Burning Strawmen

*Edited to add, I have no idea why the font screws up. Tried to fix it, can't. Sorry.*

So, it's been a while. There's lots to update, including the fact that in a couple of months I hope to work on an exciting new website (to me). But for now, here's a little something I got some fun out of. My sister works in a very conservative environment. Honestly, she works in a tea party environment most of the time (someone gave her Sarah Palin's biography as a birthday present). So she sends me a good number of the email forwards she gets from her coworkers along with little notes like, "God, this makes me so aggravated!!!" My sister is not a "liberal." She is a classic independent, in my opinion, meaning that she makes her mind up on each and every issue based on her own ethics, and not because a party mouthpiece tells her to vote a certain way. We have good conversations about politics.

So when she sent me this forward totally strawmanning conservative and liberal positions, I couldn't help myself, being the teacher of rhetoric that I am. I'm sure most of you know what a strawman argument is, but for those of you who don't, this is how I explain it (keep in mind I'm a "layman's terms" teacher). Strawmen fallacies mean that someone has created a highly simplistic version of the argument that leaves out most of the context, so that they can then whale on that simplistic (and untrue) argument with a bat and beat the stuffing out of it. Instead of addressing the actual person/argument, they've built one out of straw and stuck it up in the garden, hoping it would scare people away or so they could set fire to it and think "Hah! I showed you, look at how it burns! Your argument is totally in flames!" I know that's a whole lot of metaphor, but hopefully that makes sense. For your entertainment, I present what she got and then my response to it. Feel free to add your own contribution!

If a conservative doesn't like guns, he doesn't buy one.
If a liberal doesn't like guns, he wants all guns outlawed.
If a conservative is a vegetarian, he doesn't eat meat..
If a liberal is a vegetarian, he wants all meat products banned for everyone.
If a conservative is homosexual, he quietly leads his life.
If a liberal is homosexual, he demands legislated respect.
If a conservative is down-and-out, he thinks about how to better his situation.
A liberal wonders who is going to take care of him.
If a conservative doesn't like a talk show host, he switches channels.
Liberals demand that those they don't like be shut down.
If a conservative is a non-believer, he doesn't go to church.
A liberal non-believer wants any mention of God and religion silenced.
(Unless it's a foreign religion, of course!)
If a conservative decides he needs health care, he goes about shopping for it, or may choose a job that provides it.
A liberal demands that the rest of us pay for his.
If a conservative reads this, he'll forward it so his friends can have a good laugh.
A liberal will delete it because he's "offended".
Well, I forwarded it to you.

Here's my response:

1. If a conservative doesn't like guns, he's too ashamed to not renew his NRA (National Rifle Association) membership, because otherwise he'll be told he's unAmerican. Besides, the militia needs every hand they can get, since Obama is coming after all our guns. Any day now. Seriously. It's right around the corner.

2. If a conservative is a vegetarian, he can never reveal it, because then he might be labeled as one of those "tree hugging hippies" by other True Conservatives (TM). Also, see number one and attach it to hunting, because everyone knows the bigger the antlers mounted on a conservative's living room wall, the bigger the peenie in his pants.

3. If a conservative is homosexual, he has three choices. He can join the Log Cabin Republicans (oh, snap, we don't like to talk about that branch of the Republican party, do we??), he can sneak off for some quickie sex in the men's bathroom, where he somehow has managed to learn all the "code" for "gimme some now," or he can hit on underage interns and page boys. He has stellar role models for all three options. Bonus points if he can take the fourth underutilized option and claim that Satan tested him and he failed, but he totally has cured Teh Ghayy now with the love of Jesus.

4. If a conservative is down and out, he will somehow find a way to blame it on Bill Clinton.

5. If a conservative doesn't like a talk show host ... wait a minute? You mean there are other talk show hosts besides Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity? LOL, that's just crazy talk, mister.

6. If a conservative is a non-believer, he better not dare show it, as he'll again be labeled unAmerican. After all, the founding fathers all believed in Christianity, even though their own personal papers show they were mainly deists with a variety of beliefs. If a conservative thinks there is something wrong with church tax breaks for groups that molest kids and steal their congregation's money, praying in school even though a Muslim call to prayer would probably give him an instant aneurism, or any of the other ways that church and state are really not separate, even though that's what the founding fathers really wanted, he might be considered an atheist! And everyone knows that atheists are communists, so we can't have that.

7. If a conservative needs health care, he gets prayed over by his preacher, has a laying on of hands and is healed through the spirit of the Lord. Duh!

8. If a conservative reads this, he'll stop and think about making stawmen arguments about "liberals", since it doesn't feel very good when it's done to you. Oh, who are we kidding? He'll probably just delete it and turn the volume on Rush Limbaugh back up.

I realize this will piss off my conservative friends, but I don't care. More of you need to explain to them the concept of the "strawman" fallacy and why it isn't good to use it.

-- DV