Is progressivism really even a leftwing standpoint given that it is organic and functional to corporate state power? We will come back to that on another day. Today I want to talk about the problem of informal fallacies, which are being perpetrated in comments to my posts They are murdering reason. I hate to call out folks on this but I think everybody will benefit from understanding the problem of fallacious reasoning given that this style is rampant on the woke progressive side and I want to arm comrades with the technical weapons of reason so they can effective push back against the madness. My critique concerns many people beyond my Facebook threads. So this essay is an expanded version of comments I already made on Facebook.
I want to assure people that fallacious reasoning in many of these case is not because of any intellectual deficits by those engaging in it, but is the consequence of trying to defend irrational beliefs and a perverted sense of justice. Progressives work from party ideology and tribal affiliation and not from reason. Ideology and tribal thinking disorder cognition. People align their arguments with irrational doctrine rather than striving for clear and independent reason. Woke is a neoreligion, and, as I have explained, it comes with all the problems of the old religions, except in the woke case, there’s an additional problem: the claims of queer theory are falsifiable. That these demonstrably false claims continue to prevail in our sense-making institutions is proof of ideological-political capture. This capture is not benign, since policies are generated on the doctrines.
Which is precisely what we have in front of us in the current moment. Today, an Algerian named Imane Khelif dispatched Italy’s Angela Carini in less than a minute in the women’s welterweight preliminary boxing match at the 2024 Summer Olympics, held in Paris, France. Carini’s coach, Emanuele Renzini, said she was warned by many not to fight Khelif, who was disqualified from the 2023 World Championships due to failed gender eligibility tests (he has XY chromosomes). “Many people in Italy tried to call and tell her: ‘Don’t go please: it’s a man, it’s dangerous for you,” Renzini told reporters. Afterwards, Carini said through her tears that she had “never taken a punch like that.”
We say a fallacy is “informal” when it arises from the content and context of the argument rather than any structural flaw in logical form. Here’s the form of the fallacy: A person says that “trans identifying” male athletes should not be allowed to compete in women’s sports. The rebuttal is that the athlete is, allegedly, a DSD case. DSD is the acronym for ‘disorders of sexual development,” a legit scientific construct. The trick being played here is that DSD cases in women’s sports represent something other than a male identifying as a female. It is an irrelevant point, since DSD males enjoy the same advantages as other males because they are in fact males. You can plainly see in the side-by-side comparison that the athlete who punched the woman in the face today at the Olympics, forcing her to quit in the first minute, is male and in fact tested XY, which is the male karyotype.
(If it were the case that this was an XX karyotype who went through male puberty, many of those same advantages would accrue, in which case it would be analogous the doping scandals of the 1970s and 1980s. See Misogyny Resurgent: Atavistic Expressions of a Neoreligion.)
The rebuttal involves a misunderstanding or mischaracterization (which may or may not be intentional) of the original argument and commits an informal fallacy. In this case, the original argument is that male athletes should not be allowed to compete in women’s sports. The rebuttal that the athlete in question is a DSD case introduces an irrelevant issue. This misdirection can thus be classified as a “red herring fallacy,” where the rebuttal diverts attention from the operative point by bringing up a different topic. This could also be seen as an irrelevant conclusion (ignoratio elenchi), where the rebuttal fails to address the operative point directly. The rebutter thinks this is a gotcha moment, but this just shows a lack of understanding of the rules of rational argument. Again, entirely expected from those who hold irrational beliefs and don’t care to, or are incapable of doing so, change those beliefs because of ideological commitment and tribal affiliation. Moreover, the rebutter has perpetrated a “straw man fallacy” if the s/he misrepresents the original argument by focusing on an exceptional case. It seems obvious to me that this is also going on, since my posts come in the context of an ongoing critique with a very clear operative point, which is a defense of sex-based rights.
At the risk of sounding immodest, nobody ever attempts to rebut my actual argument. There’s a simple reason for this, at least in this case: there is no rational rebuttal. So, instead, they engage in sophistry, smears to turn people against me (as if I were a bigot), and petitions to have me fired from my job. I am not expressing a persecution complex. I didn’t ask for NBC to run a hit piece on me. And when I was asked to fuel the manufactured controversy, I declined to participate.
We see more sophistry in the criticisms of the opening ceremony of the Olympics, that the critics are wrong because the subject was not (allegedly) really “The Last Supper” but a representation of the Feast of Dionysus. And upon learning that it was “The Last Supper” after all, the fact they made such a big deal about is ignored or rationalized. Here, the argument aims to correct a factual misunderstanding about the ceremony’s subject matter. But this correction commits the straw man fallacy since the original criticisms concerns broader issues of artistic direction, cultural insensitivity, and political-ideological capture. The straw man fallacy is rampant on the progressive left. By focusing only on an alleged misunderstanding of the subject matter, the rebutter misrepresents the broader concerns expressed, thus attacking a weaker version of the argument and avoiding addressing the actual point. This case also involves a red herring fallacy because the “correction” about the Feast of Dionysus diverts attention from the core criticisms of the ceremony. If the main issues raised by the critics is not addressed by the factual correction, the rebuttal becomes a distraction rather than an actual rebuttal. (Moreover, it’s also paradoxical given that postmodernists argue that the intent of the performance doesn’t matter. What matters is how the audience receives the point. That’s the deal with deconstruction and poststructuralism. The work doesn’t belong to the author. It belongs to the audience.)
Here’s what’s going on. Those who raise these objections support the inclusion of male athletes in girl’s and women’s sports—and in other activities and spaces exclusive to women. They will vote for the political party that develops, interprets, and implements laws and politics that have made this a reality. But they don’t want to say that directly because they have enough awareness to hear how misogynistic that sounds. And that’s because it is misogynistic. So they resort to magical thinking and the art of rhetorical bamboozle. They say that these males as “trans,” as if that changes anything. That’s the alchemy I talk about all the time. It’s the belief that magical incantations change—and that simulations can stand in for—realities. It’s the woke religion’s version of transubstantiation. It confuses simulacra with the things the simulacra attempt to represent. When it is pointed out that what is presented as reality is simulation, they get mad, like the magician whose tricks are exposed—or the faith healer found with a receiver in his ear, his wife in the back with a transmitter and a stack of prayer request cards. The trans activities and their allies will pivot under stress and say that the males are DSD, as if the myth of the gender chimera (the hermaphrodite, which they try to make you stop from saying because it’s insulting even though it doesn’t exist anywhere in mammal world) changes the terms of reality of the gender binary (which is dimorphic and immutable).
The belief that men are women and should be treated as such compromises another political commitment: the profession of women’s rights. To say that males should have access to the gender-exclusive activities and spaces of girls and women is to abandon sex-based rights, the core of the feminism. Since one cannot simultaneously be committed to women’s rights and support the violation of those rights by inclusion of males in women’s activities and spaces, the resort to fallacious reasoning Orwell calls “doublethink,” the attempt to hold two contradictory positions in one’s head simultaneously, becomes required, and is sustained in this case because that’s what the Party and the tribe demand.
We see the same catalog of informal fallacies in the controversy surrounding the opening ceremonies (see Supper in the Spectacular Café; Apollo is Crucified and Butch Dines on Dionysus; The Paris Olympics and the War on Western Culture). Here, it was obvious that Dionysus made his appearance at “The Last Supper.” Those who say it wasn’t a sendup of da Vinci scene are committing the red herring fallacy because they need to divert attention from the point of the performance: the subversion “The Last Supper” by the introduction of Dionysus, the Greek god of debauchery and transgression, which is central to queer praxis—by its own lights. This is how gay burlesque became coopted by movement acts and emblematic of queer praxis, and why the targets of this praxis are children and their virtue-signaling parents—and why you will be accused of a made-up offense (“transphobia”) if you simply point that out even while they tell you that’s the point of it all. (This ideology is full of made-up words. “Cis gender” is one of the more obnoxious ones. “But, Andy, all words are made up.” yeah, but not all the things they refer are.)
Knowing that the performance was an instantiation of queer praxis, the desire to distract the public from the point of the performance was guaranteed. And because progressives think they’re the smartest people in room (the superciliousness of this bunch is truly obnoxious), they have to condescend to the mouth breathers out in MAGA land by telling them all about the Feast of Dionysus, as if an orgiastic pagan ritual promoting unbridled sexual ecstasy should concern no one. “Oh, Andy, it was so tame.” Of course it was tame. How could it have televised if it planned to go any further? It’s the Olympics, not PornHub. The point is to reach the audience—and then shame them when they predictably react to what is plainly before them. There’s a word for this that I left out of my Facebook post because I am think ice with that censorious organization. That word is grooming.
Perhaps, the ideological capture of our sense making institutions could not be better illustrated that a propaganda piece literally making sex-based rights a Nazi project in the August issue of The Nation asking, “Why There Are No Trans Women Competing at the Paris Games?” Among others, the magazine spoke with Travers (apparently just Travers), an associate professor of sociology at Simon Fraser University, said that, to quote the magazine’s summary of their views (pronouns “them/they”): “the rules governing male and female sports do more than marginalize trans girls and women at all levels of sports, from elementary school to the Olympics. They also feed a far greater right-wing current in the United States and around the world. Trans athletes are their stalking horse, but their goals extend well beyond that.”
“Female eligibility policies delegitimize trans identities, but that’s not all,” Travers told The Nation. “They have also become instruments to mobilize conservative and fascist movements both in the United States and across the globe. This is part of a process where they are using state power to eliminate all obstacles to the operation of racial capitalism and target people who are racialized, poor, disabled, LGBT, and undocumented.” Travers continues: “In the United States, this is taking the form of eliminating legal protections for all marginalized people as well as the transformation of educational institutions to eradicate critical content, the maintenance of horrific border and immigration systems, and the prioritization of the needs of capital over climate change.”
I would ask Travis if the fascists are in their room right now. They are but I don’t want to commit the ad hominem fallacy. Let us just say that what they said is delusional. But, seriously, this is a what passes for a professor as Simon Fraser? (Please don’t write the administration there and complain. Academic freedom is under enough fire without everybody participating in cancel culture. I am not doxxing this person. It’s in the pages of The Nation. And there are several other media outlets pumping out the same garbage.)
I fear that the madness Travis expresses above, to which progressives will nod their heads in agreement, is not something we can deal with on an intellectual basis. How could you persuade somebody who believes so adamantly that female eligibility policies delegitimize trans identities and therefore the norms safeguarding sex-based rights should be dismantled so men who want to be women can trample upon them? If at my worst I expressed similar sentiments (I have an essay coming on my previous beliefs about the matter of gender ideology), the way out for me was not others talking me out my position. I found my way out of the morass by redoubling my efforts at cogitating on the basis of reason, which means that the spark of enlightenment was still burning inside me. As the saying goes, you cannot reason a man out of a position that he did not reason himself into. Moreover, the incentive and disciplinary structures are such that they induce people into believing the most irrational things, which entrenches the problem, since the unreasonable man may never hear the arguments that refute his irrational views—or if he does, either reflex will have him plugging his ears and shutting tight his eyes and chanting the thought-stopping cliches, or he will act in bad faith because of what will happen to him if he doesn’t.
This is a cult, and deprogramming those who have fallen prey to cults cannot occur without violating their cognitive freedom. It’s a real dilemma. We can’t whisk away the folx to remote places and get out their heads what the total institutions of their lives have stuffed into them. We aren’t like them after all. We aren’t authoritarians. But we can retake control over our institutions and leave these people to find hills upon which they can be fools without disturbing the rest of us and trying to get at the little ones. The good news is that this will disorganize their politics and many of them will eventually find their way back into normal society and regain their capacity for reason.
freedom and reason 