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.