Flawed Logic

 Welcome back to Desktop Chats! 

This week is all about fallacies, and I chose an article from a site that intentionally creates satirical posts loaded with fallacies. I chose the article "The problem with my city is that it's a city" by Devin Wallace, the title alone is quite hilarious but it also gives me an opportunity to discuss a few different fallacies. 

The first fallacy I can point out is a slippery slope, the writer makes the statement "I have to make eye contact with a delivery driver... I didn’t realize I signed a lease in Gomorrah.”, this suggests that the small inconvenience of making eye contact with someone will lead to moral collapse. This is such a silly overreaction in the context of the author's article, not only is there a lack of evidence that this can lead to any real consequence but also not something so extreme. 

Another fallacy I can spot in this article is the Bandwagon, the author makes a remark about his neighbors making online agreements with his stance. They are strangers, arguably in the same neighborhood, but their agreement is but an echo chamber in an online forum which does not provide much credibility. This means that people are going online to specifically look for similar opinions on disliking the growth of the city and commenting the same sentiment. This is a dangerous act for any community. 

Lastly, this article presents the fallacy of false cause, insinuating that one event was the cause of the following event. This is not always the case. This is shown when inn the article it is stated that the writer moved to the city when they were twenty, and now they are older and the city just isn't the same. Of course it won't be the same, its not the same people or same time. You can't blame the city for your aging and certainly not for changing from what you once remember it to be like. 

This article is a great example of poorly written work. Too many fallacies with no real evidence to support any of the authors statements. We should see rebuttals in the writing, this would allow the reader to see that the writer did the work to anticipate arguments countering their stance and providing a way to diffuse them (Crusius & Channell, 2016). 

Source: 

Crusius, T., & Channell, C. (2016). The aims of argument: A text and reader (8th ed.). McGraw-Hill Education.