Those few brave souls who lay comment upon my weblog are quite often more intelligent than I am: Jonah Goldber edition

jmc:

I had earlier encountered this as a point to be made AGAINST logical fallacies, it was something like "just because Hitler brushed his teeth and liked dogs doesn't mean that we should stop using Colgate and kick puppies". This was used as an illustrative point for a more complex discussion.

However, Goldberg seems not to have received the memo, and has spent enough time wallowing in his own ignorance to write a book chronicling his failure to grasp logical points that are simple enough to be summarized in a sentence.

Forthcoming Goldberg titles I am now looking forward to:

"Correlation equals causation: how the rooster's crow causes the sun to rise"

"The collective wisdom of crowds: I am now going to jump off a bridge because many, many others have done so"

"Although my clock has stopped, it shows the right time twice a day and is therefore always reliable"

and so on.

More to the point, the liberal-fascist correlations Jonah highlights are for the most part neither here nor there and are, in some cases, moral positions that have won great fanfare around the world (caring for the environment, for instance, or providing universal health care). His book actually proves then--and in a perverse way--that, on many issues, modern American conservative views are uglier and substantively worse than were the views of the 20th century European fascists on those same issues.