Last time around, we noted that a common rhetorical technique/fallacy is to attack one unrepresentative case as typical of the class to which it belongs. The same thing works the other way: praising a single example as a way of suggesting all others are just as good.
A case in point is Mark Hyman’s recent praise of the Trump administration’s elimination of regulations regarding the “Y2K” software glitch from days of yore.
Hyman notes that it is silly to have regulations/policies in place for something that happened 17 years ago (and didn’t do much even at the time).
Fair enough (although it’s largely a symbolic move, since apparently these regulations/policies are understandably ignored today). But if you think this is about Y2K, think again.
Just as there is no good reason for many of these Y2K policies, there is no particularly good reason to praise their elimination (which, again, doesn’t really save time or money given that they were already defunct for all practical purposes). At least not one related to the policies themselves.
Rather, this elimination of silly regulations is meant to be a synecdoche—a part standing in for the whole. Specifically, Hyman means to imply that the Trump White House is finally taking the torch to needless regulations in general, and we should be grateful and appreciative that someone finally has the gumption to go after all this red tape.
The problem, of course, is that most policies and regulations are not the dead letters that Y2K regulations are. Indeed, it’s better to understand what are often referred to as “regulations” as “protections”—protections for the environment, for workers, for children, for nature . . . for Americans.
And while Y2K bugs no longer threaten us, things like air pollution, workplace safety, contaminated water, poor construction, chemical dumping, nefarious business practices, etc. do.
Make no mistake: Trump and his ilk see policies that protect us from these things as every bit as useless as Y2K policies. This is all in the name of adding a rounding error to next quarter’s profits at the expense of people’s health and lives.
So, the Trump administration has done its best to gut not only regulations themselves but the regulatory agencies that oversee their enforcement.
To folks like Trump, Hyman, and their fellow travelers, this represents “freeing” of American business that will allegedly create jobs.
But note that lax financial regulations were largely to blame for the Great Recession of 2008 which cost millions of jobs and billions of dollars.
Also note that air pollution causes 200,000 early deaths in the U.S. each year. Between 4,000 and 5,000 die each year from workplace accidents (less than a third of what it was pre-OSHA . . . but guess what the Trump administration’s attitude toward workplace safety is).
In the meantime, we’re supposed to be terrified of Muslim refugees and “bad hombres” from south of the border, despite the fact that they represent no measurable risk to Americans at all.
So, be careful to avoid falling for the rhetorical trick that implies the part stands for the whole. It’s just another bait and switch technique aimed at eliciting support without proving anything.
No comments:
Post a Comment