Lisa, I want to buy your rock!

This is one of the best examples of the Post Hoc fallacy out there. For a long time, a clip of this was unavailable on the internet (I don't know why), but today I finally came across one, and here it is:


The key here is Homer's confusion about the rock. If we reconstruct his argument it goes like this:

1. Lisa has a rock.
2. There are no tigers.
3. Therefore, the rock kept the tigers away.

It is the assumption that the rock caused the tigers to stay away which is the Post Hoc fallacy. 

The Bullshit of Donald Trump

Trump redlines the bullshit meter

One of the defining features of the 2016 presidential election is the degree to which the Republican party, under the leadership of their presidential nominee Donald J. Trump, has completely abandoned anything that could be characterized as "reality" or the "truth." I have discussed before how American political discourse generally has moved into a "post-truth" era in which things like facts and reality  are held in low esteem and in opposition to whatever makes someone feel good, or which reinforce existing prejudices. This phenomenon has clearly reached its apotheosis in Donald Trump, a man who has a very problematic relationship with reality and the truth. In fact, the man spreads so many lies and so much nonsense, that it is virtually impossible to keep anything resembling a comprehensive list. He generates lies and bullshit at such a rate that it is difficult even for professional fact-checkers to keep up.

Fortunately, to help us make sense of the Trump campaign and Trump's problematic relationship to the truth, the philosopher Harry Frankfurt has recently penned a useful article for Time magazine. For those not in the know, Frankfurt is most famous for a short essay he wrote in the late 80's which was repackaged as a separate volume in 2005. This essay, On Bullshit, seeks to provide a theoretical definition of bullshit as well as explain how bullshit differs from lying. In his recent article for Time, Frankfurt extends that analysis to the presidential campaign of Donald Trump. It is reasonably short, and rather than summarize it here, I encourage folks just to read it for themselves.

Science!

John Oliver gives a fantastic takedown of some of the terrible science reporting one finds in the media, and also gives a good analysis of some of the causes.

This is an interesting optical illusion, with a really nice explanation of how it works.

You can find examples of this in the real world, particularly with some of those spinning signs like the one pictured below:

When you see these signs spinning, you can often make it appear to yourself as if the sign is spinning in both directions, much like the spinning dancer illusion above.

h/t to SGU

Small hands...you know what that means.

The primary race for the 2016 Republican nomination is one of the most bizarre and surreal events American politics has ever seen. The event has gotten so ridiculous that Republicans have started to debate who has the biggest penis. The idea that penis size has any bearing on who should be president is mind-bogglingly stupid, but here we are. Here is a video of Marco Rubio insinuating that Trump has a small penis:

This is an excellent example of an Ad hominem, which is a fallacy in which one substitutes a personal attack for reasoned argument.

Interestingly enough, this claim that Trump has small hands has been around for decades. In fact, it appears that this claim can be traced back to Spy Magazine, a satirical weekly that started publication in the late 1980's.

They separate us from the animals...except for the weasels.

Weasel words are words inserted into a claim that make it weaker than it initially appears. The graphic below gives a number of examples of a favorite weasel words of advertisers: the phrase
"up to." "Up to" is a brilliant weasel word because it can make it sound like there is an incredible sale and one could get a great deal. The first image promises "Mega Reductions" and prominently features "70% off" making it sound like one could save almost 3/4. However, that weaselly "up to" actually reveals that not everything will be 70% off, and that 70% is the absolute most that you could possibly save. Such a claim is compatible with one small item being 70% off and everything else being normal price. If you tried to complain that the store was guilty of false advertising, the owner could easily respond by noting that they didn't promise that everything was 70% off, merely that one could save 'up to' that amount. The same sort of issue applies to all the examples presented below.

h/t to Angust at cracked.com

Why don't they want you to read the fine print?

Accent or Accentuation is when one changes the meaning of a statement by emphasizing or deemphasizing certain components of that statement. In the image below we see one of the classic uses of accent by advertisers. In each of these images from a TV commercial you can see the very fine print that flashes up at the end of the ad. The advertisers don't want you to see this information, but they are legally required to show it, so the solution is to flash it on the screen in fine print for half a second. Personally, I think advertising laws should be changed so that advertisers are required to present all information in the same font. But, given the influence advertisers and corporations have on the government, such a change seems unlikely. The takeaway: don't believe anything you see in an ad.

h/t Alexius08 at Cracked.com