Arguments have laws...

Am I the only one that remembers that there are rules to arguments? Why the fuck do most people start to fall into fallacies when the first signs of losing the battle rears its head? I got into a debate with a good friend the other day about Slam poetry. His position was that "Slam" poetry was inferior to the likes of Billy Collins and Langston Hughes. In addition to that he claimed that Slam Poetry was doing more harm than good in promoting poets. My position is that he knows too little to pass judgment as fast as he had. Look, Opinion is opinion, but opinion based on lack of information is ignorance. He, in my opinion, was lacking too much information to support his argument. If he had said, "Slam poetry, from what I've heard, is no where near as articulate or artistic as some other classical poets," I could have accepted that. He continued on about Slam's lack of artistic quality and worth as a viable and respected form of poetry. I can dig it man. I get your whole opinion. Just give me a ‘why’. Tell me how you reached this conclusion if you can. If you can’t, then let it die a little. Every thought we have doesn’t need to be a child. We don’t need to see every idea as a ‘little darling’ that needs to be nourished and encouraged. Some need to die. Some even need to be tortured.



As he continued bashing Slam as an inferior, obnoxious form of poetry, I would build counter points. This is where the "Laws" part of this post plays its hand. One major point of contention with him was that Slam had pushed back poetry into the dregs of artistic endeavors by being enveloped by tripe prose and stumbling lyrical disasters. One of the only counter points I had was that Slam had made poetry a success in the eyes of the market. It was now a viable form of art that HBO deemed worthwhile. My point is poetry books, magazines and pamphlets never match the staggering drawing power of TV. It didn't matter that it was HBO, CBS, NBC or any other network. The point is that it was broadcast, and that carries a lot of positive implications with it.

I was proud of this argument. How could anyone counter such a sound fact? Poetry is reaching the peak of its popularity by form of broadcast. Neither tricks nor traps to this argument. My friend did come back with an line of reasoning that, for lack of a better term, sucked the shit out of a cow's colon. He countered with, "HBO? The same network that airs Howie Mandel specials?" The table erupted with laughter. My entire argument was drowned by this comment. This blatant fallacy. The fucker drummed up support for his feeble argument by concocting a fallacious one. The fallacy he committed was a Red Herring fallacy. Red Herring fallacies, in my experience, are the most commonly abused fallacy in arguments. It’s increasingly more common when arguing with a conservative. It feels like they’re arguing what they want to argue and not the subject at hand.

Example:
“We humans are primarily responsible for causing global warming,” says person A
“No we’re not! Al Gore is just drumming up the masses on the whole global warming issue to sell books,” retorts person B

The argument has nothing to do with Al Gore. We’re talking about the science behind global warming, not some politician’s motives in exposing the science behind it.

Here’s the formula:
1. Topic A is under discussion.
2. Topic B is introduced under the guise of being relevant to topic A (when topic B is actually not relevant to topic A)
3. Topic A is abandoned.

This is the issue…he won the support of the table. More over, my roommate reminded me about how he “won the debate with the HBO comment”. His comment had nothing to do with the point that poetry had never been seen on TV before Slam. There was a huge movement across this country that gained so much momentum that Russell Simmons decided to spend time and money packaging it for the masses. The argument was not about equating Def Poetry Jam to the steaming pile of dog shit that is Howie Mandel. Ultimately it just proved to me that it doesn’t matter if your argument is sounder than someone else’s. It just matters whether you have the crowd on your side. You can rape logic every time you speak only if the crowd stays on your side. It’s fucking scary and it happens more than you know. Here’s a website with a list of inductive fallacies:
http://www.nizkor.org/features/fallacies/
Learn them. Love them.