August 31, 2009

• Death Lollypops and the concept of Honesty in Rhetoric

  Someone posted an interesting comment on my last Xanga entry. The person wrote:

  “The whole “death panels” question is nuanced, so calling the discussions of “death panels” ”lies” means that the person calling them “lies” is a liar.”

  I thought this was a fascinating statement because to me it means that he and I have completely different conceptions of what constitutes a “lie” in rhetoric and what makes someone a liar. 

  Let me give an example.

  Suppose there was a person who walked into a candy store and announced loudly and with conviction to all of the customers present the following:

  “This store promotes and sells Death Lollypops! It’s a horrible store that is trying to get you to eat lollypops filled with POISON! Really it’s exactly the same as if they had filled their lollypops with arsenic! This store needs to be shutdown immediately!”

  I’d call that person a liar. In any case it’s certainly true that the person is lying, unless of course the candy shop’s lollypops do in fact have arsenic or something similar in them. And that’d be easy to test. Pickup a lollypop and eat it. Do you die? No? OK. No poison.

  Want a less risky test? Well there are numerous ways to scientifically test the lollypops for poison. You can feed them to animals, perform chemical tests on them, or you can examine the record of everyone who has ever bought lollypops from the candy store and see if any of them have experienced immediate DEATH as a result.  No?

  THEN THAT PERSON IS A LIAR!

  And they should be held accountable for that. If not he or she will, once proven wrong, just go on to the next shop over and start yelling about how the Cakes are baked with Anthrax powder.

  Supposing someone else came along after that person was clearly refuted and tried to defend it by announcing just as loudly to the customers something like this:

  “No no. Maybe my companion went too far in calling them Death Lollypops! That was just a bad choice of words. What she meant though is obvious to anyone who thinks about it. These lollypops are poisonous. The owners of this store deliberately placed a dangerous substance called sugar in their lollypops, that when consumed will in fact lead to many people dying from diabetes and heart disease. These Lollypops are KILLERS. This store really IS horrible and ought to be shut down!”

  That person in my opinion is ALSO a liar.

  In fact I think this person is a far more dangerous liar than the first. They are insinuating EXACTLY the same things claimed by the first person only using slightly more subtle wording. Someone listening to this might reasonably assume that by eating one lollypop from this particular store they might develop heart disease and DIE because they are SOO bad. And a reasonable person who is frightened might want that store shut down! Which is precisely what the liar wants. They are invoking unjustified fear mongering in order to get the store shutdown. And that makes them a liar.

  And we can easily generalize that anyone invoking the rhetoric of Death Lollypops in an attempt to get the Candy Store shutdown is lying and doing so quite consciously and deliberately. They are twisting language to their own ends.

  And you know it doesn’t matter that there really IS a subtle and meaningful point there that really ought to be discussed. It doesn’t matter that I firmly believe that highly sugary substances CAN be dangerous to the long term health of those who consume it and particularly to Americans who are suffering from an obesity epidemic. It doesn’t even matter that maybe I wouldn’t even think it was a particularly bad idea to shutdown a candy shop or at least use our tax code to make highly sugary substances a little harder to get in order to encourage healthier lifestyles.

  You see the latter IS a nuanced position and we CAN have a rational discussion about it.  In contrast the talk about Death Lollypops is not open to rational discussion. It’s simple a lie. It’s a lie because they AREN’T Death Lollypops. They are nothing of the kind. There is no arsenic. If you eat one you almost certainly will NOT die. They’re just ordinary lollypops.

  And this is basically analogous to the situation with the Death Panel rhetoric.  The language is clearly exaggerated. It’s clearly misleading and deceptive. And it is intended to be. At least by many if not most of the people who invoke it.  People like the following:

  Sarah Palin 8/7:  “my parents or my baby with Down Syndrome will have to stand in front of Obama’s ‘death panel’ so his bureaucrats can decide, based on a subjective judgment of their ‘level of productivity in society,’ whether they are worthy of health care.”

  Glenn Beck 8/10: “So, why is there no more discussion than there is on Sarah Palin and what she said over the weekend that there would be … [a] death panel for her son Trig. That’s quite a statement. I believe it to be true, but that’s quite a statement.”"

  Rush Limbaugh 08/14: “(D)eath panels … it’s a great way to phrase this end-of-life counseling.”
  He also claimed that Death Panels were in the bill but the Senate removed them. This is clear deception. The Senate did remove controversial end of life counseling from ONE of its versions of the bill but the controversial section are STILL in the House Bill being debated. It’s still very much on the table. And it’s STILL the case that Death Panels do not exist in EITHER version of the Health Care Reform bill.

  Morris and Eileen McGann 08/17: “But all those protests miss the fundamental truth of the “death panel” charge. Even without a federal board voting on whom to kill, ObamaCare will ration care extensively, leading to the same result. This follows inevitably from central features of the president’s plan.”
  “In short, ObamaCare doesn’t need to set up “death panels” to make retail decisions about ending the lives of individual patients. The whole “reform” scheme is one giant death panel in its own right. “

  Sen. Chuck Grassley: “You have every right to fear. … We should not have a government program that determines if you’re going to pull the plug on grandma.”

  Betsy McCaughey:  “And one of the most shocking things I found in this bill, and there were many, is on Page 425, where the Congress would make it mandatory — absolutely require — that every five years, people in Medicare have a required counseling session that will tell them how to end their life sooner”

  That’s just a few. There are dozens more.

  The very use of the term “Death Panel” is in and of itself a LIE. There is nothing of the sort actually in the bill or in ANY bill. And there never was.  Likewise are all the softer implications that somehow purely voluntary end of life counceling provisions will “somehow” magically lead to “defacto” Death Panels or at least pulling the plug on Grandma. That’s why the language has been refuted numerous times. MediaMatters documents over 40 debunkings of the Myth. Virtually every half way honest news network or fact checking service has expressed in no uncertain terms that the idea is ridiculous. In fact the provisions for End of Live Counseling are recommended by most medical professionals including the AMA itself. Even conservative commentators like David Brooks called the idea “crazy”.

  The Lollypops don’t contain arsenic.

  Voluntary End of Life Counseling is not a Death Panel.

  If there are portions of the bill that are unintentionally dangerous that align perverse incentives that may have consequences we don’t want to see, FINE. Let’s TALK about those components. But let’s do so honestly and rationally. If you want to talk about potential rationing that might unintentionally result from provisions in the bill. FINE. Let’s talk about that. Nobody is saying that isn’t a reasonable topic of discussion.

  But to suggest without evidence that the framers of the bill are deliberately attempting to engineer a system that will push the elderly into as early a grave as soon as possible simply to save costs is to me a LIE unless you can back that up with real concrete convincing evidence. That’s a pretty damn shocking accusation.  You’re basically accusing the Democrats of being monstrously knowingly evil in the way they crafted this bill. You better have evidence. You better have A LOT of evidence. And you better have a pretty damn good smoking gun to back it up. I haven’t seen it. And if it existed I should think that EVERYONE would have seen it by now. And we’d ALL be out on the street protesting Death Panels.

  Really when language reaches this level of hyperbole in general it becomes IMPOSSIBLE to have an intelligent  conversation. Everything just becomes shouting back and forth. 

  It’s not just Death Panels it’s all kinds of stuff.

  For example:

  1. Presidential Evaluation -

  Honestly I have some serious criticisms of our current President. There are a lot of things I think he’s doing wrong that are very bad much like Clinton and Bush before him.  And I think he should be called to account for them. There are also things I think he is doing that are good that he should be praised for.

  However, I cannot have an intelligent conversation about the Presidency when the people I am talking to our shouting about how he’s the Antichrist or he’s a Nazi or Hitler.  The very same language is equally detrimental to reasonable debate when it is leveled against former President Bush or Cheney. I don’t like the former President or Vice-President and I think a lot of the stuff they did was very awful but they are not Hitler. They didn’t even come close. The idea that Obama has gotten there in the first six months of his Presidency because he’s dared to continue some of Bush’s policies and had the audacity to try and fight for universal Health Care is a JOKE. A very bad joke.

  For reference, undoubtedly there are liberals who compare President Bush and Cheney to Hitler in their own homes all the time but in the mainstream there was one major example.  MoveOn.org created a contest for people to submit ads. One random anonymous user submitted an ad that compared Bush to Hitler. It was posted on their website with all its other submissions but was not aired. And yet it got lambasted in the media. The RNC attacked the ad and demanded the ad be removed and that all Democratic candidates condemn the ad. Chris Mathews, Joe Scarborough, Wolf Blitzer, Cliff May, Tammy Bruce, Bryon York, CNN, Goodmorning America, The New York Times,  USA Today, and the Anti-Defamation League ALL condemned this ad as going too far.

  And I think they were right to do so. Even though it was just an anonymous ad. It DID go too far. Former President Bush was not Hitler. It’s absurd to call him such.

  But MoveOn.org gets about 1 million unique visitors. Chances are a majority of those visitors probably didn’t happen to see this one particular video or never would have had it not become a national controversy.

  And yet today Rush Limbaugh who has an audience of millions  (best estimates show about 14 million unique listeners, some say as high as 30 or even 50 million!) regularly insinuates similarities between President Obama and Democrats and their policies to Hitler and at at least one point said it outright. And he’s the HOST of the show.  And his reach is extreme. His words encourage people to attend town halls and tea parties with Hitler signs and swastikas. (YES they really do exist. It’s been quite well documented, Even fox news commentator Alan Colmes covered it well).  And other conservatives hint at the same language without ever crossing the line.

  But Limbaugh’s regular nazi rhetoric and insinuations did not get the same critical treatment in the press. At least not until Glen Greenwald covered the hypocrisy and pushed for responses. But while the MoveOn.org video was immediately removed from the website under the extreme pressure. Rush Limbaugh is still able to continue to say the same things.

  Both uses of that kind of rhetoric without basis in fact should be equally and fairly critiqued.

  2. Abortion Debate -

  I am very Pro-Choice. And there are many Pro-Life people that I respect and have reasonable discussions with. We basically disagree on where to draw the line between when life and personhood begins and when the law should intervene to stop abortions. And in truth there are a lot of Pro-Choice people I disagree with on the same points and we can have spirited and interesting conversations about it. We can in time probably come to a reasonable consensus view. Provided we are BEING reasonable.

  But I cannot have that discussion with the people who are proclaim the existence of an Abortion Holocaust. The people who are calling my friends and people I care about baby murderers and accusing them of being complicit in the greatest genocidal campaign in human history.  The people who equate any embryo or fetus with a fully functional innocent baby. It’s impossible to communicate with people when one side is calling you defacto fundamentally evil and are unwilling to even consider seeing things differently.

  3. PETA -

  Animal rights is certainly an important issue and I actually think the way we treat animals is horrible and it’s important to make note of that and try to change it as much as possible. 

  However, we can’t have a reasonable coherent conversation about what to do to improve that treatment when one side equates animals with human beings and immediately accuses us of knowingly committing monstrous atrocities on them.  If you accuse anyone who eats meat as complicit in a mass genocide that is thousands of times worse than the holocaust, where can we go from there? Nowhere.

  —–

  And you have to understand in all cases these are using rhetoric to lie quite blatantly. Anti-Obama critics know Obama is not Hitler.  Anti-Abortion activists know damn well that there is a fundamental difference between an embryo at conception and a full born baby. And Peta activists know readily that animals are NOT equivalent with human beings.

  Likewise the people leading this campaign to vilify Health Care are not simply lacking in reading comprehension skills. They know full well Democrats are not in favor of or trying to implement government run Death Panels. It’s just convenient language for them to use to rile people up.

  Just like there are NO Death Lollypops.

  You have to make a distinction between being honestly critical and using deliberately charged language to further your own ends.

  To me a lie is any deliberately deceptive language used to further an agenda. No amount of twisted justification after the fact to “explain away” what the person probably “meant” makes it any less a lie.

  So the way I understand truth and fiction, saying that discussions of Death Panels are lies is quite simply the unvarnished truth.

  • 12:50 pm
  • 9 Comments