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Jens 'n' Frens
Idle thoughts of a relatively libertarian Republican in Cambridge, MA, and whomever he invites. Mostly political.
"A strong conviction that something must be done is the parent of many bad measures."
-- Daniel Webster
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Monday, October 20, 2008 :::
A short quiz in political logic:
Hitler was a vegetarian. This fact illustrates that
A) all vegetarians are evil
B) some vegetarians are evil
C) it's offensive, because it involves Hitler, and therefore can't possibly imply anything. How dare you mention such a thing!
Anyone answering A or C should kindly withdraw from all political discourse for the good of himself and others.
Anyway, Lou Holtz is in trouble for dismissing the trait of "great leadership" with the assertion that Hitler was a "great leader", which is surely true for some reasonable sense of the term "great* leader" — not that he's a good person who leads, but that he's someone who draws a following in an effective manner. The point is arguably not terribly relevant to the football discussion that was taking place, but the response doesn't seem to involve making that argument†; it seems to fall more into option "C" above, with reporting in many venues consisting of reporting that Holtz "compared" the Michigan football coach "to Hitler". (This all-to-common use of the verb "compare" is asinine insofar as "Rodgriguez is a nicer guy than Hitler" is a comparison, but is misleading insofar as one imagines the "comparison" to be something involving a more substantive equivalence between the two.)
The best criticism I can see of Holtz here is stylistic; of course he should note that, while the extreme case most emphatically demonstrates his point, it is also likely to bypass cognitive centers in producing response behavior, and that, as a TV personality addressing a large audience that might not be specialized in having particularly well looped-in cognitive centers in the first place, he might want to look for other examples to illustrate his point.
*Two! Four! Six! Eight!
Homer's crime was very great!
[pause]
"Great" meaning "large" or "immense",
We use it in the pejorative sense!
cf. the great depression. Not quite the same thing as the Holtz comment, actually, which turns more on "leader", and what leading "well" means.
† One argument might be if Holtz seems to be trying to use it in the "A" category; I remember a congressman once responding to a report that she had bounced a number of checks with the speculation — entirely ungrounded in addition to irrelevant — that Hitler may well have kept a balanced checkbook. It's not my impression that Holtz was trying to imply this, though; I think he was making the logically correct inference and implication.
::: posted by dWj at 12:00 PM
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