YOU'RE WRONG
An Irregular Column
by Mykel Board
I can't believe you guys. I feel like a mom who's instructed her daughter to wipe carefully, only to find the toddler seating herself in a pile of fresh dogshit. And you? After thirty years of writing this column, you still don't know how to think. It's been too long since lesson one. I now present-- How to Think: Lesson Two.
In the john at the folk's house: Under your shirt, you've smuggled in the latest issue of Big Jugs. You yank your pants down to your knees. You sit down, pull out the mag and look at those pix. Huge tits. Mammoth balloons. The blood rushes between your legs. Don't want to touch it yet! Watch as it fills with blood, rising in littler jerks until it stands full and tall. Grab it and start stroking. Page after page of watermelon boobs. You speed up. Get close. Whoa! Slow down. Try to hold off as long as possible.
You put the mag on the floor as you push your butt back and lean forward. Hook yourself under the toilet seat. You don't want to splash on the mag. Uhh uhh, almost. Now, yes! yes!! Wipe up. Slip the zine back into your pants. Pull your shirt over it and leave with a smile.
The next day you hear some grrrrrrrrrrrrls talk about pornography.
"It's really bad," they say, "it gives guys these ideas about wymyn that are just wrong. It causes rape, it makes wimmin into objects that exist for their pleasure."
Thinking back on your precious Big Jugs you jump into the conversation.
"Yeah," you say in prostate self-defense, "just like you grrrrrls. Don't you know about censorship? If you let them take away porn, pretty soon they'll take away what YOU want to read. Then you've had it. They'll censor you and it'll be your own fault.
If the grrrrrrrrrrls are smart, they'll know they've got you. Why? You don't know how to think.
See, you've set up a strawman...er...strawperson. That means, you've argued against something the other side never proposed. I think the Catholic Church is evil and dangerous. I don't think they should ban it. The grrrls never advocated censorship. They just don't like pornography.
If you support porn, you've got to think about why it is good-- not why it shouldn't be banned. Of course, there are many reasons that porn is good: catharsis, safe-sex, exercise of fantasy among them. Fear of censorship is not a reason to support porn (unless the other side advocates censorship).
OK, so you find one who does advocate censorship. There are enough of them around. Use 'em while you can.
"You want to censor pornography?" you say. "If you let them, they'll start censoring erotica. Then dirty words. Before you know it, you won't be able to say anything without permission from big brother."
Just when you think you've got her by the lower lips, she answers (correctly).
"You're wrong. I'm talking about censoring pornography. Not those other things. Do you think that because we prohibit feeding people arsenic, that eventually we'll prohibit feeding them rice?"
Ah hah! She's got you by the butt hairs. You were not thinking clearly, but falling down a slippery slope. "Slippery slope" thinking happens when you object to something not on its own merits, but that it will lead to something bad. (The old, don't-smoke-marijuana,-'cause-it'll-lead-to-heroin argument is a perfect example.)
There are no slippery slopes down which things inexorably fall. There are so many twists, turns and unforseens; you can't object based on a vague prediction. You have to object to the idea itself. Directly.
After the slippery slope, the next biggest exercise in mushbrainism is attacking a person. Philosophers call these kinds of attacks ad hominem. Sleazy people of all political stripes use them. Take abortion. Please!
Much of the anti-abortion crew is right wing Christian. (Although a good chunk is Third World feminist. The lefty pro- folks never talk about them). When the debate starts, the pro abortionists attack Christians or Christianity, or right wingism in general, without ever talking about the real abortion arguments.
It's easy to attack people as "Bible thumpers who want to control women's bodies." It's much harder to defend yourself against a charge of advocating murder.
[For the new readers among you, I support abortion, because it is not murder. Unless you believe a mother has the right to murder her child, that is the only valid argument. Rights to choose, preventing backroom abortions, right to your own body, these are all crooked thinking, arguments of air.]
Next comes something I'll call Hidden Theology. Vegetarians always use this mental sleight of hand. How often have you heard:
The human digestive tract is not made to digest meat.
Made? By whom? Unless both parties agree that God made each part of the human body for a specific purpose, this argument is ludicrous. The digestive system is what it is and does what it does. "Make" has nothing to do with it.
You can recognize this bit of bogue by its passive sentences and words like "is designed," "is made," "isn't supposed to be used for." In reality, what is, is. You can use it any way you want. It either works or doesn't work in those uses. That has nothing to do with someone 'making' or 'designing.'
The biggest perpetrators of colonic thinking are the crew who call themselves "Social Scientists." They claim to research human behavior. This research becomes the basis for other people's opinions-- even laws. All kinds of totalitarian groups, from anti-porners to anti-smokers to anti-racists, base their totalitarianism on the results of "Social Science Research."
SOCIAL SCIENCE IS WRONG!
It is based on a buncha philosophical premises, as weak as The Mets' offense.
1) STRUCTURALISM:
When the turn of the century guys seriously studied linguistics they devised the "slot filler test." For example, if you pronounce 'ride' RAAEED or RAAAD (like they do in The South), it's still "the same word" (has the same meaning). If you replace the final d-sound with a final t-sound you make the word into 'right.' You change the meaning.
You can think of the word as having three slots. One for the R sound, one for the I sound, and one for the D sound. Change the last slot and you get a different word.
Linguists use this tool to discover the "minimal units of difference" in a new language. A frog named Claude Levy-Strauss, in addition to inventing bluejeans, adapted the slot filler test to anthropology. This created a social theory of "units of minimal difference" that define the structure of a culture. Social science was born.
In the 60's, Noam Chomsky with Syntactic Theories, and more strongly with The Sound Pattern of English, showed the fallacy of structuralism. Individual units have effects on other units. It's impossible to describe a language based only on minimal units of sound.
In the ride/right example, the "d" at the end of 'ride' lengthens the vowel sound. The "t" means a shorter vowel. The meaning of the word is as much in these differences as in the t/d difference.
Social science, however, still assumes a structuralist framework. They run experiments twice. Each time "exactly the same except for one variable." Then, they examine the differences between the results.
They don't consider that 'one variable' might carry with it other signals that cause changes. They also don't consider, that changing another variable (the length of the 'i' in the linguistic example) could produce the same results they got with THEIR changed variable.
2) CONFUSION OF 'CORRELATION' WITH 'CAUSE AND EFFECT.' (I talked about this in my first How To Think column.)
I live in a tiny apartment. My regular bed is a loft, built off the floor. You need a ladder to get up to it. Under the loft, is a couch. When I come home drunk, I'm too dizzy and tired to make it up the ladder. I collapse on the couch. A few hours later, I wake up. I run to the toilet, puking and spurting a hard thick brown stream from my butthole.
There are others in NY and other tight space cities who do the same. Since, there's a statistical correlation, could I say sleeping on the couch causes vomiting and diarrhea? The correlation between non-loft sleeping (when a loft is available) and vomiting/messy-shit-shitting is a strong one. Loft makers could use it to sell lofts. It would be a lie.
Social scientists (and too often medical scientists), when they see two things occurring together, assume one causes the other. That is wrong.
Watching a movie and initiating violence. Owning pornography and raping. People claim a cause and effect relationship. All they show is co-occurrence. (Usually even this is doubtful.)
3) INTRUSION OF EXPERIMENTER INTO EXPERIMENT:
Unlike medical "double blind" testing, the person who creates the social science experiment also conducts it. In physics, the Heisenberg Principle says it's impossible to measure something exactly, because the act of measuring it, changes it. This is even truer for social science.
Variables not recorded, body language, tone of voice, the facial expression of the experimenter, can influence the results of the experiment. Even the setting itself can influence the data.
During my days in grad school, I was looking for the rules for an extra vowel in a certain dialect of Finnish. I set up the tape recorder, got my subject and gave her a list of words. She read them The vowel was there only half the time it should have been. What happened?
I found that the formality of the situation made her uncomfortable speaking her dialect. She switched to a more formal, "standard" Finnish, ruining the experiment.
4) CONTROL OF VARIABLES:
This is related to structuralist assumptions. Social scientists assume that it is possible to control variables in humans. It isn't. Besides the variables introduced by experimenters' prejudice, there are factors like lighting, emotional states, ability of subjects to guess what the experimenter is after, which part of the experiment is conducted first, and a slew of unknowns. All of these can affect the results.
If the variables between 'ride' and 'right' are so great, imagine what they might be when dealing with an entire person!
Also, the
5) CHOICE OF VARIABLES to control is very important.
In our pornography and violence example, it's easy to find a correlation between people who commit violent sexual acts and people who own pornography. THAT'S what the experimenter looks for.
I'm sure no study was done on owning the Bible and violent sexual acts. It's likely a correlation would be there too. The CHOICE of what to look for determines the result.
For these reasons, the results of Social Science 'research' are bogus. This is the case anywhere the researcher is looking to prove a hypothesis, rather than just solve a problem. Using Social Science to prove a point is as valid as arguing something because your dad says it's true.
Now, buckaroos, when folks try to tell you smoking causes cancer, language oppresses people, pornography creates violence, silence equals death, meat is murder and the rest of those easy cliches, you'll know how to answer them. Practice thinking. Who knows? In a couple of years, you might not be as wrong as you are now.
ENDNOTES:
--> I got a mass mailing from some welfare reform committee. Talk about fuzzy logic!! Can somebody please explain to me how getting people off welfare will make them independent? Tell me how having to work at the same place at the same time for the same boss is being INDEPENDENT. While receiving free money and being able to do what you want is DEPENDENT. I don't get it.
--> I got a great set of postcards from Jack Perkins at Fast, Cheap & Easy Graphics (1317 Grant Ave, Rm. 126, San Francisco CA 94133). They're hilariously non-PC (eg. a whale, marked like a cow, to show where the best eating parts are), and my favorite, an Alice- in-Wonderland type character saying "I say: if vegetarianism promotes longevity then why is it one encounters few vegetarians over 21?"
--> Bad laws in the making dept: A group of liberals is sponsoring the "Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act. It's supposed to keep Operation Rescue off abortion clinics by setting the FBI on them. People are entitled to protest no matter who it upsets. You can't go around making laws aimed at specific groups you don't like. It's undemocratic and dangerous. Like so called 'hate crime' laws, they have nice-sounding names, but very bad implications.
--> If Anyone Is God, It's Him dept: Luk Haas has done it again. I just got a card from him postmarked ALBANIA! Yep, he found some bands there too. Maybe there's a scene report this issue. They don't even let Americans into Albania, let alone punk rockers. It talks a bald frog with a beard to do it. Whatta guy!
--> Write if you're bi dept: I'm passing along the following message from the lady prof who's doing a survey on bisexuality:
ANNOUNCEMENT OF RESEARCH STUDY--PARTICIPANTS NEEDED
RESEARCH STUDY ON INTERNATIONAL DIVERSITY IN SEXUAL/BISEXUAL IDENTITY, COMMUNITY, AND POLITICS. Women and men are needed to participate in a study of sexual/bisexual identity and the development of bisexual community and politics. Involves an anonymous questionnaire that includes questions on coming out, your opinions about sexuality and bisexuality, and, if you are bisexual, what it means to be bisexual, diversity in the bi community, your views on the future of bi community and bi politics. You do not have to be involved in a bisexual community or bisexual politics to participate, and you do not have to be bisexual to participate.
The study also includes women and men who are coming out, who prefer not to label their sexuality, who are not sure what their orientation is, who used to identify as bisexual but don't any more, who are lesbian/gay and have felt attracted to or had sexual or romantic relationships with members of the other sex at any time in their lives, or who are heterosexual and have felt attracted to or had sexual or romantic relationships with members of their own sex at any time in their lives. Questionnaires in large print and braille are available for visually impaired or blind people.
Available only in English, but answers may be written in other languages. Transsexuals and transgenderists are also welcome. If you are interested or want further information, contact: Paula C. Rust, Ph.D., Department of Sociology, Hamilton College, 198 College Hill Rd., Clinton, New York, 13323, USA, OR leave message at (315) 859-4219, OR e-mail to: prust@itsmail1.hamilton.edu.
--> Zine of the month Dept: Well, maybe not the whole zine, but CHUCK Magazine ($2 to PO Box 6623, Concord CA 94524) sure has some hilarious pieces. One of 'em is Chicks on Dicks. It's a series of movie reviews by two girls. They tell which mainstream films you can get to see your favorite star's danglies. Did you know there was a dick shot in Altered States? As a bonus, you get the "Top Five Ass Shots" Ho Ho!! Too bad these girls never saw Quadrephrenia, right?
--the end--
