Monday, July 5th, 2010

INTELLECTUAL DISHONESTY

It takes a lot to get me to yell at my TV; I mean, really…I know the clowns on the other side of the screen can’t hear me and all it accomplishes is make me look like a loon. But every now and again someone says something so outlandish that I turn my head and ask aloud “what the F*%K are you talking about?”

It’s almost always a case of in intellectual dishonesty. Differences of opinion do not bother me, as long as they are based and rooted in an honest, consistent premise and/or facts. Once we have those baselines established, it is time then to disagree. For example, is politicians want to argue that we need more economic stimulus because the first was too small and that’s why it didn’t work, that’s a fair argument. They’re wrong, but at least it’s a baselines argument rooted in an understanding that the stimulus plan failed. However, when politicians argue that the reason we need another, bigger stimulus plan is because the first one worked so well, that’s brazen intellectual dishonesty and a total loss of credibility.

Last week on ESPN, I was watching a show called Pardon the Interruption, in which two balding, middle-aged nitwits comment on sports activities they haven’t played or even tried in 30+ years. At one point, speaking of Saint Louis Cardinals manager Tony Larussa and his expressed support for the new Arizona Immigration Law, host Tony Korheiser said “Larussa is taking an unpopular position.”

This is stunning hubris, topped off by sheer intellectual dishonesty. There isn’t a poll on earth that suggest anywhere less than 60% of all Americans (and most polls has it much higher, into the 70s) fully supports Arizona’s new law and wants one in their state, yet Korn-holer demands that it not be true just because he says so. He referenced, antecdotaly, boycotts of the state and various players who voiced opposition to the law, as his claim for why the law is so “unpopular,” yet he never mentioned that 3 out of every 4 Americans supports it. That is intellectual dishonesty, and it is shameful.

Shortly after the Iraq war began, Bill O Reilly committed a similar yet different form of intellectual dishonesty. After calling for his dopey “boycott of France,” O Reilly reported a few months into his cause that it was, in fact, working, by citing American travel to France was down 20% and purchases of French wine were off 25%. End of report. What he left out of the exact same study, however, was that American travel to all of Europe was down 40% and all wine sales, foreign and domestic, were off 20% in America. Alas, there was no “boycott effect,” at all; it was simply the harsh truth of the economy at the time. In fact, while European travel by Americans was down, France was the most visited European country by Americans…but O Reilly left that out so that he could appear right. That is intellectual dishonesty, and it is shameful.

The Kornheiser/O Reilly examples are a primer for two of the evils we face when trying to have civil discourse in this country. Those who honestly believe that the sky is pink (Kornheiser, who says the immigration law is unpopular even when reams of evidence prove the contrary to be true), and those who know that the sky is blue, they just refuse to tell you it is (O Reilly, who reports enough of the facts to make himself look right, and omits those that belay his point entirely).

Imagine the challenge in trying to have honest, thoughtful conversations with people such as this; people who refuse to believe that there is any other way other than their own to look at something and people who, in the absence of facts to support their opinion, will simply make new facts up and brazenly proclaim them to be true!

The most common forms of intellectual dishonesty are hypocrisy and/or naivety, most properly demonstrated by the 5-decade-long campaign to outlaw cigarettes in America. The hypocrites based their tyrannical message on a very simple premise; cigarettes are bad for you, bad for others, and a burden on our health care system, so they should be consumed much less or not at all. However, as more and more people use that same premise to attack and try to ban everything from soda pops to fast food, the hypocrites go running for the hills screaming inept proclamations such as “it’s not the same thing,” when we all know it is exactly the same thing. You simply cannot ban or limit a behavior based on silly, non-scientific mumbo-jumbo while creating the template for banning everything that bothers someone else. Game Over.

The Naïve amongst us are simply too stupid to engage most subjects because they just refuse to believe what is actually so apparent to the rest of us. When warned decades ago that the march to ban cigarettes would lead to similar bans against salt and trans-fats the naïve amongst us just waived their hands and said “that’ll never happen,” usually ending by calling the rest of us fear mongers and paranoids.

So, here we sit in an intellectually dishonest America with a ton of problems before us and almost no one capable of discussing them without some form of personal attack or intellectual dishonesty. If I am to understand everyone correctly, Americans hate the Arizona law almost as much as they hate the French, and we are not living in a country that is restricting our ability to smoke, buy fast food and drink soda, despite all indications to the contrary on each and every subject. Good. I’m glad we got that cleared up.