Look who's talking!

"How can you tell me smoking is bad for me when you smoke two packs a day?"  "Simple, because it's true."  Hypocrisy is a moral failing, not a logical one.  This is the example I use to explain one of the lowest sorts of logical fallacy (though it has a fancy Latin name): tu quoque.  John Nolte uses precisely this fallacy to introduce his discussion of the role the media plays in motivating shooters such as Adam Lanza.

Though this be one of the lowest forms of fallacy (in my opinion, to be sure), it is not the only fallacy committed by Nolte in this same post.  If you don't believe Nolte's claim that the promise of media fame contributes to the actions of a Lanza, you "simply [don't] want to believe it."  Nolte makes no argument here, he simply attacks the motivation of a hypothetical detractor--a type of ad hominem fallacy, though I cannot decide if it is a sort of poisoning the well or circumstantial (I'm open to suggestions).  In addition, Nolte bifurcates on the question of media coverage, suggesting that the media should ignore such news events altogether.  He could have made a very reasonable case for a policy that would call for news outlets to not show the face or mug shots of alleged shooters (incidentally, his article begins with a huge head shot of Lanza).  Instead, he calls for a media blackout.  Indeed, his comparison between the role of guns and the role of the media fails to distinguish between final cause or motive and instrumental cause.  Without such a distinction, the comparison is meaningless.

So, Jesus and a dinosaur walk into a bar...

Breitbart.com is up in arms today at the NYT editorial page for including this advertisement.  According to Breitbart contributor John Nolte, the ad is "Christian Mocking" and disrespectful.  I cannot resist, however, pointing out that literalism (reading each word of the Bible as literally true) is not a Christian doctrine--at best it is evangelical.  More importantly, it is incredibly stupid and intellectually lazy--and a recent invention.  The Church Fathers (for example Basil the Great and Gregory of Nyssa) did not believe that the creation story in Genesis was meant to be taken literally (as the former's Hexaemeron and the latter's De opificio hominis witness).  One can be a devout, orthodox Christian without believing that god created the world in six days (or that the brothers of Yahweh (the Elohim) copulated with human women creating a race of giants (the Nephilim) (Gen. 6:4)).