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Paul Buchheit reports via AlterNet
While Edward Snowden and Chelsea Manning and John Kiriakou are vilified for revealing vital information about spying and bombing and torture, a man who conspired with Goldman Sachs to make billions of dollars on the planned failure of subprime mortgages was honored by New York University for his "Outstanding Contributions to Society".
This is one example of the distorted thinking leading to the demise of a once-vibrant American society. There are other signs of decay:
- A House Bill Would View Corporate Crimes as "Honest Mistakes"
- Almost 2/3 of American Families Couldn't Afford a Single Pill of a Life-Saving Drug
- Violent Crime Down; Prison Population Doubles
- One in Four Americans Suffer Mental Illness; Mental Health Facilities Cut by 90 Percent
- The Unpaid Taxes of 500 Companies Could Pay for a Job for Every Unemployed American ...for two years ...at the nation's median salary of $36,000 ...for all 8 million unemployed.
Citizens for Tax Justice reports that Fortune 500 companies are holding over $2 trillion in profits offshore to avoid taxes that would amount to over $600 billion. Our society desperately needs infrastructure repair, but 8 million potential jobs are being held hostage beyond our borders.
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(Score: 4, Interesting) by Jiro on Tuesday December 08 2015, @03:46PM
A Gish Gallop is an argument tactic where the person making the argument produces so many arguments that it is impossible to address them all, so no matter what you do it looks like you can't refute them. For instance, note that prisoners don't get let go just because people aren't committing further crimes, so their stated description doesn't make any sense; a decline in the crime rate doesn't lead to the number of prisoners immediately going down. (If you actually follow their links, the rate peaked at 2007 and has gone down somewhat since then.) Furthermore, the statistic compares a decline in violent crime to an increasing number of all prisoners. And even though some of the statistic is true and just really poorly reported by alternet, it just means that the sentence length has gone up; whether prisoners should get longer sentences is something that can be debated, and they're treating a debatable issue like a settled issue.
And nobody has time to address each one of their arguments so their scattershot approach makes it look like nobody has a good response, when it just means nobody has the time to write several essays refuting each claim in detail.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 08 2015, @04:01PM
Agree, but it's the same tactic used whenever someone posts something that is non-PC relative to the site that s/he's posting. For example, if you post something against relaxation of laws against file sharing, you'll get 15 responses with 20 different types of arguments: greedy record company executives, information wanting to be free, statistics cooked by the RIAA/MPAA, Congressmen should all be sacked, live performance is the new business model, Britney Spears for $19.98, CDs with one good song, sometimes I buy stuff after I sample what the musician has done, etc. The idea is that you lose unless you provide a knockdown answer to all of them, which of course is impossible.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by GreatAuntAnesthesia on Tuesday December 08 2015, @04:53PM
It could also be the case that some stances have a lot of arguments in favour of them. Not necessarily talking about filesharing here BTW.
Are you saying that if I can come up with 10 good reasons why X is a good idea then in your mind X is automatically a bad idea and I'm some kind of shill/ troll?
(Score: 2) by quacking duck on Tuesday December 08 2015, @09:56PM
Bill riders and omnibus bills use this tactic to great (if depressingly bad for democracy) effect.