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| Crimes Against Logic | | Date Created: Sep 05, 2005, 10:13 PM |
 Complete the trilogy. Read Crimes Against Logic by Jamie Whyte, Freakonomics by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner, and Blink by Malcolm Gladwell.
I thought this book was going to be an obscure classic from the skeptics or philosophy literature. It turns out it's written by a young British iconoclast in the same mold as Steven Levitt and Malcolm Gladwell. As I got farther into it I kept thinking it reminded me of Freakonomics and Blink and sure enough, if you go to the Amazon.com page for Crimes Against Logic, it tells you that people who bought this book also bought Blink and Freakonomics (along with On Bullshit, another book reviewed here).
The subtitle of Crimes Against Logic is: Exposing the Bogus Arguments of Politicians, Priests, Journalists, and Other Serial Offenders. The chapter titles tell the tale: The Right to your Opinion, Motives, Authority, Prejudice in Fancy Dress, Shut Up!, Empty Words, Inconsistency, Equivocation, Begging The Question, Coincidence, Shocking Statistics, Morality Fever. There are worthy observations, cultural references, and current events including an understanding of the US from a Brit's point of view. Whyte is definitely young, brash, and iconoclastic.
"The equivocator tries to replace hard intellectual graft with semantic sleight of hand. Capitalism may indeed exploit the workers, but you can't show this simply by spelling profit 'exploitation'. Redefinition, or slipping between different meanings of the same word, cannot deliver an intellectual free lunch where you arrive at informative conclusions without paying a price in evidence and argument. And if it won't solve your intellectual problems, it certainly won't solve any practical problems. But playing with words is much easier than tackling reality, and often overwhelmingly seductive for tired policy makers.
...You can't change the world just by describing it differently, or replacing nasty old words with nice new ones. If your shithouse stinks, you won't make it smell any better by calling it a public convenience. You need to clean it. And a cripple won't stand and walk because you call him alternatively-abled." |
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