Fallacy Alert

A Democratic politician justified her refusal to recite the pledge of allegiance as such:

… not because I don’t respect our country’s values, but because of our country’s failure to uphold them.

This claim is a fallacy:  The perfect is the enemy of the good

Using this corrupt logic, you will forever be awarded license to commit acts of disrespect and hide behind this smokescreen of defiance.

In terms of logic, hypocrisy does not invalidate the logic of one’s claim.

Therefore, claiming that she is entitled to disrespect America based on its failure to uphold its values ignores the logic of the values themselves.

This defiance, as well as Colin Kaepernick’s NFL movement to kneel during our national anthem, needs to be called out for the fallacy that it is.

WE REJECT YOUR INVALID CLAIM.

AMERICA’S VALUES ARE TO BE ASSESSED ON THE MERIT OF THEIR LOGIC; NOT ON WHETHER OR NOT YOU DETECT HYPOCRISY IN THE UPHOLDING OF THOSE VALUES!

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politicalfuriesthevoicesneverheard

I support the use of logic in rhetoric. The degeneration of political dialogue into the continual barrage of fallacies is bothersome to me. I seek to call out the corrupt use of fallacy when I see it. My ultimate goal is to spread this method of rhetorical self-defense.

One thought on “Fallacy Alert”

  1. I used to refuse to say ‘under god’ during the pledge when I was in school, and it used to infuriate my teachers, although there wasn’t anything they could do about it. Why did I do that? Because I wouldn’t profess to believing in something that I didn’t, and I used to remind them they wouldn’t say it either if the pledge had mention of another deity in it that was anathema to their beliefs. The under god was added during the communist scare of the fifties, so it’s not an original part of the pledge. They ended up getting more upset when I inserted the name of my deity into the pledge instead of under god, so we agreed that not saying anything at that time was better. When my son was in the Boy Scouts, they never seemed to complain when the Hindi and Sikh boys in the troop never said it either, although it was fairly obvious that they followed a totally different faith, and were left alone to exercise their freedom of worship by not invoking a deity they didn’t believe in. Weird how that works.

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