Crank Up the Grumpalodean!

Bill O'Reilly says some crazy stuff, but in this video he really goes off the rails, and is resoundingly mocked by John Stewart for it. Here is the link for the segment titled "Burn Notice."

The argument in this video is so nonsensical that it is actually a bit difficult to identify which fallacies are being committed. The most obvious candidate is the Non Sequitur as it is virtually impossible to understand the connection being drawn between marijuana and text messaging. I am also inclined to identify this as a False Analogy, since some sort of comparison between them is being made as well. Don't ask me what the comparison is supposed to be because I can't figure it out, but O'Reilly seems pretty convinced that there is a problem. If I had to guess, I would hazard that this segment is targeting elderly viewers who are upset about the kids of today. By linking up a bunch of things that kids do (at least in the minds of O'Reilly's elderly conservative viewers) O'Reilly can produce a story that will resonate with these viewers and reinforce their already existing prejudices. This is speculation, but it is the only way I can make sense of this clip.

Nicholas Kristof: Dumb or Dumber?

In his column today New York Times resident moron Nicholas Kristof "argues" in favor of a military strike by the US on Syria. I use quotation marks around argument because, as we will see, Kristof doesn't really have anything intelligent to say on this topic, and instead must resort to a bunch of False Dilemmas, Straw Men, Inconsistencies, and Non Sequiturs. Let's take a look.

Kristof begins by suggesting that the only alternative to fully supporting the Obama administration plan for military strikes on Syria is to do nothing. He writes:

To me, the central question isn’t, “What are the risks of cruise missile strikes on Syria?” I grant that those risks are considerable, from errant missiles to Hezbollah retaliation. It’s this: “Are the risks greater if we launch missiles, or if we continue to sit on our hands?” [Emphasis added]

This is a clear example of a Straw Man combined with a False Dilemma. The Straw Man occurs when he suggests that people who are opposed to a US strike on Syria are in favor of doing nothing. This is complete nonsense as many people have suggested other options for dealing with the ongoing civil war. Here are two: one from a former diplomat named Robert A. Pastor, and another from columnist David Sirota. One may disagree with the effectiveness of these approaches, but it is a false dilemma of gross proportions to suggest that the only two options are drop bombs or do nothing.

Kristof continues by suggesting that a limited bombing campaign would stem the violence in Syria. Ignoring the almost certain civilians casualties from these strikes, Kristof's claims make absolutely no sense on their face:

In Syria, it seems to me that cruise missile strikes might make a modest difference, by deterring further deployment of chemical weapons. Sarin nerve gas is of such limited usefulness to the Syrian army that it has taken two years to use it in a major way, and it’s plausible that we can deter Syria’s generals from employing it again if the price is high.

By Kristof's own estimates, 165 people are killed daily in Syria, and the death toll from the Syrian conflict has been estimated at around 100,000. By contrast, the alleged chemical weapons attack in Syria killed about 1500 people (I say "alleged" because we still don't have strong evidence other than reports from US officials that a chemical attack occurred, much less that the Syrian government was responsible). Following Kristof's logic, even if we could magically eliminate the Syrian government's chemical weapons capacity without harming any innocent civilians, this would have almost no impact on the magnitude of human death and suffering caused by the civil war. As others have noted, the Obama plan would not do anything to resolve the conflict, but would merely be a "face-saving" exercise for the US government.

Kristof does suggest and support the possibility of a more robust attack on the offensive capabilities of the Syrian government writing:

The Syrian government has also lately had the upper hand in fighting, and airstrikes might make it more willing to negotiate toward a peace deal to end the war. I wouldn’t bet on it, but, in Bosnia, airstrikes helped lead to the Dayton peace accord.
Missile strikes on Assad’s military airports might also degrade his ability to slaughter civilians. With fewer fighter aircraft, he may be less able to drop a napalm-like substance on a school, as his forces apparently did in Aleppo last month. [Emphasis added]

In his own comments he admits that he doesn't think a military strike would achieve the goals he wants to achieve in Syria! If so, why is he advocating such an attack? Furthermore, if we were successful in degrading the military capability of the Syrian  government, we would then be actively promoting one of the biggest concerns Kristof has about Syria:

The longer the war drags on in Syria, the more Al Qaeda elements gain strength, the more Lebanon and Jordan are destabilized, and the more people die.

Kristof seems to fail to understand that one of the major forces opposing the Syrian government are folks allied with Al Qaeda. Thus, weakening and degrading the Assad regime would only strengthen Al Qaeda in Syria! Thus, Kristof's own argument in internally inconsistent! As Atrios notes, Kristof's plan seems to boil down to:

1. Bomb
2. ????
3. ????

This means Kristof's logic is sub-underpants gnome.

And for this reason I ask again, "Is Kristof dumb or dumber?"

Senator Dianne Feinstein Weighs In

Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) weighed in the Surveillance State scandal on ABC's This Week. As should be no surprise for anyone who follows Senator Feinstein, the focus of her appearance was to defend the various programs that have been revealed by Glenn Greenwald and the Guardian. The core of her defense is that these programs are legal, and they have played an important role in keeping us safe from the terrorists. Also, 9-11. Let's take a closer look at her defense and unpack some of the fallacies she commits. After some preliminary remarks, she begins:

So here's what happens with that program. The program is essentially walled off within the NSA. There are limited numbers of people who have access to it. The only thing taken, as has been correctly expressed, is not content of a conversation, but the information that is generally on your telephone bill, which has been held not to be private personal property by the Supreme Court.

This first statement actually appears to be false. According to the Edward Snowden, the whistleblower who leaked this information in the first place, all this data was quite accesible to a large number of people.

As Snowden told The Guardian in a videotaped interview: "When you're in positions of privileged access, like a systems administrator, for these sort of intelligence community agencies, you're exposed to a lot more information on a broader scale than the average employee ... Anybody in the positions of access with the technical capabilities that I had could, you know, suck out secrets."

Let's remember, Edward Snowden is a 29 year old high school dropout, and he had access to all this classified information after just 3 months on the job with the defense contractor Booze Allen Hamilton. This is not intended as a criticism of Snowden, but merely to put the lie to Sen. Feinstein's comments about the limited access to this program. As Julian Sanchez put it:

Though, if you DO think Snowden is a traitorous criminal, shouldn't you be concerned about a system that gave him keys to the spy machine?
— Julian Sanchez (@normative) June 10, 2013

Feinstein then goes on to discuss a few cases in which the program has been used:

So, the program has been used. Two cases have been declassified. One of them is the case of David Headley, who went to Mumbai, to the Taj hotel, and scoped it out for the terrorist attack.

The case of David Headley is quite interesting and there are a few things worth noting. First, Headley was a DEA informant.  Second, the Mumbai terrorist attacks Feinstein mentions were successful  Thus, one example of the program in action was to track down a DEA informant who had slipped through the cracks to successfully commit a wide-scale terrorist attack in Mumbai. Needless to say, if the best example of this program in action is finding a former informants who went on to successfully commit acts of terror, I am unclear what benefit the program is supposed to serve. If it can't even be used to prevent an attack, I am not sure what the point of trading away my privacy was.

Feinstein's second example involves a terrorist plot to blow up the New York Subway. I won't go into to many details about this example, but there are definitely some suspicious aspects of this case.

Feinstein concludes her defense of this program with the ultimate Red Herring/Appeal to Emotion when she remarks:

Here is the point. And this is why this is so difficult. I flew over World Trade Center going to Senator Lautenberg's funeral, and in the distance was the Statue of Liberty. And I thought of those bodies jumping out of that building, hitting the canopy. Part of our obligation is keeping Americans safe. Human intelligence isn't going to do it, because you can't -- it's a different culture. It is a fanaticism that isn't going to come forward. And so, this kind of strict, strictly overseen -- it's overseen by the Justice Department, by inspectors general, by audits, by a 90-day review, by the court, is looked at as a method. I'm very happy if there's a better way, we will certainly look at it.

This last argument is really quite shameful as Sen. Feinstein invokes the specter of 9/11 to justify this program. This strategy is ancient, and was one of the favorite techniques of the Bush administration. Whenever anyone raises questions about a policy, one simply repeats 9/11 over and over again as a way to shut down conversation. This is exactly what Feinstein is doing. If the best argument she can muster to defend this program is to get everyone worked up and frightened, this suggests that the program is probably indefensible.

h/t to Digby

More Gold from the Surveillance Scandal

The revelations of the scope of the Surveillance State keep coming from Glenn Greenwald. This time the subject is the aptly named "Boundless Informant" program. This is a program that maps and details by country the amount of data that has been scooped up by the NSA. Of particular interest is the following picture and that bright yellow country on the left.

As with many of these stories, while the revelations are important and worth discussing, I want to focus on the responses. At the end of the Greenwald article cited above Greenwald quotes from Judith Emmel, an NSA spokeswoman interviewed by the Guardian. My favorite comment is her last one:

She added: "The continued publication of these allegations about highly classified issues, and other information taken out of context, makes it impossible to conduct a reasonable discussion on the merits of these programs."

I find this to be an incredible example of doublespeak.  Basically, Emmel is claiming that the disclosure of the existence of these programs interferes with our ability to reasonably discuss these programs. If we think about this for a second, we can see that this is a clear Non Sequitur that completely Misses the Point. How can we have a reasonable discussion on the merits of programs that are hidden from us and which we don't know exist? If Emmel (and President Obama as discussed in a previous post) were genuinely interested in having a reasonable discussion of this issue, they would welcome these disclosures.

In fact, it is as a result of these disclosures by the heroic whistle-blowing of Edward Snowden that we are finally actually having a discussion about the surveillance state. I realize that Emmel and President Obama would prefer the general population to remain ignorant, and that the NSA would just prefer to do whatever it wants without any oversight or "interference," but, at the risk of repeating myself, this is supposed to be a democracy, and a democracy can only function effectively when the populace is well-informed about what the government is up to. This is why people like Snowden (and Bradley Manning and Julian Assange and Daniel Ellsberg) are heroes; they were willing to sacrifice themselves and risk their lives to further freedom and democracy.

The Road to Anti-Amnesty is Paved With Fallacies

Atrios's worst person in the world for today is Ying Zh-Ye. This was bestowed upon her in honor of her editorial titled, "Immigration Reform 2013: The Road to Socialism is Paved With Amnesty." The thesis of this essay, though obviously clear from the title, is nicely summarized by Zh-Ye as:

By legalizing 11 million unlawful immigrants, the amnesty would likely have negative long-term impacts to this nation financially and politically.

Let's dig in to her argument, which is riddled with numerous fallacies. Her first argument for this conclusion involves citing at a Heritage Foundation report that claims that Amnesty would cost the US $6.3 trillion because all these immigrants would suck up $9.4 trillion in benefits (welfare, food stamps, etc.) and only pay in about $3.1 trillion in taxes. This is, right off the bat, a nice example of an Appeal to Authority. I don't know enough about how these numbers are calculated, but the assumption that every single immigrant will use more in benefits than they pay in taxes doesn't seem very reasonable. Furthermore, the Heritage Foundation is a right-wing think-tank that has a history of coming up with conclusions first, and then seeking data to support those conclusions. In any case, this report is then immediately contrasted with a reprot from the Cato Institute that comes to the opposite conclusion, namely that amnesty will be a net benefit to the economy. Zh-Ye dismisses this report, arguing:

It is true that overall GDP may appear to be bigger if currently under-the-table business activities are included, but it is not a healthy and sustainable growth, as it is associated with enormous government expenses. The purpose of a pro-growth theory is to promote an immigration policy which would make fiscal costs public and keep the corporate profits private.

As  one can see, Zh-Ye simply asserts that this is true, without providing any evidence that this is the case. Furthermore, I am unclear why a pro-growth policy would make the costs public and the benefits private, nor how this relates to the broader criticism of the Cato Institute. This would appear to be a nice example of a Non Sequitur.

Zh-Ye's next argument for her thesis concerns an imagined future conflict between all the newly legalized immigrants on welfare and the newly retired Baby Boomers who are collecting social security.

As the Baby Boomers retire, Social Security and medical costs will go up. At the same time, an exploding population of green-card-carrying immigrants would become eligible for welfare benefits in 2023. Hence, there is likely going to be major conflict between these two populations. Both retirement and welfare systems may start to default if politicians stretch younger taxpayers' ability to pay and support both of these enormous programs at the same time.

This passage clearly demonstrates Zh-Ye ignorance about these matters. In particular, she seems to be unaware that Social Security is separate from other Federal Budget items and does not contribute to the deficit. Furthermore, Social Security is self-funded, and is completely solvent through 2033. Thus, this predicted conflict between newly legalized immigrant welfare recipients and Social Security recipients is entirely a fiction invented by Zh-Ye that has no basis in reality.

Zh-Ye's final argument is the strangest and most incoherent of the three, and is summarized in the following paragraph:

Many immigrants have deep scars from socialism. They know how their home countries turned into one-party communist countries many years ago. They also learned, as a part of Asian history, how elite people were humiliated and tortured, little by little, begging for their rights, dignity, and properties. Unfortunately, America is not immune from turning into a socialist country if it imports large numbers of low-income immigrants to change its political landscape.

If I understand what she is saying, the argument can be summarized as follows:

1. Many immigrants come to the US fleeing the horrors (as they have experienced it) of Socialism.
2. In the US they will try to recreate the very thing they are fleeing from. 
3. Thus, increasing immigration will lead to Socialism

Ignoring for now the question of why Socialism would be a bad thing, it is clear that this argument is guilty of an Inconsistency. Why would people fleeing Socialism establish it in the place they are fleeing to? There is an additional inconsistency in that the article is ostensibly about Amnesty, meaning the immigrants in question are the ones who are already here illegally, but now Zh-Ye is talking about new immigrants who are fleeing Socialism with the apparent goal of establishing it in the US. The entire argument is self-contradictory, and really doesn't make any sense. In addition, it also appears to commit a Slippery Slope, arguing that the legalization of people currently in the US illegally will somehow (this is never explained) lead inevitably to Socialism.

 

Zh-Ye concludes, writing:

If this amnesty bill passes Congress and becomes the law, the U.S. may be at risk to lose a portion of its wealthy and upper-middle-class people, due to sharp tax increases and an unbalanced social structure. These people will take a good amount of talent, wealth, and jobs with them.

Again, if one thinks a bit deeply about this it makes no sense. Just where would these wealthy, upper-middle class Socialism-hating people go? To Europe? That is even more socialist than the US? China? Same problem with less freedom. The Middle East? Russia? Africa? An evil villain lair in Antartica? Again, the entire thesis of the piece is non-sensical, and once one thinks just a bit critically about the argument the entire thing just falls apart. This is a clear example of how a failure of critical thinking and analysis can lead someone to develop seriously wrong and incoherent opinions on an issue.

"Deer Crossing" signs aren't for the deer.

Kathleen O'Brian Wilhelm is a blogger for a news site that covers news in the samll town of Avon Lake, Ohio. One of her recent posts is so dumb and fallacy-ridden that at first I thought it must be a joke. As near as I can tell, it is not. Her post begins with the following:

Signs that read “Deer Crossing” and the like are going to continue to pop up throughout our country including Avon Lake, but who are these signs for? Deer cannot read, do not obey the law and probably will cross where they wish. Although adorable companions, it is hard to remember the last time that the news reported an animal talking, thinking or providing significant input for the benefit of society. Yet, these signs cost taxpayers like so much of government.

Yes, you read that correctly and this is not a joke. Wilhelm is objecting to "Deer Crossing" signs on the grounds that she sees no point in them because deer can't read. Aside from asinine stupidity, this is also a nice example of the Fallacy of Missing the Point. Wilhelm seems oddly ignorant of the fact that such signs are not there for the benefit of the deer, but for the benefit of drivers who should take special care to avoid hitting a deer (for those unfamiliar, deer are very heavy and basic physics tells us that if you hit a deer going at even a moderate speed you will total your car and likely seriously injure yourself in addition to killing the deer). That Wilhelm seems to ignore this obvious point is...bizarre.

However, the bizarreness continues. A bit later Wilhelm writes:

They are on this earth like trees to make humans’ lives better. As humans we must be kind to them, eat them when hungry, feed them when they are, but remember they are here to enhance our lives. 

In this passage she makes a pretty big unargued assumption about the role of animals. I assume this belief is a product of her religious background, but it is really Begging the Question to just assert this without providing any justification for it. 

Lastly, Wilhelm commits a pretty significant Non Sequitur when she writes:

Besides, it appears that this gesture of kindness to animals does not extend human to human. This President’s  Obamacare appears to welcome abortion of innocent babies. It is painful to think that there are those who  cry for seals while Obamacare  never blinks an eye at abortion.

The movie from a discussion of animals to a discussion of abortion coverage under the Affordable Care Act makes no sense, and one doesn't really have anything to do with the other. This is a classic example of a non sequitur as the comments about abortion do not follow from the earlier comments about our duties and responsibilities towards animals.

Upon first reading this article, I was fairly disturbed and disappointed that someone could get away with writing something so obviously moronic and ill-conceived, but much of my faith in humanity was restored by reading the comments. It appears that Wilhelm's readers, at least, are much more intelligent than her.

h/t to Pharyngula

Black people run faster because they are descended from slaves?

Sometimes, when one tries to come up with a ridiculous title, it turns out that you can't out ridicule reality. As a case in point, check out this "commentary" on black athletes from the BBC:

According to the commentator in this clip, black people are good at running because slavery exerted an evolutionary pressure on them that made them faster runners. This is a good example of a Non Sequitur and a Post Hoc fallacy combined with a bit of straw manning. The straw manning comes from the misrepresentation of evolutionary theory and the ideas of eugenics. The commentator in question clearly doesn't have a very good grasp of this topic and uses a very cursory analyis of evolutionary theory to develop his points.

The non sequitur arises in that his conclusion just does not follow from his premise. The reconstructed argument seems to be as follows:

1. Evolution proceeds by natural selection and survival of the fittest.
2. West Africans were slaves and were subject to enormous evolutionary pressure such that only the fittest West Africans survived the slave passage and made it to the Americas.
3. All successful (in terms of Gold medals and world records) runners are of West African descent.
4. Therefore, their success is due to their descent from slaves.

It should also be clear that this is a post hoc fallacy in that the commentator is assuming a causal relation between slave ancestry and skill at running, when there is, at best, a correlation. There are likely a variety of other factors at work here besides mere descent from slaves. Furthermore, as PZ Meyers notes,  the evolutionary story doesn't even make sense:

…because, obviously, being able to survive shackling in a slave ship and a lifetime of menial stoop labor in the cotton fields clearly selects for genes of benefit in short foot races.

If anything, it would seem that slavery would select against speed over short distances as the last thing a slave owner would want is for his slaves to be able to run away!

Reality is not a democracy

In a rather bizarre article trying to argue that plants aren't alive (yes, really), Henry Morris III, CEO of The Institute for Creation Research provides a very nice example of an Ad Populum. An ad populum is an appeal to popularity in which one argues that because a certain belief is widely held or popular it must be true. That this kind of reasoning is fallacious should be obvious: just because a bunch of people believe something, doesn't make it true. Reality is not a democracy. Here is the ad populum:

If that were the only battle to fight, the scientific accuracy of the creationist model would be rather easy to demonstrate. In spite of the generations-long effort of the academic world to foist evolutionary naturalism on the world, 46 percent of the U.S. population still believes that “God created human beings in their present form at one time within the last 10,000 years” (Gallup poll released June 1, 2012). Intuitively and observationally, people “know” that plants and animals are not the same and that human beings are vastly different from everything else on the planet.

There are a number of fallacies in this passage besides the ad populum, but let's deal with that first. Here, Norris is trying to argue to that because many (though less than half) Americans don't believe in evolution this is somehow evidence of the falsity of that theory. Again, just because many people believe something, that doesn't make it true. In this case, it seems clear that 46% of Americans are just wrong.

Furthermore, this fact about popular opinion doesn't actually support Morris' thesis that plants are not alive. Even if 46% of Americans don't believe in evolution, I imagine that if you polled these people they would all think that plants are alive. The opinion of people about the truth or falsity of evolution tells us nothing about their opinion on whether or not plants are alive. This is a good example of a non sequitur.

Lastly, we can see a good example of a straw man in the last sentence. I (and I imagine most evolutionary biologists) would certainly agree that it is obvious that plants and humans are different. Just look at them.

Maybe not this guy.

However, these radical differences don't tell us anything about common descent. In fact, evolutionary theory does a very good job of explaining how the diversity of life we observe on our planet all descended from a common ancestor. To claim otherwise is to misrepresent the claims of proponents of evolution.

h/t to Pharyngula

Tinkerbell Science and the Higgs boson.

Sometimes an argument is so bad that it can be difficult to identify a specific fallacy. One reads the argument and knows it is nonsense, but it can be difficult to articulate exactly why. This is where the Non Sequitur and Missing the Point Fallacy come in handy. These are both essentially catch-all labels for fallacies in which the conclusion clearly doesn't follow from the premises, but where one can't be more specific (in some sense all fallacies are non sequiturs, but specificity is always to be preferred to vagueness whenever possible). As a case in point, see this article, again from Mike Adams on the Higgs boson.

To summarize, Adams essentially suggest that the Higgs boson was discovered because a bunch of scientists wished hard enough. That is, because they concentrated so hard on wanting the Higgs boson to be discovered, those conscious intentions brought it into being. Lest one think I am straw manning Adams, read the article for yourself, but here is one particularly representative quote:

CERN may not have discovered a new particle, it turns out, but may have inadvertently proven the power of mind-matter interaction.

Adams uses a great deal of weasel words like "may" but the general point should be pretty clear, the Higgs boson exists because scientists wished hard enough (Why I am calling this Tinkerbell science should be clear, if not this should explain it).

So, this is the claim, what is the argument? Adam's writes:

In other words, was the Higgs discovery actually the greatest intention experiment ever conducted? This is not a casual question. It reaches into the very nature of science itself and begs the question: Can human-run science ever truly be conducted independent from an observer? The answer, of course, is no. The subsequent question then becomes critical: Do observers alter the outcomes of scientific experiments even without any intention of doing so?

There are a great number of fallacies packed into this passage. First, the final sentence and the other rhetorical questions are clearly examples of Loaded Questions since they all assume the conclusion Adams is trying to make.  In addition, this is a good example of a Non Sequitur because the conclusion doesn't follow from the premises, and in effect reflects a significant misunderstanding of the scientific process (Missing the Point of science). The argument seems to be:

1. Science is done by human beings. 
2. Human beings are incapable of being completely objective. 
3. Therefore everything they do is radically subjective. 
4. Therefore there is no objective reality.

Now there is a kernel of truth in what Adams writes. Science is conducted by scientists, scientists are human, and thus subject to all the errors and biases normal human beings commit. However, to then go on and argue that there is no objective reality and because of this wishing really hard brings something into existence simply goes too far. There just isn't enough evidence to draw such a radical conclusion from what we are presented. In addition, things like the scientific method and peer review exist exactly to avoid the subjectivity of scientific conclusions. We certainly can't trust what CERN says just because they say it, and this is why all their research is made publicly available so that other scientists (many of whom do not care whether or not CERN is correct and who may in fact strongly wish that it is incorrect) can evaluate the evidence and conclusions. It is not a perfect method, but it is really the best method we have, and is far preferable to the Tinkerbell science Adams seems to be supporting.

Journalists shouldn't be nosy? Then what are they for?

In a recent editorial for CNN LZ Granderson has argued that US citizens should be less nosy about what their government is doing:

Times have changed. Yet, not everything is our business. And in the political arena, there are things that should be and need to be kept quiet.

I know that's hard to digest in a society where pregnancies and marriages of D-list celebrities make the cover of People magazine, but there comes a point where the public's right to know needs to take a back seat to matters like national security and diplomacy.

Putting aside the clear false analogy between celebrity gossip and governmental policies, Granderson never makes a clear argument for why this kind of willful ignorance is valuable and important. The general tone of his editorial suggests that he would rather be spared the messy details of some of the uglier aspects of US foreign and domestic policy because then he would feel bad about his country, but I am merely speculating here. Personally, I am quite amazed that someone who calls himself a journalist would argue that investigative journalism is a bad idea, but I guess if Granderson doesn't think his job is worthwhile, he should probably quit. I must also disagree with the idea that things need to be kept quite in the political realm. As we have seen time and time again, when people don't pay attention to politicians and politics awful, horrible, disgusting things happen. Lastly, the claim that what goes on in the political arena is none of my business is unbelievably wrong-headed. I pay for it through my taxes, the people who do it are my representatives, and if they screw up I personally may be the one to suffer. How could this not be my business?

As moronic as this editorial is, perhaps the most moronic part is a non sequitur Granderson commits towards the end of the piece. A non sequitur is a fallacy in which the conclusion does not follow from the premises. Granderson commits his non sequitur when he writes:

Much in the same way, Project Wide Receiver and Project Road Runner -- the earlier versions of Fast and Furious under President Bush -- were executed with the hope that they will do more good than harm. Hardly anyone in the public knows the finer points of these programs.

Were they legal?

Hell no.

Were they effective?

Who knows?

Were they done as a way to keep America safe?

Yes.

The non sequitur lies in the claim that these programs kept America safe. However, if we have no idea of the effectiveness of these programs we can't conclude anything about them. For all we know, the may have made America less safe, or perhaps had no impact on the safety of America whatsoever. Without knowledge of their effectiveness, we can't draw any conclusion whatsoever. Yet, for some unstated reason, Granderson thinks they made America safe. 

And this brings me back to the inanity and absurdity of Granderson's editorial. He seems to have absolutely no understanding of the purpose of journalism in a democracy. Though this is somewhat surprising, it is actually a fairly common view among main stream journalists in the US. Democracy requires a free and aggressive press in order to inform voters about politicians and their policies so that voters can make informed decisions when they go to the polls. To instead argue that we should all just stick our heads in the sand is deeply disturbing, and really calls into question the integrity and legitimacy of these "journalists" and the media outlets they work for.

h/t to Glenn Greenwald