Politics Not So Sweet in Home AlabamaWritten by Steven Jackson
Those officals elected to represent it's citizens should excerise their power of leadership.We people vote with hopes of landing our particular candidate into office. Thinking he or she will make change. Change for better. In Cullman, Alabama economy is getting better from fifteen years ago. Laws are being enforce from my observation and it's still a "Dry County." But race relationships....no improvement what-so-ever! When all of your legal agents, judges and even local merchants are caucasian (white) that shows us no dimenison of diversity or change.
| | The Bush "There Or Here" Fallacy and the War in IraqWritten by Christopher Brown
Today we wish to examine a fallacy, or error in reasoning, which we have found springing up now and again in today's popular discourse about so-called War On Terror. This one comes straight from top -- well, not VERY top -- but from Washington D.C. You have heard President say it on national teevee, and so have we: "We either have to fight them [the terrorists] over there [i.e. Iraq], or we have to fight them over here [i.e. inside U.S. border]."Now we have chosen to examine this particular Bushism because, here, Mr. Bush has offered quite textbook example of what informal logic-addicts call, a "false disjunction," or simply "either-or" fallacy. To commit this error in reasoning, you only need to oversimplify a range of many options, reducing it to a pretended range that limits them to two logically-possible options only. For instance, isn't possible that, if U.S. pulled its troops from Iraq, using many of them to assist with border patrol duties, that we could avoid fighting "them" here by not letting them in, and yet not fight them "there" either? Now, to be sure, many will hasten to point out that they see this as impractical, ill-advised (for whatever reason), etc. My only point remains this: option I have mentioned is logically possible. And I could imagine quite a few others. For instance, U.S. could spend a handsome little sum on policing our domestic internal affairs, and arrest all terrorists before they can do any harm. We have already arrested quite a few of them here without any fight whatever. One might argue that bloodless arrests seem much better, not to mention a good deal cheaper, than national invasions where whole countryside gets shot up.
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