Paul Krugman

Paul, honey, we pro-choicers could have told you this 30 years ago

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krugman

Paul Krugman’s Monday NYT column is a sharp observation of how the American Right is untethered from evidence on a wide variety of policy issues.

Of course not. Evidence doesn’t matter for the “debate” over climate policy, where I put scare quotes around “debate” because, given the obvious irrelevance of logic and evidence, it’s not really a debate in any normal sense. And this situation is by no means unique. Indeed, at this point it’s hard to think of a major policy dispute where facts actually do matter; it’s unshakable dogma, across the board. And the real question is why.

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Thucky and the Gish Gallop

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Frequent commenter Thucydides, who is affectionately known as Thucky around these parts and who may or may not be Arizona’s Superintendent of Public Instruction, has a familiar arguing style. DailyKos diarist AmBush referred to it after the first Presidential debate in 2012, where Mitt Romney “won” by spewing out a barrage of lies and distortions of his own positions. The technique is known as the Gish Gallop.

The Urban Dictionary defines the Gish Gallop thusly:

Named for the debate tactic created by creationist shill Duane Gish, a Gish Gallop involves spewing so much bullshit in such a short span on that your opponent can’t address let alone counter all of it. To make matters worse a Gish Gallop will often have one or more ‘talking points’ that has a tiny core of truth to it, making the person rebutting it spend even more time debunking it in order to explain that, yes, it’s not totally false but the Galloper is distorting/misusing/misstating the actual situation. A true Gish Gallop generally has two traits.

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Krugman Nails It, For The Millionth Time

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Posted by Bob Lord I really feel for Paul Krugman. He’s brilliant, and has precious few peers as an economist. He knows that what’s coming out of Washington, from both Democrats and Republicans, is crazy talk. Ditto for what’s coming out of Europe. So he tries, repeatedly, to use his op-ed column to move policy … Read more