17 October 2011

Notes - Logical Fallacies & Political Rhetoric / Salted Dark Matter in the Styx?

        Mid-afternoon. You and Carol just had a late lunch at Chipotle/Panera and are stopped at Kroger on Tylersville. A few minutes later you are at the north end of Pine Hill Park. Carol is reading the mail and you are looking out at the bottom of a forty-foot (plus tall tree) covered hill.

         I like the hills of southwestern Ohio. Growing up in the Columbus area we were mostly flatlanders. It has been a busy day, at least mowing the yard was.

         You were ready to post part of your old lecture on propaganda earlier, as a reminder of how it is in times of Tea Party and Occupy demonstrations and renewed political discords from both the Republicans and Democrats.

         I thought about it because I needed to review the logical fallacies myself. I read someone calling Occupy socialist or communist and Tea Party people were called fascists or something more or less credible. 

         Drop them in here, and try to make sure you don’t use them yourself. – Amorella.

         I know. It is so easy to think along such lines.

Logical Fallacies & Examples:

         1. overgeneralization; jumping to conclusions from one or two cases (nuke safety)

         2. thin-entering wedge; overgeneralization involving prediction (Hindenburg)

         3. name calling; forsaking issue to attack personal character (nuclear power plants are better built than Jane Fonda)

         4. you’re another; if both wrong then the less wrong is therefore more right

         5. cause & effect; A appears to cause B (Thales, Anaximander, Anaximenes)

         6. false analogy; false comparisons:
                  appeal to past: (1960 was a better time to be young than in than now)
                  appeal to future: (things will be better after college graduation)

         7. wise people can be wrong; clenching an argument w/ appeal to authority

         8. statistics prove; 4/5 dentists . . . survey until desired results

         9. appeal to the crowd; [cheerleading]; political rallies

         10. arguing in circles; using conclusion to prove itself (true if on TV- on TV therefore true)

         11. self-evident truth; ‘everyone is doing it’ therefore it is okay

         12. black or white; forcing any issue w/shades of gray to yes or no (abortion/no new taxes/tax the rich)

         13. guilt by association; running around with the wrong crowd

From: Logic for Undergraduates by R.J. Kreyche // 

& from daughter Kim’s class logic lecture notes (8/29/96 - 9/11/96) -- I can’t find my own notes. I loved the classroom experience, such a joy seeing them take the notes because that way I knew a bit of it might sink in. Student ears to student brain to student fingertips and pen/pencil and ink/graphite on paper – that’s the way it was many times in my classes. Spice the literature/history up with modern times and their student lives and I had a good time, some of them did too.

** **

         I can’t believe Kim dated her logic notes but she did. I always liked to begin British Literature classes; both College Prep and Advanced Placement with logic, set the tone to/for using higher thinking level skills. Some former students will remember these.

         As you are now home and about to do some more errands while Carol mows the southwest side yard, post. – Amorella. 



         After 2100 hours and you both watched three TV shows on ‘catch-up’. Tomorrow afternoon a return to the social security office for Carol’s application for Medicare Part B.

         I remember when Carol’s parents were doing this – mid-seventies and they were in a very nice apartment complex in Crystal City thinking about their Florida retirement in Sun City Center. Here we are with Carol finishing up the same thing. Thirty-five some years from now Kim and Paul will be applying for Medicare Part A and B and Social Security or whatever takes the place of what we have today. Carol will be sixty-five in January and in August I will be seventy. I used to think of time as water behind a dam, now it is flatter, more like a puddle of a small pond waiting for further evaporation.

         For Merlyn it is Avalon that holds a small spring of virgin water, an island that is surrounded by the movement of souls, surrounding water whose balanced chemistry is two-thirds soul and one third something else altogether. – Amorella.

         Two-thirds soul sounds right enough, but if heartanmind are human and marsupial-humanoid, what else is there? Plus, H20. What’s the ‘O’?

         A loaf of quantum entanglement rising by way of heart-yeast in a thin disk of circular cogitation. Heart becoming Mind, boy, that’s how it is in here. – Amorella.

         This appears without reason, Amorella. Heart cannot become Mind any more that Mind can become Heart. I’ll go with the two-thirds soul as the makeup of the Styx, that makes sense as the heart and mind (once snipped from the physical) have to ‘swim’ through the Styx to HeavenOrHellBothOrNeither. The other third, the way you have set this up, has to be angelic perspiration or shredded angel hair, something angelic, or so it seems to me. Anyway, this is way too esoteric – I think I am free drifting looking for something intuitive that has not yet floated to the top. I think this is me in a state of free imagination, not you, Amorella.

         Tomorrow you’ll have found an anchor near the spine and things will make more sense. Post. – Amorella.

          What could mix with soul in any case? It is as a shell of great density, something solid to hold the heartanmind inside for their own protection. That's how it reads in the Merlyn series. It would have to be reasonable, to be as ice or a gas for the water analogy to work. This is a waste of speculative silliness tonight. Sometimes darkness is just that -- dark and solid. 


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