« Best tech rumor ever | Main | Foo Camp »
You can so fight that
You know what I hate? Besides people who doubt my robot-reviewing integrity? I hate quasi-profound philosophical arguments that are just plain wrong on their face. This year’s commonly seen example is used as an argument against the “War on Terror” and usually attributed to Michael Moore or Gore Vidal (although I’ve heard this particular chestnut for at least a decade): “You can’t fight a noun.”
You can so.
You can fight an addiction. You can fight a war. You can fight a dog. You can fight a fat man.
You can’t fight City Hall, but that’s just a bad example.
Here’s video proof of me fighting a noun.
Sometimes, the phrase is rendered, "You can't fight an abstract noun.” That’s a little better, but still incorrect, because you can fight, say, depression. I think “depression” is an abstract noun by this definition:
An abstract noun refers to states, events, concepts, feelings, qualities, etc., that have no physical existence. eg: Freedom; happiness; idea; music are all Abstract Nouns that have no physical existence.
Now, maybe Mr. Moore or Mr. Vidal mean that you can’t *physically* fight an abstract noun. As in, "you can’t fight depression by punching." Even this doesn’t seem to be the right because (1) it’s such an obviously narrow statement that it’s not worth making, and (2) if you punch a depressed person, you probably could snap him out of depression at least for a bit. Or maybe you could punch a mime in front of a depressed person. That would probably cheer him up (the depressed person, not the mime), and if your goal was to get rid of the depression then you can’t really be said to be “fighting the mime.”
Occasionally, the person using this argument starts to feel the linguistic thin ice cracking under their mixed-metaphorical feet, so they try to button up the phraseology: “You can’t fight a war against an abstract noun.”
Better still, but gibberish nonetheless. The accuracy of that phrase hangs on your definition of “war”. If you only mean literally blowing things up with tanks, then I guess that statement could be technically correct. On the other hand, we did pretty well fighting a war against the abstract nouniness of “fascism” in WWII and I believe that blowing things up with tanks was a cornerstone of our persuasive arguments. More recently, a “cold war” against hyper-abstract “communism” also produced some results. Then there’s always the expression, “war of words”. What do we make of that?
Anyhoo, the point is that while you may be able to find plenty of arguments against the specifics or generalities of the “War on Terror”, you ain’t gonna find them in your Strunk and White.
Please don’t write in to explain what these people meant to say. I’m not making a political statement here, only pointing out that what they did say is stupid. Social debate would be better served if both sides stayed away from this kind of bumper-sticker sloganeering in the first place. This is not Mr. Moore’s first warning, either.
And don’t get me started on the current right-wing and pseudo-scientific favorite, “You can’t prove a negative!”
You can so!
September 8, 2004 | Permalink
Comments
It's not that you CAN'T prove a negative - it's that you don't HAVE to, seeing as the burden of proof resides with the individual who asserts the positive
Posted by: Lurene Grenier | Sep 8, 2004 1:34:23 PM
Prove it!
Posted by: | Sep 8, 2004 1:35:45 PM
This is an anonymous challenge, so I’ll take the easy way out (no TeX or truth tables).
Prove: ~ (P & ~P)
1. P = True
1.1 ~P: False
1.2 (P & ~P): (True & False): False
1.3 ~ (P & ~P): ~ (False): True
2. P = False
2.1 ~P: True
2.2 (P & ~P): (False & True): False
2.3 ~ (P & ~P): ~ (False): True
The following proofs are left as an exercise to the reader:
“Four does not equal five.”
“Not all men live forever.”
“This blog does not get 5,000 hits per day.”
Posted by: Phil Libin | Sep 8, 2004 5:37:52 PM
Very witty, but you know well that there's no way to prove that there are no WMDs in Iraq, and the left-wingers who have been saying so since April 2003 have been relying on superstition, not knowledge. Also there's the problem of trying to reconcile Saddam's supposed WMD-free good nature with his henchwoman "Dr. Germ".
Two thumbs up on the video.
Posted by: David | Sep 9, 2004 10:34:23 PM
Or maybe you could punch a mime in front of a depressed person... [I]f your goal was to get rid of the depression then you can’t really be said to be “fighting the mime.”
Tell that to the mime.
Posted by: | Sep 13, 2004 7:25:38 PM
Funny, I always thought WWII was a war against Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan (also Italy, but they don't really count...)
Posted by: john b | Oct 6, 2004 6:40:26 AM
That would be fine, John, if we'd stopped all military and political activity in 1945. We didn't, though: we spent many years in Germany de-Nazifying the place.
Posted by: Squander Two | Oct 6, 2004 8:54:39 AM
My favourite response to this tiresome piece of conventional wisdom is to point out that the Royal Navy conducted an extended and ultimately successful war on piracy.
Posted by: Jimmy Doyle | Oct 6, 2004 11:15:26 AM
Mark Steyn has written on this too (see http://www.spectator.co.uk/article.php?table=old§ion=current&issue=2004-06-19&id=4730 - registration required).
"In these pages, Correlli Barnett has dismissed the entire ‘war on terror’ as a fraud on the grounds that one cannot wage war against a phenomenon. As it happens, the Royal Navy has quite a track record of waging war against phenomena — slavery and piracy. One can certainly make the case that that’s what the Bush administration is doing — after all, from Colombia to Sri Lanka, various longstanding terrorist campaigns seem to have mysteriously quietened down since 9/11. "
Posted by: windowlicker | Oct 8, 2004 6:01:09 AM
Very witty, but you know well that there's no way to prove that there are no WMDs in Iraq, and the left-wingers who have been saying so since April 2003 have been relying on superstition, not knowledge.While proving the absence of something is a difficult proposition, one can bound the likelihood that it exists. The process of inspection does not prove that no WMD program exists, it merely lowers the probability that the statement Saddam has weapons of mass destruction is correct. Given a rigorous enough process and analysis, one might even put a pretty good statistical bound on that.
That process was carried out, not by lefties like Howard Zinn, Michael Moore, Noam Chomsky, or Elderbear, but by US Marines with CIA and NRO backing. We had the evidence back in 2002 that there was an extremely low possibility that Saddam had any WMDs. But those analyses didn't fit administration policy.
Elderbear
Fighting creeping fascism one HTML tag at a time.
(See, I'm fighting (as in my own private war) both a noun and an adjective, which together are an abstraction!)
Posted by: Elderbear | Oct 16, 2004 1:37:43 AM
mnsmartonlineshops.com I can appreciate that. It's the http://directtv.smartonlineshops.com/directtv.html directtv same sort of concept as in recording, http://directv.smartonlineshops.com/directv.html directv when a mistake, or an incidental, http://satellite.smartonlineshops.com/satellite.html satellite online can sometimes be noticed and played http://direct-tv.smartonlineshops.com/direct-tv.html direct tv up in the mix to great effect. I'll http://direcway.smartonlineshops.com/direcway.html direcway attest to all of the above from experience. http://satellite-tv.smartonlineshops.com/satellite-tv.html satellite tv I can think of another particularly http://dish-network.smartonlineshops.com/dish-network.html dish network helpful exercise, though I wasn't dish network aware of it at the time: I was, some http://directway.smartonlineshops.com/directway.html free directway smartonlineshops.comnm
Posted by: dishnetwork | Mar 2, 2005 7:51:39 PM
I am with you on the bumper sticker sloganeering. One that annoys me is the ultramoronic "Free Tibet" bumper sticker that allows the person driving a car so equipped to feel a false sense of moral superiority, while relieving him/her of actually taking or advocating any action to alleviate the plight of the oppressed Tibetans. I am sure that the thugs who rule the People's Republic of China are suitably impressed by this show of resolve to pull their occupation troops out forthwith.
Then there is the [in]famous sticker featuring a picture of Albert Einstein and the slogan "You cannot simultaneously prepare for war and have peace" or something like that. Hasn't history demostrated conclusively the fallacy of this old chestnut? And did Einstein actually say that?
And while I can equally be persuaded that "War is not the Answer," I wonder if the people whose cars sport that bumper sticker are asking the right question.
Then there is
Posted by: Charlie McLain | Mar 11, 2005 5:02:01 PM
okkk u bitch, even my boyfriend is better than u, oops gtg have sex!
ttyl :)
Posted by: barbie canell | Sep 9, 2010 8:05:41 PM
wow that is soo cool!
you taught me alot! thanks! :)
Posted by: maria yang | Sep 9, 2010 8:16:57 PM
