidentially relevant to the evaluation of their conclusions.

In the case of Pollock and O'Hanlon, the fact that they either misrepresented their past stances on the Iraq war, or repeatedly allowed themselves to be thus misrepresented by others without correction, is relevant to the question of their veracity; and their past track record in drawing erroneous substantive conclusions from the data they possessed, i.e. getting so many things wrong, is relevant to the question of the reliability of their judgment.

Posted by Dan Kervick | August 5, 2007 10:48 AM

I don't know why fresh examples of Republicans projecting their worst charactertistics onto their "enemies" should surprise me. But it always does.

Sure, some on the left will fall into the ad hominem mode, but the party of swift-boaters and scapegoaters has raised it to an art form.

Posted by Curt M | August 5, 2007 10:57 AM

Greg Djerejian over at the Belgravia Dispatch gave a pretty good fisking to O'Hanlon and Pollack. Then again, what do you expect from a hack at the Weekly Standard. They aren't interested in fact based discussions.

Posted by Joe Klein's conscience | August 5, 2007 11:29 AM

Kervick makes the salient point: in addition to the fact that other substantive rebuttals, given the nature of the "evidence" they were offering, their trustworthiness as analysts was, in fact, perfectly relevant. And on that score, it's clear that they absolutely cannot be trusted.

Posted by Scott Lemieux | August 5, 2007 11:34 AM

When O'Hanlon and Pollack deliberately suppressed the fact that they both supported the surge and included the fact that they had criticized Bush's war - which a good editor would not have let pass - they were obviously writing to the second audience, the insider circle of politicos, spindoctors and 'serious' pundits, who were going to legitimate another rosy picture of Iraq by claiming that it came from people who, up until that moment, were anti-war. It was a simple exercise in false legitimacy, and it was very neatly shot down, especially by Glenn Greenwald, who is the man who should be writing the NYT op eds.

A fourth grader with a memory could poke holes in the factual basis of O'Hanlon and Pollack op ed piece. The idea, for instance, that the police force of Tal Afer is "reliable" after said police force massacred 70 or more Sunnis at the end of March is ridiculous on the face of it. The idea that you would quote from the mayor of a city near Mosul - and omit the fact that you can't quote from the mayor of Mosul, a major Iraqi town, because there is a dispute as to who that mayor is - is what is known as cherrypicking. The idea that the military is gaining in Anbar province is simply a spin on the U.S. surrender in Anbar, with the U.S. backing down on its opposition to amnesty for Iraqis who have killed Americans and actually arming them, so desperate are the Americans to get rid of the extreme jihadist faction of the insurgency - a faction that is a small minority of the insurgent total.

But the pro-war side, with the sad logic of the lobotomized that characterizes their entire, charade like arguments, actually points to the U.S. surrender as a victory.

Posted by roger | August 5, 2007 1:22 PM