Unequal blame

Fallacious thinking

After a weekend in which I battled both fire ants and tears (after receiving a vaccination reminder for my dear, departed furry one), I want to move on to happier things. Alas, it appears time instead to revisit logical fallacies, specifically false/moral equivalence.

Donald Trump is far from the only offender in this area (or in whataboutism, otherwise known in my mind as “but her emails”), but lately he seems to be the most prolific. Please, General Kelly, take his phone away, or at least give him a new shovel for that hole he’s digging. The old one’s wearing out.

Dwight Eisenhower was also guilty of false equivalence after the Brown v. Board of Education rulings, criticizing “extremists” on both sides of the segregation issue. The Washington Post’s Lindsey Bever spoke to historians about Eisenhower and Trump’s false equivalencies. James Grossman, the American Historical Association’s executive director, said Eisenhower’s cannot be compared to Trump’s. “Eisenhower was not making an equivalency that indicated whatsoever any disinclination on his part to condemn neo-Nazis or to compare neo-Nazis with Americans who were protesting against Nazis,” he told Bever.

False equivalence, says the Skeptical Raptor blog, is “a logical fallacy where there appears to be a logical equivalence (usually in quantity and quality of evidence) between two opposing arguments, but when in fact ... one side has substantially higher quality and quantity of evidence. However, there is no equivalence between the two sides when one is supported by evidence, and the other side with little or no evidence, of which most is of low quality.”

But sure, go ahead and believe that story that cites chiefly opinion, fantasy and conspiracy theories over the one that cites actual evidence.

Alex B. Berezow of RealClearScience, in explaining that not all disagreements are logical fallacies, wrote in 2014 of false equivalency: “this argument is used mostly by political hacks who are trying to rationalize hypocritical beliefs and behavior. … both sides of the political spectrum—Republicans and Democrats—will throw science under the bus whenever it is politically convenient. But partisans don’t see it that way. In their minds, only the ‘other side’ is unscientific, and any comparisons between the two sides immediately draw accusations of ‘false equivalence’.”

Naw, doesn’t sound at all like the sniping we see between the left and the right nowadays.

We see this in the climate-change debate, and in countless other areas that have become hopelessly politicized. When you combine false equivalence with other fallacies like hasty generalization (no, everyone on the left is not Antifa, nor is everyone on the right a white supremacist), it’s enough to drive perfectly sane people ’round the bend. And in the case of Charlottesville, we were presented with a special kind of false equivalence—that of moral equivalence. If other people do bad things too, then it’s OK for someone else to do them because two wrongs do make a right … right?

Nobody is completely blameless; however, by laying blame equally on the Unite the Right participants and the counter-protesters, we forget about pesky things like facts. According to police, Unite the Right ralliers—including everyday conservatives as well as white supremacists and neo-Nazis— broke with the established plan which kept them separated from the counter-protesters (most of whom were peaceful, but did include anarchists and Antifa members). There were skirmishes on both sides, but, again, mostly from the extremists.

Both groups had permits, despite what was reported by the president and others, and when Heather Heyer and the other victims were struck by that car, it was after police had declared the rally and counter-protest to be unlawful assemblies, and participants were dispersing.

But most importantly, the suspect in Heyer’s death has been identified as a supporter of Nazi ideals and a participant in the rally. I think we can safely say, then, that extremists on the right merit far more of the blame in this instance.

As I’ve noted before, while we have freedom of speech, we are not free from the consequences of that speech, nor are we free from opposition. Blaming counter-protesters for being there at all is just madness. Yes, violence happens on both sides, but one side in particular at Charlottesville came spoiling for a fight, and with armed militia. Yes, there were weapons on both sides, but it was one side responsible for the act that killed a young peace activist.

People on both sides can see the truth of the situation, and have loudly condemned both the actions in Charlottesville and the false equivalence pronounced by the president. So why does one side prefer to believe something false?

Quite simply, it’s just easier not to take ownership of what happened and to believe they’re not the bad guys in the equation.