While I was watching the political convention last week (and the week before as well, actually), it astounded me at how often the speakers would resort to obvious logical fallacies. I counted five false dichotomies and four straw men within the Sarah Palin speech alone. Now, just to not be political: I’m sure Joe Biden also committed a whole bunch of logical fallacies, I just didn’t think about it until I heard Sarah Palin ‘poison the well‘ against Barack Obama.
Just discovering this, are we? That’s one reason that I dislike politics, and I was under the general assumption that others capable of spotting such arguments (e.g. scientists) felt the same way.
The goal in life is to not become jaded by things you can change and not to disillusion the people that haven’t become jaded yet.