Rummy and His "False Analogy"....

[leftchick]

http://www.juancole.com/



Rumsfeld complained at SAIS a week ago that there are 14,500 murders a year in the United States and 42,000 driving fatalities, and the US press isn't covering that, whereas, he implies, 43 people getting blown up on a bus in Baghdad is front page news.

Rumsfeld is committing a logical fallacy here. He is comparing apples and oranges. Does Rumsfeld think that there is not also a murder rate in Iraq beyond the guerrilla violence? The likelihood from the information that has leaked out from the Baghdad morgue is that Iraq is among the more murderous societies in the world at the moment. (As you would expect, since where there is no law and order, criminal elements act with impunity. Worse, there are regular political assassinations by religiious militias.) These Iraq murders are not usually reported in the press, any more than the murders in the US are. Likewise, one can only imagine the traffic death rate in Iraq. The country has imported more than 100,000 used cars since the fall of the old regime, and there aren't exactly a lot of vigilant traffic police.

<snip>


In logic, Rumsfeld's mistake is known as the "false analogy." He incorrectly likens military violence to individual crime, and then expresses astonishment that the two things are not covered the same way by the press. Rumsfeld has a long track record of indulging in this particular form of sloppy thinking. He has also in the past made a false analogy between guerrilla violence in Iraq and race riots in small towns in the United States. In the terms of American racial discourse, that particular meme has overtones of bigotry, since he appears to be attempting to code the Sunni Arab guerrillas as "Black." (Or maybe it is the other way around.) It is all propaganda. It is shameful in a democratic society for the Secretary of Defense to engage in such warped discourse. It is more shameful that almost no one calls him on it.

[H2O Man]

1. The banality of evil ......

Mr. Rumsfeld is not able to deal with the evil he has done. It matters not at all what the murder rate is anywhere else on earth, or at any other time period. He is responsible for the deaths and injuries that are happening now in Iraq.

[ProSense]

2. True, and he wants it both ways

Typical Rumsfeldism: he implies that 43 people getting blown up on a bus is not newsworthy, but runs around saying these terrorist are violent monsters worthy of the US' full military muscle to rid the world of them.

By the analogy in the OP, an Iraqi police force should suffice.

[annabanana]

3. also..

Iraq is the size of what American State?

Stupid lying Rummy...

[TahitiNut]

4. Sounds like a good reason to bring the troops home to me.

Fucking asshole! Lousy fascist lying bastard! :grr: He belongs in prison.

[leftchick]

5. a psychiatric hospital

I firmly believe the man is insane.

[zbdent]

6. If 1000 cops were killed in the line of duty in America in the past year

(or, for God's sake, 20 in one day in one shootout)

There would be a total media blitz.

That's the true analogy . . . every time that some rightwing shithead tries that analogy ("Well, Michigan had more murders in 200x than killed in Iraq . . ."), I point out that the RWSH (rightwing shithead) is actually talking about what would be the cops in the US . . .