This is the next blog post in my ongoing effort to distract you from LSAT studying by analyzing random videos (see the Arrested Development and Colbert Report posts for more.)For the past few years, the fine folks at The Onion (wiki) have posted short, and often hilarious, 2-3 minute YouTube videos.
Fortunately, their latest video, "Obama Axes Pentagon Plan To Build Billion Dollar Tank In Shape Of Dragon" is more worthy of LSAT-style analysis than most, so I finally have an excuse to share one of their videos with you.
My student Ashley has written a detailed analysis of the logical fallacies this video contains, so I've decided to share her response with everyone on the blog.
Ashley's analysis:
The General defending the dragon tank against budget cuts doesn’t have a terrible argument, per se – “if we are to maintain the supremacy of the U.S. military, then we need to invest in new technology” (an important assumption being: it doesn’t really matter what it costs if it’s important for our military). But it’s an argument he doesn’t give any compelling (or relevant) evidence for.
Consider the contrapositive: if we don’t invest in new technology, then we won’t maintain the supremacy of the US military. For this argument to be legit (and to relate to the argument he's actually trying to make...the necessity of the dragon tank program), he needs to makes sure he makes the case this particular multi-billion dollar tank is an absolutely essential piece of the entire U.S. military’s investments in new technology, that it is the “brink” investment, the key program, and that if we take it away, all of the other investment will be worthless and we might as well hoist the Canadian flag and rightfully accept hockey rather than baseball as the national pastime. (I am for this.) But he can’t, so instead, he tries to distract his audience with irrelevant evidence and quite a bit of flawed reasoning (see below).
A good example of this is his (fabulous) non sequitur:
General Cotti: Developing new technology is essential to maintaining American military advantage. Just last week for example, we figured out how to make the dragon’s scales glow in the dark.
Huh??
A better journalist might have pushed him on this a little harder. For example, he or she could have asked about the opportunity cost of the dragon tank, relating it perhaps to other investments that are more likely to pay off and (thus) actually benefit the U.S. military. (In other words, the dragon tank itself could be reducing the readiness of the US military by sucking away resources from good investments!)
And then, of course, there’s the possibility the existence of the dragon tank is angering our enemies (or making them nervous?) which makes them more likely to attack us, rather than less. (Ok, admittedly less plausible in this case, but think about the arguments against nuclear deterrence theory – when major powers maintain nuclear weapons, smaller countries and/or terrorists know how they can use them to get powerful countries to listen to them, which leads to the spread of nuclear weapons and instability…rather than the promised stability that comes from "mutually assured destruction").
Regarding the “limit” to out-of-control military spending, he says the Pentagon is being “reasonable” because it cut the pool and the ballroom. In this, he moves the goalpost" on what is reasonable so he can meet it…but just because you cut something doesn’t mean you are being reasonable.
He uses irrelevant analogies (karate and the atomic bomb) when addressing the question of how long it will take to develop the dragon tank.
(Steve: Although I'd like to think the dragon tank is an "achievement" worthy of being compared to karate or the atomic bomb, it's probably not nearly as useful in practice, and it's more likely to be turned against its creators. For this reason, one could argue this is a false analogy.)
He uses an emotional appeal/appeal to fear (“lives will be at risk!/soldiers will die!”) rather than justifying this particular program. Also, I don’t know how to categorize this one, except for "appeal to emotion", but there’s also some weird shit going on with the simulations (the tank shooting down what look like Muslim people and which looks like a video game, and the tank bulldozing a city that looks a lot like the Middle East...where we are fighting and losing two wars at the moment...), which is probably included to win over the portion of the American population that uses the word “Islamofacism” instead of trying to tap into our cost-benefit analyses.
(Steve: Ashley continues by identifying an example of a classic correlation vs. causation flaw and an ad hominem attack. I've included the following quote for anyone who can't watch the video or just wants to read part of it. This quote is the main reason I decided to send this to Ashley in the first place. It takes place at 1:19 in the video.)
General Cotti: We've made this mistake before. When Bill Clinton was elected, he canceled the giant invisible squid submarine project, and then the USS Cole was bombed.
News Anchor: Well, that's true, but the military has had 5 years to complete the dragon tank---
General Cotti: Was the atomic bomb, or karate, developed in 5 years? President Obama is putting lives at risk. The only explanation I can think of is that he's terrified of dragons.
And, of course, he discounts every single other possibility on the face of the planet (the recession? that he wants to spend more money on other things? that it’ll never work?) when he concludes, ad hominemishly, that Obama is against the program because he is “afraid of dragons.”
Just because things happen in succession doesn’t mean they are causally related. Just because Bill Clinton canceled the giant invisible squid submarine project, and USS Cole was bombed afterward, it doesn’t mean the bombing was because of the cancellation. Also, even assuming for argument’s sake that the two were related, just because it happened in the case of the giant invisible squid submarine doesn’t mean it’ll happen in the case of the dragon tank!
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Steve: Have you come across an example of an LSAT-style logical fallacy in an online video or article? Email it to me, and if I think it's funny and worthy of analysis, I'll cover it on the blog!
Photo by thetruthabout / CC BY-SA 2.0
