Thatcher's Blame
Doctor Madsen Pirie, founder and current President of the Adam Smith Institute, published a highly entertaining and very useful book in 1985 called
"The Book of the Fallacy - a training manual for intellectual subversives."
which is a masterly guide to the different tricks which people can use to make their argument sound much stronger than it really is, how to spot them, and what the holes in their logic are.
Pirie listed many of the most commonly encountered logical fallacies and traps which, by accident or design, can lead people to support false conclusions.
Unfortunately, as Madsen Pirie points out, knowing why the argument you are listening to is wrong does not always make it easy to defeat the person advancing it. Arguments "ad baculum" (by threat of force) do not go away if you prove the person making the threat to be wrong, irrelevant humour, if it is funny enough, can carry away a valid argument on a gale of laughter, and emotional appeals can be extremely hard to stop with mere logic.
Nevertheless, to be able to understand why an argument is wrong is a useful start - if you don't know yourself you have little chance of persuading anyone else. And this book is really helpful at showing you how to see where faulty logic is in play. Sadly the original version with it's highly entertaining cartoons is no longer in print though one can sometimes get second-hand copies on Amazon, but a second edition of the book was published in 2006 with a new title
"How to Win Every Argument - the use and abuse of logic."
The text is about 95% common, although the new version has a few updated concepts.
One of these is called "Thatcher's Blame."
This is Madsen's twist on a concept also known as "Damned if you do, damned if you don't" but he gives a particular example of the way some people on the left always manage to make things Mrs Thatcher's fault.
If the country was going through a period of austerity and poverty, any misbehaviour was blamed on Mrs Thatcher on the grounds that people who don't have enough money are rioting / mugging / stealing / getting drunk to drown their sorrows because they are suffering as they don't have enough money, and this is destroying the fabric of society.
When the economy was growing at an incredible rate and people had much more money (and some of the people caught rioting or looting turned out to be in well-paid jobs) the same journalists and politicians who had advanced the argument in the above paragraph said that the misbehaviour was all Mrs Thatcher's fault because she had encouraged them to worship material success and think that all that mattered was to have "loadsamoney," which led to moral decay / rioting / mugging / stealing / getting drunk to celebrate or get even more money and that this is destroying the fabric of society.
So all the evils of society are Mrs Thatcher's fault because people have too much money or not enough money.
This year will see the thirtieth anniversary of Mrs Thatcher's fall from power and at the first full council meeting of the year in Cumbria today we had -you've guessed it - the Leader of the council blaming things on Mrs Thatcher.
When asked by my colleague Ben Shirley whether the council could do more to improve the effectiveness of bus services, the first response of Labour councillor Stuart Young was to blame the problems with bus services in Cumbria in 2019 on Mrs Thatcher's bus deregulation of the 1980's.
The fact that his party had been in power for thirteen of the intervening thirty years and either of the two Labour Prime Ministers at that time could easily have reversed the decision had they thought the case for re-regulating buses was so overwhelming did not seem to be of interest to him.
"The Book of the Fallacy - a training manual for intellectual subversives."
which is a masterly guide to the different tricks which people can use to make their argument sound much stronger than it really is, how to spot them, and what the holes in their logic are.
Pirie listed many of the most commonly encountered logical fallacies and traps which, by accident or design, can lead people to support false conclusions.
Unfortunately, as Madsen Pirie points out, knowing why the argument you are listening to is wrong does not always make it easy to defeat the person advancing it. Arguments "ad baculum" (by threat of force) do not go away if you prove the person making the threat to be wrong, irrelevant humour, if it is funny enough, can carry away a valid argument on a gale of laughter, and emotional appeals can be extremely hard to stop with mere logic.
Nevertheless, to be able to understand why an argument is wrong is a useful start - if you don't know yourself you have little chance of persuading anyone else. And this book is really helpful at showing you how to see where faulty logic is in play. Sadly the original version with it's highly entertaining cartoons is no longer in print though one can sometimes get second-hand copies on Amazon, but a second edition of the book was published in 2006 with a new title
"How to Win Every Argument - the use and abuse of logic."
The text is about 95% common, although the new version has a few updated concepts.
One of these is called "Thatcher's Blame."
This is Madsen's twist on a concept also known as "Damned if you do, damned if you don't" but he gives a particular example of the way some people on the left always manage to make things Mrs Thatcher's fault.
If the country was going through a period of austerity and poverty, any misbehaviour was blamed on Mrs Thatcher on the grounds that people who don't have enough money are rioting / mugging / stealing / getting drunk to drown their sorrows because they are suffering as they don't have enough money, and this is destroying the fabric of society.
When the economy was growing at an incredible rate and people had much more money (and some of the people caught rioting or looting turned out to be in well-paid jobs) the same journalists and politicians who had advanced the argument in the above paragraph said that the misbehaviour was all Mrs Thatcher's fault because she had encouraged them to worship material success and think that all that mattered was to have "loadsamoney," which led to moral decay / rioting / mugging / stealing / getting drunk to celebrate or get even more money and that this is destroying the fabric of society.
So all the evils of society are Mrs Thatcher's fault because people have too much money or not enough money.
This year will see the thirtieth anniversary of Mrs Thatcher's fall from power and at the first full council meeting of the year in Cumbria today we had -you've guessed it - the Leader of the council blaming things on Mrs Thatcher.
When asked by my colleague Ben Shirley whether the council could do more to improve the effectiveness of bus services, the first response of Labour councillor Stuart Young was to blame the problems with bus services in Cumbria in 2019 on Mrs Thatcher's bus deregulation of the 1980's.
The fact that his party had been in power for thirteen of the intervening thirty years and either of the two Labour Prime Ministers at that time could easily have reversed the decision had they thought the case for re-regulating buses was so overwhelming did not seem to be of interest to him.
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