Funny, that is not what you said last time....

Kellyanne Conway is currently the Counselor to President Trump.  I find it hard to cry too much for her lately.  She is decrying the media as being biased, liers and out to get the President.  Hmmmm.

In his first appearance before the press, Sean Spicer criticized the "media" for reporting that the bust of Martin Luther King had been removed from the Oval Office.  He used this as proof that the "media" was out to get him.  Here are the facts:

7:21 Zeke Miller tweets that the Churchill bust is back in the Oval Office
7:33 another reporter tweets that the MLK bust is gone, sourced from another reporter - not Miller (there seems to be no "Tweets" from Miller, but he might have said that in a press pool report.)
8:14 Miller tweets that the MLK bust is still there
8:41 Miller tweets that he has confirmed with White house aide that the MLK bust is in the Oval Office.

Now Miller claimed the bust was obscured by a door and a secret service agent.  I did not believe that until I saw this:

Can you see either? 

MLK bust is on the left - Churchill is on the right.  (actually, this might have been taken earlier and the bust on the right might be Lincoln.  The picture above MLK sometimes shows the Statue of Liberty.)

Now this is sloppy reporting if they noticed that the  Churchill bust was there and did not ask the aide if the MLK bust had been replaced.  But if Miller thought he saw it with his own eyes, then he would not have asked.  So let's assume he was looking for a gotcha moment and screwed up, then apologized.

Let's compare this to:

On Wednesday November 2, 2016, FOX News anchor Bret Baier announced that according to unnamed sources, the FBI was investigating Hillary Clinton which “will continue to likely an indictment.”

This was picked up by then Candidate Trump and blasted out over many conservative websites.

This was amplified on November 3, even while other news outlets were debunking the claim.  Even Baier himself walked back the claim on Thursday but that did not stop people on Friday from repeating the claim, 48 hours later.

Baier even apologized. - even though he did not fully back down.

How does this relate to Ms Conway?

“The damage is done to Hillary Clinton,” Trump campaign manager Kellyanne Conway told MSNBC’s Brian Williams on Friday.  (11/3)

Funny, this was 24 hours, not 2 before a correction was made.  There was no apology to Ms Clinton by Brett Baier as was demanded by Sean Spicer from Zeke Miller to Donald Trump.  In fact Ms Conway doubled down and stood by the report even after it had been walked back.  There was no backing down by candidate Trump, he doubled down also.

For President Trump, Ms Conway or Sean Spicer, to express outrage at bad reporting is the ultimate in hypocrisy, seeing as "Alternative Facts" such as the FOX News report, helped him win the election - but they saw nothing wrong with it.

1/30/2017


Sources:
http://www.snopes.com/mlk-bust-oval-office/
http://morninganswerchicago.com/2017/01/21/reporters-jump-chance-report-fake-news-mlk-bust-removed-oval-office/
http://mediamatters.org/blog/2016/11/03/bret-baier-serving-mouthpiece-unknown-sources-fbi-stories/214269
http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/trumps-claims-evidence-fbis-clinton-foundation-probe-impressive/story?id=43282736
http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2016/11/conway-on-fox-clinton-indictment-story-the-damage-is-done.html
http://www.msnbc.com/11th-hour-with-Brian-Williams (

The True - False Fallacy

I propose there is a theory that we subscribe to that if something is not true, it has to be false.

Now you say of course if A=1 and B=2 then A+B cannot equal 5.

But if I said that A is between 1 and 5 and B is between -3 and +3,  then A + B could be anywhere from -2 to +8 and still be correct.

So if we take two statements:

1. All people unemployed and on welfare are lazy.

2. Businesses eliminate jobs due to government regulation.

At first you may say that they are unrelated and you can hold that each statement may be true or that each statement may be false.

The problem is that in saying that a statement is either true or false, you then limit yourself to possibilities between the two.

For example, there might be reasons other than government regulations, why companies lay people off.  Automation, cost cutting, lack of sales, etc.  These people who are laid off are not lazy if they lost the job not due to anything they did or did not due.  The skills that they had may not be valuable anymore in the workplace. Therefore there are people who are unemployed and on welfare who are not lazy, just do not have the skills to ind a job.

In this case one of the solutions is better education and retraining.  However, either one of the statements by themselves will not lead to this conclusion; only by assuming they are not strictly true or false.

Now there are people who are on welfare and are lazy, and some people might lose jobs due to regulation.  If these cases are the majority of instances, you deal with them differently than if they are a small subset. If most people on welfare are lazy, then you look for ways to tie welfare into motivation, rather than education.

For example, let us look at the statement "If you car burns oil, the engine is defective".
If your car burns a quart of oil every 3000 miles, you tend to just add oil and accept that.  On the other hand, if you car uses a quart of oil every 50 miles, you rebuild the engine or buy another car. The solution is different depending on the degree of the problem.

Ford got into trouble with the Pinto, because they calculated that the design of the car could result in fatalities, but that the cost of the fix would be more than the cost of the lawsuits.  On the other hand, some people said that even one death was too much.  So if you had to design the car so that nobody ever, could get killed in the car, the price would be so high that nobody could afford it.  Neither solution is reasonable.  Ford should have spent built the car to a higher standard. and not just calculated a cost, once they were aware of an issue.

So instead of looking at a statement that it is EITHER True or False, accept that there may be cases where the statement contains a degree of truth and make decision related to the degree.

1/29/2017