False Equivalency Watch

Pogroms and Strongly Worded Editorials.

Fri, 14 Jan 2011 14:20:54 -0800

Pogroms and Strongly Worded Editorials.:

“This is simply the latest round of an ongoing pogrom against conservative thinkers.”

Pogroms are riots and attacks against minorities, and the term is primarily a reference to the attacks on Jews in the Russian Empire.

Conservative thinkers have been subjected to, at worst, a series of strongly worded editorials.

Violence and Blood Libel

Wed, 12 Jan 2011 13:42:00 -0800

For the record, blood libel is the accusation that Jews use the blood of gentile children in religious rituals and/or in the making of matzoh.

Sarah Palin claims that that accusing her of using violent imagery is akin to blood libel. Except it’s demonstrably true that she has used violent imagery on multiple occasions.

(Thanks to eldan for being the first to point it out to me this morning. Seriously, sleep in on the West Coast and you miss an entire news cycle.)

Environmentalists and the Discovery Channel shooter

Tue, 11 Jan 2011 10:07:00 -0800

Environmentalists and the Discovery Channel shooter:

Palin aide: “I never went out and blamed Al Gore or any environmentalist for the crazy insane person who went to shoot up the Discovery Channel.”

Has Al Gore ever used violent imagery in his talks? Cross-hairs? Has he ever, in his entire life, said “RELOAD!”?

On internet posters and VP candidates

Tue, 11 Jan 2011 09:02:00 -0800

In this inaugural post, let’s hit Matt Bai’s recent NY Times column, in which he makes not one, but two false equivalencies!

One was Sarah Palin’s infamous “cross hairs” map from last year, which showed a series of contested Congressional districts, including Ms. Giffords’s, with gun targets trained on them. Another was from Daily Kos, the liberal blog, where one of the congresswoman’s apparently liberal constituents declared her “dead to me” after Ms. Giffords voted against Nancy Pelosi in House leadership elections last week.

A random person commenting on a blog does not have the influence, power, and respectability of a recent vice presidential candidate.
The phrase “dead to me”, while unfortunate, is usually used in a tongue-in-cheek fashion. And there is no violent imagery inherent in the phrase, whereas gun targets are, by their very existence, violent imagery.

Let me expand upon the second point for a bit. If you were to say, “Jar Jar Binks is dead to me!”, most people would commiserate. If you were to photoshop gun targets onto a screenshot of Jar Jar Binks, most people would say, ” … dude. That’s a bit extreme.”