The Debates: Cite? Fallacies?

Good interpretations, but not exactly what I had in mind. I’m not the dictator of the board or anything, though, so feel free to ignore what I say here and go with the scores above :slight_smile:

For the first score, I was looking more for scoring actual cites… but I guess giving data to back up a claim should count, too. Simple assertions get a nil score (things like “We can do better”), and cites (and now evidence) that turned out to be untrue (like misquotes or incorrect numbers) would get a negative, I guess.

For the second, I was looking for logical fallacies–not just incorrect statements, but actual fallacies.

Let me see what I get if I pick 'em apart:

Through here I count 0 points in either category.

On reconsideration, these numbers go into the “evidence” category. I score “90 percent of the casualties” as definitely true; if we’re at 88%, that’s 90% if you round to one significant figure. That’s absolutely fine in my book.

For the 90% of the costs, I’ll need to know the total costs. I see $140 billion (or $120 billion, per factcheck) for our costs; that would mean we need a total in the $130 billion to $160 billion range for the statement to be accurate. Does anyone have a total-cost-of-Iraq figure? We can’t judge the “90% of the costs” statement without knowing the total costs. So far I give him a 1 on my evidence scale and a 0 on the fallacy scale, with a sneaking suspicion that he’d get another point for evidence if we could find the total cost of the Iraq operation.

I don’t see any actual evidence or logical fallacies in there, so that leaves Kerry with scores of 1 (possibly 2) on the evidence side, and 0 on the fallacy side.
Now for Bush:

0/0 so far.

To fully judge this, I’d need a list of “known Al Qaida leaders,” and a list of those we’ve “brought to justice” (I’ll accept “killed or captured” as a definition of “brought to justice”). The general concensus seems to be that this “75%” figure only counts those who were leaders as of 9/11. If that’s true, Bush gets a -1 on the evidence scale for this statement.

Nope, not 10 million people. There have been 10 million registrations, but not by 10 million people. That’s another -1, for a score so far of -2/0.

Technically, the Saddam mention is a non-sequitor if we don’t have evidence that he was a threat. However, both candidates concede that he was a threat (although Bush sees him as the threat, while Kerry ranks him much lower), so I’ll give Bush +1 on that.

I’ll give him +1 for Libya; even though he probably had little to do with it, that is evidence that we’re pursuing “our policy of disrupting those who proliferate weapons of mass destruction.” However, A.Q. Khan being arrested doesn’t seem to me to count as his network being brought to justice. I’m giving him -1 on that, for a total score so far of -1/0.

0/0 on that one.

Totals for round 1 by my accounting:
Kerry: 1 (2?) / 0
Bush: -1/0

I’ll give people time to disagree with that, then come back in an hour or so with round 2…

The first part isn’t 100% settled, but I think we have enough to move right along to question #2:

In a related vein: CNN’s fact-check list.

The quotes in this Kerry campaign fact sheet say otherwise. For example:

A quick note: if you put the candidates’ words in quote marks, we can’t “reply with quote” successfully. Can you italicize them or something instead?

Although I quibble with some of these ideas, I don’t think that they’re factually coherent enough to say anything about. No issues here.

He’s referring to the schoolchildren in Russia, lumping them in with the killers in Iraq. I do not believe they can coherently be called “a group,” and this gets at the heart of one of the things he’s trying to do: he’s trying to tie other horrific terrorist events to the Iraq war. -1 on logic, I’d say, so 0/-1.

Nothing so far.

False, as discussed. -1/-1.

Does anyone know where the source for this fact is? I’m guessing that this is correct, if you say that 41% of the registrations were done by women; on the radio today, I heard that a lot of Afghani women mistakenly thought they were signing up for food rationing cards, and were signing up multiple times so they could get more food for their families. But I have no idea whether that’s true; although i can’t assign the point, I’m guessing he’ll get this one right, which will eventually push him up to 0/-1. For now, he stands at -1/-1.

Nothing substantive here, I think.

Rhetoric.

The 9/11 commission did indeed say this, to the best of my knowledge. +1/0. However, there were multiple reasons for going to war; although the WMD reason was paramount, I do not believe it was mentioned as the sole reason, despite what some of our local conservatives claimed at the time. So These cancel out, to 0/0.

These all seem to me to be legitimate appeals to authority; what do y’all think, and should they be counted together or separately? If together, we’re up to 0/1; if separately, we’re up to 0/+4.

We don’t know for certain that we had him surrounded. -1/+1. The president did rely on warlords. 0/+1.

Thoughts?
Daniel