Saturday’s debate harkened back to the earlier Republican contests, with moderators spending an inordinate amount of time in the beginning trying to get candidates to attack each other. They weren’t disappointed in their efforts to provoke a cockfight. The tamestream media should be more transparent with their agenda and take ownership of the questions they want to [...]
When we look critically at Thursday’s GOP debate, it becomes clear that Trump’s absence made for a more informed, more mature more reasoned debate. I’ll propose my nominations for the top winners and losers. GOP Debate Winners Perhaps the biggest winners were the audience members, both in person and at home, who weren’t subjected to [...]
As the most recent Democratic debate proved, the Republicans have no monopoly on pandering to a base. While they congenially agreed on a number of issues, the big three differentiators they chose to highlight were Wall Street influence, healthcare and gun control. 1) Wall Street Reform When faced with the charge that Clinton was too [...]
As more pachyderms near the precipice of dropping out of the primaries, we can still learn a thing or two (actually three) as we watch them. As they continue to pander to the extreme wing of the base, the biggest question of the debate for each candidate is expressed in the immortal words of The [...]
There was almost no mention of domestic policy in the 5th Republican debate. Instead, the focus was on national security. I predicted that candidates would argue about who had the best plan to defeat terrorism and who would be the toughest. After watching the debate, three aspects stood out for me: Revealing moments, language choices [...]
CNN has been promoting the 5th Republican primary debate as if we’re about to watch The Hunger Games [watch the CNN trailer]. While we won’t hear a cannon shot and see pictures of the candidates afterwards because they’ve been figuratively killed during the debate, we might see certain elephants make a big splat after falling [...]
Remember that one of Aristotle’s “available means of persuasion was logic, or what I refer to as “argument” in blog postings. To better understand how to judge the strength of an argument, it helps to have some tools at hand, so in this post I look at the structure and constituent parts. To effectively analyze [...]
I once had a colleague, who when she heard something she found difficult to believe, would exclaim: “Oh, tell the truth!” How I now wish she was asking the candidates questions, trying to weed through their fallacies. A fallacy is a mistake or deliberate misuse of one of the parts of argument. Fallacies often seem persuasive [...]
The post on the DNA of Argument introduced the role reasoning played in argument. I wrote that reasoning connected the evidence someone presents to the assertion someone makes. You could also think of reasoning as a bridge or a link. In this post, we take a closer look at some different types of reasoning and [...]
I begin with a caveat: If you ever read a book on argumentation or take a course in argument, you’ll likely see more distinctions among the different types of evidence than what I’m about to present. I’ve condensed the many different types into three general categories: 1) examples 2) statistics and 3) expertise. I chose [...]