Propaganda and Debating Techniques
by A. Orange


In his Rhetoric, Aristotle acknowledges that it would be better if we could make our case without either browbeating or flattering the audience; nothing should matter except "the bare facts." Yet he laments, "other things affect the result considerably, owing to the defects of our hearers."
— Stanley Fish, in his blog "Think Again" in the New York Times, 2008.11.09
http://fish.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/11/09/psychology-and-torture/?apage=1


"I soon realized that the correct use of propaganda is a true art which has remained practically unknown to the bourgeois parties. Only the Christian-Social movement, especially in Lüger's time, achieved a certain virtuosity on this instrument, to which it owed many of its successes."
— Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf, Volume 1, Chapter 6, "War Propaganda"


"Through clever and constant application of propaganda, people can be made to see paradise as hell, and also the other way round, to consider the most wretched sort of life as paradise."
— Adolf Hitler


"Propaganda," Goebbels once wrote, "has absolutely nothing to do with truth."


"In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act."
— George Orwell


"This election is not about issues," Rick Davis, John McCain's campaign manager said this week. "This election is about a composite view of what people take away from these candidates." That's a scary thought. For the takeaway is so often base, a reflection more of people's fears and insecurities than of our hopes and dreams.
— Judith Warner, New York Times, September 4, 2008


As you read the following pages, you will be exposed to quite a variety of deceptive propaganda techniques, logical fallacies, and lies (hopefully, none of them mine). You might as well learn a little about how the art and science of propaganda works, so that you can recognize the techniques as people try to fool your mind with them.

You probably already know a lot about this, whether you realize it or not, because politicians pull many of these standard stunts on you every election year, and you have grown immune to some of them. And modern advertising uses a lot of them, too, and you just tune them out. Nevertheless, let's just do a quick over-view of propaganda techniques.

Bear in mind that "propaganda" is not inherently a dirty word — it just usually is. Any time you are trying to convince anyone of something, you are using some kind of persuasion, debating, or propaganda technique. Just telling the whole truth about something is one simple propaganda technique, and a highly effective one. But lying often works better, at least with some audiences...

Master these propaganda techniques, and you too will be able to proselytize and promote cult religion and radical politics just like a battle-hardened old-timer.

PROPAGANDA TECHNIQUES:

DEBATING TECHNIQUES:


PROPAGANDA TECHNIQUES:


  • Tell The Truth, The Whole Truth, and Nothing But The Truth.
    This can be highly effective, and very convincing, if you know your subject material well, and are a good speaker.

    ... And IF the truth is really what you want your audience to hear and believe.

    The Truth, as a matter of habit, has some disadvantages: You have to learn and remember a whole lot of facts, and keep them straight in your head. The facts might not always be what you wish them to be. And, alas, the truth is sometimes very boring...


  • Lie
    This one is simple, straight-forward, and obvious. Just lie and say whatever you want to. It has the advantages that you don't need to memorize so many facts, and you can make up new facts when the currently-existing ones don't suit your purposes. The disadvantages are that you might get caught in a lie, and that would destroy your credibility.

    "You're never going to make it in politics. You just don't know how to lie."
     Richard M. Nixon
    Secret Lives of the U.S. Presidents, Cormac O'Brien, page 228.


  • Lie By Omission and Half-Truths
    This is also known as Suppressed Evidence.

    This one is more subtle. It has the advantage that you can't get caught in a lie, because everything that you say is true. You just happily fail to mention all of those bothersome little facts that do not support your point of view. Should a critic point out one of those annoying undesired facts, you can at least feign innocent ignorance, or claim that the fact is really just an unimportant, trivial detail, not worth mentioning.

    For example: In 1908, the Lutheran minister Dr. Frank Nathan Daniel Buchman got into a squabble over money with the trustee committee of their hospice for young men in Philadelphia, and in an angry huff, Buchman resigned and got on a boat for Europe. He ended up at a large religious convention in Keswick, England, where he felt that he had a spiritual transformation. He felt moved to write letters of apology to all six of the trustees with whom he had squabbled, humbly asking their forgiveness. Buchman said that none of them even bothered to answer his letters.

    That was rather unkind of them, wasn't it? No wonder Buchman had a disagreement with them, if they were really so haughty and so inconsiderate that they would not even acknowledge a man's humble apology and request for forgiveness...

    There is just one small detail that Frank Buchman left out in his telling of that story: Buchman didn't put any return address on the envelopes that he mailed back to Philadelphia.

    Vice President Dick Cheney told CNN on May 8, 2001, that nuclear energy "doesn't emit any carbon dioxide at all."
    That is lying by omission. It is true that nuclear reactors do not create carbon dioxide while burning their nuclear fuel, but the process of mining the uranium is done by machines like bulldozers that create lots of carbon dioxide and air pollution. And so does the process of refining the ore and converting it into usable nuclear fuel, and transporting it to the reactor. And then there is the problem of disposal of the nuclear waste. That's another giant hole to be dug with diesel-powered machines. If the whole fuel cycle is taken into account, then nuclear power creates several times as much CO2 as renewable energy sources. (The Party's Over: Oil, War, and the Fate of Industrial Societies, Richard Heinberg, page 135.)


    Bill Wilson gave us lots of good examples of that technique. In chapter 8 of the Big Book, "To Wives", the wives of the recovering alcoholics seem to give advice to the wives of other alcoholics:

    As wives of Alcoholics Anonymous, we would like you to feel that we understand as perhaps few can. We want to analyze mistakes we have made.
     A.A. Big Book, 3rd Edition, William G. Wilson, Chapter 8, To Wives, page 104.

    Sometimes there were other women. How heartbreaking was this discovery; how cruel to be told that they understood our men as we did not!
     A.A. Big Book, 3rd Edition, William G. Wilson, Chapter 8, To Wives, page 106.

    We wives found that, like everybody else, we were afflicted with pride, self-pity, vanity and all the things which go to make up the self-centered person; and we were not above selfishness or dishonesty. As our husbands began to apply spiritual principles in their lives, we began to see the desirability of doing so too.
          At first, some of us thought we did not need this help. We thought, on the whole, we were pretty good women, capable of being nicer if our husbands stopped drinking. But it was a silly idea that we were too good to need God. Now we try to put spiritual principles to work in every department of our lives.   ... We urge you to try our program, for nothing will be so helpful to your husband as the radically changed attitude toward him which God will show you how to have. Go along with your husband if you possibly can.
     A.A. Big Book, 3rd Edition, William G. Wilson, Chapter 8, To Wives, page 116.

    Yes, Bill Wilson really would like you to feel that the wives understand as perhaps few can.

    The big problem with those quotes is that the To Wives chapter of the Big Book was not written by Lois Wilson or any of the other wives of the alcoholics — Bill Wilson wrote it all. Lois wanted to write it, but Bill didn't trust his wife to say the right things, or to get the "style" the way he wanted it, he said, so he wrote the whole chapter himself, while pretending to be his own wife.

    What a huge difference that one tiny little fact makes. That chapter reads entirely differently, it becomes a sick twisted joke, when you know who the real author was.

    Bill Wilson perceptively analyzed his wife's many mistakes for her, and confessed all of Lois' sins for her (in print), and honestly admitted her many failings: her moral shortcomings and dishonesty and selfishness and her silly thinking that she was too good to need God (page 116). (She was "selfish" while she worked in Loesser's department store to support his unemployed thieving philandering drunken ass for years and years.)

    Then Bill the housewife even lectured "the other girls" not to nag their husbands about their drinking, or else those guys will get mad and go sleep with their mistresses (page 111)... Like Bill did.


          Bill Wilson gave us many more examples of that Lie By Omission technique. Here, he is talking about doing Step Five, where we confess all of our sins and moral shortcomings to someone else:

    This is perhaps difficult, especially discussing our defects with another person. We think we have done well enough in admitting these things to ourselves. There is doubt about that. In actual practice, we usually find a solitary self-appraisal insufficient. Many of us thought it necessary to go much further. We will be more reconciled to discussing ourselves with another person when we see good reasons why we should do so. The best reason first: If we skip this vital step, we may not overcome drinking. Time after time newcomers have tried to keep to themselves certain facts about their lives. Trying to avoid this humbling experience, they have turned to easier methods. Almost invariably they got drunk. Having persevered with the rest of the program, they wondered why they fell. We think the reason is that they never completed their housecleaning. They took inventory all right, but hung on to some of the worst items in stock. They only thought they had lost their egoism and fear; they only thought they had humbled themselves. But they had not learned enough of humility, fearlessness and honesty, in the sense we find it necessary, until they told someone else all their life story.
     A.A. Big Book, 3rd Edition, William G. Wilson, Chapter 6, Into Action, pages 72-73.

    Wow. That's really impressive. I guess we had better get down on our knees right now, and start confessing everything, holding nothing back!

    Right?

    Wrong.

    Notice that the rest of the logic is missing. That is, where do we see the report on the other people, who did confess everything, and then successfully abstained from drinking? There is no such report, because they all relapsed too. The early New York group that Bill Wilson was writing about had a very high relapse rate. Fully fifty percent of the original Big Book authors relapsed and returned to a life of drinking. In Akron, Bill Wilson and Doctor Bob calculated that they had only a 5% success rate in sobering up alcoholics (which is the same as the success rate of people who quit on their own). Bill Wilson couldn't keep 'em sober not for nuthin'. The cult religion routine didn't work at all.

    But Bill didn't want to talk about that, because he was a faithful Buchmanite who believed that you must confess your sins to everyone else in your group if you are to be holy. So Bill was doing everything in his power to make everyone holy, even if it didn't make them sober.

    And note how Bill also gave us illustrations of a few other propaganda techniques:

    • The Straw Man Tactic:
      "We think we have done well enough in admitting these things to ourselves."
      "They only thought they had lost their egoism and fear; they only thought they had humbled themselves. But they had not learned enough of humility, fearlessness and honesty..."
       Those people who think that they don't really need to do all of Bill Wilson's wonderful 12 Steps are really stupid egotistical dishonest cowards, aren't they?

    • Hiding Behind Others:
      The use of "We" to create the false impression that it was more than just the opinion of Bill Wilson — that many people had done a whole lot of research on the subject, and had gained a lot of valuable experience in what really works to keep people sober: "We think... We usually find..." The truth is, when Bill wrote that paragraph in December of 1938 and January of 1939, there were only 60 or 70 sober A.A. members in the whole world, and they didn't all agree with him. Their major experience was in watching Bill Wilson's religious program fail to keep them sober, with most of the early A.A. members relapsing and leaving. Here, Bill Wilson was really just pushing his own strange Buchmanite religious beliefs, and trying to convince others that his ideas were the only things that work.

    • Lying by Omission (some more):
      Half of those few sober A.A. members didn't like or do Bill Wilson's Twelve Steps. They were the members who demanded that Bill's 12 religious steps be called "suggestions", not requirements, because they saw clearly that Bill's dogmatic religiosity would drive away many of the alcoholics whom the program was supposed to help. See page 59 of the Big Book — the steps are only "suggested as a program of recovery". But here, Bill wants to fool you into thinking that all of the sober members did Step Five thoroughly, holding nothing back, and that's why they were sober.

    • Post Hoc, Ergo Propter Hoc: "It happened after 'X', so it was caused by 'X'."
      "Time after time newcomers have tried to keep to themselves certain facts about their lives.   ...   Almost invariably they got drunk."
       Bill Wilson doesn't really give us any evidence that withholding embarrassing personal secrets makes people drink alcohol, just like he doesn't give us any evidence that confessing sins to other A.A. members makes people get sober. He just wants to fool us into thinking it. I can with equal validity argue that they all relapsed because they wore clothes to the meetings:

      Time after time, we have seen newcomers make the stupid mistake of wearing clothes to A.A. meetings. Almost all of the newcomers who relapsed wore clothes. (What sins were they trying to hide?) Almost invariably, they got drunk. And almost all of the people who wore clothes to A.A. meetings eventually dropped out.

      Conclusion: Obviously, wearing clothes to A.A. meetings causes people to drink alcohol.

    • Sly Suggestions and Fear Mongering, Creating Phobias:
      "If we skip this vital step, we may not overcome drinking."

      Then again, we might. (I did.)
      Notice how Wilson lies to you obliquely, by hints and suggestions, to lead you to an erroneous conclusion: "...we may not overcome drinking."

      And Wilson does it again, here:
      "... they wondered why they fell. We think the reason is that they never completed their housecleaning."
       It's hard to prove that Wilson is lying when he plants a suggestion like that. He might actually think that all of that crazy stuff is really true.

      And we can again use the clothes clause:
      "We think the reason that they relapsed is because they never completed the task of taking off all of their clothes and fully exposing themselves to the whole group."

    • And who says that Step Five is a "vital" step? Well, Bill Wilson does. That's assuming facts not in evidence, assuming facts yet to be proven, the trick called petitio principii. We have absolutely no evidence, other than Bill Wilson's deceitful declarations, that Step Five is in any way necessary, or even helpful, for quitting drinking.

    • Sarcasm, Condescension, and Patronizing Attitudes:
      "Trying to avoid this humbling experience, they have turned to easier methods."
       If you won't do what Bill Wilson says, and humbly grovel before your sponsor and confess all of your sins, then you are just a weak, wimpy, unspiritual lazy bum who is guilty of seeking "an easier, softer way."
      (You couldn't possibly be seeking a saner way to recover.)
      Real men are proud to masochistically grovel on their knees and wallow in guilt.


    For another example of lying by omission, look closely at this text:

          Despite four decades of AA research, no clear picture has emerged as to which patient characteristics can predict a positive outcome with AA and, therefore, can be used as criteria for matching patients to AA.   ...
          To date, only three randomized clinical trials have examined the efficacy of AA participation, either with or without additional simultaneous treatment approaches (Ditman et al. 1967; Brandsma et al. 1980; Walsh et al. 1991). The vast majority of AA studies, however, have focused on two narrower questions: Which factors predict whether a person will join AA? And how does involvement in AA predict outcome? In an attempt to answer these two questions, Emrick and colleagues (1993) reviewed 107 previously published AA studies.
     Tonigan, J. Scott, Hiller-Sturmhofel, Susanne, Alcohol Health & Research World, 0090838X, 1994, Vol. 18, Issue 4.

    1. The authors almost accurately stated that there have only been three good randomized clinical trials of the effectiveness of Alcoholics Anonymous treatment ever done. (Actually, they ignored the best test of all, the very large test done by Drs. Orford and Edwards in England, and also Dr. George E. Vaillant's clinical trial, which also had merit.)
    2. But the authors did not tell us what those clinical trials actually found. They did not say one word about what Doctors Ditman, Brandsma and Walsh reported.
    3. Instead, the authors did a quick tap-dance towards "the vast majority of A.A. studies" that were not properly done and are not scientifically or medically valid. Then they cited a survey done by Emrick where he examined 107 of those less-reliable "studies", essays, opinions, and propaganda articles.

    So what did those three valid clinical trails find? They found that Alcoholics Anonymous was a disaster:

    • Dr. Ditman found that participation in A.A. increased the alcoholics' rate of rearrest for public drunkeness.
    • Dr. Brandsma found that A.A. increased the rate of binge drinking. After several months of indoctrination with A.A. 12-Step dogma, the alcoholics in A.A. were doing five times as much binge drinking as a control group that got no treatment at all, and nine times as much binge drinking as another group that got Rational Behavior Therapy.
      Teaching people that they are alcoholics who are powerless over alcohol yields very bad results. It becomes a self-fulfilling prediction — they relapse and binge drink as if they really are powerless over alcohol.
    • And Dr. Walsh found that the so-called "free" A.A. program was actually very expensive — it messed up patients so that they required longer periods of costly hospitalization later on.

    • And the authors could have mentioned that Doctors Edwards and Orford found that A.A. was completely ineffective, and that having a doctor talk to the alcoholic for just one hour, telling him to quit drinking or else he would likely die, worked just as well as a whole year of A.A. meetings.

    • And the authors could have mentioned that Dr. George E. Vaillant, member of the Board of Trustees of Alcoholics Anonymous World Services, Inc., found in his 8-year-long test that A.A. was completely ineffective, and just raised the death rate in alcoholics. His A.A.-based treatment program had the highest death rate of all of the treatment programs that he studied.

    But the authors mentioned none of that. They just started talking about matching patients to A.A. without ever having established whether A.A. works or helps alcoholics even a little bit, or that we even should try to match alcoholics to Alcoholics Anonymous. What is the point of sending patients to A.A. when it just makes them worse? (So that also makes it an example of Assume The Major Premise.)


  • Lie With Qualifiers
    Make sweeping statements to give the impression you want, but insert so many qualifiers that the statements are meaningless, or downright dishonest.

    You get bombarded with advertisements that say,
    "Make up to $6000 per month working from home."
     Why the upper limit? Why not a lower limit? Why don't they advertise,
    "Make at least $3000 per month working from home"?

    And Qwest says, "You get free long distance (except for a 10 cents per minute surcharge)."
    If you have to pay 10 cents per minute, then it isn't free at all.

    And A.A. gives us numerous examples:
    "It works, if you work it."
    "It works, if you make it work."
     Yes, and vanilla ice cream works, if you make it work.
    Dancing in a ballerina's tutu works, if you make it work.

    In The Promises, Bill Wilson wrote:

    If we are painstaking about this phase of our development [Step 9], we will be amazed before we are halfway through.
     The A.A. Big Book, Alcoholics Anonymous, 3rd Edition, page 83.

    So of course if we are not amazed, then we were not painstaking enough...

    Another example: the A.A. faithful read this statement out loud at the start of every A.A. meeting:

    RARELY HAVE we seen a person fail who has thoroughly followed our path.
         The A.A. Big Book, Alcoholics Anonymous, 3rd Edition, Chapter 5, "How It Works", page 58.

    How could Bill Wilson write such a line when A.A. had a horrendously high failure rate?
    Simple: the A.A. program requires people to abstain from drinking alcohol, so if they relapse and drink, then they aren't "thoroughly following our path", are they?

    With that qualifier, Bill Wilson could have written,
          "NEVER have we seen a person fail who has thoroughly followed our path".

    For another example, in the Foreword to the Second Edition of the Big Book, page XX, Bill Wilson wrote:

    Of alcoholics who came to A.A. and really tried, 50% got sober at once and remained that way; 25% sobered up after some relapses, and among the remainder, those who stayed on with A.A. showed improvement. Other thousands came to a few A.A. meetings and at first decided they didn't want the program. But great numbers of these — about two out of three — began to return as time passed.

    The impression we get is that A.A. worked great, and sobered up 75% of the alcoholics pretty fast, and that all of the alcoholics benefited at least a little bit, if they just tried. Nothing could be further from the truth.

    Later, Bill Wilson told the truth:

    You have no conception these days of how much failure we had. You had to cull over hundreds of these drunks to get a handful to take the bait.
     Bill Wilson, at the memorial service for Dr. Bob, Nov. 15, 1952; file available here.

    This quote gives us the impression that A.A. had about a one or two percent recruiting success rate: You have to "cull over hundreds of these drunks to get a handful to take the bait." But that "handful" is people who just "take the bait" and join Bill's club. How many of those gullible joiners actually stayed sober for a year or more? Even less, for sure. So the real long-term A.A. success rate was under one percent, even by Bill Wilson's own reckoning.

    So how do we reconcile the vastly different numbers in those two statements? Easy. We use qualifiers:

    • First off, Bill Wilson began the first quote with a major qualifier about those alcoholics "who came to A.A. and really tried". If they didn't join A.A., or they didn't "really try", then they weren't counted.

    • And who decided whether they had really tried?
      Well, Bill Wilson, of course.
       Heck, with that qualifier, Bill Wilson could make the numbers into anything he wanted them to be.

    • The last qualifier counted only "those who stayed on with A.A.", so those who relapsed and left A.A. and didn't "Keep Coming Back" didn't count either. That conveniently eliminated all of the drop-outs, deaths, and failures from the statistics. So there wasn't a single case "of those who stayed on" that didn't "show improvement" in the statistics that Bill manufactured.

    • So we can have the reality that less than one percent of the alcoholics were actually success stories, joining A.A., quitting drinking and staying quit for many years, while, in the Big Book, after Bill Wilson prettied up the numbers with those qualifiers, it looked like at least 50% of the alcoholics were eventually getting sobered up by A.A. (75% of the two thirds who kept coming back).

    Cute, huh? Now that's lying with qualifiers.

    (And it's also a fair example of lying with statistics.)

    "Keep Coming Back! It Works! (...If you work it...)"


  • Lie With Statistics
    Speaking of which, there is the time-honored method of lying called Statistics.

    Both Mark Twain and Desraeli said that there are three kinds of lies:

    • Little White Lies,
    • Damned Lies,
    • and Statistics.

    You can have all kinds of fun with statistics:

    • Ninety-nine percent of all of the people who ate carrots between 1800 and 1900 are dead, so carrots are obviously very hazardous to your health. If you eat carrots long enough, you will certainly die.

    • President Eisenhower expressed astonishment and alarm when he was told that fully half of all Americans had below-average intelligence.

    • Likewise, fifty percent of all Americans have below-average income, or savings, or beauty, or housing, or education. It's no wonder why the politicians don't want to associate with all of those stupid, ugly, poor people, but guess who elects the politicians? If 80% of the stupid people, and 75% of the poor people, and 65% of the ugly people voted for a politician, then 220% of the poor, stupid, ugly people voted for the politician. No wonder that bozo got elected.

    • Another good one: Statistically, men who have survived two heart attacks almost never die from lung cancer or cirrhosis of the liver. There is just something about having heart attacks that protects people from death by cancer or cirrhosis. So, after you have had two heart attacks, you can smoke and drink all you want.

    • Ninety-three percent of the people who use statistics in their arguments just make them up, and the rest get the numbers wrong.

    • Fifty percent of all marriages end in divorce.
      If you think that's bad, consider that the other fifty percent end in death.

    • If you don't buy a lottery ticket, then your chances of winning are zero. If you do buy a ticket (Powerball), your chances of winning are only 0.00000002 — 1 in 50 million. Both numbers are so close to zero that there is little point in your actually handing over your two dollars and buying a ticket — you still aren't going to win.
      On the other hand, if you do buy a ticket, then your chances of winning are infinitely higher than if you don't.

    • Public service announcements on TV and radio declare:
      "2 out of every 5 fatal automobile accidents was due to drinking. 33% of the drivers involved in fatal accidents had been drinking. 24% of the pedestrians involved in fatal accidents had been drinking. Therefore, alcohol intoxication is a major cause of automobile accidents, and drunk driving must be dealt with harshly."

      That logic sounds impressive, but it's completely wrong. Consider the reverse logic:

      "3 out of every 5 fatal automobile accidents did not involve drinking. 67% of the drivers involved in fatal accidents had not been drinking. And 76% of the pedestrians involved in accidents had not been drinking. Therefore, sobriety is undoubtedly the major cause of fatal automobile accidents, and sober driving must be outlawed immediately, and punished harshly."

    • And we could really have fun, starting a big war with statements like, "Forty-five percent of the drivers in fatal automobile accidents were women, therefore women shouldn't be allowed to drive."
      (But if we did that, then 100% of the accidents would be caused by men. So men shouldn't be allowed to drive.)

    • Some people often cite statistics like,
      "95% of all heroin addicts smoked marijuana before they graduated to the hard stuff. Therefore, marijuana is a gateway drug that leads to heroin."

      That is also false logic. Consider this:

      "Further research has revealed that 99.8% of all heroin addicts consumed the white drug called milk for years before they graduated to the white powder called heroin. Therefore, giving children milk at school turns them into heroin addicts."

      Or:

      "99% of all heroin addicts, cocaine addicts, amphetamine addicts, and marijuana users drank alcohol before they graduated to the harder stuff. Therefore alcohol is the universal gateway drug."

      (Actually, there is a lot of evidence that alcohol really IS the universal gateway drug, but the cigar-smoking, whisky-guzzling Senators and Congressmen in Washington don't want to hear that. They never tolerate hearing something bad about their own favorite drugs; they just want to hear bad stuff about other people's favorite drugs — preferably other people who are poor, a different color or subcultural type, and not registered to vote.)

    • Another piece of propaganda on TV now says,

      "In roadside tests of reckless drivers after auto accidents, one out of three drivers tested positive for marijuana. Marijuana: It's more harmful than we thought."

      • They fail to establish any connection between having smoked marijuana some time in the previous 30 days (which is what the drug test detects) and driving recklessly or being in an auto accident today. They could just as well have tested for coffee, and then found that "Coffee! It's more harmful than we thought."

      • And more harmful than who thought?
         The anti-drug lunatics have been swearing that marijuana produces instant insanity and addiction ever since they made that Reefer Madness movie back in the 'thirties. They have never said that marijuana was harmless. So they are also using the Sly Suggestions propaganda technique, implying that we thought it was less harmful than it really is.

      • Also note that two thirds of those reckless drivers managed to get into their accidents without any help from pot. Logically, we must conclude that NOT smoking pot causes more reckless drivers to get into auto accidents than smoking it.

      • That propaganda also did not say that the pot-smoking drivers actually caused any of the car accidents — they were just involved in the accidents. For all we know, they might have been hit from behind by drunk drivers.

      • Which brings up, how many of the drivers involved in the accidents were drunk?
        They didn't tell us anything about that, did they? Why weren't they saying,
        "Alcohol — it's more harmful than we thought"?
        The propagandists appear to be hiding all evidence of drunk driving (lying by omission) and just trying to blame all of the auto accidents on marijuana. But we know from other propaganda, especially that disseminated by Mothers Against Drunk Driving, that alcohol is the major cause of fatal auto accidents. (But that's a different TV commercial.)

      • One of the factors that really biases such a test is the fact that traces of marijuana will linger in body fat for up to a month, while the evidence of any use of alcohol, speed, cocaine, or heroin disappears within a day or two. That can make it look like there is a lot more pot smoking going on than there really is, while it fails to detect the chronic abuse of other drugs.

      • Speaking of which, they didn't even say that they tested for those other drugs, did they? They only told us that they tested for marijuana. What else were the drivers on?

      Obviously, such propaganda is not designed to tell anyone the truth about drugs. It is just more lying politics as usual.


  • Observational Selection
    Observational selection, also known as "cherry-picking", is a tactic like counting the hits and forgetting the misses. See only what you wish to see. Overlook and ignore evidence you don't wish to see. And encourage your audience to be equally blind. Observational selection will destroy the validity of any statistical study.

    All lies and jest,
    Still a man hears what he wants to hear
    And disregards the rest.
    Ooh-la-la-la-la-la-la-la.
         The Boxer, by Paul Simon and Art Garfunkle.

    The classic example of this is: Something very unusual happens, and it turns out that a tabloid "psychic" predicted it. So the "psychic" must be the real thing, able to see the future, right? Wrong. It turns out that the self-proclaimed "psychic" made many hundreds of screwy, off-beat "predictions", and just by chance, one of them came true. The "psychic" just doesn't bother to tell you about all of the wrong guesses that didn't come true... Fans of Nostradamus still do this for him.

    That "psychic's" stunt can be staged in very convincing ways, like:

    • The "psychic" writes his prediction on a piece of paper.
    • The paper is put into an envelope, which is sealed by several witnesses who put their seals on the envelope, and sign it and date it, and even add code numbers to later verify that it's the envelope they sealed.
    • The envelope is kept locked in a safe or bank vault for a long time, until after The Big Event has happened.
    • Then, in a big showy ceremony, in front of hundreds of witnesses and many TV cameras, the safe is opened and the envelope is removed from the safe and opened, and there it is for all to see: unquestionable proof that the "psychic" predicted the event.
    You guessed it: the safe is also full of failed predictions, which the con artists happily ignore. (There may even be another envelope in the safe that contains a prediction that is the exact opposite of what just happened... The code numbers on the envelopes tell the con artists which prediction is in which envelope.)

    Another way to use observational selection to get desired results is to do many studies or tests, and only report the results that you like. For example, suppose you are a P.R. firm hired to make Buzz Cola look better than Fizz Cola. You could get 1000 people to do a taste test, to see which they liked better, but you don't. You do 100 "tests", each of which have only 10 people in them. In 95 of the tests, the people liked Fizz Cola better. But by random chance, in the other 5 tests, a majority of the people liked Buzz better. So you report,
    "In test after test, a majority of the people chose Buzz Cola over Fizz."
     Technically, that statement is true, even if it is deceptive as can be. You just don't bother to mention all of the other tests where the people liked Fizz better.

    I didn't mean to pick on any real cola brand names there. I wrote that paragraph many years ago, and just made up the names "Buzz" and "Fizz" to avoid using names like "Coke"® and "Pepsi"®. That was years before I ever heard of any Buzz or Fizz Cola. Years later, I was really surprised to find that somebody used both of those names for actual brands of soft drinks. Sometimes, reality mimicks satire.

    And obviously, another way to rig any test or study is to cherry-pick the people who will be in the test. If you want 'Group A' to look better than 'Group B', then put all of the promising candidates in Group A, and put all of the losers in Group B. (That is why real valid tests must be randomized. You must throw dice, or pick names out of a hat, or something like that, to choose which people go into which group.)

    The government uses a subtle form of observational selection and cherry-picking in reporting the national unemployment rate: They only report those people who are actively looking for work at the unemployment office. People who have despaired and given up looking for work, or who are still looking but have simply stopped asking at the unemployment office, are erased from the rolls of "the unemployed", and are not counted when the government calculates the national unemployment rate. (Likewise, someone who accepts a menial job for minimal wages out of sheer desperation — even a part-time minimum-wage job — is considered no longer unemployed.) The real unemployment rate is always much higher than the government reports, no matter which political party controls the government. They all misreport the facts.

    Another example of observational selection:
    Smith: "I have here 29 files that describe cases where people went to Alcoholics Anonymous meetings and quit drinking. So we have a demonstrated relationship between people going to meetings and quitting drinking."
     Jones: "How many cases of failure were there, where the people went to A.A. meetings but didn't quit drinking?"
     Smith: "I didn't study them. They weren't interesting, because they were just failures. I'm more interested in what works. Besides, those other people don't count because they didn't keep coming back."

    That is just like Bill Wilson only printing selected success stories in the Big Book.

    And that is just like how Alcoholics Anonymous claims a great success rate today. The people who relapse and leave are not counted — A.A. says that they didn't "work the program" right, or they didn't "keep coming back", so they don't count. Only the people who stay in A.A. and attend many meetings (usually because they quit drinking) get counted.

    Some treatment facilities use a variation on Observational Selection — they cherry-pick their patients, drafting into their program as many of the most promising prospective patients as they can get, in order to improve their "success rate":
          "You have someone who just quit drinking two weeks ago? You say that he quit once before, and stayed sober for three years, all on his own, without any treatment or A.A. or anything — just going it alone? Quick! Shove him into our treatment program, so that we can 'treat' him, and teach him how to stay sober for six months. Then we can score him as one of our 'success stories'."
     (That story is 100% autobiographical — that's my own personal experience with a "treatment program".)

    Likewise, most all treatment centers are very deceptive when they advertize their success rates — they only reveal what percentage of the program graduates are sober shortly after the end of the program. They ignore all of the people who drop out, flunk out, and relapse and disappear, and do not include them in the reported statistics. (They rationalize that deception by saying, "Well, they didn't finish the program, so they don't count.")

    If 100 people start a program, and ten of them last until graduation, and 8 of them are still clean and sober a month later, then the treatment center advertizes an 80% success rate. That is obviously false. A mere 8% success rate is obviously closer to the truth. But then the treatment centers do not do a follow-up a year later, to see what the real long-term success rate is. That would reveal even more failures. In the final analysis, the success rate of the treatment programs is little or nothing more than the normal rate of spontaneous remission — the success rate of people who get no treatment at all (approximately 5% per year).

    And I know of a drug treatment program that rejects, and will not even try to treat, any and all people who have been treated before and then relapsed — even their own graduates — because the program managers are afraid that those relapsers will relapse again and pull down the program's average "success rate". That program also discounts all of their dropouts and relapsers. When someone "goes out" and uses drugs, or gets arrested for something, the counselors simply erase that person's name from the list of patients, and they do not count him in computing their success rate. Then they claim that their program is very successful and greatly reduces the crime rate of their patients (those few remaining patients who are not currently out stealing to get a fix).

    When such a treatment center announces that it has reduced crime in its patients by a certain amount, it is lying with statistics. It is not revealing the resulting average crime rate of all of the clients who started treatment; the T.C. is only revealing the average crime rate of those few successful patients who are still sticking with the program and still abstaining from drugs and alcohol.

    Another kind of observational selection is interpreting data in a biased manner, seeing what you wish to see. That is illustrated in this story:

          A drug and alcohol treatment center that used acupuncture on its clients wanted to show that acupuncture reduced cravings for drugs and alcohol in patients who were in recovery, so that the treatment center could produce a report that justified continuing to bill health insurance companies and state agencies for more acupuncture treatments. So they conducted a survey where they questioned their patients to see how the acupuncture treatment was affecting them:
          Counselor: "How are you doing with cravings for alcohol?"
          Patient: "No problem. I don't have any."
          Counselor: "That's because of the acupuncture."
          Patient: "No, it's because I don't have any cravings for alcohol. I am craving cigarettes like mad, because I also quit smoking, but I'm not craving alcohol."
          Counselor: "That's because of the acupuncture. I'll write down that acupuncture has reduced your cravings for alcohol."
          Patient: "No, actually it hasn't. I just don't have a problem with cravings for alcohol. I didn't have any cravings the last time I quit drinking, all on my own, without any treatment or acupuncture, and I don't have any this time either. I am too busy crawling the walls for a cigarette to crave alcohol."
          The counselor wrote "acupuncture reduced cravings" anyway.

    That story is also autobiographical, and 100% true.

    Later, the city and state agencies received a report that declared that a survey of the patients found that acupuncture was very helpful for reducing their cravings for drugs and alcohol, so the city agencies and the state health plan should continue to fund acupuncture treatment of patients in recovery.

    Notice that there was also no control group. That is, there should have been another group of patients who received no acupuncture, who were also surveyed to find out how much they were bothered by cravings. Then you compare the results from the two groups to determine what effect, if any, the acupuncture actually had on cravings for drugs or alcohol.

    Unfortunately, such properly-conducted research is almost never done by substance-abuse treatment centers. Their findings are usually just as phony as their claimed success rates.

    Another good stunt is to take surveys at A.A. or N.A. meetings. Only the faithful members who Keep Coming Back will be there to answer the questions. Asking,
    "Is there anyone here for whom the Twelve Steps did not work?"
     is the same stupid thing as asking,
    "Will everyone who isn't here please raise your hand?"
     (Never mind the fact that it also immediately leads to an "Emperor's New Clothes" situation where no one wants to confess that he is the only unspiritual one for whom the Steps are not working...)

    Observational selection does not have to be deliberate. One of the ever-present dangers to a researcher is accidental or unconscious bias in making observations. In a study of the use of LSD in therapy for alcoholism, the authors also studied the methods that other studies had used. Their observations were disconcerting — it seems that people have an unfortunate tendency to see whatever they wish to see whenever tests are not rigidly controlled. The various psychiatric treatments and medications being tested were successful in 83 percent of the uncontrolled studies, but only in 25 percent of the controlled studies. How curious. It would seem that looking too closely, and measuring too carefully, makes the medicines or treatments suddenly stop working.

    That's a good example of researcher bias. The researchers just really wanted their experiments to be sucesses, so that's what they tended to see. But when their studies were rigorously controlled, then the researchers were forced to be more objective, and the observed success rate dropped sharply. (That is also why the FDA prefers double-blind studies, where neither the patients nor the doctors know whether the patients are getting the real medicine or a placebo.)

    A variation on the theme of Observational Selection is getting biased data even when you don't wish to. In one survey, researchers sent out questionaires that essentially asked people to honestly reveal their racist attitudes. Not surprisingly, a lot of the questionaires were simply never returned, and lots more reported that the respondents just didn't have any racist attitudes at all. As you can imagine, the resulting statistics showed that racism and racist attitudes were almost non-existent.


  • The Statistics of Small Numbers
    Also beware of The Statistics of Small Numbers, which is a different kind of observational selection. It is an error caused by looking at too small of a sample. For instance, "They say that one out of every five people on Earth is Chinese. That can't be true. I know hundreds and hundreds of people, and only three of them are Chinese. So Chinese people must be pretty rare, really..."

    A variation of that is: A wildlife program on Public Television says: "One out of every four mammals is a bat."
    Well, let's see... "I know I'm not a bat, and my wife isn't a bat, and Joe isn't a bat, so Harry must be a bat."


    The statistics of small numbers problem appears in discussions of A.A. often. People will say things like, "We don't have any nasty thirteenth-stepping sexual predators in our group," and imagine that every other group in the whole country must be just the same, and that it doesn't happen anywhere else either. Unfortunately, it does.

    Likewise, "Nobody in our group has committed suicide, so those stories about A.A. suicides are ridiculous."

    How can you be sure, unless you know every member of your group very well, and keep track of all of them, and check up on them, and know what shape each drop-out, quitter, or disappearance is really in? You don't really expect them to commit suicide at the A.A. meetings, do you? And again, you have no idea what is happening in the other A.A. groups that you don't visit. They sure aren't going to email you to broadcast the news about their suicides.

    And again, "No sponsors in our group tell the newcomers to quit taking their doctor-prescribed medications, so those stories must be untrue."
    I wish they were. (And how do you know what some sponsor is telling his sponsee, if you aren't listening in?)


  • Bury The Lead
    Burying the lead (pronounced, "lede") is a newspaper term. It means that you hide the most important fact in the story down at the bottom of the article.

    For example, a recent newspaper article about the soaring price of oil tried to explain the price increases in terms of speculators buying oil futures, and political instability in foreign countries causing uncertainty in the market. Then they gradually got around to mentioning that India and China have booming economies that want ever more oil. And then finally, in the last sentence of the article, someone said, "Oil is getting harder to find."


  • The Big Lie
    The Big Lie is a technique that Adolf Hitler used with great success. The idea is that you just keep repeating the same lie over and over, in spite of all arguments or evidence to the contrary, until people believe it. Massive repetition is essential. (Think: "Why do they keep running the same stupid commercials on TV, over and over and over again, ad nauseum?")

    "Tell a lie enough times and it will become the truth."
     — Heinrich Himmler

    "A big lie is more plausible than truth."
     — Ernest Hemingway

    Hitler explained his Big Lie technique in Mein Kampf,

    The greatness of the lie is always a certain factor in being believed; at the bottom of their hearts, the great masses of a people are more likely to be misled than to be consciously and deliberately bad, and in the primitive simplicity of their minds, they are more easily victimized by a large than by a small lie.... Some part of even the boldest lie is sure to stick.

    It's a strange fact of human psychology that giant, totally outrageous lies are sometimes more believable than small lies, just by virtue of their bodaciousness. People feel that there must be something to it, because the claims are so extreme. People can't help but feel that "Where there is so much smoke, there must be some fire."

    In using the Big Lie technique, Hitler said, essentially,

    The Jews are an inferior race. The Jews have always been the thieving greedy bankers and money-lenders, bleeding the lifeblood out of our country. Everybody knows that the Jews are the cause of all of our problems, and now that we are imposing the Final Solution, we will soon be much better off without them.

    Today, the fascist rap is,

    Drug users and dealers are inferior people. They are really low, dirty and disgusting bums who deserve to die because they are drug users and dealers, and they don't care about anything but getting high. Everybody knows that they are the major cause of all of our problems. When we impose the death sentence for more and more drug offenses, we will finally get rid of those dopers, and we will be much better off without them.

    And:

    Those poor, long-suffering rich people desperately need a tax cut. They have been treated so badly by the government for so long, it's the least we can do to make it up to them. (Heck, some of them are down to their last billion.) Giving the rich people a tax cut will stimulate the economy so much that soon the wealth will trickle down, and we will all benefit from it.
     [Just like happened under Ronald Reagan and George Bush — Remember: "It's the economy, stupid!"]

    And Donald Rumsfeld, Secretary of Defense, said, in speaking of the "Shock and Awe" bombing war that he was waging against Iraq (March 21, 2003):
          "You don't understand how compassionate our bombing is."

    I'm sure that the children whose heads were blown off by malfunctioning smart bombs really thought that it was compassionate.

    On Jan. 27, 2004, NBC Evening News reported that the death toll of civilians killed in Iraq in the Bush vs. Saddam War had reached 10,000. That is a lot more than the 2900 Americans who died on September 11, so that's a lot of pay-back. And Saddam Hussein of Iraq wasn't even the guy who attacked America; it was Osama bin Laden from Saudi Arabia, remember? (The guy whom the CIA armed and funded during the Russia-Afghanistan War.)

    A few months later the score was 13,000 dead, and by April 16 it was up to 14,000, because of the battle in Fallujah That's a lot of pay-back to a country that didn't attack us.

    In just the two-week period from April 1 to April 15, 90 Americans and 900 Iraqis died, mostly in Fallujah, most of them civilians (punishment for the killing of four American civilian contractors in Fallujah).

    If reminds me of the Nazi reprisals during WWII. If one German soldier was killed by The Resistance in an occupied town, the Nazis would get their revenge by randomly shooting hundreds of civilians in that town, just making sure that somebody was always punished, even if it wasn't the people who did it.

    When the German S.S. Obergruppenführer Reinhard Heydrich was assassinated in Czechoslovakia by the Czech underground, the Germans simply totally annihilated a nearby town — Lidice — in reprisal. They immediately shot all of the men, and sent the women and children to concentration camps, where most of them eventually died. Then they burned and blasted and bull-dozed the town until nothing was left but rubble, and then the Germans erased the name of the town from the maps.

    When the war ended, the Allies assembled at the Geneva Convention and wrote up the Geneva Accords, which made such group punishment a war crime. (But then Donald Rumsfeld, G. W. Bush's Secretary of Defense, announced that the Geneva Convention was obsolete and that he did not wish to be limited by it.)

    So after four Blackwater contractors were killed in Fallujah, 900 residents of Fallujah were killed in reprisals — the vast majority of them being civilians, including plenty of women and children.

    On March 19, 2004, on the anniversary of the start of the war, it was revealed by major news networks that the U.S. forces had used cluster bombs against targets located in civilian areas of Bagdad during "Shock And Awe". Such cluster bombing of civilians is a violation of international law. It's a war crime. A U.S. military spokesmen said that the American commanding officers felt that such usage was "appropriate".

    As of December, 2004: Now the city of Fallujah has been destroyed to eliminate the resistance, with a loss of Iraqi lives so high that the American officials won't count them and release the count. They will not tell us how many civilians were killed by American firepower. The best study to date estimates that the total Iraqi death toll in the war is now over 100,000 — with most of them being civilians, including many, many children.

    As of 4 August 2005, the score was:

    • 1825+ U.S. military people dead in Iraq.
    • 43,000+ U.S. wounded, maimed, and crippled for life.
    • 113,000+ dead Iraqis, most of them civilians, including 30,000 children.

    And still, the Bush administration constantly repeats the chant that the war is a good thing. "Freedom is on the march." That's the Big Lie technique.

    UPDATE: July 2007: Now, of course, the war has gone on for two more years, and all of the body counts are much higher. The British medical journal Lancet reported last year that their estimation of Iraqi deaths was 600,000. The American deaths were 3546 as of 22 June 2007. And the people wounded, maimed, and crippled are uncountable.

    And still, George W. Bush prattles on about "victory in Iraq", and "establishing democracy", and "creating a stable government there", and "when they stand up, we will stand down."

    That's the Big Lie technique.


    And A.A. says:

    • Alcoholics Anonymous is the best — the only — way to recover from alcoholism.
    • Nobody can do it alone.
    • Everybody knows that The Twelve Step programs work, and keep millions of people sober.
    • Alcoholics Anonymous is an enormously successful program.
    • "RARELY have we seen a person fail, who has thoroughly followed our path..." (The Big Book, 3rd & 4th Editions, William Wilson, page 58.)
    • Everybody knows that A.A. is spiritual, not religious.
    • If you are having a problem with drinking too much alcohol, then you have a disease which only a spiritual experience will conquer. (The Big Book, 3rd & 4th Editions, William Wilson, page 44.)
    • Alcoholism is an incurable, progressive disease, often caused by an inherited gene, and a disease is respectable, not a moral stigma. (The Big Book, 3rd Edition, Marty Mann, Page 227.)
    • Nobody can quit drinking until they hit bottom and are ready to surrender to the A.A. program.
    • The best thing you can do for a loved one is force him to go to A.A. meetings, for his own good.
    • In A.A., nobody has any power over anyone else. In A.A., everybody is equal (but some people are more equal than others).
    • So Keep Coming Back! It Works if you work it... You die if you don't. So work it, you're worth it!

    In an official A.A. history book, A.A. co-founder Dr. Robert Smith said,

    He said, "Duke, I think this A.A. program will appeal to you, because it's psychologically sound and religiously sane."
     Dr. Bob and the Good Oldtimers, Alcoholics Anonymous World Services, Inc., 1980, page 253.

    That statement is the exact opposite of the truth:

    And still, A.A. prints and distributes large quantities of propaganda that claims just the opposite.

    That's the Big Lie technique.

    Here, Bill Wilson quoted Dr. Harry M. Tiebout quoting Bill Wilson, as if that would add authority to Bill's faked numbers:

    "Alcoholics Anonymous claims a recovery rate of 75 percent of those who really try their methods. This figure, coupled with their mushroom growth, commands respect and demands explanation."
    [Reprinted from The American Journal of Psychiatry, January 1944, "Therapeutic Mechanism of Alcoholics Anonymous".]
         Alcoholics Anonymous Comes Of Age, William G. Wilson, page 310.

    Actually, such a figure commands contempt and derision, because it is a bare-faced lie. Alcoholics Anonymous never had a success rate anything like 75%; they didn't even get a tenth of that. Notice how Tiebout repeated Bill Wilson's grossly inflated and exaggerated claims of success as if they were true facts, and even cited them in professional journals. That is the Big Lie technique, one more time again.

    [Also notice how cleverly Tiebout covered his own ass: He started off by saying that A.A. merely claimed to have a 75% success rate — a rate which Tiebout had to know was totally untrue, because Tiebout was Bill's psychiatrist, and Tiebout had a number of other patients in A.A., too, so he could see what was going on. But then Tiebout just accepted Bill's grossly exaggerated claims as correct, and declared that they "commanded respect and demanded explanation". If anyone called Tiebout on it later by pointing out just how inaccurate those numbers really were, Tiebout could always just pass the buck to A.A., and say that he was just using their numbers.
    And the psychiatrist Dr. Tiebout accepted those inflated numbers as valid, in spite of his own diagnosis of Bill Wilson's mental state as "immature and grandiose", and stating that Bill Wilson was trying to live out "the infantilely grandiose demands" of "His Majesty the Baby."]

    Since then, numerous A.A. shills have parrotted those false numbers without doing any research of their own. The West Baltimore Group of A.A. has a web page on the A.A. success rate that declares:

    Q - What is the success rate of Alcoholics Anonymous?
    A - Of those sincerely willing to stop drinking about 50 per cent have done so at once, 25 per cent after a few relapses and most of the remainder have improved. (N.Y. State J. Med., Vol. 44, Aug., 1944)
    ...
    Of those alcoholics who wish to get well and are emotionally capable of trying our method, 50 per cent recover immediately, 25 per cent after a few backslides. The remainder are improved if they continue active in A.A. ... (N.Y. State J. Med., Vol. 50, July 1950)
     What is A.A.'s Success Rate?, http://www.voai.org/Success%20Rate.htm

    Notice how the West Baltimore Group of A.A. quoted the New York State Journal of Medicine as if it were endorsing Alcoholics Anonymous, and reporting the A.A. success rate. But that Journal was actually just publishing a piece of propaganda that was written by Bill Wilson, an article that Wilson got into the Journal with a letter of endorsement by Dr. Harry M. Tiebout — "Basic Concepts of Alcoholics Anonymous" by William G. Wilson. (So much for anonymity.) That article contained the same false claims as Bill Wilson wrote in the foreword to the second edition of the "Big Book" — lines which were blatant lies when they were written, and which are still lies.

    Of alcoholics who came to A.A. and really tried, 50% got sober at once and remained that way; 25% sobered up after some relapses, and among the remainder, those who stayed on with A.A. showed improvement.
     William G. Wilson, in the Foreword to the Second Edition of Alcoholics Anonymous, page XX, 1955.

    Those numbers were not even vaguely true, and still aren't. You can read an analysis of those false claims here.

    Likewise, Bill Wilson wrote that an A.A. newcomer said:

    "Then I woke up. I had to admit that A.A. showed results, prodigious results. I saw that my attitude regarding these had been anything but scientific. It wasn't A.A. that had the closed mind, it was me."
     Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions, William G. Wilson, page 27.

    That's the Big Lie technique.


          And they have been doing that for a very long time, too. This phony "review" of the "Big Book" Alcoholics Anonymous was published in The New York Times in 1939. It was actually written by a hidden A.A. true believer — Percy Hutchison, the New York Times poetry editor — who was scheming with Bill Wilson and the other early A.A. members to help sell the new A.A. book, not by any neutral observer or dispassionate critic, or by anybody who knew anything about treating alcoholism:

          Lest this title should arouse the risibles in any reader let me state that the general thesis of "Alcoholics Anonymous" is more soundly based psychologically than any other treatment of the subject I have ever come upon.
    ...
          "Alcoholics Anonymous" is unlike any other book ever before published. No reviewer can say how many have contributed to its pages. But the list of writers should include addicts and doctors, psychiatrists and clergymen.
    ...
          Here, then, is the key to "Alcoholics Anonymous," the great and indisputable lesson this extraordinary book would convey. The alcoholic addict ... cannot, by any effort of what he calls his "will," insure himself against taking his "first dose." We saw how the chap with his whiskey in milk missed out. There is one way for our authors, and but one way. The utter suffusion of the mind by an idea which shall exclude any idea of alcohol or of drugs.
    ...
    The thesis of the book is, if we read it aright, that this all-embracing and all-commanding idea must be religious. ... There is no suggestion advanced in the book that an addict should embrace one faith rather than another. He may fall back upon an "absolute," or "A Power which makes for righteousness" if he chooses. The point of the book is that he is unlikely to win through unless he floods his mind with the idea of a force outside himself. So doing, his individual problem resolves into thin air. In last analysis, it is the resigning word: Not my will, but Thine, be done, said in the full knowledge of the fact that the decision will be against further addiction.
    ...
    The argument, as we have said, has a deep psychological foundation.
     BOOK REVIEW, NEW YORK TIMES, June 25, 1939. ALCOHOLIC EXPERIENCE, By Percy Hutchison

    Percy Hutchison was actually prescribing religiomania — maniacal obsession with religion — and faith healing as the best cure for alcoholism. Religiomania and faith healing are not "soundly based psychologically", and they do not have "a deep psychological foundation". Nevertheless, the A.A. true believers persistently claim that A.A. does, even while they simultaneously brag that A.A. is not based on science. And they have been doing that for 74 years now.

    That's the Big Lie technique. Just never stop telling the lie, no matter how absurd and contradictory it is..

    Percy Hutchison was the poetry editor of The New York Times.

    • What does a poetry editor know about medicine, alcoholism, or human psychology?
    • How could he claim that A.A. was the best cure for alcoholism that he had ever seen? How many others had he seen?
    • How could Hutchison claim to know that the problem of alcoholism would just "resolve into thin air" if an alcoholic followed Bill Wilson's instructions?
    • What was Hutchison doing reviewing a book about a new cure for alcoholism, and recommending one treatment program over another?
    • When did Percy Hutchison become qualified to advise the public about critical life-or-death medical conditions like alcohol addiction? Isn't that the job of the medical editor or the science editor or an actual doctor?

    Let me guess — Hutchison suggested the book to the newspaper's editors, and volunteered to review it, because he really wanted people to hear about a "wonderful new fellowship that had a magical new treatment program for alcoholism..."

    The June 1940 financial report of "Works Publishing" says that the original New York A.A. group used the New York Times Book Review and several other media outlets to publicize and tout the newly-printed Big Book for free. Obviously, that so-called "book review" was a fraud — a very biased piece of promotional propaganda, a commercial for the book, not a fair objective analysis of the Alcoholics Anonymous program.

    That's the Big Lie technique — just keep saying it, over and over and over again, as often as you can, and in as many places as you can, no matter what, until people believe it.

    And here another long-time true believer parrots the lie:

    It is probable that more contemporary alcoholics have found sobriety through the fellowship of Alcoholics Anonymous than through all other agencies combined.
     Alcoholics Anonymous, an interpretation, by Milton A. Maxwell, Ph.D., contained in Chapter 33 of Society, Culture, and Drinking Patterns, David J. Pittman and Charles R. Snyder,editors, page 577.
     (Note that Milton A. Maxwell was a member of the Board of Trustees of Alcoholics Anonymous World Services, Inc..)

    Actually, it isn't "probable" at all. The truth is that the Harvard Medical School says that 80% of those alcoholics who successfully quit drinking for a year or more do it alone, on their own. That only leaves 20% who could possibly have recovered through Alcoholics Anonymous, and lots of those 20% did it in other ways too, like in Christian brotherhoods or monasteries, the Veterans' Administration program, the Salvation Army, the Catholic DePaul program, Rational Recovery, SMART, SOS, WFS, etc...

    Considering the immense A.A. dropout rate and high A.A. failure rate, it is "probable" that very few of the successful sober alcoholics actually recovered through Alcoholics Anonymous.

    Today, the A.A. campaign of misinformation continues even in the halls of Congress:

    As the fabulously successful twelve-step program pioneered by Alcoholics Anonymous has conclusively demonstrated, one cannot tackle a crisis until acknowledging the reality of a genuine problem.
     Statement of John C. Hulsman, Ph..D. Research Fellow for European Affairs, the Davis Institute for International Studies, The Heritage Foundation. Committee on House International Relations Europe Subcommittee June 11, 2003.

    I sincerely hope Mr. Hulsman knows more about foreign affairs than he knows about alcoholism treatment programs, or else we are liable to find ourselves trapped in a quagmire of unwinnable foreign wars...

    [P.S.: A year later: Let's see now, how did that premonition work out?
    Afghanistan? Iraq? The so-called "War on Terrorism"?
    "Fabulously successful" easy victories, or quagmires?    ]

    [P.S.: Two years later: Let's see now, how did that premonition work out?
    "Fabulously successful" easy victories, or quagmires?    ]

    [P.S.: Three years later... Four years later... Need I continue?]


  • Reversal Of Reality
    Have the nerve to completely reverse reality, and say the exact opposite of the truth.

    As evidence accumulated that the Bush administration had lied, fabricated evidence, distorted other evidence, and hidden contradictory facts about the Weapons of Mass Destruction in Iraq in order to manufacture an excuse to go to war, Vice President Dick Cheney declared:
          "The President and I cannot prevent certain politicians from losing their memory or their backbone, but we're not going to sit by and let them rewrite history."
     (TIME, Nov 21-27, 2005)

    Likewise, when CIA agent Valerie Plame's cover was blown, Bush declared: "We are going to find those leakers and take care of them."
     (Of course, George Bush and Dick Cheney and their White House Chiefs of Staff turned out to be the leakers, but that's okay, Scott McClellan said, because George had already declassified the secret information and approved of the leaks before they leaked it — so George knew who the leakers were even as he swore that he would catch them.)


  • Make a Virtue out of a Fault
    Advertise and promote a shortcoming or a fault as a virtue.

    For example, ultra-cheap cameras are advertised as "No Focusing Required." The truth is, no focusing is possible, because the cameras have cheap plastic fixed-focus lenses. What is a serious shortcoming for a camera — the inability to properly focus on the subject — is sold as a convenience: "You don't have to bother with focusing."

    Alcoholics Anonymous uses this technique too. When the founder Bill Wilson is shown to have been a fraud, a liar, a felonious thief, a certified nutcase, a philandering sexual predator, and a con artist who sold cult religion as a quack cure for alcoholism, the true believers proclaim, "Isn't it wonderful? It just goes to show that Bill Wilson was human. And if he could get sober, then so can we. God wanted Bill to be less than perfect so that he could be a good example for us all."


  • Unsupported Claims
    Make any grand claims you wish, supported by no facts at all.

    The Red-baiter Senator Joseph McCarthy did it in his speeches in the 1950s like this:
    "I have in my hand a list of 205 Communists working in the State Department",
    as he waved a piece of paper that had no names on it. (He never, ever, revealed that list of names, or any other list of names of Communists, either. McCarthy just went on to make more and more outrageous claims, also supported by no evidence, until the U.S. Senate got fed up with the routine, and censured him.14)

    On June 1, 2004, while talking about the high prices of gasoline, acting President G. W. Bush declared, "Had we had drilled in Anwar [National Wildlife Refuge], back in the mid nineties, we would be producing an additional million barrels a day by now."

    He doesn't know that. They might have drilled a bunch of dry holes while destroying the wildlife refuge. They might have had technical difficulties. Things might have frozen up. Eco-terrorists or foreign terrorists might have bombed the pipeline. A lot of things could have happened. Predicting alternative futures is always guesswork.

    Besides, that is all a smoke screen — a diversion of attention from the truth. The real bottleneck in producing more gasoline now is refineries — there have been almost no new refineries built in the USA in the last 30 years. Even worse, the oil companies are actually shutting down refineries to force gasoline prices even higher — so of course the supply of gasoline is tight.

    And the Republicans are notorious for killing alternative energy projects. President Carter started a lot of them, and then President Reagan shut them all down. Why don't we talk about what kind of a world we would have today if Reagan had not killed alternative energy?

    Bill Wilson did it like this:

    The alcoholic, realizing what his wife has endured, and now fully understanding how much he himself did to damage her and his children, nearly always takes up his marriage responsibilities with a willingness to repair what he can and to accept what he can't. He persistently tries all of A.A.'s Twelve Steps in his home, often with fine results. At this point he firmly but lovingly commences to behave like a partner instead of a bad boy. And above all he is finally convinced that reckless romancing is not a way of life for him.
     Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions, William G. Wilson, Page 119.

    • Where is the evidence that some unnamed stereotypical alcoholic reformed himself in that manner?
    • Where is the evidence that he got "fine results" from working the Twelve Steps?
      (And it says that he "often" got "fine results". So did he get miserable results the rest of the time?)
    • Where is the evidence that the unnamed alcoholic stopped philandering and hurting his wife? Bill Wilson never did.


  • Imaginary Evidence

    Notice the lack of hard evidence in this article:

    Two recent studies support the potential effectiveness of this [12-Step] treatment when carried out by mental health professionals. The first studied alcohol-dependent outpatients. The group of subjects that received 12-Step treatment improved substantially. The second study focused on VA inpatients with alcohol and/or other substance use disorders. At the one-year follow up, the group of subjects that had received 12-Step treatment improved significantly in many life areas.
    ...
    A recent award-winning study conducted at SUNY-Albany lends support to this notion.
    Better Treatment for the MICA (Mentally Ill Chemically Addicted) Patient, Mark Lazarus, Coordinator, Partial Hospitalization Program, The Holliswood Hospital, NEW YORK CITYVOICES: April/May 2002

    Just try to figure out what studies the author is citing. It is impossible. (There was no bibliography.) You have no way of knowing whether the studies were valid or faked or improperly conducted, or whether the author interpreted the results correctly. While such grand statements sound good, they are actually meaningless because they are completely unverifiable, and hence, unreliable.

    Also notice the strange contradiction where 12-Step treatment programs are supposedly effective IF they are "carried out by mental health professionals." But an often-repeated Alcoholics Anonymous boast is that they don't use professional healers, because the non-professional A.A. sponsors are supposedly much better than professional therapists:
    Here was a book that said that I could do something that all these doctors and priests and ministers and psychiatrists that I'd been going to for years couldn't do!
     The Alcoholics Anonymous Big Book, 3rd Edition, page 473.


  • Use Association
    Association is just linking together two unrelated things. Often, it creates an emotional reaction in the intended audience. It can be anything like Guilt by Association, Honor by Association, or Desirability by Association, depending on what somebody or something is associated with.

    Advertisers routinely associate beautiful women in skimpy clothes with new cars, cigarettes, alcoholic beverages, clothes, and diamond jewelry. TV commercials teach us that we can get laid if we use the right toothpaste and the right under-arm deodorant. So we have been programmed to consciously or unconsciously associate sex with all kinds of strange things.

    Politicians also routinely kiss babies, hug children, and hobnob with other, more popular and powerful politicians, to look good by association. They also love to rub elbows with the the rich, the famous, and the beautiful people, like movie stars and sports heroes, for the same reason. And of course they want to be photographed with a good selection of wise men like university professors, Nobel prize winners, and high-ranking religious leaders, to look good by association.

    Politicians will also, occasionally, associate their opponents with some villainous characters, perhaps Adolf Hitler, Mao Tse Tung, Joseph Stalin, or Ghengis Khan, to make their opponents look dangerous and evil. (Sometimes the comparison is unfair, and sometimes it isn't. It all depends.)

    The Scientology propaganda book "What Is Scientology" devotes 16 pages (xiv to xxix) to showing you pictures of beautiful, palatial buildings that the organization owns around the world, and the last "building" is really a large ship, the Freewinds. What do those beautiful buildings and that beautiful ship have to do with whether Scientology is a good organization, or whether it can help you with your mental problems, or with whether you should give all of your money to Scientology? Absolutely nothing. They are just trying to impress you, to make you think that Scientology is really a big, high-class outfit, not the sleazy, low, money-grubbing con that it actually is.

    A powerful association that I find in my own mind is that, ever since September 11, every time I see a photograph of an American Airlines jet, I see it crashing into a skyscraper, or blowing up as it comes out through the wall of a skyscraper. There is no skyscraper in the picture; my mind just fills it in because of those televised images that were burned into my mind on September 11. That is totally unfair to American Airlines, of course. It wasn't their fault that some terrorists chose to hijack some of their flights. Nevertheless, American Airlines has a real problem with that association that has been planted in so many people's minds.

    Similarly, before September 11, the public perception of firemen was something like "a bunch of adventurous young guys and overgrown boy scouts with too much testosterone, who are living out a childhood fantasy of being firemen and getting their kicks by driving big red trucks real fast." After September 11, the image is "a bunch of heroic guys who rush into burning towers to save people, and die when the building comes down on their heads."

    That's the power of association.

    A corollary to association is something that I like to call "reverse association" — basking in reflected glory by honoring others (who may be totally out of your league). An easy way to accomplish that is to hand out "awards", honoring others for something or other. An interesting example of "reverse association" is: Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan received the Enron Prize for Distinguished Public Service from Ken Lay in November, 2001, less than three weeks before Enron filed for bankruptcy. Now I'll guess that Greenspan wishes he had never accepted the award.13

    Guilt By Association is of course a negative association. It is like, "Senator Blowhard had lunch with Ken Lay, Andy Fastow, and Jeffrey Skilling of Enron. Therefore Senator Blowhard is just as corrupt as them."
     We do not really know anything about Blowhard's integrity, just from that. He is not automatically guilty just because he associated with those guys one time.
    (But if he often associated with them, and took lots of money from them, and rode around in their jet while campaigning for office, like George W. Bush did, then that is another matter.... And if his Vice President then arranged the energy regulations so that Enron could massively rob the State of California with artificially inflated electricity prices, then that is very suspicious.)


  • The Glittering Generality
    The Glittering Generality is a kind of Association technique.

    American politicians routinely wave the American flag and praise God, country, Democracy, Freedom, Mom, and apple pie, trying to create links in people's minds (associations) between themselves and those other positive images.

    So salt and pepper your speeches with zillions of flowery phrases and wonderful-sounding words and vague glittering generalities:

    • "God, country, Mom and apple pie"
    • "Patriotism, Freedom, Democracy, and the good old USA"
    • "safety and national security"
    • "those simple home truths that some of us learned at our mother's knee, and which many of us have forgotten and neglected — honesty, purity, unselfishness and love."
    • "inspiration and liberty for all"
    • "the great creative sources in the Mind of God"
    • "the combined moral and spiritual forces of the nation"
    • "Christian values"
    • "family values"
    • "Freedom is on the march."
    • "Our wonderful patriotic troops who are fighting for Freedom in Iraq"
    • "The wonderful men and women who serve in our volunteer army"

    It is really tragic how many innocent people have been murdered in the name of Freedom, Democracy, and Christian family values... (Just recently, 30,000 children in Iraq, and before that, zillions of Nicaraguans, Guatemalans and Vietnamese.)

    A common variation on The Glittering Generality is invoking images of "The Golden Age". Imply that there was a better time way in the past — "The Good Old Days" — when everything was wonderful — "everybody was happy, everybody was kind and decent, everybody obeyed the law, everybody believed in God, the rulers were wise and just, and children obeyed their parents".

    Sometimes this Golden Age is embodied in a popular myth, like The Days of King Arthur, where noble knights believed in Might For Right (not "Might Makes Right"), and the brave knights spent their time rescuing fair damsels in distress. And of course, the wizards of The Olden Times, like Merlin, were much wiser and much more powerful than today's wizards, and their magic was so much better than today's magic...

    Then the speaker invokes an appeal to return to the Good Old Days — "We must get Back to the Basics, and Back to Traditional Values".

    Adolf Hitler and the Nazis actually used those terms — "Back to the Basics" and "Traditional Values" — in their propaganda, while campaigning for seats in the Reichstag, and they declared that Hitler could take Germany back to "The Golden Age" if elected.


  • Exaggerate
    You don't blatantly lie; you just stretch the truth a good bit. This also has the advantage that even if you get caught at it, you can always argue that you were telling the truth, and it's all a matter of degree, and people just got the wrong impression, or took it the wrong way... Mark Twain explained that expanding a story wasn't really a lie, just a "stretcher".

    For an example of exaggeration, this is one of the faithful followers of the cult leader Frank Buchman singing his praises, trying to make him sound like a citizen of the world:

    ...he knows China like the Chinese; he is thoroughly at home in Germany, the Netherlands, India, America, Africa, and Australia.
     A. J. Russel, For Sinners Only, page 82, quoted in
    Experiment With God; Frank Buchman Reconsidered, Gösta Ekman, page 57.

    Frank Buchman probably did feel at home in Germany, because he was a native German speaker, the son of German-speaking Swiss emigrants to Pennsylvania. But it is questionable whether he was equally at home in all of those other countries that he visited for short periods of time, unless they just happened to have five-star hotels, which was really Buchman's favorite environment. And it is absurd to say that Buchman knew China like the Chinese. Frank Buchman only spent a couple of years in China as a missionary, where his behavior was so obnoxious and offensive that the Bishop of Hankow finally ordered him to stop working in China.

    For another example of exaggeration:

    Japanese business and industry is such an incredible gargantuan efficient powerhouse that it will devour American industry, like Godzilla stomping his way through Tokyo. We'll all end up speaking Japanese and driving Hondas. The only hope of survival that we have is to adopt Japanese styles of management, so that we can become more like them. And American workers need to learn how to be more like Japanese workers, too. They need to learn to be more loyal to their companies, and they need to accept wage cuts and roll-backs in benefits to help save their employers.

    That was actually a real argument heard very often during the seventies and eighties, when Japan was having a few good years and taking major chunks of the American consumer-electronics and automobile markets. But after that, the Japanese economy crashed badly, and stayed crashed, and it's still a dead dog. Nobody but nobody now says that we should copy Japanese business, industry, banking, or management styles. In fact, the current pundits proclaim that the Japanese must abandon their traditional ways, dump the good-old-boy system, abandon protectionism and open up their markets, and copy American business and banking styles if they are to ever have any hope of economic recovery.

    The error was in exaggerating the degree of Japanese success in the business world, and in exaggerating the effectiveness of Japanese management and business styles. The speakers extrapolated a world-shaking economic juggernaut from a few spectacular Japanese successes in making TVs, stereos, and cars — successes that used unfair anti-competitive practices that were sponsored by the Japanese government — "Japan, Incorporated". The speakers exaggerated those Japanese successes to the point of assuming that those successes were an unstoppable wave of the future that would go on forever, and conquer the whole planet. (And then they told the American workers that was why they must take pay cuts...)

    In Alcoholics Anonymous, Bill Wilson made heavy use of exaggeration, especially when discussing the success rate of the Twelve-Step program.


  • Confusion of Correlation and Causation
    This is simple and straight-forward: just because two things tend to happen together does not prove that one thing causes the other. Likewise, people also often confuse association and causation, or causation and coincidence. The rooster's crowing doesn't really make the sun rise.

    Young women going to church and getting married does not really cause them to get pregnant and have babies, even though there does seem to be a strong correlation there. The real cause of the women getting pregnant is something other than the priest or minister reciting some words...

    Some people who tout "spiritual healing" routinely cite studies that show that people who have positive, cheerful attitudes recover from illnesses and surgeries faster than people who have glum, dour attitudes. They then assume that this is proof of the efficacy of "spiritual healing".

    • They overlook the obvious fact that those cheerful attitudes may well be caused by the the patients' rapid recovery. People who are rapidly recovering are almost always much more cheerful than patients who are sick unto death and dying.

    • And they overlook the fact that those two factors may correlate — they may happen together: Rapid recovery causes cheerful moods, which cause more rapid healing, which causes more cheerfulness, and so on... Just the act of relaxing and being cheerful increases blood flow through the body, which promotes healing and improves the functioning of the immune system. That is simple medicine, not "the power of spiritual healing".

    • They also ignore the fact that any apparent link between recovery and something else, anything else, may be pure coincidence. In any large group of sick people, some will recover and some won't. There isn't necessarily any link between "spiritual attitudes" and people recovering, but the people who wish to believe there is will concentrate their attention on just the recovering "spiritual" people, and ignore everything else. That, in turn, becomes an example of "observational selection", seeing what you want to see, and ignoring the rest.

    • And when the investigator has an agenda — a desired outcome — he can be also be fooled by observational bias as well — just tending to see what he wishes to see. The measure of which patients are cheerful, and how cheerful, is a subjective measurement — it relies entirely on the judgement of the investigator. It is all too easy to rate the recovering patients as very cheerful and the non-recovering patients as very glum when that is what the investigator wishes to see.

    Alcoholics Anonymous has plenty of examples of confusion of causation and correlation, or confusion of coincidence with causation. The most obvious ones are:

    • Assuming that attending A.A. meetings makes people quit drinking.
    • Assuming that attending A.A. meetings makes people stay sober.
    • Assuming that doing the Twelve Steps makes people quit drinking and stay sober.
    • Assuming that praying makes people quit drinking and stay sober.
    • Assuming that doing the Twelve Steps makes people more "spiritual", or more moral.
      (And of course, that last item will be loaded with observational bias. Who judges? How do you impartially judge just how much more "spiritual" somebody is after doing the Twelve Steps for three or six months? And how do you impartially distinguish between "spirituality" and superstition? How do you distinguish between real spirituality and crazy self-delusion like,
      "Quite as important was the discovery that spiritual principles would solve all my problems.")

    Just because some people sit in an A.A. meeting room and talk about God and not drinking does not prove that A.A. made them quit drinking, even if they believe it. Nor does it prove that A.A. is keeping them sober.

    Using the goofy A.A. "cause and effect" illogic, we can happily declare that A.A. is totally unnecessary because mothers are the real cause of sobriety. How can we know that? Simple. Show me an alcoholic whose mother didn't tell him to quit drinking so much. Momma tells him to quit drinking, and then he finally does, so mothers are the real cause of sobriety. A.A. is irrelevant and unneeded.

    What really happens is: A lot of people quit drinking in order to stop being sick, and a lot of them get pressured or coerced into attending some A.A. meetings, and then a few of them become obsessed with cult religions like the Moonies or Scientology or Alcoholics Anonymous, and their favorite cult convinces them that they are sober because of the cult — that the cult saved their lives — that involvement with the cult is keeping them sober — so they become committed to the cult and make it their new lifestyle for a while. They confuse coincidence with causation. But, eventually, most of those people wise up and realize that it's all a pack of lies, and quit the cult. In Alcoholics Anonymous, for example, 95% of the newcomers drop out in the first year alone, and, nevertheless, a bit more than half of all alcoholics find lasting sobriety anyway.

    And it's easy to see causation where there is simply no evidence to support such an assumption. Often, just wishful thinking is enough to make people see cause-and-effect relationships:

    "And... I believe addictions are also caused by a sense of spiritual separation from God, or one's Higher Power, or union with the All-That-Is."
     Addiction: A Spiritual Crisis, Judith Wagner, Tampa Bay New Times, Winter 1991, page 18.

    And that belief was based on what facts or observations? Did the authoress actually do even just one good survey of a few hundred addicts, asking them what they believed and how separated from "Higher Power" they felt?

    A common use of this propaganda technique of confusion of causation and correlation is to do polls or surveys of A.A. members, asking them about their drinking habits, and then "discover" that they drink less than some other group of people, perhaps a group of guys at the local bar, or the winos under the bridge. Then the "researcher" declares that there is "an association between AA attendance and abstinence from alcohol/drug use", and he concludes that

    "Weekly or more frequent attendance at 12-Step programs may be effective in maintaining long-term drug and alcohol abstinence. Treatment providers should encourage and assist their clients in 12-Step participation."
     "12-Step programs help maintain abstinence", R Fiorentine, The Brown University Digest of Addiction Theory and Application, Sept 1999, v18 i9 p1

    What the "researcher" won't tell you is that if you repeat that kind of study, comparing the people found at the local Baskin Robbins ice cream parlor to the guys at the local bar, you can, in just the same way, "prove" that eating ice cream reduces alcohol consumption.

    The logical conclusion is, of course:

    "Weekly or more frequent attendance at Baskin Robbins may be effective in maintaining long-term drug and alcohol abstinence. Treatment providers should encourage and assist their clients in Baskin Robbins ice cream socials participation."

    Also note the use of the propaganda technique called "Sly Suggestions" in that quote. In the first sentence, the author Robert Fiorentine suggested that A.A. may be effective. He could only suggest the idea, because he knew full well that the data did not show any cause-and-effect relationship. But in the next sentence, the author suddenly assumed that his suggestion was true, and he stated that treatment providers should shove patients into Alcoholics Anonymous groups.

    And lastly, note how the author completely ignored the fact that the people at the A.A. meeting were a self-selected group (a biased sample). That is:
          The people who wanted to stay sober went to the A.A. meetings.
          The people who wanted to get drunk went to the bar.
     So of course the people at the A.A. meetings drank less than the people at the bar. That comes as no surprise. But that does not prove that A.A. is somehow causing the "meeting makers" to abstain from drinking. It doesn't even "suggest" it. The truth is just the opposite:

    People's desire to stay sober makes them go to A.A. meetings.

    They go because they have been mis-educated and fooled into believing that A.A. is somehow necessary or "helpful for maintaining sobriety".

    To be fair, what the author of that "study" really did was conduct interviews with the patients and ex-patients of 26 Los Angeles area "treatment programs" (almost all of which were based on "Twelve Step Facilitation" — 'TSF'11), and compare those who were still attending A.A. meetings with those who were not. He found that those who attended the meetings drank less and took fewer drugs. That should come as no surprise, because, by and large, only those people who had not relapsed were still attending A.A. meetings. Many of the relapsers really were to be found at the local bars. People stopped going to A.A. meetings when they resumed their former alcohol or drug habits. Hence Fiorentine used a very biased sample. His claimed results were just another example of Lying With Statistics, as well as Observational Selection — i.e.: 'Cherry-Picking'.

    And, alas, we were never told what the success rate of those 26 Los Angeles area treatment programs really was. (They almost never tell the truth about that.) Those so-called "treatment programs" usually have about a 90% failure rate, so the remaining 10% of the patients who were still moderately clean and sober (clean and sober enough to "graduate") were the people who really wanted to stay clean and sober.

    The so-called "treatment programs" are really just a system for filtering out those few alcoholics and addicts who are ready and willing to quit drinking and doping now — and then the treatment center and A.A./N.A. will take the credit for the successes when they quit, but will refuse to take any of the blame for the other 90% of the "clients" who don't "graduate".

    That stunt is pure Observational Selection — counting the hits and forgetting the misses.

    And it's backwards logic to try to conclude that the A.A. meetings *make* the few abstainers stay clean and sober. Fiorentine reversed the cause-and-effect relationship. The truth is:
          People's sobriety causes a few of the clean and sober people to go to A.A. meetings.
          People's choice to consume drugs and alcohol causes them to not go to A.A. meetings. They go to the meetings at the local dope dealer's house instead.

    That is not a joke or an idle suggestion. In her 1988 book that promoted Alcoholics Anonymous, Nan Robertson reported that most of the newcomers to A.A. had already quit drinking, so it really is sobriety that causes people to go to A.A. meetings:

    About 60 percent of all newcomers — some still drinking at first, most not — who go to A.A. meetings for up to a year remain in A.A.
     Getting Better Inside Alcoholics Anonymous, Nan Robertson, 1988, page 94.

    (You can ignore the funny word game where Nan Robertson declares that most of the people who stay in A.A. "for up to a year" stay in A.A. for a while longer. Actually, only five percent of the newcomers stay in A.A. for a year.)

    Another way to say it is:
          People's desire to stay clean and sober causes some of them to go to 12-Step meetings.
          People's desire to get stoned causes them to go to the dope dealer or the liquor store.

    So of course the people whom you find at the 12-Step meetings will be a bit less drunk and stoned than those whom you find at the bar or at the dope dealer's house. (Even though 22% of the treatment programs' ex-clients who were going to the A.A. and N.A. meetings were actually still using drugs or alcohol. See the 2nd quote down.)

    In another write-up of Fiorentine's Los Angeles study, we also got this misinformation:

          Looking at 262 patients in 26 Los Angeles addiction treatment programs, the researchers found that clients who attended at least one 12 Step meeting per week after completing treatment had much lower levels of drug use at six-month follow-up (22% were using), than those who participated less frequently or not at all (44% were using). Statistical analysis led Fiorentine to conclude that the better rates of abstinence "could not be attributed to differences in motivation or to other post-treatment activities". Regular 12 Step attendance made the difference, prompting the conclusion that 12 Step meetings work well as "a useful and inexpensive aftercare resource that can help many patients to maintain abstinence".
     "12 STEP POWER SHOWN BY SCIENTIFIC METHOD", By: Voyles, Claudia, Guidepoints: Acupuncture in Recovery, 10708200, March 2000, page 5,
    which cites: R Fiorentine, in NIDA Notes, v. 14, No 5, December 1999.

    Fiorentine's conclusions are totally unwarranted and are based solely on his assumption of a desired cause and effect relationship between going to meetings and sobriety, not the facts.

    That is, he just wishes that A.A. or N.A. meetings really worked. His "statistical analysis" is worthless because he assumes that the numbers show that 12-Step meetings cause abstinence, rather than that the desire to be sober and unaddicted causes meeting attendance. Fiorentine confuses correlation with cause and effect.

    And it was really outrageous to claim that "the scientific method" had proved the effectiveness of 12-Step meetings. Claudia Voyles titled her article:
          "12 STEP POWER SHOWN BY SCIENTIFIC METHOD".
    There is no truth to that statement. None whatsoever. That was not a valid scientific test. There was no "scientific method" in any of Fiorentine's deceptive propaganda. There was no control group with which to compare the Twelve-Step Facilitation groups, to see what effect the so-called "treatment" and the 12-Step meetings actually had — to see whether the "treatment" really improved on Mother Nature.

    The proper way to do such a medical study or scientific experiment is a "Longitudinal Controlled Study". How you do that is get, say, 200 or 2000 convicted drunk drivers or other alcoholics from a traffic court or a hospital, all of whom have been determined to be alcohol abusers by a doctor or competent therapist, and then divide them, randomly, into two equal groups. Send the first group to Alcoholics Anonymous meetings, and do nothing with the second group. Let them go home. Let them drink all they want. They are "the control group". Give them no "treatment" or punishment of any kind.
    (It's fair. Getting no treatment — being a guinea pig in a scientific experiment — IS their punishment.)

    In order for any "treatment" or program to claim success, it must do significantly better than the control group.

    At the end of the test, at 6 months or a year or two later, count and measure all of them, to see how many are still drinking destructively. Compare the A.A. group to the no-treatment group, to see what the effect of A.A. really was.

    Every time that experiment has been done, the results were that A.A. didn't work at all, and had no good long-term effects. In fact, the A.A.-treated group did worse than the no-treatment group, and A.A. had an appalling death rate, too.

    Likewise, the statement that
          "Regular 12 Step attendance made the difference, prompting the conclusion that 12 Step meetings work well..."
    is groundless and untrue. Fiorentine merely assumed that 12-Step meetings made a difference. The evidence does not support that conclusion.

    Nevertheless, the citation for Fiorentine's article says:

    "A recent study confirms that weekly participation in 12-Step programs, such as Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) or Narcotics Anonymous (NA), help people in recovery to maintain their abstinence for up to two years after completing substance abuse treatment."
     "12-Step programs help maintain abstinence", R Fiorentine, The Brown University Digest of Addiction Theory and Application, Sept 1999, v18 i9 p1

    Note the word game where it says that 12-Step meetings "help" people maintain abstinence. They imply cause-and-effect, but don't say it outright, because they can't. There is simply no evidence of any cause-and-effect relationship between going to 12-Step meetings and abstaining from alcohol and drugs.

    We also got a demonstration of the propaganda technique called "Lying With Qualifiers" there. It said that A.A. meetings "helped" people to "maintain their abstinence for up to two years". Up to two years? So does that mean that lots of the "meeting makers" relapsed at the one month point, and more at two months, and more at three, and more at six, etc.? And the very last clean and sober hold-out relapsed at the two-year point? Yes, unfortunately, that must be what it really means, because that's what really happens.


  • Reverse a Cause-and-Effect Relationship
    Declare that 'B' caused 'A', when in fact 'A' caused 'B'.

    A recent article in the British newspaper Telegraph gave us an illustration of this logical error:

    Intelligent humans evolved because of big-hipped ancestors
    Intelligent humans developed because our female ancestors had wide hips which allowed them to give birth to babies with big brains, according to new research.

    By Nick Allen
    Last Updated: 9:13PM GMT 13 Nov 2008

    The hips of females from the species Homo erectus, a primitive relative of modern humans, have been found to be wider than was previously thought.

    That means they were well equipped for delivering babies with a larger cranial capacity which ultimately allowed intelligent human beings to evolve.
    ...
    Scientists came to their conclusion after reconstructing a 1.2 million-year-old fossil pelvis discovered in Gona, Ethiopia.
    ...
    A narrow pelvis for females would have caused infants to be born with relatively small brains.
    http://www.telegraph.co.uk/scienceandtechnology/science/3453980/Intelligent-humans-evolved-because-of-big-hipped-ancestors.html

    That is the exact opposite of the truth. The reality is:

    1. Pre-human ape-men evolved larger brains and higher intelligence in order to survive. The stupid ones either starved or got eaten by lions and tigers, leaving the smarter ones, with bigger brains, to reproduce. (Hint: the ones who were intelligent enough to use clubs, tomahawks, and spears to defend themselves from the predators lived a lot longer.) So gradually, human intelligence and human brains both increased in size.

    2. Then, the females with wider hips were able to deliver such larger-headed babies without complications, while the narrowest-hipped females died in childbirth.

    3. The wider-hipped females gave birth to more wider-hipped daughters, and the process repeated itself, with the narrowest-hipped females continuing to die in childbirth, and the wider-hipped ones surviving.

    4. Carry that process forwards a million years and you get a population where all of females have wide hips.

    Later in the article, the author got his logic straightened out:

    The need to give birth to large brained infants was probably the primary driver behind the shape of the pelvis.

    Alcoholics Anonymous uses this logical error constantly:

    1. They routinely infer that A.A. meeting attendance causes sobriety, rather than that the desire for sobriety causes some people to attend A.A. meetings. (The same desire for sobriety also causes people to quit drinking alcohol.)

    2. A.A. infers that doing the 12 Steps causes people to quit drinking, rather than that quitting drinking causes some people to do the 12 Steps of Alcoholics Anonymous. Most of the A.A. members who are actually continously sober really quit drinking before they did the 12 Steps — and often, they quit drinking before they even attended very many A.A. meetings. (Many alcoholics quit drinking in a detox center, which then sends them to A.A. meetings, and then A.A. takes the credit for the sobriety.)

    3. Again, the desire for sobriety causes some people to waste their time practicing some useless "steps" of an old cult religion. The 12 Steps do not cause people to desire sobriety.


  • Straw Man
    The Straw Man technique is a stunt where you prop up an easy-to-defeat opponent, like a Straw Man, and then attack him and knock him down, to make yourself look big, strong, and victorious.

    Similarly, you can attack a caricature of what the other person said, rather than arguing against what he actually said.

    A popular variation of the Straw Man technique is the "What if?" argument. Just prop up absurd hypothetical situations that never really happened and then demolish them.

    During the March 23, 2006 press conference, Washington Post reporter Jim VandeHei asked, "A growing number of Americans are questioning the trustworthiness of you and this White House. Does that concern you?"

    Bush just wouldn't say. "I believe that my job is to go out and explain to people what's on my mind," he replied, launching himself on a rambling discourse on war followed by a straw-man attack on unnamed people who don't take al Qaeda seriously.
     By Dan Froomkin
    Special to washingtonpost.com
    White House Briefing, News Between the Lines
    Wednesday, March 22, 2006; 1:00 PM

    Nan Robertson used a flavor of the Straw Man trick in her book Getting Better Inside Alcoholics Anonymous. While arguing for the disease theory of alcoholism, she propped up a few reasons why alcoholism should not be called a disease and then knocked them down, and then felt that she had made her point:

    • Moral and social objections: "How can the habit of opening ones mouth and pouring alcohol down one's throat be called a disease?"
    • Objections that the disease concept interferes with recovery — it provides patients with a ready-made excuse: "Don't blame me, I'm sick".
    • Political and social objections — If alcoholism is a disease, it should be treated by doctors, not amateurs.
      (See Getting Better Inside Alcoholics Anonymous, Nan Robertson, pages 196-197.)

    Nan Robertson dismissed all of those arguments with a paragraph each, and then concluded that alcoholism was a disease.

    • All that Nan Robertson did was dispute some other people's objections to calling alcoholism a disease.
    • She did not prove that alcoholism was a disease, or even produce any good evidence that there is any such disease as alcoholism.
    • What Nan Robertson missed in her broken logic is the simple fact that, even if it was okay, in Nan Robertson's mind, for alcoholism to be called a disease, that still did not make it an actual disease.
      It's just like: Even if it is okay, in the minds of some superstitious people, for the world to be called "flat", that still does not make the world really flat.

    Another example: From the "Big Book" Alcoholics Anonymous, we learn that Bill Wilson was only able to convert brain-damaged morons and pathetic cry-babies to the new Alcoholics Anonymous religion. Wilson used the straw-man tactic constantly, portraying non-believers and the unconverted as the most pathetic self-pitying stupid prejudiced fools who were unable to see the truth until the brilliant, wonderful Bill Wilson came along and saved them from their stupidity. This quote is from the "Man On The Bed" story in the Big Book, where Bill Wilson and Dr. Bob were recruiting for A.A. in the hospital:
    (Actually, they were really recruiting for Frank Buchman's Oxford Group cult at that time.)

    Two days later, a future fellow of Alcoholics Anonymous stared glassily at the strangers beside his bed. "Who are you fellows, and why this private room? I was always in a ward before."
          Said one of the visitors, "We're giving you a treatment for alcoholism."
          Hopelessness was written large on the man's face as he replied, "Oh, but that's no use. Nothing would fix me. I'm a goner. The last three times, I got drunk on the way home from here. I'm afraid to go out the door. I can't understand it."
     The A.A. Big Book, Alcoholics Anonymous, 3rd Edition, Chapter 11, "A Vision For You", page 157.

    (The answer, you blithering idiot, is that you are getting drunk because you are stopping off at the bar on the way home from the hospital, and drinking more alcohol. It's very easy to understand.)


    "Bill Wilson, converting a fawning moron."

    Bill Wilson posing for a staged "Man On The Bed" publicity photograph, where Bill allegedly performed miraculous faith healings, making the drunks "pick up their beds and walk."
    Notice the cross on the wall. This photograph was very carefully staged for best effect.


    For another good example of the straw man tactic, consider this quote:

    A Peek Into Twenty-First-Century Medicine

    The healing power of the spirit, exemplified by the success of the Twelve Steps program in helping overcome a variety of addictions, will be harnessed more fully to treat a wider range of medical problems.

    Lawyers boast that when their professional forebears were writing the Constitution and organizing the Supreme Court, doctors were still bleeding patients to remove ill humors and using leeches as medical apparatus.

    As medicine moved out of its primitive beginnings and joined the revolution in science, it is easy to understand why the spiritual dimension of healing was absent from serious discussion. Spirituality, with its nebulous connotation, sounded too much like the folk traditions of another era and did not have the clarity of the surgeon's knife or the pharmacist's pill. Today, however, it is only because medicine is on a firm scientific basis that the spiritual dimension of healing can be fairly evaluated. Although modern medicine has been slow to take up the challenge, this healing factor is now too obvious to ignore.
    ...
    The field of medicine is still in its infancy in understanding the spiritual dimension of healing. But it is clear that the power of the mind and the spirit to overcome both chronic and acute medical problems is real. In the twenty-first century, this healing force can be harnessed more fully and effectively through scientific persistence and spiritual growth within the discipline of medicine.
     The Spiritual Dimension of Healing, Jeff Jay, The World & I, 05-01-2000, Size: 8K.
    Available on the Internet through your public library's Electronic Library of periodicals.

    The author has a bone to pick with modern doctors. He is angry with them because they won't agree with his ideas of "spiritual healing." So he declares, essentially:

    The reason that modern medicine refuses to approve of "spiritual medicine", faith healing, and magical "Twelve-Step therapy" is because contemporary doctors are still just as blind, stupid, and slow to learn as they were 200 years ago, and they have still hardly gotten beyond using leeches and blood-letting.

    That is quite untrue, of course. Modern medicine is very good, and is far beyond stupidly using voodoo medicine, which is what the author of that quote wants to shove on us.

    The author recites the faults of ancient medical practice in order to make current medical practice look bad, because he can't fault contemporary doctors. If you can't attack today's doctors as stupid, then attack the ones who lived 225 years ago. They are easy to criticize and ridicule and knock down. That's the Straw Man tactic.

    And the author lies and grossly distorts the facts as well: People studied and tried faith healing and spiritual medicine for thousands of years. It was all they had, so they really wished that it would work. It took us a very long time before we finally learned some things that actually work properly, and what actually works is penicillin, streptomycin, and tetracycline, not occult incantations, prayers, chants, charms, voodoo dolls, or magic spells.

    And the author also misuses the word "spiritual". Bill Wilson constantly confused psychological, emotional, and spiritual things, and so does this faithful follower of his. (Bill made grand, sweeping proclamations like that all forms of "spiritual diseases" were caused by "resentments" — the Big Book, page 64.) What isn't obvious from the quote above (see the larger review) is that the author would talk about things like how people having a positive mental attitude towards their recovery from illness coincided with people rapidly healing what ailed them, and then the author would call that "spiritual healing." That isn't spiritual healing; that's just psychology. That's just having a good mind-set — a positive and cheerful attitude. And that positive attitude was often caused by the patient's rapid recovery, rather than the rapid recovery being caused by the positive attitude... That is "Confusion of Correlation and Causation" again.

    And last but not least, the author also gave a good demonstration of the Big Lie technique. That quote is just loaded with Big Lies:

    1. "'The healing power of the spirit' is an established fact."
    2. "Everybody knows that spiritual healing works."
    3. "The spiritual dimension of healing is an established fact."
    4. "The power of the mind and the spirit to overcome both chronic and acute medical problems is real."
    5. "The success of 'the Twelve Steps program' in helping people to overcome a variety of addictions is an established fact."
    6. "Alcoholics Anonymous successfully practices spiritual healing."
    7. "Modern medicine is an infant, just barely out of the realm of blood-letting and leaches."
    8. "Modern medicine was slow to move out of its primitive beginnings and join the revolution in science." (Not, that it was the revolution.)
    9. "'Spiritual healing' has never been properly studied."
    10. "The spiritual dimension of healing was absent from serious discussion."
    11. "Modern medicine has been slow to take up the challenge of studying faith healing and 'spiritual healing'."
    12. "The spiritual dimension of healing is a healing factor that is now too obvious to ignore."
    13. "The field of medicine is still in its infancy in understanding the spiritual dimension of healing."
    14. — And, by implication, "Sometime in the future, modern medicine will finally get smart enough to discover spiritual medicine and learn how to use it."
    — All of which are lies.

    For just one example of modern medicine embracing "spiritual healing," consider that 'Native American' or Original American people can and do have their own spiritual healing ceremonies performed for them in hospitals. They get both the medicine man and Western-medicine doctor working on them, simultaneously. (I was tempted to write "white-man doctor", but these days, the 'Western-medicine' doctor is likely to be Jordanian, Pakistani, or Indian — India Indian.)


  • Hypnotic Bait and Switch
    Observe the broken flow of logic between these two paragraphs:

          This world of ours has made more material progress in the last century than in all the millenniums which went before. Almost everyone knows the reason. Students of ancient history tell us that the intellect of men in those days was equal to the best of today. Yet in ancient times material progress was painfully slow. The spirit of modern scientific inquiry, research and invention was almost unknown. In the realm of the material, men's minds were fettered by superstition, tradition, and all sorts of fixed ideas. Some of the contemporaries of Columbus thought a round earth preposterous. Others came near putting Galileo to death for his astronomical heresies.
          We asked ourselves this: Are not some of us just as biased and unreasonable about the realm of the spirit as were the ancients about the realm of the material?
     (The Big Book, William G. Wilson, page 51.)

    All of the statements before the last one are true and unchallengeable. The listener will be lulled into uncritically accepting more statements, expecting them to also be unquestionably true. That is when the speaker (Bill Wilson) suddenly slips a lie into the speech. The last sentence is an irrational appeal to embrace the very evils, the narrow-minded blind faith, the superstitious "spirituality" and "the realm of the spirit" that the previous sentences had so properly criticized.

    Bait and switch.

    And it's also a gross distortion of the facts — a false analysis of history — to say that "the ancients" were "biased and unreasonable" about the "realm of the material." They weren't. The medieval Roman Catholic Church authorities were far more "biased and unreasonable" about the "realm of the spirit." They would not tolerate any "spiritual", religious, or philosophical ideas that were different from their own. They asserted that they and the Bible had all of the true answers about everything in the world, and anyone who disagreed with them the least little bit was evil and doing the work of the Devil and trying to lead people to Hell. Their inquisitions ran for centuries, and killed a lot of people. One of the commonest reasons for a death sentence and burning at the stake was "heresy".1


  • The Either/Or Technique — Bifurcation — the Excluded Middle
    Present the audience with only extreme either/or, black-or-white choices, while admitting to no gray areas inbetween. Consider only the two extremes in a range of possibilities, to make the "other side" look worse than it really is. Carl Sagan called this the "excluded middle" technique.

    The Excluded Middle technique also includes:

    • Short-term versus long-term comparison — a subset of the excluded middle —
      • "why pursue fundamental science when we have so huge a budget deficit?".
      • "Why should we believe predictions of global warming when they can't predict the weather two weeks in advance?"
    • Slippery slope — another subset of the excluded middle — make unwarranted extrapolations of the effects of a course of action, like: "give 'em an inch and they'll take a mile."

    For example:

    • "If you're not one of us, you're one of them."
      This is called "the sheep and goat distinction".

    • "If you aren't a dirty, lying Communist, then of course you agree with us, and you will be happy to join our John Birch Society (or the KKK, or the Nazi party, etc.)..."

    • "He who is not with me is against me, and he who does not gather with me scatters." [Matthew 12:30]

    • "Those who are not with us are against us." [Comrade Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, Russia, 1917]

    • "You are either part of the solution, or part of the problem."

    • "Either you are Serving the Lord (as our church defines it) or you are serving the Forces of Evil."

    • "Either you are a fanatical true believer like us, or you are an evil hard-boiled atheist."

    • "Either you are willing to commit your entire life to our great cause or else you are a wimp, a weak hand, and a real loser."

    • "Look. You're on board, or you're not on board. Okay. But just, if you're on board, then you're on board just like the rest of us. Period." — Tom Cruise, talking about membership in Scientology.

    • This Nazi propaganda poster from World War II used the Either/Or technique along with a lot of Glittering Generalities. It says:

      In the Red War,
      Mother or [Communist] "Comrade"?
      People or Machines?
      God or Devil?
      Blood or Gold?
      Race [Racial Purity] or Crossbreed [Mixed-race children]?
      Folk Songs or Jazz?
      National Socialism [Naziism] or Bolshevism?

    • The Oxford Group/Moral Re-Armament cult leader Frank Buchman said:

      "an extreme of evil must be met with an extreme of good. A fanatical following of evil by a passionate pursuit of good. Only a passion can cure a passion. And only a superior world-arching ideology can cure a world divided by warring ideologies."   ...
            "Whenever men give man the place in their lives that God should have, slavery has begun. 'Men must choose to be governed by God, or they condemn themselves to be ruled by tyrants.' There can be no neutrality in the battle between good and evil."
       Dr. Frank N.D. Buchman, the leader of the Oxford Groups—Moral Re-Armament cult, in a speech, "Brave Men Choose", given June 4, 1961, at Caux, Switzerland, quoted in Frank Buchman's Secret, by Peter Howard, page 141.

      What Frank Buchman didn't bother to say there is that those who "chose to be governed by God" were really supposed to be governed by Frank and his lieutenants. The Buchmanites claimed that they, and only they, knew what God really wanted people to do. They, and only they, were "sane" and "Guided by God", Frank said, and everybody else was "insane". So, if you were "Guided by God", then you would do what Frank told you to do...

    • Buchman also said,

      "There are only two fronts in the world — the positive front and the negative front, those who obey God and those who refuse to obey Him."
       Dynamic Out Of Silence; Frank Buchman's relevance today, Theophil Spoerri, page 117.

      But "obeying God" really ended up meaning that you were supposed to obey Frank and his followers. That's the logical fallacy of False Equality.

    • In 1943, Frank Buchman declared:

      "Unless America recovers her rightful ideology nothing but chaos awaits us. Our destiny is to obey the guidance of God.
            The true battle-line in the world today is not between class and class, not between race and race. The battle is between Christ and anti-Christ.
            'Choose ye this day whom ye will serve.'"
       Frank Buchman As I Knew Him, H. W. 'Bunny' Austin, page 110.

      Nevertheless, America somehow managed to win World War II without choosing to join Frank Buchman's cult.

    • Peter Howard, the fascist who succeeded Frank Buchman as the leader of Moral Re-Armament, wrote:

      The choice is moral re-armament or national decay.   ...
      It is a choice that all of us must make. Christ or anti-Christ, spirit or beast, renaissance or decadence, moral re-armament or a godless, hopeless, purposeless age.
       Britain and the Beast, Peter Howard, pages 110 and 118-119.

      "Christ or anti-Christ"... That doesn't leave much room in the middle, does it?

    • "Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists."
      Acting President G. W. Bush has repeatedly declared that the world was either "with us or against us" in his war on terrorism that he launched after the September 11 attacks.
      Note that George Bush didn't give the rest of the world any choice in the means, strategies, or tactics that they may choose to use in their wars against terrorism (which some of them have been fighting for many years). Everybody was supposed to just follow Bush's orders and attack Iraq or else they weren't "with us".

    • Likewise, our Fearless Leader said of his war against Iraq:
            This will not be a campaign of half measures.
      G. W. Bush, 21 March 2003.

    • And Bush creates a false choice with this statement:
            "When it comes to a choice between defending America or believing the words of a madman, I will always defend America."
      G. W. Bush, July 2004.

      Who was the madman?
      • Hans Blick (the United Nations weapons inspector) when he said that there were no Weapons of Mass Destruction in Iraq?
      • The 9-11 Commission when it declared that there was no connection between Saddam Hussein and the 9-11 terrorist attack?

    • Enron came up with a great choice for its some of its employees:
            "Either help us to cook the books so that the CEO Jeffrey Skilling gets the numbers that he wants, or else you are a coward who doesn't have the guts to play with the Big Boys, and you aren't a team player."

    Alcoholics Anonymous and Narcotics Anonymous give us many more examples of the either/or technique:

    • "Either you will totally abstain from drinking alcohol for the rest of your life, or else you will drink maniacally, consuming such huge amounts that you will die drunk in a gutter."

    • "Either totally abstain from all drugs, even the ones the doctor gives you, or else you will be shoving a needle in your arm next week."

    • "Either totally abstain from all medications, even the ones the doctor gives you, or your recovery isn't complete — you aren't really sober. Meds still the small quiet voice of God."

    • 'Either you are a true believer or else you are an atheist': According to Bill Wilson, if you won't completely accept all of his dogmatic religious beliefs, then you must be a disgusting agnostic or an atheist. No middle ground or independent thinking is allowed — it's literally all or nothing:

      "When we became alcoholics, crushed by a self-imposed crisis we could not postpone or evade, we had to fearlessly face the proposition that either God is everything or else He is nothing. God either is, or He isn't. What was our choice to be?"
       The Big Book, 3rd Edition, William G. Wilson, We Agnostics, Page 53.

    • "It's Alcoholics Anonymous — or else!"     (A.A. Big Book, 3rd Edition, page 378.)

    • "God has either removed your husband's liquor problem or He has not."     (A.A. Big Book, 3rd & 4th Edition, page 120.)

    • Bill Wilson says that alcoholics must practice the A.A. religion or else they will die:

      "To be doomed to an alcoholic death or to live on a spiritual basis are not always easy alternatives to face."
       The Big Book, William G. Wilson, page 44.

      Actually, they are not alternatives at all. There is a third choice: just quit drinking, and live a healthy, happy, and sane life without a cult religion.

    • "Either you are dealing with a man who can and will get well or you are not. If not, why waste time with him?"
       The Big Book, 3rd Edition, Henry Parkhurst, Chapter 10, To Employers, page 142.

    • "None of us in Alcoholics Anonymous is normal. Our abnormality compels us to go to AA... We all go because we need to. Because the alternative is drastic, either A.A. or death."
       Delirium Tremens, Stories of Suffering and Transcendence, Ignacio Solares, Hazelden, 2000, page 27.

    • "Either work a strong program or else your fate will be jails, institutions, or death." (Popular A.A. slogan.)

    • "Work the Steps or Die!" — (Popular A.A. slogan.)

    • "Even if you abstain from drinking alcohol, you must still practice Bill Wilson's Twelve Steps all of the time, or else you will turn into a dry drunk, a person who acts just like an obnoxious drunkard even when sober."

    • "You must be willing to go to any lengths to recover from alcoholism", or else "you aren't really trying."
      (A.A. Big Book, 3rd Edition, pages 58 and XX.)

    • Bill Wilson said of alcoholics:
      "Either we insist upon dominating the people we know, or we depend on them for far too much."
      "Either we ... tried to play God and dominate those about us, or we ... insisted on being overdependent on them."
       (Not-God, Ernest Kurtz, page 125.)

    • A.A. defenders say, "You can't criticize our program unless you have a perfect, fool-proof, never-fails program of your own to offer as an alternative."
      Translation: "Either show us a perfect program of your own design, or else accept our goofy program."

    • A.A. promoters ask,
      "Which would you rather get treatment and advice from — your old drinking buddies, or AA members?"
       (For me, the answer is, "Neither.")

    • And even people who are trying to be objective can get caught in traps:

      "Either addiction is a disease and addicts are powerless over their addictions, or else addiction is a choice and addicts can stop any time they want to."

      Such an argument ignores the middle possibility: that physical addiction to a chemical really messes with the addict's mind and makes quitting extremely difficult (but not impossible). Sometimes, it is true that an addict can quit any time he wants to — he just cannot "want to" intensely enough to overcome the urges, the cravings, the crazyness, and the pain that inevitably accompanies withdrawal. (That is, he can't "want to enough" until something extreme happens to motivate him, like getting sick unto death, nearly dying, or seeing a friend die.)


  • False Dichotomy

    The False Dichotomy technique is very similar to the Either/Or technique. A dichotomy is the division of something into two pieces. A false dichotomy is an attempt to divide something with a false dividing line, like:

    1. Some people vote for God, and some people vote Democratic.
    2. Some people support the troops, while others want to end the war.
    3. Some people support President Bush, while others are not so patriotic.
    4. Unwanted fertilized human eggs should be adopted, not used for stem cell research.
        {That statement implies that it is an either/or choice, and ignores the fact that there are 400,000 unwanted embryos in freezers around the U.S.A., extras left over from in vitro fertization procedures, and very, very, very few of them will ever get adopted and become "Snowflake Babies". So far, only 81 of them have ever been adopted. There really are not a lot of women around who are begging the doctors to shove somebody else's fertilized egg into their wombs. There are more than enough unwanted frozen embryos to go around, and the sad truth is that almost all of those embryos will end up getting flushed down the drain after they have sat in the freezer for too long. They get freezer burn too, you know.}

    Another very common false dichotomy is: "Do you believe in God or evolution?"
    But if you believe that evolution was God's method of creating us, then there is no conflict between science and religion. Yes there is a God, and yes, evolution is true.

    The only conflict is between modern observations of reality and the superstitions of some ill-educated Israeli goat-herders who happened to live in the Sinai Desert 4000 years ago. But what did they know? They thought that the Earth was flat, and that the Firmament was a black dome over the Earth, to which all of the stars were glued. (Read the beginning of Genesis, and the part of Revelations where the Lord rolls up the Firmament and takes it away.)

    George Bush uses the false dichotomy technique constantly, framing an argument as a choice between two irrelevant things. While talking about the armed insurgents in Iraq, he said that they had to "choose between freedom or a return to darkness." (23 Aug 2005). The insurgents are not opposed to freedom. They are opposed to the occupation of their country by the United States Army. In fact, those insurgents want to be even freer than they are now, so that they can do whatever they want to do without interference from Americans.

    Recently, Tom Cruise appeared on television to promote the movie War of the Worlds. Somehow, the interview morphed into a tirade against modern psychiatry, and criticism of psychiatrists for giving tranquilizers to adults and psychotropic drugs to children. He voiced many bitter denunciations of modern psychiatry. Cruise claimed that "You don't know the history of psychiatry like I do." Cruise also said that he believes that Scientology offers a valid alternative to current psychiatric practices.

    But Tom Cruise is making the whole issue into a false Either/Or choice — a false dichotomy. Is isn't EITHER modern psychiatry is right, OR Scientology is right. Cruise ignores the obvious possibility that both could be wrong:

    • Some psychiatrists are very much at fault for prescribing entirely too many medications — especially Ritalin — to children just because they are high-energy little live-wires (which a lot of healthy children are). Sitting still in a classroom all day long, year after year, is downright unnatural and unhealthy, and drugging children to make them be quiet is despicable.

    • AND Scientology is at fault for being a complete fraud and cruel rip-off — just organized crime masquerading as a healing group.

    Bill Wilson's favorite false dichotomy was to divide people into those "faithful" people who believed the crazy dogmatic things that he was preaching, and the "atheists and agnostics" who didn't.

    And, some alcoholics accepted all of Bill's bull, while others were "unreasoningly prejudiced".

    And then A.A. teaches us that there are:
          1) those good A.A. members who Keep Coming Back to more A.A. meetings and Work The Steps in all of their affairs; and
          2) those unfortunates who will die drunk in a gutter.

    And,
          1) Good A.A. members are able to grasp a lifestyle that requires "rigorous honesty" (like Fake It Till You Make It and Act As If), while
          2) Non-members are "constitutionally incapable of being honest with themselves.   ...   They seem to have been born that way."


  • The Enemy Of My Enemy Is My Friend
    This is another kind of false dichotomy — an attempt to divide people into just two camps or sides or causes.

    Variations:

    • "The enemy of bad must be good."
    • "Those who are opposed to bad must be good."
    • "If a bad man hates me, then that proves that I am good."
    • "If a very bad man is opposed to what Joe is doing, then Joe must good, and Joe must be doing good things."
    • "The friend of my enemy is also my enemy."
    • "If I am opposed to something bad, then I must be good."


    Heinrich Himmler and two other S.S. officers collecting wildflowers for a little girl that he is going to visit.
    Those are obviously false assumptions, fraught with dangers. Nobody is absolutely bad, or absolutely good, so their enemy cannot be absolutely the opposite, either. Even Heinrich Himmler, the man who personally managed the halocaust that murdered 6 million Jews, had a soft spot in his heart for pretty little girls, and he doted on them and would pick wild flowers for them. But that didn't make those little girls bad, or our enemies.

    Adolf Hitler hated Joe Stalin, and was totally opposed to what Joe was doing, but that didn't make Stalin a good guy. Both Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin were world-class murdering monsters.

    Peter Howard used this technique to try to claim that the Oxford Group / Moral Re-Armament organization was good. He claimed that he had a secret Gestapo report on the Oxford Groups that the Gestapo had printed during World War II, which condemned the Oxford Groups as a dangerous influence, and ordered Gestapo agents to watch them closely. Thus, Howard concluded, the Oxford Groups must be virtuous, and the allegations that the Oxford Groups were essentially a fascist cult religion must be false. That is bad logic. The leader of the Gestapo, Heinrich Himmler, was against all Christian churches, because they encouraged people to be loyal to something other than Adolf Hitler. Also, Himmler dismissed all of Christianity as a "Jewish" religion, and wanted to stamp it out and return to ancient paganism. So Himmler was wary of the Oxford Groups just because they said that they were Christian (which they were not, really, in the final analysis).

    Scientology routinely uses a variation on this tactic. Scientology opposes the use of all psychiatric drugs and medications, claiming that Scientology procedures are the only valid treatment for psychiatric problems. Scientologists especially like to complain about children being overmedicated with harmful drugs like Ritalin. Like most successful Big Lies, there is a grain of truth in such complaints. It is despicable to overmedicate children and dope them out just because they are energetic little live wires who don't want to sit still in classrooms when the sun is out and it's a beautiful day outside. But Scientology way overdoes it in opposing all psychiatric medications. And then they use the logical fallacy of "we oppose something bad so that proves that we are good."

    And then they go on and on, denouncing drug after drug, finding fault with every tranquilizer and anti-psychotic around, picketing and warning against Zoloft, Paxil, Luvox, Celexa, Lexapro, Seroxat, Prozac, Effextor, etc., and all the while claiming that they great because they are saving people from the bad psychiatrists. And the more they can find wrong with medications or psychiatrists, the more convinced they are that they are right about everything.


  • "Hobson's Choice" or Alternative Advance
    Provide two or more choices which do not cover the range of possibilities, but which only reflect essentially the same proposition.
    A Jehovah's Witness recruiter may say,
    "If you don't agree with me, let's study this book I've brought along. If you do agree, let's go to the Kingdom Hall this Sunday."
    Both choices expose you to indoctrination in their religion.10 One obvious logical choice is missing:
    "If we don't agree about religion, we can just drop the matter and part company amicably."


  • "Somebody's got it worse"
    When people complain about something, tell them that they should be happy with the situation because somebody else has it worse.

    • "You should be happy to have Mr. Smith as your slavedriver. He only beats you once a day. Those poor bastards under Mr. Jones get beaten three times a day."
    • "You are lucky to have those shiny new chains and shackles. Look at those poor slobs over there, with rusty old chains. Do you know how those things chafe on wrists and ankles?"
    • "You should be happy to be working for a dollar an hour. The boss is being generous. The guys in Bungeria only get 25 cents an hour."


  • Faulty Syllogism
    A Faulty Syllogism is bad logic, pure and simple — a bad chain of logical deduction.

    Technically, a proper syllogism is an argument, the conclusion of which is supported by two premises, of which one (major premise) contains the term (major term) that is the predicate of the conclusion, and the other (minor premise) contains the term (minor term) that is the subject of the conclusion; common to both premises is a term (middle term) that is excluded from the conclusion. A typical form is: "All A is B; all B is C; therefore all A is C."23

    Whew! A simpler and clearer example of a good syllogism is like this:

    "All Pekinese ducks are white.
    Mister Lee is a Pekinese duck.
    Therefore Mister Lee is white."

    A faulty syllogism might be something like this:
    "You think as much as college professors, and college professors don't make any money, so if you keep on thinking we won't have any money!"

    Another rather popular faulty syllogism is this:

    1. A young, aspiring poet has his poems panned, trashed, or ignored by the critics.
    2. That young poet recalls that many of the greatest poets were also panned, trashed, or ignored by the critics when they were young.
    3. "Therefore," the young poet concludes, "I must also be one of the great poets."

    Obviously, the flaw in the logic is to overlook the simple truth that for every young genius artist who gets panned by the critics, there are a hundred incompetents who really should be trashed by the critics.

    A variation on that faulty syllogism is:
          "Jimi Hendrix, Janice Joplin, John Bellushi and James Dean all died young, and they were all great artists. So if I die young — go out in a blaze of glory like a shooting star — then I will also be remembered as a great artist."
     NOT!
     You have to be a great artist to be remembered as one. Dying young does not make one a great artist.

    And memory is selective. What you don't remember is all of the non-greats who died young. What were their names?

    And conversely, what about all of the great old artists? What about the Rolling Stones and the Grateful Dead, and B. B. King and Chuck Berry, and Robin Williams and Dustin Hoffman and and Frank Sinatra, and George Burns and Bob Newhart and W. C. Fields? They didn't have to die young to achieve greatness, did they?
     (And that was a demonstration of the debating technique called "Refute by Example"...)


  • Non Sequitur
    Non sequitur means "it does not follow" — the logic is broken. If there is a chain of argument, every link in the chain must work.

    A non sequitur can be something like this:
    "I supported terrorists today. I did just a little bit of dope. I thought I was just having fun, but I gave money to terrorists when I did that."

    That is totally bogus logic. Colombian drug lords did not bring down the World Trade Center on September 11; some crazy oil-rich Saudi Arabians did. A good chain of logic is like this:

    "I supported terrorists today. I thought I was just having fun, but I gave money to terrorists. I drove my car down to the gas station and filled up the tank, and went cruising. But the gas station sent the money to Bush's and Cheney's friends' oil companies, who sent the money to Saudi Arabia, which gave the money to the bin Laden family, who gave some of the money to Osama, who gave it to his terrorist guys. So I supported terrorists when I bought gasoline today."12

    Likewise, this old argument is completely illogical: At the dinner table, a mother tells her child, "Finish your peas. There are children starving in China."
    A precocious child will answer, "So send my peas to China."

    A commercial on PBS for a big financial company tells the story of a couple of university professors who put their children through college. The wife stops the narrator and says:
          "You don't build up a big nest egg on a couple of teachers' salaries. You need a plan and a financial consultant who isn't afraid to roll up his sleeves."
    That is nonsense, another non sequitur. Obviously, unless that couple robbed a bank or inherited a fortune or took bribes from their students for good grades, they really did build up their big nest egg on a couple of teachers' salaries.

    Advertisements for some cigarettes brag that the tobacco is completely natural and free from additives and chemicals, so it is somehow less harmful. That is completely non-sensical logic. Tobacco in any form is poisonous, and tobacco kills 430,000 Americans per year, regardless of what chemicals it may or may not have added to it.

    Frank Buchman's Oxford Group cult came up with this jewel:
    'I most hate self, because "I" is the middle letter of SIN.'
     (By that brain-damaged Oxford Group logic — '"I" is the middle letter of SIN' — they should have also hated Saints and Salvation, because "S" is the first letter of SIN. And perhaps they should also hate Nuts and Noodles, because "N" is the third letter of SIN.)

    Another Non Sequitur, or piece of broken logic, is Carl Sagan's old favorite:
    "There aren't any aliens out there. We have been looking for them for 50 years, and we haven't seen any. We would have seen them or made contact or something by now, if they existed."
     Carl Sagan's answer is: "Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence."
    In particular, we have explored only the most minuscule part of our Universe, maybe something like only a quintillionth of one percent or less. Even our best telescopes cannot even see the planets orbiting the nearest neighboring stars, so how could we see their spaceships? (Really. We compute the existence of distant planets by watching how the stars wobble a tiny bit as the invisible planets orbit them.) It's outrageously premature to declare that there is nobody out there, just because we haven't seen them yet.

    It's kind of like going down to the seashore, and sucking up a drop of water in an eye-dropper, and then looking very closely at the drop, and announcing, "I don't see any whales in there. Obviously, whales don't really exist."

    Another popular one is: "Drafting people and forcing them to serve in the army isn't slavery because everybody is subjected to it."
     Of course it's slavery. Whether something is slavery or not has nothing to do with how many people are enslaved.

    In a TV commercial for the Turbo-Tax® computer program (2004.01.20), the husband asks, "What if we made a mistake?"
    His wife confidently answers, "The calculations are guaranteed accurate."
    That is brain-damaged logic, a real non-sequitur. The husband asked "What if we made a mistake?", not "What if the computer program made a mistake?"...
    Sure, the computer's basic calculations like addition and multiplication will be accurate, but that doesn't guarantee that the humans haven't messed everything up. You know the old saying, "Garbage In, Garbage Out".
    The Turbo-Tax guys cannot guarantee against human error. The reason that it is so hard to make things fool-proof is because fools are so damned clever at thinking of new ways to screw things up.

    American Express has a commercial on TV that is similarly illogical. A man who declares that he works as a waiter in a restaurant and also coaches childrens' basketball explains that,

    "I want my players to develop as athletes.
    "I want my players to develop as students.
    "My life isn't just about playing games.
    "That's why my card is American Express."
    What?! There is no logic to that. He has not established any basis for choosing an American Express card over a VISA or Mastercharge. He has not introduced a single fact to support his sentiments. He might as well be saying,
    "My life isn't just about playing games.
    "That's why I drink only expensive imported single-malt scotch."

    Crazy anti-environment people who are also religious fundamentalists declare that warning messages about destruction of the environment are untrue because...
          "We cannot destroy the world any more than we were capable of creating it."
    That's a non-sequitur — completely illogical nonsense. Of course we can destroy things that we did not create. Anybody who picks up a gun and kills someone who isn't one of his own children is destroying something that he didn't create. Anybody who is stupid enough to start a forest fire and burn down a forest is destroying something that he didn't create.
    Those fundamentalists are trying to imply that only God can destroy this world (so we are safe from such danger), but that is obviously not true at all. That is just so much wishful thinking. Just ask the survivors of Hiroshima.

    Curiously, that goofy non-sequitur is almost a word-for-word repetition of the illogical argument that was parroted by the true believers in Frank Buchman's Nazi-sympathizing Moral Re-Armament cult back in the 1930s and '40s. They declared that without hearing "The Voice" that Frank Buchman heard (which they claimed was the Voice of God) —

    Without it we are no more capable of saving the world than we were capable of creating it in the first place."
     Experiment With God; Frank Buchman Reconsidered, Gösta Ekman, 1971, page 84.

    In another brain-damaged non sequitur, G. W. Bush tells the troops: "It is wonderful to bravely, patriotically, serve your country and fight terrorism. I am committed to fighting terrorism. Some of you may die in this war, but that is a sacrifice that I am willing to make. Bring 'em on!"

    The supporters of George W. Bush insist that having investigations to discover the truth behind Bush's many, many mistakes, deceptions, and false statements regarding the war in Iraq would not be good for America:
    "We can't discover the truth right now; we are in a war against terrorism."
     That is a non sequitur.

    Recently (Nov. 22, 2006) the elder George Bush was in Dubai, where he was harshly criticized for the foreign policy of the United States and the military adventurism of his son. Papa Bush responded, "How come everybody wants to come to the United States if the United States is so bad?" That is a non sequitur. There are many good reasons for wanting to come to the United States which do not imply approval of George W.'s bombing and invasion of Afghanistan and Iraqi, or his policy of unquestioning support of Israel. One good reason for coming to the USA is to get away from American bombing in Afghanistan or Iraq. Another good reason is to get away from American-trained death squads in military dictatorships around the world.

    A cult old-timer declares, "I dedicated my life to the cult. I worked hard for 20 years to promote it and recruit new members. Therefore I am noble and selfless and the cult is wonderful, and we all live lives of self-sacrifice to help others."

    This non sequitur might be called "proof by delusion": "I saw lights, so it was a spiritual experience."

    Today, commercials on the radio tell you that you need to join Al-Anon or Ala-Teen "to get help" because Daddy drinks too much alcohol —

    "I don't know who he is any more. I don't know who I'll meet — my husband or somebody else..."
    "We are the family and friends of alcoholics. We may be different, but we have one thing in common: We want our lives back."
    The broken logic there is: "Daddy drinks too much alcohol, and living with him is a nightmare, so you need to go join the 12-Step cult religion where you will be told to confess all of your sins and find your part in it and quit being so selfish and quit being such a domineering bitch."
     That's a real non sequitur — there is no logic to it.

    For another example of bad logic:

    Both of the co-founders of Alcoholics Anonymous, William G. Wilson and Dr. Robert Smith, were very heavy smokers. So were most of the other early A.A. members. Bill Wilson often said that members did not need to quit smoking; that smoking was okay, and could even help (in spite of the fact that it was killing him). A coffee pot and lots of ash trays were considered the standard essential equipment for any A.A. meeting. Therefore, smoking lots and lots of tobacco, and drinking lots and lots of coffee, just like Bill W. and Dr. Bob did, is perfectly okay, and it may even help you to quit drinking alcohol, just like they did.

    (It may also help you to quit breathing, just like they did, but that's another story...)

    Another brain-dead non-sequitur:

    "When I went to an A.A. meeting, I was amazed to see that they were all just like me. They really understood. For the first time, I felt like I belonged. Therefore, Bill Wilson was a total genius and right about everything, and the Twelve Steps are the One And Only True Path to Sobriety, Serenity, and God."

    A very common argument that one often hears around the "recovery community" is descriptions of the horrors of alcoholism and drug addiction being used to glorify Alcoholics Anonymous and Narcotics Anonymous. The logic is: "Alcoholism is bad, so A.A., which is intended to save alcoholics, is good."

    But that is just another non-sequitur. That is no more logical than saying, "Alcoholism is bad, so Scientology is good."
    Scientology also claims to have a never-fails cure for alcoholism and drug addiction — an allegedly-independent organization called Narconon. And their magic answer is: "Give all of your money to Scientology for more 'auditing', and they will fix your mind."

    Just because something claims to have good intentions does not make it good. As one wit declared,

    The opposite of 'good' is good intentions.


  • Post Hoc, Ergo Propter Hoc — "It happened after 'X', so it was caused by 'X'."
    Post hoc, ergo propter hoc means "it happened after..., so it was caused by...". That implies a cause-and-effect relationship where none may exist.

    The classic example of this is, "The rooster's crowing makes the sun rise: First the rooster crows, and then the sun comes up over the horizon, so the rooster's crowing makes the sun rise."

    A few more examples of false logic:

    • A bunch of teenage girls took sex education classes in high school, and then got pregnant. Therefore, sex education classes make teenage girls get pregnant. The classes give the girls ideas.
      The fact that young females have been managing to get pregnant for hundreds of millions of years without any formal education — using only on-the-job training — is considered irrelevant.

    • Tommy says, "I was sick. I drank a whole bottle of Dr. Philo T. Farnsworth's Magic Rejuvenation Elixir, and immediately got better. So that Elixir really works good."
      Tommy ignores the simple fact that most people routinely spontaneously recover from all of their illnesses (except perhaps the last one) without any Magic Elixir, so he has no way of knowing whether the Magic Elixir was responsible for his recovery.

    • Sam won the lottery, and immediately went on a huge outrageous binge of celebration that ended in him dying drunk. He had all of the free time and money he needed to drink himself to death, and he did. Therefore, winning the lottery is a terrible thing that will make you die drunk.
      (Likewise, success is also a dangerous thing that will probably ruin you, so don't succeed in life.)

    • Joe went to A.A. meetings, and quit drinking. So, going to the meetings caused Joe to quit drinking.

    • Henry did the Twelve Steps, and quit drinking. He stopped drinking after he did his Fifth Step. That proves it: doing the Fifth Step makes people quit drinking.

    • Jackie relapsed after he did his Twelfth Step. So did Paddy and Lillian and Ebby and Johnny. That proves it: doing the Twelfth Step makes people relapse and die drunk.


  • The Norm of Reciprocity
    The norm of reciprocity is a technique that exploits people's natural tendency to want to repay debts. I know that sounds unbelievably Pollyannaish, because you might think that most people want to avoid paying debts, but no matter how cynical you may feel about the human race, people do have a basically cooperative nature, especially in face-to-face relationships. It dates from our days as primitive members of tribes, just cavemen, who helped each other to survive. When one person does a favor for another, the other feels indebted, and wants to return the favor to even out the score. Even today, there are still a few remaining tribes who have an economic system that is just a complex web of traded favors and debts, and they all manage to remember who owes what to whom...

    The Hari Krishnas discovered that they could increase their haul of money from airports by giving away flowers. That is, if they just tried to shake travelers down for donations, they got rejected a lot. But when they gave travelers a flower, "...because we love you, and you are so beautiful...", and then hit up the traveler for a donation, they got a lot more money. The act of giving the flower made the traveler feel indebted and embarrassed, and vulnerable to the request for money.

    Then they used the same technique for selling their Krishna books in airports: "Give" the book to the traveler "because he looks so enlightened, like someone intelligent enough to appreciate that material", and then hit him up for a big donation to finance the printing and distribution of that cosmic wisdom...

    The one time they pulled that stunt on me, I had just spent my last dollar on the airplane ticket. When I finally managed to convince the woman who was working on me that I really didn't have even just a twenty left in my pockets, she gave me a look of disgust, angrily grabbed the book back out of my hands, and stomped off in frustration... So much for how intelligent and enlightened I look... Oh well.


  • Guilt Induction
    Guilt is an especially powerful tool for manipulating people's minds.

    A late-night TV infomercial says:

    "Don't you think it's time you gave your family all of the things that they deserve? Buy this get-rich-quick scheme right now."

    Another commercial that sells a panic button service has a woman saying,

    "What if something happened to my mother? I don't think I could forgive myself. I'll buy her a medical alert service."
    They imply that you are neglecting your mother if you don't buy their service, and they make you afraid of what might go wrong. That commercial cleverly combines guilt induction with fear-mongering, so they are using two propaganda techniques on your mind at once.

    People who feel guilty are far more likely to comply with a request than they would be if they didn't feel guilty. Thus, making people believe that they have hurt you, and then pressing a request for them to do something (which offers them a feeling that they can make amends by doing something for you) is an effective way to get people to do what you want.

    Guilt induction and self-criticism (confession) sessions formed the core of the Red Chinese brainwashing program, and they are still used by many cults. Edward Hunter wrote a beautiful book about the Red Chinese brainwashing that was done to the American, British, and other United Nations prisoners of war in North Korea during the Korean War. He explained the mechanics of "brainwashing" this way:

    The Reds had found that the easiest way to subdue any group of people was to give its members a guilt complex and then to lead them on from self-denunciation to self-betrayal. All that was required to put this across was a sufficiently heartless exploitation of the essential goodness in people, so that they would seek self-sacrifice to compensate for their feelings of guilt. The self-sacrifice obviously made available to them in this inside-out environment is some form of treason.
     Brainwashing, From Pavlov to Powers, Edward Hunter, page 169.

    So, first, the Communist guards would do something like make the prisoners feel guilty for being part of "a rich racist society where they never cared about the fate of the poor Negroes", and then the prisoners had to confess that in self-criticism sessions, and then the only way to atone for such sins was to love and praise the wonderful Chinese Communist society where everyone was equal (but some people were more equal than others).

    Margaret Thaler Singer also considered inducing "a sense of powerlessness, covert fear, guilt, and dependency" to be one of the five essential conditions for an effective mind-control or "brainwashing" program. The Red Chinese guards were able to accomplish that easily, because all of the prisoners were at the mercy of the guards, who could punish or kill them on a whim, or for no reason at all.

    Likewise, many religions and religious cults use guilt to manipulate their members. Frank Buchman's Oxford Group cult refined guilt induction to an art and a science — "The Five C's" — and used it as a standard part of their recruiting scheme. The Oxford Groups also induced a sense of powerlessness in their victims with the doctrine that "Everyone has been defeated by sin, and is powerless over it. Everyone is insane (except Frank Buchman and his lieutenants). Only 'Surrender to God' [Read: surrender to Frank Buchman's cult] can restore one to sanity."
    All of Margaret Thaler Singer's five essential conditions for an effective mind-control or "brainwashing" program were present in the Oxford Groups.

    Guilt induction is also a big part of the Alcoholics Anonymous program. The A.A. founders Bill Wilson and Dr. Robert Smith learned it from the Oxford Groups when they were members of that cult. Seven of the Twelve Steps, Steps Four through Ten, dwell on sins, "defects of character", "moral shortcomings", offenses, people we have harmed, and wrongs — "the exact nature of our wrongs." Good A.A. newcomers are supposed to do a "moral inventory" and list every sin they ever committed in their whole lives, and then confess it all to another A.A. member and God. Then they are supposed to make another list of everybody they ever hurt, offended, or pissed off, and they have to go apologize or somehow "make amends." And then they are supposed to repeat that whole rigamarole for the rest of their lives. Such constant guilt induction can be very harmful and psychologically damaging.

    (And Alcoholics Anonymous also induces a sense of powerlessness with Steps One and Two:
    "1. We admitted we were powerless over alcohol — that our lives had become unmanageable."
    "2. [We] Came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity."
    Implying that you are insane and you cannot heal yourself. Somebody else has to manage your life for you and restore you to sanity.
         With the guilt induction and inducing a sense of powerlessness, we have two of the most important ingredients for a working brainwashing program.)

    Bill Wilson's mania for inducing guilt in others was so intense that he even tried to make people feel guilty for not being sinners. On page 66 of Bill's second book, Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions, Bill described all of the disgusting ways that sinners will sin and then deny it and try to avoid confessing their sins. Then Bill wrote:

    We who have escaped these extremes are apt to congratulate ourselves. Yet can we? After all, hasn't it been self-interest, pure and simple, that has enabled most of us to escape? Not much spiritual effort is involved in avoiding excesses which will bring us punishment anyway.
     Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions, William G. Wilson, page 66.

    So if you don't commit a lot of sins and crimes, then you should feel guilty for being selfish and pursuing "self-interest, pure and simple":
    — You aren't really a good person, and you aren't really spiritual.
    — You are just selfishly avoiding punishment.
    Poor insane old Bill Wilson really did hate human nature. No wonder he was a chronic depressive.

    That's also a good example of a double-bind — You are damned if you do, and damned if you don't:

    • If you commit a bunch of sins and crimes, it's because you are selfish and unspiritual.
    • If you don't commit a bunch of sins and crimes, it's because you are selfish and unspiritual and just selfishly avoiding punishment.
    Either way, you are too selfish to be "spiritual." So you should start doing Bill Wilson's Twelve Steps, listing and confessing all of your sins and feeling guilty about everything.

    But the best example of Bill Wilson's crazy mania for guilt induction has to be this jewel where Mr. Wilson declared that we were guilty of all of the Seven Deadly Sins, including Sloth, because we work hard:

    And how often we work hard with no better motive than to be secure and slothful later on — only we call it "retiring."
     Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions, William G. Wilson, page 67.

    So, working hard now, so that we can retire later, in our old age, with some financial security, is contemptible "slothful" behavior, is it?
    Is there anything more ridiculous that Deacon Wilson could possibly try to make us feel guilty about?


  • Play On Emotions, Appeal To Emotions
    We have lots of emotions that can be manipulated by a clever propagandist. We've already mentioned guilt, which is in a category of its own. But there are plenty more to exploit, like: Fear, lust for power, hope, pride, vanity, egotism, insecurity, ambition, machismo, "patriotism", greed, love, loneliness, nostalgia, religiosity, sentimentality, and lust for sex.

    Fear, especially fear of death, is a particularly powerful emotion, one that can be manipulated to good advantage:

    • A preacher who wants to increase attendance at his church advertises: "Don't wait for the hearse to take you to church."

    • A cult recruiting leaflet asks, "If you died this very moment, do you know where you would spend eternity? If you do not, there is an answer for you. It is ______." (Fill in the blank with the name of your favorite panacea...)

    • When San Francisco residents suggested getting their own municipal power company so that they could stop paying for enormously over-priced electricity from PG&E and Enron, they were told, "It's too risky, too costly."
      (How could it possibly be more risky and more expensive than handing your wallet to Enron?)

    • Someone who wishes to stop a public debate declares, "The debate must be cancelled, both because it might offend people and because it could stir up racial hatred. There is a potential threat to public order." (BBC News, Monday, 26 November 2007, "The limits to freedom of speech")

    • Spread Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt (FUD).
      Microsoft is a past master of this stunt: "If you use some software that was written by someone besides Microsoft, it might not work right with your Micro$uck operating system. It might mess up your machine. You might lose files... We might even have deliberately built in some secret bugs and booby-traps and bombs that will get triggered if we see you using a competitor's software in 'our system'..."

    • Promote conspiracy theories. "They" are all out to get you. (And a paranoid book of disorganized 'facts' proves it.)

    • After September 11, 2001, our Commander-in-Empty-Flight-Suit Bush declared,
      "Oceans no longer protect us"
      as if the oceans protected us from the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, or from the first World Trade Center bombing in 1993...

    • Alcoholics Anonymous often uses the threat of death to manipulate people:
      • A.A. teaches that failure to follow the A.A. program precisely will result in relapses and drinking yourself to death.

      • A.A. also teaches that you will either turn into a "dry drunk" and act crazy, or relapse and die, if you don't "work a strong program" by practicing Bill Wilson's Twelve Steps "in all of your affairs."

      • Bill Wilson constantly threatened people with death unless they followed his instructions exactly:

        Unless each A.A. member follows to the best of his ability our suggested [my required] Twelve Steps to recovery, he almost certainly signs his own death warrant.
         Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions, William Wilson, page 174.

      • They say that if you won't make A.A. or N.A. your new life, that your fate is "Jails, Institutions, or Death."

      • Failure to "Work A Strong Program" in A.A. will end in "Jails, Institutions, or Death".

      • Step Eleven teaches us to practice meditation and prayer until we hear God talking to us, but then Bill Wilson tells us not to trust our own minds when we hear God talking — that it is "dangerous" to "go it alone" and could result in "tragic" results — so we should take our received "Guidance from God" to our sponsors for their approval, and let them rewrite God's messages:

        If all our lives we had more or less fooled ourselves, how could we now be so sure that we weren't still self-deceived?   ...   Going it alone in spiritual matters is dangerous.   ...   Surely then, a novice ought not lay himself open to the chance of making foolish, perhaps tragic, blunders in this fashion. While the comment or advice of others may be by no means infallible, it is likely to be far more specific than any direct guidance we may receive while we are still so inexperienced in establishing contact with a Power greater than ourselves.
         Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions, William G. Wilson, pages 59-60.

    But there are also plenty of other emotions to exploit:

    • Arouse Resentments.
      Adolf Hitler found a great way to get the German people on his side: Claim that Germany had been attacked by the Jews, and that the Jews had caused World War One, and that the Jews were exploiting the German economy after the war, which was supposedly why all of the German people were poor and unemployed, which aroused feelings of paranoia, resentment, and anger. And then it didn't matter whether it was the British and French, or the Jews or Communists, or Czechoslovakia or Poland, they had all supposedly attacked Germany or German people in one way or another, at some time or other, so it was supposedly okay for Hitler to strike back in revenge, which he did with a vengeance. That made Hitler look like a great leader, someone who was very strong on national defense while he invaded foreign countries.

      Fat old Nazi Reichmarshall Hermann Goering said,

      "Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country."

      Oddly enough, that is the same technique that George W. Bush and Carl Rove have been using on the American people to promote the war in Iraq. Did Rove study the Nazi propaganda techniques?

      Alcoholics Anonymous often arouses feelings of self-pity and resentment by complaining about how unfairly alcoholics have been treated for so long:

            Psychiatrist Leo Hennigan, a former alcoholic and author of the book A Conspiracy of Silence: Alcoholism, says that the battles he fought in the South Pacific during World War II were nothing compared to the personal war that he fought with alcohol for 15 years. Hennigan blames this long siege on the medical community's disinterest. It wasn't until 1956 that the American Medical Association labeled the condition a disease rather than immoral behavior, and even now, after four years of training at most medical schools, doctors receive only two hours of instruction about alcoholism. He also blames societal attitudes that reflect people's misunderstanding about the disease. Most don't realize that the nature of alcoholism causes the alcoholic to drink because he must, not because he wants to. Society is also largely unaware of alcoholism's genetic predisposition. In Hennigan's family, for example, three maternal uncles died before 50 of the affliction.
            When Hennigan takes issue with Alcoholics Anonymous, it has nothing to do with its tremendous 75% rate of rehabilitation. Instead, he argues that AA relies too much on the "anonymous" part of its title. When the organization began in the 1930s, the group was small and needed the shield of anonymity, but not so today. "If AA's anonymity is scrapped, the group's ranks will swell by many millions and greatly assuage the effects of alcoholism in America." The most therapeutic role that AA can deliver is to allow struggling members to be encouraged by others who have "been there, done that." In fact, it was the testimony of a recovered alcoholic that influenced the AA founders to begin the organization.
            When alcoholics are no longer anonymous, Hennigan contends, the organization will finally fulfill the 12th step of the program which says: "Having had a spiritual awakening as the result of these steps, we tried to carry this message to alcoholics."
       "Alcoholism's nemesis", by Robert Selle. World & I magazine, Jun 2000 (Vol 15, No 6). Pages 62-65.

      • Oh those poor, hard-done-by long-suffering alcoholics. The doctors are stupid and don't know anything and don't care, and nobody understands alcoholism, and society's attitudes are all wrong. The only answer is to cry in your beer and go join a cult religion.

      • And that declared 75% success rate of Alcoholics Anonymous is a lie, so the author was assuming facts not in evidence. Bill Wilson was actually lying with qualifiers when made that claim — he only counted those people "who came to A.A. and really tried". (If they didn't quit drinking, then, in Bill Wilson's opinion, they didn't "really try".) Wilson wrote that lie in the forward to the second edition of the Big Book, and the A.A. true believers have been repeating it ever since, but it's still a lie. The truth is that even the two founders of Alcoholics Anonymous, Bill Wilson and Dr. Robert Smith, calculated that their success rate was a mere five percent — which is just the same as the success rate of people who do it alone, without Alcoholics Anonymous.

      • In this sentence, the author used the tricks of Assume Facts Not In Evidence and Assume The Major Premise:
        "Most don't realize that the nature of alcoholism causes the alcoholic to drink because he must, not because he wants to."
         No matter how many people "realize it" or don't realize it, the assumed "fact" is flat-out wrong, period. Alcoholics drink because they want to. Alcoholics have a choice. If alcoholics didn't have any control over their drinking, then they couldn't quit drinking. But they do quit, by the millions, and they do it without any cult "support group".

      • [Oh, by the way, the World & I magazine is a front for the Moonies. It is part of Rev. Sun Myung Moon's empire. That's why they publish goofy articles like that.]

    • Arouse 'Patriotism'.
      In the nineteen-sixties through the 'eighties, there was a Moral Re-Armament song-and-dance show called "Up With People", which featured squeaky-clean, well-shorn beautiful young people singing and dancing and waving the American flag in patriotic skits. Although the show never explicitly said that we should go over to the other side of the world and drop bombs on skinny, starving rice farmers in Viet Nam and kill about two million innocent civilians, that was the effective message, and that's what happened. All of that, just from appealing to "love of country", and "love of people" and "the American Way".

    • Arouse 'Love' and exploit peoples' loneliness.
      The Moonies (members of Rev. Sun Myung Moon's Unification Church) use "love bombing" to exploit the loneliness and horniness of new prospects:

      Basically I felt a great love and warmth from all sides and I couldn't understand why they were so loving and warm. Why were they so serving? At times I found it a bit oppressive, it was too much for me at some times. I couldn't understand why they were doing it because I'd never met Christians like that before. They were talking about changing the world. Other Christians always talk about the Bible and believing in Jesus Christ and believing faith would do it — and I believed that that wasn't going to do it at all.
       The Making Of A Moonie: Brainwashing Or Choice?, Eileen Barker, page 185.

      "Again, there is a strict segregation between the sisters' and brothers' sleeping and bathroom arrangements, but physical contact in the form of (albeit strictly platonic) hugging and hand-squeezing occurs frequently between the sexes. The guests may have their backs and shoulders rubbed during lectures (presumably to keep them awake) or at night (presumably to help them sleep). I received an expert massage from one young woman while she told me about her experiences when her mother, one of the most active anti-Unification campaigners in America, had attempted to have her deprogrammed."
       The Making Of A Moonie: Brainwashing Or Choice?, Eileen Barker, page 112.

      A further 'spontaneous' response, towards the end of the weekend, was to break into song:
           We love you, Eileen (or Johnathan, or Dave, or Jane),
           We love you more than anyone,
           We don't want you to leave us —
           And we don't mean maybe!
             The Making Of A Moonie: Brainwashing Or Choice?, Eileen Barker, page 113.

    • Alcoholics Anonymous also exploits people's feelings of loneliness or isolation:

      • "We offer you unconditional love and acceptance."
      • "Let us love you until you can love yourself."
      • "When we reached A.A., and for the first time in our lives stood among people who seemed to understand, the sense of belonging was tremendously exciting."
         Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions, William G. Wilson, page 57.


  • Ad Hominem, Launch Personal Attacks On Opponents
    When you can't refute factual arguments, kill the messenger. Have fun with character assassination. Attack the arguer and not the argument. Ad Hominem includes slurs, slander, libel, innuendo, baseless accusations, irrelevant criticism, groundless denunciations, and name-calling.

    For example,

    • "Maybe that book you quoted makes a good case, but I heard that the author is a drunk."
    • "I can't believe what you say because you're just an imperfect human being."
    • "You're just arguing to prove to your colleagues that you can change my mind."
    • "That came from a guy who has a bathtub in his basement."
    • "He still lives in his mother's house."
    • "You should learn to be more civil in your criticisms."
    • "You are just prejudiced. Who did you vote for in the last election?"
    • "You are just partisan."
    • "You are just trying to make us look bad."
    • "You are just an immature complainer."
    • "You are just feeling sorry for yourself."
    • "Don't take yourself so seriously."
    • "You are ugly, and your wife is even uglier."
    • "You have funny hair."
    • "You have bad taste in music."
    • "You are against God."
    • "You should be on the '10 Worst-Dressed People' list."
    • "It seems very unlikely that you wished that the Olympus E-3 camera was a better camera. You are only too happy to criticize the E-3." And dismiss criticism as invalid and "nit-picking": "Isn't all that excessive comparison and pixel-peeping going much too far for this forum?"
    • And, when you refuse to believe the lies of a thieving con artist, he says, "You have some trust issues that you need to work on."
    • When a black person or a long-haired old hippie argues that there is something wrong with a society that spends more money on jails and prisons than on schools, the neo-conservatives answer, "Oh, you're just worried about getting sent to prison yourself."

    A blogger described the behavior of Pentecostal recruiters who use the ad hominem technique on people who disagree with them:

    ...when a Pentecostal cannot get you to agree with his memorized slogans or his procedure to manipulate you into doing and thinking in his way, he will dispense with you as a corrupt, or even as an evil person. Furthermore, if his mind is working even at a deficient level of efficiency, and part of his mind can see that you have a valid point, he will immediately recognize your "logic" as a threat and he is likely to attack you personally, and accuse you of ulterior motives for holding such "logic." However, he cannot see that his response is not a rational response to a respectable argument, but a change in the context — he changes the subject from the topic at hand to you personally, and proceeds with this attack.

    This, I assert, is the basis of FRAUD.

    It is based upon a faulty system whereby the person is not bound by the ground rules of a logical system. They are not engaging in a debate or discussion with you; they are trying to manipulate you. They might try to deceive you into thinking that they are open to discussion or a respectable debate, but they are not; they are being deceitful, crafty, irrational, and devious. Again, go back and read what I described above. If they talk to you and then proceed to attack you personally instead of focusing upon the subject at hand, they are playing a manipulation game and not entering into a serious discussion. When they accuse you of bitterness without listening to your arguments, they are hustling you; the same goes for any other number of epithets they use to dismiss you and attack you personally, like backslider, reprobate, rebellious, etc.
     http://ex-pentecostal.blogspot.com/

    When Jesse Prince, a former leader of Scientology in Denmark, criticized the dishonest financial practices that he had seen in Scientology, a spokesman for Scientology answered,

    To make allegations about the church's finances now, Mr. Prince, who has not been a position of responsibility in the church for nearly 15 years, and who hasn't even worked for the church for more than 7 years, is, uh, very specious. He's not in any position to know.
     ARON MASON, in an interview, reprinted on the Rick Ross website
    http://www.rickross.com/reference/scientology/personal1.htm [Dead Link]

    Note that Mason did not actually deny or even answer Prince's statements about Scientology's history of financial dishonesty — Mason just implied that Prince didn't know what he was talking about because Prince couldn't know what the current facts were. That's a type of Ad Hominem attack.
    (It's also bad logic: "If you can't prove that I stole money this week, then what I might have stolen last year doesn't count." It's also the propaganda trick of Creating A Diversion — divert attention to a different time.)

    Sometimes ad hominem attacks can be quite subtle. When the Alaska oil pipeline was pierced by a bullet, 275,000 gallons of oil spilled out because the operators of the pipeline took several days to stop the leak. As you can imagine, some Alaskan citizens complained. Aleyesca, the pipeline operator, claimed that it had handled the accident in a competent manner, and that "The criticism came from a small group of critics who always criticize everything that we do."22
    That is a kind of ad hominem attack on critics.
    The oil company did not actually respond to the charges and accusations of incompetence. They did not explain why it took them several days to plug a single bullet hole. They merely attacked their critics, trying to assert that the criticism was invalid because it came from a small group of vocal critics.
    But the truth is: It does not matter whether the criticism comes from a small group of diligent watch-dog citizens or a large environmental protection agency — valid criticism is valid criticism, and incompetence is incompetence.

          You can use the Ad Hominem technique to defend Alcoholics Anonymous like this:
    If a critic says something like,
    "We have a lot of good, valid, scientific and medical studies that show that the Twelve Steps do not cause people to quit drinking or stay sober,"
     then you should respond with:

    • "Oh yeh? Well I hear that you are just an atheist and a liar, and crazy."
    • "You are just in it for the money."
    • "You are insane."
    • "You are in denial."
    • "You aren't an alcoholic, so you can't possibly know what you are talking about."
    • "And if you are an alcoholic, then you are just a dry drunk."
    • "You haven't been a member long enough to know anything."
    • "You just don't want to get sober."
    • "You are just unspiritual and don't want to Work The Steps yourself."
    • "You are against spiritual principles."
    • "You criticizing A.A. because you just want to drink."
    • "You don't know what you are talking about because you don't Work The Steps."
    • "You have a grudge against A.A., that's all..."
    • "Right now your mind is insane, and you can't tell the truth from the falsehood."
    • "You are just looking for an excuse to drink."
    • "You are angry."
    • "You have a 'resentment'."
    • "You don't understand A.A.."
    • "You don't understand A.A. spirituality because you are an atheist."
    • "You don't understand A.A. spirituality because you are a Christian."
    • "You don't understand A.A. spirituality because you aren't a member of A.A.."
    • "You think you know everything."
    • "We don't have to listen to you because you don't have any credentials — you aren't a doctor or a professor. You don't know what you are talking about."
    • "We don't have to listen to you — you are just a doctor. A.A. knows much more than all of the doctors and priests and ministers and psychiatrists that we went to for so many years." (The Big Book, 3rd Edition, page 473.)
    • "You think you are smarter than other alcoholics."
    • "You are diseased and in denial if you criticize Alcoholics Anonymous."
    • "You just don't want to quit drinking."
    • "Screw you! What do you know about sobriety?"
    • "You aren't qualified to have an opinion of A.A. yet, because you don't have enough years of sobriety." (And if you do have enough years, then "You are just a Bleeding Deacon.")
    • "your obviously not equiped to give any advice." (sic., sp.)
    • "Those critics are often pushing inaccurate information or unintentionally pushing misinformation."
    • "You are angry, so we don't have to listen to you."
    • "Somebody injured you; that's why you spend so much time criticizing Alcoholics Anonymous."
    • "Your posts and your website lead me to wonder why you spend so much energy on this. Don't you have anything better to do than run down a group that has helped many, many people?." (Hint: That line was not about me; it was aimed at Rebecca Fransway in the newsgroup alt.recovery.from-12-Steps, Feb. 8, 2001.)
    • "You are just obsessed with proving Alcoholics Anonymous wrong."
    • "You are a chronic slipper who could not grasp AA at all."
    • "You will relapse soon."
    • "You will fall off of the wagon soon."
    • "Nobody can have as many resentments as you have and not drink again."
    • "Are you still drunk? Anybody with such a chip on their shoulder will go back out again."
    • "You are one of the people who couldn't work the program."
    • "You are not really committed to sobriety."
    • "Your arguments are more and more like rants. Increasingly technicoloured ones."
    • "You just like to hear yourself talk."
    • "You don't care how many alcoholics you kill by saying that A.A. doesn't work."
    • "You are doing a great disservice to those seeking sobriety."
    • "You are doing great harm to alcoholics."
    • "You are causing alcoholics to relapse."
    • "You are hurting alcoholics by driving them away from Alcoholics Anonymous."
    • "Have you saved any lives lately, or do you just sit here and bitch about AA?"
    • "That orange guy is getting really REALLY boring."
    • "Your anger towards A.A. can't be doing you any good."
    • "You spent a lot of time trying to figure out why AA didn't work for you. Which is really just a way of justifying your drinking."
    • "You've only paused your drinking, and never genuinely stopped."
    • "You must be an agnostic or an atheist if you object to the wonderful spirituality of Alcoholics Anonymous."
    • "And I'll bet that you molest little girls when the moon gets full, too."

    Here is another example of an ad hominem. When somebody using the name "King EZ" posted criticism of A.A. to a blog, an A.A. defender counter-attacked with:

    King ez can't spell worth a damn, and places punctuation at random between words so his writing will look like -- books he sees; at barnes&noble. Though this % makes his posts hard to read, make no (mistake), he is a genius, both his Son and {Mother} think -- so.
     http://kingez.com/blog/2008/11/11/aa-become-the-addiction/

    That attack uses both ad hominem and sarcasm. But there was not a word of defense of A.A., or any facts relating to the subject of "addiction to A.A.". Just complaints about imaginary errors. And the funny thing is, I couldn't find any incorrect punctuation, and only a few misspellings, in the original post. But who needs facts when you are defending a cult?

    And a cute variation on that theme is:
    "Oh you poor thing. I'm so sorry to hear that the 12-Steppers hurt you so bad. You are obviously in need of some counselling. Just call 1-234-567-8901 and we'll fix you right up."
    In other words,
    "Yep, you're insane, so us counselors who push 12-Step meetings on every patient we get can happily disregard everything that you have said about the inefficacy of 12-Step 'treatment'."


  • Engage in Name Calling
    Name calling is a kind of ad hominem attack, but it has a special power and flavor all its own.

    "If you can't answer a man's argument, all is not lost; you can still call him vile names."
    — Elbert Hubbard

    This technique is simple and obvious: you just call your opponents names, preferably really derogatory and slanderous names, like this:

    • "You are an atheist, a liar, a dummy, a drunkard, etc..."

    • "You are a sexist, a racist, a fascist... not politically correct..."

    • "You are an elitist, effete, intellectual..."

    • If someone wants to leave a few old trees standing in the forest, call him a "tree-hugger".

    • If someone talks about the inequality of the justice system, where poor blacks get the death sentences, but rich people who can afford a dream team of expensive lawyers get off, call him "a bleeding-heart Liberal."

    • When France and Germany declare that they do not wish to participate in unprovoked "pre-emptive warfare", dismiss them as "the old Europe".

    • A blogger who insists that people are not going to wastefully use up the world's remaining oil supply declared on 10 October 2005, when the price of oil declined temporarily:
      "I don't know how low it [the price of oil] will go, but I do know that the frikkin' lunatics over at clusterfucknation are foamin' at the mouth about this. 'Its just temporary. We're still all gonna die.' Kuntsler says it is a 'Make-believe nation'. They just can't take it that the apocalypse is not nigh."

    • If someone criticizes Alcoholics Anonymous, answer:
      "People who attack A.A. are just stupid A.A.-bashers. You don't have to pay any attention to what A.A.-bashers say because they are just stupid A.A.-bashers."

      "You're just a dry drunk with a resentment..."

      And when sober old-timers complain about A.A. misbehavior, say "You're just a bleeding deacon..."

    Notice that name-calling allows you to actually define your opponent, based on just a few facts, or even on no facts whatsoever.


  • Apply Labels
    Apply labels to things or people — especially derogatory labels. This is very similar to name-calling.

    • If someone talks about universal health care, scream "That's Socialism!"
    • If someone talks about peace and freedom and justice, complain, "That's a Liberal agenda."


  • Delegitimize One's Opponent
    Delegitimize one's opponent so as to avoid addressing the substance of his argument. This is another kind of ad hominem attack. The goal is to make it impossible for opponents to be heard respectfully in the debate.

    Sen. Joe McCarthy (R-WI, 1947-1957) accused Gen. George C. Marshall and Secretary of State Dean Acheson of being part of "a [Communist] conspiracy so immense as to dwarf any previous such venture in the history of man. A conspiracy of infamy so bleak that, when it is finally exposed, its principles shall be forever deserving of the maledictions of all liberal men."

    If a politician can convince the audience that his opponent is a sleazy Commie lying traitor, then it won't matter what the other guy says after that...

    When ABC News wrote an article about the Democrat's targets for investigation (Nov. 8, 2006), one Republican apologist responded:

    "It causes me concern that Nancy Pelosi has stated that Halliburton, CIA, and tobacco companies are early targets for them. They need to get on with real business. Voters wanted change. Not adults acting like children."

    So, Republicans investigating President Clinton's sex life for two years was okay, but Democrats investigating major crimes like immense corruption and war profiteering, secret CIA kidnappings and "renditioning" to foreign torture prisons, and tobacco companies addicting our children to a killer drug is "adults acting like children."

    When the Olympic torch was being carried through London (4 April 2008), protestors denounced China's occupation of Tibet and human rights abuses. Protestors repeatedly clashed with the Chinese security guards and British police. Then a Chinese official criticized the protesters:

    A spokesman for the torch relay's passage around the world, Qu Yingpu, putting a brave face on the protests, said Chinese officials were grateful to the British police "for their efforts to keep order."
    He added, "This is not the right time, the right platform, for any people to voice their political views".     New York Times, 6 April 2008

    As if we should suddenly stop caring about freedom and human rights abuses just because someone declares a sporting event?
    And who says that sporting events cannot be the site of a protest about human rights violations?
    (And what good did it do to let Adolf Hitler host the 1936 Berlin Olympics without protest?)

    When a photography web site gave a low rating to Olympus digital SLR cameras, one Olympus fan retaliated with, "DPReview can say what ever they want when classifying cameras. I believe they are just bowing to Canon's marketing strong arm."
    As if nobody could possibly criticize an Olympus camera unless he was paid to do it.
    (And notice that the speaker was also using the propaganda technique of providing feelings or beliefs instead of any actual evidence.)

    A.A. members use this technique too. When people start discussing the failings and shortcomings of Alcoholics Anonymous, some true believer A.A. member often sanctimoniously declares, "I am not much of an AA gossip. I'm here to save my ass."


  • Stroking Ploys
    This is just the opposite of name-calling — call somebody good things, like: "a patriot, a real American, a great Christian, a real credit to his race, an example to us all, an inspiration."

    A late-night TV infomercial that advertizes an exercise machine introduces the machine's designer as: "Here is Joe Blow, one of the hottest men in Hollywood because he gives people what they want — crisp, lean, healthy bodies."

    The true-believer Buchmanite Theophil Spoerri gave us examples of both denigration and stroking ploys in his biased biography of Frank Buchman: Dr. John Hibben, President of Princeton University, was called "a well-meaning but weak man", and Spoerri said, "fearing for the good name of the university, [he] allowed himself to be stampeded", when President Hibben banished Frank Buchman and his cult from Princeton. On the other hand, Spoerri called the lady Anneliese von Cramon-Prittwitz, who converted to Buchmanism, "a distinguished and intelligent woman." (Dynamic Out Of Silence: Frank Buchman's Relevance Today, Theophil Spoerri, pages 77 and 114, respectively.)

    Bill Wilson gave us an example of this technique in his pro-smoking story on page 135 of the Big Book. The chain-smoking A.A. member who threw a drunken temper tantrum to avoid quitting smoking was called "our friend" and "a most effective member of Alcoholics Anonymous", while his clean and sober wife who was pleading with him to quit killing himself with cigarettes was called "one of those persons" — you know, one of those intolerant puritanical killjoy nagging wives who are always trying to keep us good old boys from having fun.


  • Blame A Scapegoat
    This is a well-known trick: find a scapegoat to blame for all of your group's problems.

    Hitler was of course infamous for blaming the Jews for all of Germany's economic problems after World War One. He even claimed that a Jewish conspiracy had caused World War One. And Hitler insisted that the Germans would be very happy after the Jews were eliminated.


  • Blame Somebody Else (Anybody Else)
    This is the more general version of Blaming A Scapegoat.
    • You can blame other people for your problems — "They are all against me. They have been sabotaging me at every turn."
    • You can blame subordinates for your poor job performance: "No one in the Intelligence Community urged me to step back from my tough talk about a nuclear Iran posing a danger of World War Three."

    A popular variation on this technique is, "Do Whatever You Wish To Do, And Blame Somebody Else For It".

    • "The reason why I must create and enforce such draconian rules and regulations is because some people cause problems."
    • "We wouldn't need to bug your telephone and spy on you if it wasn't for the terrorists..."
    • "Now look at what you made me do."


  • Blame A Non-Factor
    Blame something that isn't really the cause of the problem. (It's a kind of diversion tactic, diverting attention from what is really wrong.)

    George W. Bush recently gave us a good example of this technique. While touring in Biloxi, Mississippi, in early May 2006, Bush declared that he would like Congress to "give me a capacity to raise CAFE standards." (CAFE is "corporate average fuel economy" — the miles-per-gallon standards for new cars.) Well gee, it seems like Bush would have raised the fuel efficiency standards long ago, if it weren't for that nasty Republican-controlled Congress tying his hands and keeping him from doing the right thing.

    But Bush always had the power to change the fuel standards. Ronald Reagan didn't need the approval of Congress to change the standards (downward). Certainly Congress was under the impression that the President could require cars to get better mileage in the 1990s, since it went out of its way, using annual spending legislation, to prevent President Clinton from doing so. But now that the public is noticing that Bush has done nothing to make the car manufacturers build in better fuel efficiency, Bush claims that he needs Congress to allow him to do his job.

    Likewise, A.A. boosters try to explain away the immense A.A. failure rate by saying, "Well, you can't consider those people who drop out of A.A. without working the Twelve Steps to be failures of Alcoholics Anonymous. They don't count. You can't blame A.A. if they won't work the Steps. And you can't blame A.A. for those drunks who didn't "work a strong program". They don't count."

    Actually, they do count. No matter why people quit A.A. without quitting drinking, A.A. still failed to get those alcoholics sober. They are still a part of the A.A. failure rate. Either the A.A. program works to make alcoholics quit drinking, or it doesn't.

    Something that is so repulsive that it causes 95% of the newcomers drop out within a year cannot claim that it is a great success, if only people would follow orders.

    And what about all of the people who spent years in A.A., working the Steps and "working a strong program", and who regularly relapsed anyway? The speaker doesn't mention them. He tries to pretend that they don't exist — he tries to claim that all of the A.A. failures and dropouts are solely due to people not working the program correctly.

    (And then they use a self-referential definition of "correctly". Someone who is "working the program correctly" is abstaining from drinking. So by definition, the program "always works if people work it correctly".)


  • Claim That There Is A Panacea
    Claim that there is, or that you have, a magical cure for all of your listeners' problems.

    Adolf Hitler told the German people that he had a simple sure-fire cure for Germany's economic woes: National Socialism, which really meant fascism, which included getting rid of the Jews and Leftists, and having Germany run by "one strong leader", and getting revenge on Britain and France.... We all know how well that worked out.

    Bill Wilson declared that the relabeled Oxford Group cult religion (which he called "the Alcoholics Anonymous program") was the answer to all of an alcoholic's problems:

    "Quite as important was the discovery that spiritual principles would solve all my problems."
     The Big Book, 3rd edition, William G. Wilson, Chapter 3, More About Alcoholism, page 42.


  • Claim That There Is A Panmalefic
    A panmalefic is just the opposite of a panacea. A panmalefic is supposedly the one big bad cause of all of your problems.

    I just made that word up. A panmalefic is the exact opposite of a panacea. Where a panacea is one simple cure for all of your problems, a panmalefic is the one simple cause of all of your problems.

    The prefix "pan" means "over all" or "entirely covers" or "everywhere", as in pan-American, pandemic, and panacea.
    The word "malefic" is in the dictionary, and means "causes evil, bad things, ills, harm, or diseases".
    Put them together, and you have a word that means the cause of all of the world's problems.

    Simple-minded people like simple answers, so they love to hear that everything can be explained in terms of panmalefics and panaceas.

    Historically, plenty of rabble-rousers have used the panmalefic idea to blame one scapegoat or another for everything:

    • "Jews are the cause of all of our problems and are a great threat to our children and our nation and we must find all of the hidden Jews and destroy them before they do great harm to us." [Paraphrasing the Nazis in 1932.]

    • "Communists are the cause of all of our problems and are a great threat to our children and our nation and we must find all of the hidden communists and destroy them before they do great harm to us." [Paraphrasing Senator Joseph McCarthy (R-MN) in 1952.]

    • "Alcoholics are the cause of all of our problems and are a great threat to our children and our nation and we must find all of the hidden alcoholics and destroy them before they do great harm to us." [Paraphrasing The Secret History of Alcoholism: The Story of Famous Alcoholics and Their Destructive Behavior, by James Graham, and also Doug Thorburn's books.]


  • Flattery
    Get someone to accept the bulls**t that you are shovelling by flattering and praising them. This is an unabashed appeal to egotism.

    For example, a television commercial tells housewives that "You are so wonderful — you juggle six jobs at once, take care of three kids, and still manage to look good — so that's why you should buy our junk. A sophisticated person like yourself would settle for nothing less..."

    Another commercial declares, "Your life has more than one dimension. That's why you wouldn't consider playing [golf] with anything but..."

    The advertising on a box of clove cigarettes says, "Their brown wrapping is uniquely created to suit your distinct personality."

    • My distinct personality? What is so distinct about being stupid enough to get addicted to nicotine and burn out your lungs?
    • And that brown wrapping isn't unique. They crank out those clove cigarettes by the millions, and every last one of them has the same brown wrapping, no matter whether they are being made for me or for the teenage kids down the street.

    Alcoholics Anonymous uses this stunt too. If you believe A.A. propaganda, you will "Come To Believe" that only unto you has the Lord given the gift of being able to heal other alcoholics — you are that special in the eyes of the Lord — you have been chosen by God:

    God in His wisdom has selected a group of men to be the purveyors of His goodness. In selecting them through whom to bring about this phenomenon He went not to the proud, the mighty, the famous or the brilliant. He went to the humble, to the sick, to the unfortunate — he went to the drunkard, the so-called weakling of the world. Well might He have said to us:
    Into your weak and feeble hands I have entrusted a Power beyond estimate. To you has been given that which has been denied the most learned of your fellows. Not to scientists or statesmen, not to wives or mothers, not even to my priests and ministers have I given this gift of healing other alcoholics, which I entrust to you.
    Judge John T., speaking at the 4th Anniversary of the Chicago Group October 5, 1943.

    Well, God might have said that to them, but God didn't really say that to them, now did He? Nowhere in the Bible, The Talmud, the Koran, the Bhagavad-Gita, the Sutras, the Vedas, the Upanishads, the Dead Sea Scrolls, or any other major religion's scriptures does it say that the alcoholics are God's Chosen People, entrusted with "a Power beyond estimate" — "the only cure" to alcoholism.


  • Proof by Anecdote
    Proof by Anecdote is a stunt where you make some grand generalization, and then you tell one or more individual stories that appear to support your generalization, and then you conclude that the point is proven. (You can ignore all of the other stories that disprove your point.)

    For example, President Ronald Reagan gave a speech on TV where he told of Sandinista soldiers tying a priest to a tree and beating him. Reagan concluded that this story was proof enough of the evils of the Sandinistas to justify the USA waging an undeclared, illegal, war against Nicaragua for several years, the war that ended with the treasonous Iran-Contra Arms-for-Hostages and the Oliver-North-Contra Cocaine-for-Guns fiascoes.
    (President Reagan didn't bother to give any TV speeches complaining about how many Nicaraguan civilians were killed by the Contras, or how many American inner-city black kids were killed by the Contras' cocaine. Just a few anecdotal stories of Sandinista soldiers' misbehavior was all of the evidence that Reagan needed or wanted...)

    This Proof-by-Anecdote technique is heavily used in advertising:

    • "Diets never worked for her, but then Susan discovered the Shrivel-Up Program® and lost 50 pounds."
    • "My wife and I needed a new dishwasher. Thanks to you we received a $1900 Viking dishwasher for free!"
    • "I made $8000 in my first week of trading."
    • "He made more money on that trade than he made in a week on his job. And what computer program did he use to trade stocks? The XYZ program from the stock market genius Joe Blow."

    Lots of organizations like to use poster children to "prove" their point. The homophobic fundamentalist Christians show off one guy who says that he got "converted" from homosexuality or bi-sexuality to straight heterosexuality, and then they claim that their poster-child example proves that all gays are merely "choosing a gay lifestyle", and that they can change if they want to.

    Likewise, the entire back two thirds of the Alcoholics Anonymous Big Book, with all of its autobiographical stories, is just one long demonstration of the Proof by Anecdote propaganda technique. Bill Wilson just printed a collection of people's stories, all of which claimed that A.A. had helped them in some great way, and then Bill concluded that the stories proved all kinds of things like:

    • that the A.A. program and the Twelve Steps really work for quitting drinking,
    • that the A.A. program is the only thing that works.
    • that prayer really works, and that God could, and would, if they asked Him to, answer their prayers, and remove all of their "defects of character", and make them quit drinking.
    • that people must completely surrender and completely give themselves to the "simple" A.A. program,
    • that if you pray and meditate enough, you can hear God or some other Higher Power talking to you in your head,
    • that you can get wonderful results, and recover from alcoholism, by praying to just any old God or "Higher Power", and your "Higher Power" can be anything you wish it to be, including the A.A. group itself.
    • that God is actually eager to start doing favors for you and granting all of your wishes, just as soon as you start doing Bill Wilson's Twelve Steps.

    — None of which were actually proven, or even demonstrated by a fair sampling of cases. It is obvious that the stories are just another example of cherry-picking — Bill printed only those stories that said what he wanted people to believe, and rejected everything else. (And "cherry-picking" is actually just another name for Observational Selection.)

    This is another example of Proof by Anecdote, used in a slightly different way:

    Step Nine has reclaimed many broken friendships; it has brought peace and happiness to the lives of those who suffered because of our alcoholism. Its great rehabilitative power has also affected the lives of thousands of alcoholics through the spiritual awakening they have experienced. Because of this Step, these alcoholics have recovered their self-respect, they have taken on courage and confidence, and they have assumed responsibility. They sense God's presence, and with His presence comes the realization that their lives are again becoming manageable.
     The Little Red Book, Hazelden, page 89.

    Gee, that sounds pretty fantastic. I guess we should all start doing the Twelve Steps immediately, so that we can get the Big Experience too, right?

    Well, it sounds great, but only until we remember that A.A. claims to be keeping millions of alcoholics sober. If only "thousands" out of millions get the wonderful "spiritual awakening" and "sense God's presence", then the odds of getting "The Big Spiritual Experience" are really only one in a thousand.

    Now that doesn't sound so awe-inspiring, does it?

    Note just how carefully that deceptive, double-talking Hazelden propaganda was constructed. If we read it critically, we will see that maybe a few thousand people — out of millions of claimed A.A. members — have benefited in some way from the Twelve Steps that Bill Wilson wrote. But, without hesitation or qualifications, Hazelden says that the guilt-inducing Twelve Steps will give people:

    • self-respect
    • courage
    • confidence
    • responsibility
    • awareness of the presence of God
    • and manageable lives
    without offering us any actual evidence or proof of their unfounded grandiose claims that the 12-Step program has "great rehabilitative power."

    Which brings up the next item: Double-talk.


  • Double-talk
    Confuse your listeners with contradictory, illogical, or incomprehensible jabber:

    • The pigs in George Orwell's Animal Farm wrote: "All animals are equal but some are more equal than others."

    • An Oxford Group leader bragged about the accomplishments of the Groups as,
      "Men are becoming freed from acquisitive greed into stewardship of property; they are becoming freed from the stagnation of the instinct of curiosity into a new enlightened stewardship of the mind."
       Oxford and the Groups, Rev. G. F. Allen, et al., page 40.
      • So, apparently, the greedy men get to keep their property, but not their curiosity.
      • Since when does curiosity cause stagnation of the mind? It is usually the lack of curiosity that signals a stagnant, dull mind. Curiosity is a common characteristic of most intelligent species, from the cat to the human. — But it is not an "instinct" like sex; it is just a characteristic.
      • And what is "a new enlightened stewardship of the mind"? In the Oxford Groups, it really meant discarding the rational, thinking, mind, and just "having faith" and obeying the orders of the leaders. (It's called fascism.) — So that phrase, "a new enlightened stewardship of the mind" was also really a euphemism for "abject, obedient, unthinking slavery". That's another propaganda trick.

    • More double-talk: In a TV commercial, a merchant promises:
      "We guarantee that we will either have it in stock, or order more."
       But that is no big promise or guarantee. That's what all merchants do: Sell what they have in stock, and then order more.

    • Speaking of merchants, the immortal all-time classic car salesman's double-talk is:
      We lose money on every car that we sell, but we make up for it in volume.

    • The Alcoholics Anonymous "First Tradition" declares that the A.A. group is more important than the lives of the individual people:

      Each member of Alcoholics Anonymous is but a small part of a great whole. A.A. must continue to live or most of us will surely die. Hence our common welfare comes first. But individual welfare follows close afterward.
      That double-talk is just like "All animals are equal, but some are more equal than others."

      Also notice the standard cult statement that you cannot live without the cult.

    • A.A. promoters tell us things like:
      Contrary to the belief of many, it [Alcoholics Anonymous] is not a program of conversion to religion, although a religious conversion is probably unavoidable as one becomes positively spiritual.
       Spirituality: The key to recovery from alcoholism, Warfield, Robert D. and Goldstein, Marc B., Counseling & Values, April 1996, Vol. 40, Issue 3, page 196.
       The A.A. Twelve-Step program just sort of accidentally on purpose "unavoidably" converts people to belief in Bill Wilson's favorite cult religion.

    • This is quintessential double-talk:
      "AA is a spiritual rather than a religious program of living; and living this program, for many of us, is our religion."
             Getting right with God (Recovery Life), Father Joseph C. Martin, Alcoholism & Addiction Magazine, April 1988 v8 n4 p35(1)
       Huh? It's not a religion, but it is your religion?
       (And notice that a Catholic priest is writing that. What happened to practicing the Christian religion of the Church in Rome? Strange, very strange...)

    • Essentially, spirituality involves attitudes that are based on beliefs about our relationships with our self, with other human beings, with our world (including our physical and social environments), with life (as to its meaning and purpose), and ultimately, with God, a Higher Power, or 'Universal Consciousness'.
       (ibid.)
      Apparently, spirituality helps you to cop an attitude.

    • About half our original fellowship were of exactly that type [atheists or agnostics]. At first some of us tried to avoid the issue, hoping against hope we were not true alcoholics. But after a while we had to face the fact that we must find a spiritual basis of life — or else. Perhaps it is going to be that way with you. But cheer up. Something like half of us thought we were atheists or agnostics. Our experience shows that you need not be disconcerted.
       The Big Book, 3rd Edition, William G. Wilson, We Agnostics, page 44.
      • Question: Why, if we are true alcoholics, do we suddenly have to find Bill Wilson's "spiritual basis of life"?
        Answer: Because Bill Wilson believed that only Bill Wilson's cult religion could cure alcoholism. So there goes our freedom of religion; we shall have to give it up.
      • 'But cheer up. "You need not be disconcerted." Our experience shows that converting to Wilsonism won't hurt you too much.'
      • 'Besides, we only thought that we were atheists or agnostics, but we were wrong. After Bill's brainwashers fixed our thinking for a while, we discovered that we really did believe in Bill Wilson and his wonderful spirituality after all.'

    • Try to figure out the logic in this statement:
      Introduction to Alcoholics Anonymous through court ordered intervention is common. The legal system, heavily burdened with drunk drivers, often refers offenders to AA in an attempt to help individuals who may have an alcohol problem. Studies of court ordered participation have indicated that AA is not particularly effective and sometimes markedly less effective than other treatments in dealing with this particular group (Ditman et al. 1967, Brandsma et al. 1980), but there is significant, active participation in AA membership among those referred by the criminal justice system.
             Alcoholic Thinking: Language, Culture, and Belief in Alcoholics Anonymous, Danny M. Wilcox, page 32.

      First the author said that A.A. does not help alcoholics — those studies found that A.A. was often the least effective treatment program for alcoholics — and then the author said that many of the alcoholics who were coerced into A.A. by the criminal justice system became active members of Alcoholics Anonymous. Huh? So what's the point of that? The author already clearly declared that A.A. doesn't work and doesn't help alcoholics.


  • Unprovable Statements
    Just make up grandiose, completely unprovable statements that say whatever you want people to believe:

    • "You don't have to worry about overpopulation. Overpopulation of the Earth is impossible, because each person is a ray of light from God, and God will only send out so many rays." (That came from some new-age nut or other.)
    • "I lived on Betelguese in my last incarnation. I came here to help mankind through the current crisis." (Another phony guru.)
    • "Body thetans are the spirits of people from another planet who were murdered 60 million years ago in a big purge of excess population. Today, they will cling to your body, and try to get into your body, and cause you all kinds of troubles." (But, for only $350,000, we can fix your Interplanetary Cooties problem for you. — Scientology)
    • "We were friends in a previous lifetime."
    • "God appeared to me in a vision and told me that he had a special message that I was to carry to the world." (Many goofy cult religions)
    • "The Purpose of Life is Self-Realization." (ISKCON)
    • "The purpose of life is to transform energy from one plane to another."
    • "God guided Bill Wilson to write the Twelve Steps." (A.A., of course.)
    • "Doing these Twelve Steps will please God."
    • "Doing these Twelve Steps causes an increase in spirituality."
    • "God wants you to do this stuff."
    • "The Twelve Steps work in a magical mystical way that cannot be scientifically tested or logically explained."


  • Undisprovable Statements
    This is simply the converse of unprovable statements. This technique uses statements that cannot be proven false.

    Peter Howard, the fascist disciple who took over the leadership of Moral Re-Armament after Frank Buchman died, gave us many examples of undisprovable statements in his little book of praise for the cult leader Frank Buchman:

    Frank Buchman liked to recall the story of the time he introduced Joe to a French Cardinal at tea.   ...
          It was the same Cardinal who said, "MRA is a crack of the whip for Christians who have forgotten their mission, and offers a positive alternative to sincere Marxists."
     Frank Buchman's Secret, Peter Howard, pages 89-90.

    Which French Cardinal? When, where? Did he really say that? We only have Frank Buchman's word for it, saying that some unnamed Cardinal praised his organization.

    Senior military men in America have realized the necessity that a nation have an ideology to match the demands of the twentieth century. One of them is an Admiral. He came many times to meet Frank Buchman and to be trained in Moral Re-Armament.   ...
     Frank Buchman's Secret, Peter Howard, page 81.

    Who? Which "senior military men"? Which Admiral? When? Where?

    An American General told Frank Buchman two years ago, "Our country is like a dead knight in armor. We have the weapons, but need the spirit and will to prevail."
     Frank Buchman's Secret, Peter Howard, pub. 1961, page 82.

    Which general said that? "Two years ago" would have made the year 1959, at the height of the Cold War. The U.S.A. was definitely not like a "dead knight without a will" then. (More like a paranoid psychotic, busy building enough H-bombs to blow up the entire world 19 times over.)

    A British Colonel once came to see him.   ...
    A few days later the Colonel came back. He was smiling. He said, "It's a miracle.   ...
     Frank Buchman's Secret, Peter Howard, pages 99-100.

    Once again, which Colonel? When, where?

    At a time when Africa is calling on the white man to leave, leaders of seventeen countries of Africa urged Frank Buchman to come, and bring with him the men and women of Moral Re-Armament.
          An African leader summed up Buchman's work in these words, "Moral Re-Armament is doing for Africa what Abraham Lincoln did for America. It is binding up the nations' wounds and setting the people free."
     Frank Buchman's Secret, Peter Howard, page 68.

    So, the Hitler-loving Dr. Frank N. D. Buchman was the "Abraham Lincoln of Africa", was he? Says who?

    And once again, which leaders? And how did the author, Peter Howard, define "an African leader"? Those "leaders of 17 nations" who supposedly invited Frank Buchman to come to Africa could have been anything from popularly-elected Presidents to murdering territorial warlords to the chiefs of hungry tribes of cannibals. Just try to prove that 17 of them didn't invite the stout, well-fed Frank Buchman to dinner...

    You know, Peter Howard's book reads a lot like Hollywood gossip sheets or supermarket tabloids, which are always loaded with unverifiable sources like:

    • "Close friends say...",
    • "Inside sources say...",
    • "Knowledgeable persons said...",
    • "An unnamed official said...",
    • "It is rumored that...".

    And not to be left out, Bill Wilson used the same stunt in the Big Book:

    Many doctors and psychiatrists agree with our conclusions. One of these men, staff member of a world-renowned hospital, recently made this statement to some of us: "What you say about the general hopelessness of the average alcoholic's plight is, in my opinion, correct."
     The Big Book, 3rd Edition, William G. Wilson, More About Alcoholism, page 43.

    What unnamed doctors and psychiatrists agreed with Bill Wilson? How many doctors really agreed with Bill Wilson? It wasn't any sizeable percentage of the American Medical Association — what they said about the Big Book and Bill Wilson's religious cure for alcoholism was: "the book has no scientific merit or interest."


  • The Language Trap
    Use a word in different ways, but logically treat it as the same concept:
    "You say you're looking for truth. Well, we refer to our religion as 'The Truth'. Why do you think we do that?"

    The Language Trap is not just a rhetorical device, but a major problem in communication. It is a "trap" because people on both sides of an argument can inadvertently stumble into it if they are not aware that the same word can be used with different senses and connotations.7

    In Alcoholics Anonymous, the word "alcoholic" has four distinctly different definitions that are used interchangeably, all too loosely. (Bill Wilson started doing that in the "Big Book", and his followers have been doing it ever since.)

    1. An alcoholic is someone who habitually drinks far too much alcohol.
    2. An alcoholic is someone who is hyper-sensitive to alcohol — something like allergic to it — perhaps because he inherited a gene — and he is someone who will become readdicted to alcohol and go on a binge and drink for years if he drinks even just one beer.
    3. An alcoholic is somebody who cannot quit drinking — he is "powerless" over alcohol.
    4. An alcoholic is an immoral person who is resentful, angry, manipulative, self-seeking, dishonest, selfish, and a prime example of instincts run wild, self-will run riot, and the Seven Deadly Sins... and on and on and on....

    Those are four very different definitions of "an alcoholic", and they are not the same thing at all. And they are not equally applicable to all people who have a drinking problem.

    Personally,

    1. By the first definition, I stopped being an alcoholic nine years ago when I quit drinking alcohol.
    2. By the second definition, I will always be an alcoholic — I am and always will be hypersensitive to alcohol, and easily readdicted if I drink any more alcohol.
    3. By the third definition, I wasn't an alcoholic, because I could quit drinking, and I did. I even quit drinking without any help from A.A., because I quit drinking two weeks before I was ever sent to an A.A. meeting.
    4. By the fourth definition, I was never an alcoholic. I was, in fact, a nice, happy, drunk, and people liked having me at their parties because I was fun to have around when I got high. (But, as one friend pointed out, even nice drunks die of cirrhosis of the liver.)


  • Vague, Undefined, Grandiose Language
    Make up all kinds of impressive-sounding grandiose phrases and expressions that are vague and not very precisely defined, so that no one can quite accuse you of being wrong. They can't even really argue with you because everything is so nebulous and intangible. It's like trying to bite fog.

    Politicians are past masters of this art:

    • The Great Society (Johnson: the country nearly explodes in civil war.)
    • Law and Order (Nixon: the most criminal administration in history: the President and Vice-President resign to avoid impeachment, and half of the administration goes to prison.)
    • Peace with Honor (Nixon: when defeat is inevitable, be someplace else.)
    • A Kinder, Gentler Nation (Bush the first: start another war, while running up staggering deficits.)
    • Compassionate Conservatism (Bush the second: start another war, spend the Social Security and Medicare money on weapons systems, eliminate civil rights, rape the environment, and give the rich people a big tax cut, all while running up staggering deficits.)
    • States' Rights ("The state has rights only if I think the state is right.") States can do whatever they want to do, if and only if the White House, the Supreme Court, and Congress happen to like it. Think: racism and segregation, Medical Marijuana, "Right to Choose" vs. "Right to Life", the year 2000 Florida Presidential elections, Physician Assisted Suicide, and Gay Marriage.)
    • Selfless Patriotism (serving your political party)
    • Public Service (30 years of taking bribes)
    • Judicial Restraint (the Republicans on the Supreme Court rig the Y2K election.)

    A current commercial for a politician says, "He'll move us forwards."
    Huh? He'll move us where?
     That's actually so vague that it is meaningless. You have no idea what that scoundrel will do if he gets elected.

    Bill Wilson's delusional disorder gave us a bunch of classic examples of vague, grandiose, bombastic raving:

    • "We have come to believe He would like us to keep our heads in the clouds with Him, but that our feet ought to be firmly planted on earth. That is where our fellow travelers are, and that is where our work must be done."
       (The Big Book, 3rd edition, Chapter 9, page 130.)

    • "We feel we are on the Broad Highway, walking hand in hand with the Spirit of the Universe."
       (The Big Book, 3rd edition, Chapter 6, page 75.)

    • "Instead of regarding ourselves as intelligent agents, spearheads of God's ever advancing Creation, we agnostics and atheists chose to believe that our human intelligence was the last word..."
       (The Big Book, 3rd edition, Chapter 4, We Agnostics, page 49.)
      (So just what is "God's ever advancing Creation"? It sounds like "The Blob that Ate Hollywood". And where is it advancing to? )

    • "He stood in the Presence of Infinite Power and Love."
       (The Big Book, Bill Wilson, 3rd edition, Chapter 4, We Agnostics, page 56.)
      (How did Bill Wilson know that it was 'infinite'? Did Bill measure it?)

    • "We are not cured of alcoholism. What we have is a daily reprieve contingent on the maintenance of our spiritual condition. Every day is a day when we must carry the vision of God's will into all of our daily activities."
       (The Big Book, 3rd edition, page 85.)

    So just what does all of that grandiose nonsense have to do with not drinking alcohol?

    And Bill wasn't alone. We get this kind of double-talk from other A.A. boosters:

    • As the human personality develops from a preoccupation with the survival, passion, and power needs of its "lower self," toward the understanding, compassion, and unity strivings of its higher self, it also grows spiritually.
       (Spirituality: The key to recovery from alcoholism, Warfield, Robert D. and Goldstein, Marc B., Counseling & Values, April 1996, Vol. 40, Issue 3, page 196.)
      Say what?

    • Anyone who comes to ten meetings has begun an irreversible process of recovery. Everything in that person's life becomes part of the recovery process, regardless of how chaotic it looks or feels.
       (An ACOA recruiting pamphlet)
      Anyone? Irreversible process? Everything?

    • You can go anywhere you want and take risks, because with sobriety and the Twelve Steps of AA you can always correct what has gone wrong and make amends. Your compass will always point you back, even if it feels like you're spinning in circles and have lost your direction.
       (The Way Home, Hazelden, page 245.)
      Which means just what? Note the repeated use of the word "always". That reveals cultish irrational absolute black-and-white thinking. The authors won't say something moderate like that the 12 Steps will often help you, or that they help most of the time, because that would be admitting that the Steps fail some of the time. No, the Hazelden religious fanatics insist that the 12 Steps will always work, anywhere. (That is, of course, absurd. Not even penicillin works all of the time. And the real A.A. failure rate is staggeringly high.)

    • Another A.A. true believer exhorts people to read the A.A. Big Book with this grandiose declaration: "Want a new life? Read it! Read the black bits, don't put anything into the white bits and find a freedom you never imagined you could have."


  • Loaded Language, Euphemisms, and Redefined Words
    This item is related to the previous two, but they aren't the same thing. Loaded language is more generic because any words can be redefined for any reason, to support any agenda, and to mask any activity.

    Carl Sagan called such terminology "weasel words."

    "An important art of politicians is to find new names for institutions which under old names have become odious to the public."
     — Talleyrand.

    "When I use a word," Humpty Dumpty said in a rather scornful tone, "it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less."
    Alice in Wonderland, and Alice Through the Looking Glass, Lewis Carroll

    "You can always tell when someone isn't telling the truth, because he doesn't speak clearly. Euphemism is a cover for either ignorance or dishonesty. In other words, if you can't state it in a clear simple declarative sentence, then either you don't know what you are talking about, or you are trying to prevent me from understanding what you are talking about, and both bug me."
     Tucker Carlson, in an advertisement for his TV program "Unfiltered" on Public Television, August 6 to 27, 2004.

    • Adolf Hitler and the Nazis routinely invented euphemistic phrases to disguise what they were doing, like the "Special Handling" that they gave the Jews, sending them to the "Final Solution." "Guest workers" were really foreigners who had been kidnapped at gunpoint and forced into slave labor brigades. Zyklon B, the poison gas used to kill millions of Jews, was called "material for the resettlement of Jews".

      Sometimes, the euphemisms became comical. By the end of World War Two, the Germans had 30 euphemisms for "retreat", including "planned withdrawal, successful disengagement, elastic defense, mobile defense, retrocessive maneuver, withdrawing maneuver, unencircling maneuver, according to plan, shortening of the front, systematic evacuation, without enemy pressure, undisturbed by the enemy, and withdrawal to the enemy's surprise."

    • Likewise, Mao Tse Tung sent his enemies to slave labor on remote farms for "re-education" so that they would learn to "blossom properly." And all of the Commumists were notorious for "liberating" people, like the Tibetans, Latvians, Lithuanians, and Estonians, who did not wish to be "liberated" by the Chinese People's Army or the Soviet Army. And now, of course, George W. Bush is "liberating" Iraq in the same manner.

    • Throughout the entire second half of the twentieth century, various United States Presidents used the term "police action", rather than "war", to get around limitations on Presidential powers, and to avoid having to tell the public that we actually were in yet another war.

    • In the Oxford Groups and Moral Re-Armament cults, Frank Buchman's "inspired democracy" really meant slavery:

      An increasing number of citizens in democratic states are now unwilling to acknowledge in speech and action those inner authorities on which the life of democracy depends. Each man has his own plan. It's so wonderful each to have his own plan. It's such freedom, such liberty! Everyone does as he pleases. But not in the Oxford Group. There you have true democracy. You don't do as you please, you do as God guides. You do God's plan.
       Frank Buchman, speaking at Visby, Sweden in 1938, quoted in Experiment With God; Frank Buchman Reconsidered, Gösta Ekman, pages 44-45.

      Ah, but who gets to say just what God's plan is? The Oxford Group sure didn't hold elections.

    • Likewise, Frank Buchman's convert Herbert Grevenius praised Frank Buchman with this bit of Orwellian double-think:

      His enormously active life is built on one thing only — guidance. He openly admits it. He is a sail always waiting to be filled by the wind, a man with a great and warm and humble heart, a democrat who wants to set men free under God's dictatorship.
       Experiment With God; Frank Buchman Reconsidered, Gösta Ekman, page 21.

    • The most outrageous one I've heard recently is "aggressive accounting practices". That's what Enron used to do things like turn $3 billion of very real losses into $1 billion of phony paper profits, which made the stock price rise, which was very convenient for the executives who were happily dumping their worthless shares of Enron stock on an unsuspecting public in the world's biggest Pump and Dump stock swindle... "Aggressive accounting practices" indeed.

    • Another good one is: George W. Bush's scare stories about how we were all going to be killed by Saddam's Weapons of Mass Destruction which he built with all of that yellow-cake uranium that he was supposedly buying from Niger — "The next warning may come in the form of a mushroom cloud" — were not really exaggerations, fear-mongering, deceptions, and bare-faced lies; they were merely "less-than-fully-verified" facts; (A conservative talking head, defending Bush on National Public Radio, Jan. 20, 2004.)

    • Another recent goody from the Bush administration: The poor people are not suffering from hunger any more; they just have "nutritional insecurity".

    Alcoholics Anonymous makes extensive use of loaded language and redefined words:

    • In Alcoholics Anonymous terminology, the word "sobriety" doesn't mean "not drinking" or "an unintoxicated state"; it has this bombastic redefinition: "A special state of Grace gained by working the Steps and maintaining absolute abstinence. It is characterized by feelings of Serenity and Gratitude. It is a state of living according to God's will, not one's own. It is sanity."

    • Likewise, "Sanity is living according to God's Will, rather than one's own."

    • "Recovery" does not mean rebuilding your health, mind, body, and life while not drinking; it means going to A.A. meetings, doing The Twelve Steps, and abstaining from alcohol. According to A.A. dogma, someone can't be recovering from alcohol if he isn't going to A.A. meetings and doing The Twelve Steps; he's "only abstaining".

    • By the same broken logic, he's "only dry" but not "sober". According to A.A., you can't enjoy a period of "sobriety" without going to A.A. meetings. Thus, a cultish A.A. member can ask someone, "Do you really have a year of sobriety, or are you only abstaining from drinking?"

    • Likewise, a "dry drunk" is someone who does not drink alcohol, but who refuses to join A.A. and do the Twelve Steps. He is supposedly still acting like a drunk man, exhibiting all of the objectionable behavior of a drunkard, even though he does not drink alcohol, simply because he won't conform to the A.A. program.

    • "Emotional security" means "getting our own way." (12X12, page 115.)

    • "Humility" is "a desire to seek and do God's will." (12X12, page 72.)

    See the Cult Test item Cult-Speak for many more examples.

    A variation on euphemisms is the use of lots of acronyms, which can reduce speech to near total incomprehensibility. This is Scientology jargon:

    ...the New OT VIII C/S was RPFed (Laura Wolfe, wife of Milton Wolfe who was jailed on behalf of the GO and later ended up as CO FSSO (FSSO: Flag Ship Service Org, The service org on board the Freewinds.) The replacement C/S, Sue Walker, wife of Jeff Walker, one of the original Class XII who was Snr C/S Int at the time...
     http://www.whyaretheydead.net/krasel/aff_96.html


  • Use Self-Referential Definitions — Define Something In Terms Of Itself
    These are also called circular definitions.

    Alcoholics Anonymous uses a self-referential definition of "working the program correctly", and "Working A Strong Program".

    • Someone who is "working the program correctly" abstains from drinking alcohol, as well as gets a sponsor, reads the Big Book, does the Twelve Steps, and attends a lot of A.A. meetings.
    • Then the A.A. promoters claim that the A.A. program "always works if people work it correctly" .
    • Works to do what? Well, it supposedly works to make people quit drinking. But quitting drinking was the first requirement for starting to "work the program correctly".


  • Deception Via Mislabeling or Misnaming Things

    A commercial for a get-rich-quick scheme says that the cost of the scheme is inconsequential because: "You can take it out of your cash flow."
    Wrong. You do not deduct expenses from "cash flow". Expenses come straight out of your profits, and if you don't have any profits, then you are suffering a loss, no matter how large your cash flow is, and the cost of that get-rich-quick scheme will be part of your loss. In fact, if you don't have profits, then "cash flow" becomes your enemy — it turns into "burn rate" — the rate at which you are burning up your cash reserves and heading for bankruptcy.

    Similarly, George W. Bush calls his attack on Iraq "a war for freedom". Every time Rumsfeld attacks another city like Fallujah or Najaf or Kut or Sadr City and kills several hundred more people, including women and children, Bush says that it's a victory for "freedom".

    Bush also calls the rebels against American hegemony "the enemies of freedom". No, they really want to be free — especially free from our army in their country.

    Bush says that they hate us because of our "freedom". No, they hate us because our military forces are destroying their country and killing their children with our "Shock and Awe" bombing.


  • Misuse Words
    Blithely give words a completely different meaning than their usual or commonly-accepted ones.

    For example, Bill Wilson wrote this deceptive propaganda while trying to convert people to his religious beliefs (and while pretending to be a converted agnostic):

    Logic is great stuff. We liked it. We still like it. It is not by chance we were given the power to reason, to examine the evidence of our senses, and to draw conclusions. That is one of man's magnificent attributes. We agnostically inclined would not feel satisfied with a proposal which does not lend itself to reasonable approach and interpretation. Hence we are at pains to tell why we think our present faith is reasonable, why we think it more sane and logical to believe, why we say our former thinking was soft and mushy when we threw up our hands in doubt and said, "We don't know."
     The Big Book, 3rd & 4th Editions, William G. Wilson, Page 53.

    There, Bill Wilson misused the word "logical". There is nothing "logical" about blind faith in a cult religion. Logic is a thought process where one examines facts and then draws conclusions from them, using inductive or deductive reasoning. It is not "more sane and logical" to stop thinking critically, and just blindly believe in Bill Wilson's religion.

    Bill was also using the hypnotic bait-and-switch trick. He started the paragraph by praising logic and saying that he liked it. But then he switched sides and attacked logic, and praised blind faith in his beliefs as being more "logical" than logic itself.

    And it's almost funny how Bill admitted that he was "at pains to tell why we think our present faith is reasonable, why we think it more sane and logical to believe..." The reason that it is so hard to defend that point of view is because it is completely irrational and illogical. It is based on no facts at all. It is just so much wishful thinking.

    Likewise, George W. Bush misuses words like "freedom" and "civil liberties" while he claims that he has the right to spy on people without a judge signing off on the surveillance. Bush says that he is careful of people's "civil liberties" while he spies on American citizens without a court warrant.

    Wrong.

    The Constitutional protection of the American people from the searches of an intrusive dishonest politician is not "freedom" or "liberty"; it is a Constitutional protection. "Civil liberties" are things like the rights of the citizens to gather together and speak in protest against Bush's actions — something that George W. Bush does not allow anywhere around him. The protesters are confined to "free speech zones" that are far away from Bush.

    (By the way, the whole of the United States of America is a Free Speech Zone. George W. Bush should learn that while he is pretending to protect and uphold the Constitution of the United States.)


  • Moving The Goalposts

    This trick is like:

    1. Demand that your opponent prove Fact A.
    2. When he does, answer, "But you didn't prove Fact B."
    3. When he does that, answer ""But you didn't prove Fact C."
    4. etc...

    This trick is also known as "changing the parameters of the question afterwards", so as to invalidate a true answer.

    For example, "BLAH-BLAH is a harm-reduction model rather than an abstinence model. From my observations of those around me, and my own experience, I have the opinion that the harm reduction model doesn't work for most people."

    Answer: "Every addict who injects heroin with a clean syringe has zero chance of contracting HIV or Hep C, so how can that be 'not working for most people'?"

    The mental diversion was, of course, to assert that harm reduction programs fail because they do not enforce absolute abstinence from drugs or alcohol. But that was never the goal of harm-reduction programs.

    Dr. and Prof. George E. Vaillant used the same technique in his analysis of Alcoholics-Anonymous-based treatment in The Natural History of Alcoholism Revisited. Alcoholics Anonymous insists that members must totally abstain from drinking alcohol, and if a member drinks even one single drink, then he looses all of his sober time and immediately starts over at zero. But when Dr. Vaillant tested Alcoholics Anonymous, he found that the results were "appalling", so Dr. Vaillant changed his definition of "sobriety" to "sober for 51 weeks out of the year", so that some people could be scored as "in stable remission for 3 years". That's moving the goalposts to make the results look better.


  • Set Low Expections
    Prepare the audience for poor results by setting expectations very low, so that whatever happens, it seems better than they expected.

    Corporate executives use this stunt on Wall Street financial analysts all of the time. They cry to the analysts that business conditions are really tough right now, the economy is bad this quarter, and the results won't be very good, so that the analysts predict a low profit-per-share for the current quarter. Then, when the company produces results that are better than expected, the stock price soars.

    Alcoholics Anonymous uses the same stunt to explain away the bad behavior of A.A. members. An often-repeated slogan is "We are not saints." Thus, anything from dealing drugs to other A.A. members, to helping oneself to the collection basket, to sexually exploiting the attractive young women who come to A.A. seeking help with a drug or alcohol problem is okay, and easily explained, because "We are not saints."

    One A.A. apologist actually argued that it was wrong to demand moral behavior from rapist A.A. members — to demand that the sexual predators in A.A. stop raping the young female newcomers — because that would be setting expectations too high:

    The problem with what you are doing is that A.A. is a place for sick people to get well. For alcoholics to come recover. It is not a place for nice kind folk to become saints.

    If you start making behavior rules, which is in essence exactly what you are trying to do, where does it end? Do you really think people are trying to condone illicit behavior?

    No, that is not what people are saying. What they are saying is that "no matter how far down the scale" you have gone, you are welcome in A.A. If you don't change, well, you won't stick around. You are welcome to come, but why would you? A.A. is for the sick trying to get well, and if you aren't interested in getting well, you won't be around long. That is why the traditions state 'there is no A.A. police'. Get it? That is why A.A. members — and I live in PA — have a hard time listening to you.

    If you start trying to make a list of unacceptable behavior, you are essentially making a list of rules for membership, of which there aren't any and hopefully never will be. I fail to see how you can not comprehend this. Our fellowship can not deny even the most unsavory of individuals. Even in the midst of their lowest points, they are welcome.

    Posted by: "inventory" — September 13, 2007 07:12 AM, to a Washington Post readers' comments section, in response to a story about the sexual exploitation going on in the Washington DC "Midtown Group of A.A.".

    The writer argues that "If you don't change, you won't be around long." That isn't true at all. The thieves and rapists in the Midtown Group have been around for 20 years, and they show no signs of going away. Why would they quit A.A. when they get money, power, and sex from running a cult?

    This A.A. apologist is actually trying to argue that there are no rules in Alcoholics Anonymous, and that it is against "The Traditions" to demand that people behave in a moral manner. Well, the A.A. "Third Tradition" says,

    The only requirement for A.A. membership is a desire to stop drinking.

    The "A.A. 12 Traditions" do not say that the only RULE that A.A. members must follow is "a desire to quit drinking". There are still other rules that are expected of all people: don't rape, don't rob, don't murder... A.A. does not get to suspend those rules because "We are not saints".


  • Sliding Adjectives
    Use a sequence of descriptors, usually adjectives, where the value, quality, and characteristics of what is being described slip and slide from one thing to another, often to the exact opposite.

    For example:

    • genuine pictures of a fake artifact
    • genuine simulated leather
    • high-quality plastic
    • honest politicians
    • really solid guesswork
    • anecdotal medical study
    • Compassionate Conservatism
    • "executive vinyl" (That is actually real terminology. I found that label inside of a cheap appointment book with a plastic simulated leather cover.)


  • Vague Adjectives
    Use adjectives that sound good but don't really tell us what they mean. For example, advertisements for a store offered:
    • "the top digital cameras"
    • "top plasma and LCD TVs"
    • "popular furniture"

    In the first two examples, does the word "top" mean that the equipment is high-quality, or that they are best-sellers? Best-sellers are usually inexpensive and hence low quality.

    The third example more clearly describes best-sellers, but that still does not show that the furniture is actually any good, or worth buying. Attempts to stampede you into buying something because everybody else is buying it is just another recycling of the old "Everybody knows, everybody says, everybody is doing it" propaganda trick.


  • Pseudo-intellectual Bull
    Use lots of big or unusual words and tell your lies with stilted, complicated, incomprehensible sentences that sound very educated.

    This item is similar to "Vague, Grandiose Language" and "Double-talk", but this one has a flavor all its own. It is particularly prevalent around universities, and lives in scholarly journals, and is a favorite tool of intellectual wanna-bees.

    This example of pseudo-intellectual bull is Dr. Carl G. Jung, telling us how to get a spiritual experience:

    The only right and legitimate way to such an experience is that it happens to you in reality and it can only happen to you when you walk on a path which leads you to higher understanding. You might be led to that goal by an act of grace or through a personal and honest contact with friends, or through a higher education of the mind beyond the confines of mere rationalism.
     C. G. Jung, in a letter to Bill Wilson, quoted in Bill W., by Robert Thomsen, pages 362-363.

    Just try to figure out, from reading that, just what you are really supposed to do to get yourself a spiritual experience.

    Adam Rafalovich wrote an exemplary piece of such pseudo-intellectual bull that attempted to posit that Narcotics Anonymous meetings actually work and have positive effects on ex-addicts:

    Embedded within the interplay of these moments of recovering-addict identity is a technique of identity transformation I refer to as false working. False working denotes a mechanism by which NA members are given permission to "act as if" they truly believe in the NA message regardless of their real sentiments. This technique is exemplified by the aphorism Fake it 'til you make it. False working proves to be a crucial component for the NA organization to maintain long-term membership and recruit new, skeptical members.
     Keep coming back! Narcotics Anonymous narrative and recovering-addict identity, Adam Rafalovich, Contemporary Drug Problems, Spring 1999, v26, i1, p131.

    In other words, lie and fake it and pretend to be getting great results from "working the program", to fool the newcomers into believing that the voodoo medicine 12-Step routine really works. Such deceit is useful for what the author calls "identity transformation" — converting newcomers into good cult members. Note that the author says that such deceit and fakery is even "a crucial component" in keeping the old-timers coming back. So everybody is deceiving everybody else, all of the time. Everybody is re-enacting "The Emperor's New Clothes".

    Note the stilted language and the euphemisms that disguise the real meaning of Rafalovich's statements. Instead of saying, "lie and deceive", the author uses the phrases, "false working" and "permission to 'act as if' they truly believe in the NA message".

    The author, Adam Rafalovich, gave us many more examples of this pseudo-intellectual bull technique in that article. A few more of them:

    • "Standing most significant in the literature today is the concept of narrative and its effect in creating group cohesion inside and outside 12-Step meetings. It is believed in the study of 12-Step recovery processes that the mutual disclosures of members fosters processes of belonging and commitment to the collective goal of drug and alcohol abstinence.   ...
      In addition, the study of story presentation has been shown to be integral in developing moral attachments to a collectivity."
       Keep coming back! Narcotics Anonymous narrative and recovering-addict identity, Adam Rafalovich, Contemporary Drug Problems, Spring 1999, v26, i1.

      In other words, use the standard cult recruiting technique of Personal Testimonies of Earlier Converts to fool the newcomers and suck them into the cult. Much of the "sharing" is just sales pitches telling newcomers to join the group and Keep Coming Back.

      And Rafalovich uses the passive voice technique to assert unsupported claims:
      "It is believed ... that the mutual disclosures of members fosters processes..."
       Who believes it? What do they know? Why should we care what some nameless, faceless people believe?

    • "By examining the contents of common NA testimony, we can examine data that demonstrate that individual action is as much a result of the NA organization as it is a contributor to it. Therefore when positing a theory of the recovering-addict identity process, it is important to acknowledge the internalization of an organization as a result of becoming a contributor. Interestingly, NA members realize this theoretical notion. Contribution, for example, is a strong ethic within the organization; it is believed that to not participate in the narrative environment (i.e., not share during meetings) will harm one's chances of continued abstinence."
       Keep coming back! Narcotics Anonymous narrative and recovering-addict identity, Adam Rafalovich, Contemporary Drug Problems, Spring 1999, v26, i1.

      In other words, the way to become one of the group is to start talking the talk in meetings, and telling people that the program is working for you. "Fake It Until You Make It." The more you do it, the more it will warp your thinking and make you feel and act like one of the old-timers.

      That is a use of the cognitive dissonance technique — Since you don't want to think of yourself as a lying fake, you will start to imagine that you really are getting some great results, just like you have been saying... Your subconscious mind will struggle to minimize the pain of the conflict between believing that it is wrong to lie, and the group requirement that you say that you are getting great results from the program — and coming to believe that the program really IS working for you, and that you are telling the truth, is the subconscious mind's answer to the problem.

      It's really a very common brainwashing and mind-control technique:
      "Makem' say it enough times, and they'll start to believe it."
      "Makem' go through the motions enough times, and they'll start to think that such behavior is normal."

      And, the author tells us, if you should choose to not engage in such cultish behavior, and do not "Fake It Until You Make It", then you just might leave the cult and not come back. (No surprise there.)

      Also note the use of two other propaganda techniques in this one line: "it is believed that to not participate in the narrative environment (i.e., not share during meetings) will harm one's chances of continued abstinence."
      There, we get

      1. the use of the passive voice, yet again, citing the opinions of some more invisible, unnamed people, and
      2. fear mongering

      1. It is believed by whom? Says who?
      2. Where is the evidence that anybody should believe such nonsense?
      3. What medical or scientific study, survey, or poll showed that telling lies in N.A. meetings — faking it 'till you make it — reduces drug consumption, or reduces relapses?
      4. Where is the evidence that refusing to lie and deceive increases drug addiction?

      There is no evidence to support such illogical statements. The author tries to shove that cult dogma at us as established fact by declaring that some unnamed people believe it to be true.

    • "Solidarity and collective identity in NA are constructed by narrative that depicts qualitative differences between addict and normie worlds. It has been argued that this process of creating difference is socially constructed and is ultimately aimed at fostering a stronger dependency upon the group."
       Keep coming back! Narcotics Anonymous narrative and recovering-addict identity, Adam Rafalovich, Contemporary Drug Problems, Spring 1999, v26, i1.

      Meaning: the testimonials of earlier converts emphasize the standard cult attitude of, "Our group is special. We are special people, and different from the 'normies'. Only another cult member understands."

      And it's also the cult practice of: You must become dependent on the cult. They say, "You really need this 'support group'. You can't make it alone. Nobody can do it alone. You'll die without us." and "Addicts like us can't be happy in the normie world, so just stay here with us."

      Rafalovich says that the program is "ultimately aimed at fostering a stronger dependency upon the group." That is really insidious cult behavior. They want you to become dependent on the cult for everything. The cult will become your entire social circle, and your family, and your whole life. You will end up needing the cult to tell you who you are, and what you should think and what you should do. That produces mental cripples who cannot live outside of the cult. That is not 'recovery'.

    • "Leveling: This initial phase of learning Narcotics Anonymous normativity and adopting a recovering-addict identity involves a homogenization where newcomers become convinced of a common thread between themselves and the rest of those involved with NA.   ...
      No one member ever stops becoming part of the leveling process. 'Oldtimers' still try hard to discover linkages between themselves and other members of the group.   ...
      The focus for seasoned members often involves the invocation of the disease concept, its manifestations at the psychic and behavioral levels."
       Keep coming back! Narcotics Anonymous narrative and recovering-addict identity, Adam Rafalovich, Contemporary Drug Problems, Spring 1999, v26, i1.

      Translation: Newcomers buy the group member stereotype and start to think that they are "just like everybody else" in the cult. Then, you can't ever leave the cult,and you can't ever stop using the Procrustean Bed on yourself, trying to force yourself to become the cult's stereotypical "good member". (What the author calls "Leveling".) Even the old-timers have to continue doing it. And you can't ever stop parroting the cult dogma, like the "spiritual disease" concept.

    • "Conclusion: The presence of a technique like false working gives credence to the relative instability of the addict identity. It is not a technique reserved strictly for those who are new to the NA environment. It is a safety valve for all members, allowing those who have never encountered or are straying away from a sincere attitude of recovering-addict identity to be cynical or skeptical of NA, given, of course, that their actions state otherwise."
       Keep coming back! Narcotics Anonymous narrative and recovering-addict identity, Adam Rafalovich, Contemporary Drug Problems, Spring 1999, v26, i1.

      Translation: the presence of a technique like "false working" proves that it is a cult that plays mind games on people's heads, including deceiving the newcomers and dishonestly changing people's concepts of themselves (identity). The fact that even the old-timers are still supposed to be "faking it until they make it" means that the program doesn't ever start working right — they never make it — but the old-timers can't be honest and actually say that out loud. They too must continue to "Act As If..."

    • "Twelve-step programs are increasingly recognized as important resources and treatment adjuncts for recovering alcohol and other drug abusers.   ...   This paper explores 12-Step programs such as Alcoholics Anonymous in light of Margaret Mahler's conceptualization of the separation-individuation process that leads to object constancy and healthy object relations."
       An analysis of 12-Step programs for substance abusers from a developmental perspective, Shulamith Lala Ashenberg Straussner; Betsy Robin Spiegel, Clinical Social Work Journal, Fall 1996 v24 n3 p299(11)

      Meaning: If it is totally incomprehensible even to someone with a degree in the hard sciences, then it just might be total bull.

      Also notice how the A.A. propagandists routinely proclaim that A.A. and the other 12-Step groups are "just being discovered" (by whom?), and are "increasingly recognized as important" (by whom?), as if those A.A. promoters haven't been pushing the same irrational old 12-Step cult religion and voodoo medicine for the last 74 years — and as if Alcoholics Anonymous were not actually an organization in decline. That is the propaganda technique of Assume The Major Premise.


  • Confuse With Technicalese
    This one is pretty obvious — just confuse the issue with a lot of technical-sounding garbage that means little or nothing.

    "Today's Terrorist Level Color is Chartreuse with Pink Polka-Dots. Do not panic. In fact, do nothing."

    (The only Terror Color I'm really sure about is Yellow. That's the level where George W. Bush parks his ass safely 5000 miles behind the front lines and then bravely yells, "Bring 'em on!")


  • Simplistic Slogans
    There just isn't anything quite like a nice, short, snappy slogan. People don't like to have to memorize long pages of boring facts and figures, but they can remember slogans easily. Slogans can just cut through the fog and grab people's hearts and minds in ways that no other kind of speech can. Slogans can become battle cries, like "Remember the Alamo!" A good slogan can make or break a politician's campaign:
    • "Where's The Beef?"
    • "Make My Day!"
    • "It's the Economy, Stupid!"
    • "Ein Volk, Ein Reich, Ein Führer!"

    Dr. Robert J. Lifton, who did much of the original research on Chinese Communist brainwashing techniques, called such slogans "thought-stopping clichés". He found that such slogans constrict human understanding, rather than expand it. They stop people from thinking.

    Thought-stopping slogans can be used to jump to completely illogical conclusions: "People are more important than things. So let's drill for oil in the Anwar National Wildlife Refuge."

    "The answer is Jesus! The answer to everything is Jesus! The answer is always Jesus!"

    Yeh, but what if the question was, "What will your monthly payments be if you borrow $100,000 at 7% interest and want to pay it back in 20 years?"

    A.A. has far too many slogans to list here. Here are just a few examples:

    • "Keep Coming Back! It Works!"
    • "It Works If You Work It!"
    • "Work It, You're Worth It! You Die If You Don't!"
    • "Turn It Over."
    • "Let Go and Let God."
    • "One Day At A Time."
    • "Your best thinking got you here."
    • "Think, Think, Think!"
    • "Stop Your Stinkin' Thinkin'."
    • "Keep It Simple, Stupid."
    • "Utilize, Don't Analyze."


  • Wrap Yourself In A Higher Power
    The two most popular styles are "Wrap Yourself in the Flag" and "Wrap Yourself in the Bible." But wrapping yourself in a generic God without a Bible, and in a generic religiosity, like Alcoholics Anonymous does, also works.

    People feel reluctant to attack someone who appears to be so patriotic or religious. They fear that their criticism will be misunderstood by others as an attack on God or Country. So you can get lots of cheap and easy advantages by wrapping yourself in the Bible or the Flag, or both.

    The absurd lengths to which con artists will go to convince you that they are good, religious people are sometimes mind-boggling. A web page that is supposedly about "Christian" drug and alcohol treatment programs, http://www.christiandtc.com/christiandrugrehabprogram/, actually features a lot of garbage that is just failed quack programs with the label "Christian" added on, to make them sound good:

    1. The link for "drug rehabs" actually goes to a web page that advertises schemes to beat drug tests: http://www.christiandtc.com/drugrehabs/ actually links to http://www.asmartsourcedrugtestkit.com/prodblood.htm.

    2. The link for "drug rehab program", http://www.christiandtc.com/drugrehabprogram/, advertises, among other things, "Alex knows what it takes for you to get a Pharmaceutical / Medical sales position!", and CELEBRITY CRUISE LINE — Drug store, Payday Loan, video poker, and — best of all — "Jeb Bush: Daughter improving in drug rehab".

    3. And the most amusing feature of that web page is the second paid link, "Christian Pastor Converts To Paganism" — http://www.christiandtc.com/ltrendee.html — which actually links to a web page that sells a software package for submitting articles intended to drive traffic to your web site to that you can make money by selling more stuff — http://article-submitter.solidbytes.com/?hop=seishin. (Now a broken link.)

      Please don't ask me what that has to do with Christianity or recovery from drug and alcohol problems.

    Similarly, a web page that sells colloidal metals as cures or treatments for various aliments decorates its web pages with the American flag, and the quack doctor (a veterinarian and N.D., not an M.D.) is even dressed in a red-and-white striped shirt (with a cowboy hat, just to mix the images). See http://www.healthy-ways.com/selenium.html and http://www.healthy-ways.com/quest.html.


  • Repeat Old Memes

    There are some old ideas that are so pervasive that they might be called the memes of the society. They may be inaccurate or even quite false, or give a very distorted picture of reality, but people often accept them without thought because they are so old and well-established that they slip into your mind without triggering a critical reaction.

    For instance, old Conservatives often love to describe one of their own as a "self-made man", who rose up from poverty in another Horatio-Alger-like rags-to-riches story. The problem is, there is no such thing as "a self-made man".

    • The guy's mother would probably have a strong opinion on the subject — pointing out that she distinctly remembers a lot of discomfort and pain that was involved with making him and getting him into this world.

    • And then his mama had to work for many years to feed him and clothe him and teach him and give him a good set of values...

    • And then this "self-made" boy went to a public school where his education was paid for by the tax-payers...

    • And then the guy probably got a lot of other opportunities and lucky breaks, and help from a mentor, and then, yes, I'm sure he worked hard for success, and he was lucky enough (or corrupt enough) to end up rich.

    And then the ideologues who have a Wild-West mentality — "every man for himself; survival of the fittest; you can build an empire if you are strong and brave and smart and work hard" — like to declare that he is a good example of a "self-made man" who did it without any "handouts".

    For more on memes, see these links which were suggested by Mary C. Hogan, Ph.D.:

    1. http://jom-emit.cfpm.org/1998/vol2/wilkins_js.html
    2. http://www.memecentral.com/
    3. http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/MEMIN.HTML (Dead Link.)


  • Claim Causation By A Higher Power
    Claim that your favorite thing was deliberately put here or created by a "Higher Power" (which is often called "God" or "the Lord", but is also called a lot of different names).

    Joseph Goebbels, Adolf Hitler's fawning Minister of Propaganda, declared:

    Destiny has sent us this man [Adolf Hitler] so that we, in this time of great external and internal stress, shall testify to the miracle.
     The Rise And Fall Of The Third Reich, William L. Shirer, page 1109.

    So who is "Destiny", and how can I meet her? Is she related to that other popular cause, "Fate"?

    Likewise, when he heard that President Roosevelt had died, another of Hitler's boot-lickers declared:

    This was the Angel of History! We felt its wings flutter through the room. Was that not the turn of fortune we awaited so anxiously?
    == Count Schwerin von Krosigk
     The Rise And Fall Of The Third Reich, William L. Shirer, page 1110.

    The Angel of History? I recall Michael, and Gabriel, and Lucifer, and The Angel of Death, and several others, but can't seem to remember any "Angel of History"...

    That sounds a lot like Karl Marx's mystical "Force of History" that was supposed to spontaneously bring us a Worker's Paradise. (In spite of his declarations of atheism, Karl Marx was actually a muddled-headed mystic who believed in Higher Powers or Higher Forces that just magically made things happen, and determined the course of history.)


  • Everybody's Doing It, Everybody Knows, and Everybody Says
    Imply that what you want people to do or believe is what everybody else is doing or believing.

    • "Everybody knows that the world is flat. All of the leading university professors and Church authorities agree that Christopher Columbus is a crazy fool for thinking that the world is round, and that he can get to the East by sailing west. Everybody knows that he will fall off of the edge of the world."

    • "Everybody knows that diseases are caused by evil spirits, and witches putting hexes on people. So if your children get sick, the only cure is to burn the old lady who lives next door, and then your children will get better."

    • "Everybody knows that blood-letting is the best cure for a fever. It worked on George Washington, didn't it?"

    This is also known as "The Bandwagon" — appeal to people to "get on the bandwagon", or "get with the program", or "catch the wave", or "get with it".

    • "This product is the hottest thing — it has sold out repeatedly."

    • "It's the most popular thing we have."

    • "It's definitely the fashion hit of the season."

    • "These beliefs are increasingly being accepted."

          The individual who clings tenaciously to unverified beliefs confuses his beliefs with fact, and often inflicts this confusion on others in his struggle to resolve it in his favor. When many people are persuaded to subscribe to the same pretense, of course, it can gain the aura of objectivity; as British psychoanalyst Ron Britton has observed, "we can substitute concurrence for reality testing, and so shared phantasy can gain the same or even greater status than knowledge." The belief doesn't become a fact, but the fact of shared belief lends it the valuable appearance of credibility. The belief is codified, takes hold, and rises above the level where it might be questioned.
     Bush on the Couch, Justin A. Frank, M.D., page 61.

    A variation on this technique is rationalizing one's own behavior by claiming that:

    • It's what everybody does.
    • That's just how it's done.
    • It's normal.
    • It's standard operating procedure.
    • It's customary.
    • It's standard practice in the industry.
    • It's accepted practice.

    You can stampede large masses of people into following a certain course of action if they think it's what everybody else is doing, or will do. We see an amusing example of this most every Christmas, when one particular toy, like a Furby or a Cabbage Patch Doll, becomes the fad toy of the season, and all of the children simply must get one because everybody else (all of the other children) is getting one. The parents go nuts trying to find one as the supply sells out and a bidding war sets in, and the parents often have little real idea of what it is they are trying to get. All they know is that it's what the kids want. All that the kids know is that it's what everybody else wants.

    The human and social pressures to conform to the group are very strong. People often conform to the group even without realizing it, or admitting it. Some people fancy themselves non-conformists, but they almost always simply adopt an alternate fashion of dress, hair style, speech, and behavior. You can tell who the "non-conformists" are by which uniform they wear.

    In fact, to be a "real non-conformist", you have to conform and wear the uniform. If you simply dress and act any way you want to, people will just regard you as a weirdo.

    • For more than 20 years that I can remember, McDonald's has been advertising that it is simply The place where everybody eats burgers. The commercials tell our children, "It's just the regular American Way. Everybody is doing it." Not to be left behind, Dairy Queen has launched a series of commercials that tries to convince us that we should just refer to Dairy Queen as "D.Q.", as if eating at Dairy Queen is so commonplace that everybody will immediately know what you mean when you just say "D.Q.". So far, that phony chummy familiarity does not seem to have caught on, probably because people know that it's phony and resent the attempt at manipulation of their feelings. Oh well, better luck with the next advertising campaign.

    • In a wicked twist on this psychology, organizations like Microsoft or political special interest groups have been caught sponsoring phony "grass roots campaigns" where long tables of tired, frowzy grandmothers were paid to hand write a river of "spontaneous" letters that supported some particular position that their employer liked... The numerous letters were supposed to show that everybody favors the sponsor's position.

    • On television, advertisements for two TV shows declare that "Everybody is talking about..." and "All of America is talking about..." (Oddly, I had never watched either stupid show and none of my friends said anything about them either.)

    • The "Moonies" — the members of the Unification Church of Rev. Sun Myung Moon — use the "Everybody's Doing It" technique in their recruiting and indoctrination routines. Newcomers are invited to lectures or workshops, where they are exposed to Unification Church doctrines like The Divine Principle. The Moonies always pack the audience with committed true-believer members, making sure that the audience is always more than 50% enthusiastic members, and then they arrange the seating so that each newcomer has an old member on both sides of him. To the newcomer, it seems like the doctrines of the Unification Church must be brilliant, because everybody else is really wowed and amazed at how clear and logical it all is...6

    • Politicians love to use that stunt too. Richard Nixon and gang packed the gallery at the 1972 Republican National Convention with clean-cut photogenic Young Republican college kids who had been specially bussed in just for the occasion, just so that they could be seen on TV cheering for Nixon — just showing the American people that it wasn't only the old fascists who loved Nixon...

    • In 2004, George W. Bush is using a variation on this stunt: He appears before crowds that are "mostly friendly, invited guests".16 Well that gets rid of the hecklers and the critics, doesn't it?

    • Another recent example was on Meet The Press (NBC TV). Steven Hadley, President G. W. Bush's National Security Advisor, declared on 3 December 2006 that "I think the American people understand the cost of failure..." (So let's all do what George wants.)
            No matter how many Americans understand the cost of failure, there is no evidence that the American people want to see more of their sons' lives wasted in a disastrous misadventure. There is no evidence that the American people agree with George. The results of the last election declare that the American people really do understand the cost of failure, and they are tired of George Bush's failures.

    Alcoholics Anonymous and Narcotics Anonymous and Al-Anon use this Everybody's Doing It and Everybody Knows technique often:

    • Everybody recovers through x.A..
    • Everybody knows that x.A. works, and has saved millions of lives.
    • Everybody who ever overcame an alcohol or drug addiction did it by doing the Twelve Steps.
    • Everybody goes to meetings.
    • Everybody needs to go to meetings.
    • Everybody knows that the answer to every crisis in life is "Get to a meeting, as fast as possible."
    • Everybody knows that x.A. members are the experts on addiction.
    • Everybody is just taking it "One Day At A Time."
    • Everybody is in recovery.
    • Everybody knows that the Twelve Steps work, and that all of the x.A. religious dogma is true.
    • Everybody knows that x.A. is "spiritual", not religious.
    • Everybody knows that x.A. is the only way.
    • Everybody knows that newcomer alcoholics and addicts are all "in denial", and if they object to anything about the "spiritual" 12-Step program, it is just their addiction talking.
    • Everybody knows that the best thing you can do with an alcoholic or drug addict is force him to go to x.A..

    • "Twelve-step programs are increasingly recognized as important resources and treatment adjuncts for recovering alcohol and other drug abusers."
       An analysis of 12-Step programs for substance abusers from a developmental perspective, Shulamith Lala Ashenberg Straussner; Betsy Robin Spiegel, Clinical Social Work Journal, Fall 1996 v24 n3 p299(11)

    • "The tremendous fact for every one of us is that we have discovered a common solution. We have a way out on which we can absolutely agree, and upon which we can join in brotherly and harmonious action."
       The Big Book, 3rd Edition, William G. Wilson, chapter 2, "There Is A Solution", page 17.

      (What does "brotherly and harmonious action" really mean? That is yet another one of Bill's many euphemisms. And it usually it means is, "go recruiting" and then "attend A.A. meetings and help to indoctrinate the new recruits by not quite telling them the truth".)

    Alcoholics Anonymous also makes good use of the social pressures to conform to the group. If A.A. can just make people Keep Coming Back, then those people will eventually get worn down and converted to believing what everybody else is believing. They will end up saying and doing what everybody else is saying and doing. It's just human nature.

    The flip side of the "Everybody's Doing It" coin is "Nobody Is Doing It." If you don't see it on TV, then it isn't real. If you don't hear an idea espoused on TV, then that idea must be radical or extremist, and can't be true.

    For instance, the CIA didn't really perform experiments in mind control and brainwashing on innocent, unaware American and Canadian civilians, including giving them LSD without their knowledge. That can't possibly be true, because we never saw it on TV.5

    Likewise, television and the movies always portray Alcoholics Anonymous in a positive light, with movies like "My Name Is Bill W.", "Clean and Sober", "The Days of Wine and Roses", and "28 Days", and positive portrayals in TV programs like "Cagney and Lacy" and "ER" and "The West Wing". Nobody on TV ever says that A.A. is actually a stupid superstitious cult religion that is completely ineffective for treating alcoholism, so that can't possibly be true.


  • Pomp, Ceremony, and Ritual
    Pomp, ceremony, and ritual are effective techniques for manipulation of the emotions of crowds. Everybody uses it, from the President of the United States, to the Queen of England, to the Pope. The Moonies like to have mass weddings where thousands of couples are married at a time. Adolf Hitler raised pomp, ceremony, and ritual to an art form at the Nuremberg rallies.



Nazi Party Day, Nuremberg, 1934
Adolf Hitler is the center guy of the three who are facing us and giving the straight-armed salute.
Heinrich Himmler is Hitler's right-hand man there.

(click on image for larger version)


    Speaking of large, powerful armies of disciplined, unthinking, obedient followers, Alcoholics Anonymous seems to have its own too. These quotes are from books of daily meditations for A.A. members published by the A.A. headquarters and Hazelden:

    "I will center my thoughts on a Higher Power. I will surrender all to his power within me. I will become a soldier for this power, feeling the might of the spiritual army as it exists in my life today. I will allow a wave of spiritual union to connect me through my gratitude, obedience, and discipline to this Higher Power. Let me allow this power to lead me through the orders of the day."
     Daily Reflections; A Book of Reflections by A.A. members for A.A. members, Alcoholics Anonymous World Services, Inc., 1990, August 27, page 248.

    I will lock arms today and move forward in the company of those who need me. I need them also.
     The Promise of a New Day: A Book of Daily Meditations, Karen Casey and Martha Vanceburg, Hazelden, November 4.


    The interesting thing about pomp, ceremony, and ritual is that it has an irrational appeal. You are asked to accept an organization and its whole package of beliefs and dogma based on beautiful costumes, magnificent surroundings, rituals, ceremonies, and dramatic productions — things that have absolutely nothing to do with whether it is a good or bad organization, has a good or a bad agenda, or has a good or a bad leader.

    You shouldn't choose your religion or your politics on the basis of who has the most colorful costumes or the most entertaining ceremonies, but a lot of people do.

    A variation on this technique is lots of hoopla, fun, parties, spiritual jet-setting, get-togethers, conventions, and conferences.


Moonies Mass Marriage Ceremony, 13 Feb 2000

    Alcoholics Anonymous has lots of ceremonies and rituals — every meeting is a ceremony where people practice rituals like incanting the Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions, and praying out loud, as well as reciting several other pieces of standard church dogma at the start of every meeting. Unfortunately (or maybe fortunately), the ceremonies of A.A. are not nearly as dramatic or colorful as those of the Nazis or the Moonies.


  • Humor and Ridicule
    Satire is a time-honored political weapon, and a devastating one. Few pompous, stuffed-shirt politicians or other phony leaders can stand much of it. A good joke can be deadlier than a gun when it comes to killing off bad politicians.

    Unfortunately, Alcoholics Anonymous doesn't have any good jokes about itself. A.A. pretends to have a lot of humor by laughing and joking about everything and anything except the stuff that really matters — like the faults and shortcomings of A.A. itself. A.A. claims to have rules like,
    "Rule #62: Don't take yourself too damn seriously." (12X12, page 149.)

    But what that really means is,
    "You can and should put yourself down, and tell jokes about yourself, and laugh at how stupid you are, but don't you dare ridicule A.A. or its doctrines, or its founders."
    (I hear that the A.A. true believers go non-linear when you tell them my jokes about A.A.... Too bad; they are missing out on some fun.)


  • Assume The Major Premise
    People's minds have this peculiarity: Only the most thoughtful of listeners examine major premises — the premises upon which an argument is based. When a doubtful assertion is made, most people will plunge into arguing about the assertion without further thought about the underlying assumptions.

    For example: in the early part of World War Two, before the U.S.A. had gotten into the war, the Nazis desired to convince the American people that Germany would defeat Britain and win the war. But if they had stated such an idea directly, it would have aroused the suspicions of the American people, who would have argued the point.

    So, what the Nazis did was spread many stories and arguments about how the U.S.A. should go ahead and trade with a victorious Germany after the war was over:

    • "Whether we like Hitler or not, we will have to deal with him."
    • "If the Nazis win, let's not be sentimental — business is business. It is all an imperialist war anyway."
    • "Europe is just too big for us to ignore, and not trade with, even if Germany is running the whole thing."

    The listeners may have immediately launched into arguments over whether we should trade with Germany, but few challenged the underlying assumption, the major premise, that Germany would defeat Great Britain.

    Another example: "Why does America have the best government in the world?"
     No evidence has been supplied to support the idea that the United States (not "America") has the best government. Many European democracies from Denmark and Sweden to Switzerland would challenge that arrogant assumption.

    In March of 2005, we are seeing the use of this technique of assuming the major premise in the tragic case of Terri Schiavo, a woman who 14 years earlier suffered a heart attack that stopped the flow of blood to her brain that caused most of her brain to die. Her husband favors stopping life support and letting her go, but Terri's parents and brother (the Schindler family) constantly talk about "saving her" and "keeping her alive" by re-inserting the feeding tube. That is assuming a fact that has not been established — that her brain is still alive — that she can be saved.

    Her brother has even gone so far in his sadly deluded wishful thinking as to interpret some of her moans as speech declaring that she "wants to live". That is really assuming a lot. Her moans of "Aaaah waaaah" could just as easily mean "I want you to leave me alone and let me die" (although in truth they don't really mean anything at all).

    Those who favor keeping Terri on life support call it "judicial murder" for the courts to order the feeding tube to be removed in compliance with her husband's wishes. And out in the streets, protesters campaign for the governor or congressmen or judges or the President to "save the life of Terri".

    What all of those activists erroneously assume is the major premise — that Terri Schiavo can in fact "be saved" and be "kept alive" and that she actually is alive and has a functioning brain — that there is something or somebody left in that body to save. But 14 years of debates and court cases and doctors' examinations and medical tests, as well as the failure of Terri's medical condition to improve in 14 years, have shown beyond a shadow of a doubt that the higher parts of her brain died and liquefied a long time ago, and that she isn't in there any more. There is nobody left to save. The real Terri Schiavo died 14 years ago.

    [Update: June 2005: The autopsy of Terri Schiavo revealed that her brain had been hopelessly destroyed, and she was brain-dead for 14 years.]

    (Also note that somebody is using the propaganda technique of Observational Selection on you when they choose what you will see on television. Out of the many, many hours of videotapes that the Schindler family has made, you get to see only a few seconds of images that appear to show Terry Schaivo reacting to her environment or responding to people stroking her face. But a judge who watched 14 hours of the videotapes concluded that she was not aware of her surroundings, and that she was not reacting to stimuli in any conscious manner.)

    Also see The Effectiveness of the Twelve-Step Treatment for an example of A.A.-Trustee Professor George Vaillant's use of this technique.


  • Petitio Principii — Assume Facts Not In Evidence
    Petitio Principii is similar to "Assume the major premise".

    Petitio Principii is "a logical fallacy in which a premise is assumed to be true without warrant, or in which what is to be proved is implicitly taken for granted." In court, lawyers will scream, "Objection, Your Honor! The counsel is assuming facts not in evidence!"

    "I don't believe in astrology. But then again, I'm a Capricorn, and Capricorns don't believe in astrology."

    Another facet of "Petitio Principii" is asking questions that are really veiled statements. One of the most famous examples of that is the question, "Have you stopped beating your wife yet?" It doesn't matter whether you answer yes or no, you are confessing to having beaten your wife.

    One of the most annoying things about religious recruiters and proselytizers is how they assume that you are a hopeless sinner, before even bothering to ask about your actual spiritual condition. Their tracts advertise "How To Get On Target", without asking where you are currently aimed. They just assume that you are a disgusting sinner, headed for perdition, going to Hell in a bucket. (And they rationalize their behavior by declaring "All are sinners" — which they conveniently interpret to mean that they are entitled to lecture you about religious matters.)

    Alcoholics Anonymous uses this technique in many ways. For instance:

    • "When they choose a sponsor, beginners should usually choose someone with four to eight years of Time. Someone with less time may not be experienced enough, while someone with much more time may be too spiritual to relate well to a beginner's problems."

      If you want to argue with that statement, the usual human thing to do is to start arguing about how many years the ideal sponsor will have, rather than whether one should get a sponsor at all, or whether having many years of Time makes someone more spiritual.

      That "advice" has many underlying assumptions — premises — none of which are supported by any evidence (and none of which are even true):

      • Beginners should get sponsors.
      • Beginners will benefit from having sponsors.
      • Suitable sponsors will be able to relate to the beginners' problems and help them with those problems.
      • People grow increasingly spiritual from more years of practicing the Twelve Steps and going to A.A. meetings.
      • People with lots of Time are so spiritual and holy that they have moved up to another plane of existence, one that is just too lofty for a beginner to handle, and one from which the terribly holy old-timers may have difficulties relating to the common rabble.

      None of those assertions have been proven or even clearly stated and supported by evidence and facts. The speaker just shoves it all at us, "under the table", so to speak, as assumed facts that are just incidental to the question of how many years of sobriety a good sponsor should have.

      In fact, recent research has shown that newcomers do not benefit at all from getting sponsors. In a recent controlled study, a group of new Narcotics Anonymous and Alcoholics Anonymous members who got sponsors did no better than another group who didn't get sponsors. But strangely enough, the elder members who chose to become sponsors did better than the other members who did not choose to act as sponsors. (The sponsors were a self-selecting group; not randomly chosen.) It seems that getting their egos stroked, acting as puffed-up, all-wise, all-knowing sponsors, ordering the wimpy newcomers around, helps the sponsors to stay clean and sober, even if it doesn't help the newcomers any.

    • For another example of "assuming the major premise", at Narcotics Anonymous meetings, the group secretary always asks:
      "Can we see a show of hands of those who have a year or more of clean time to show that this program works?"

      They never ask,
      "Can we see a show of hands of those who have a year or more of clean time without doing Bill Wilson's Twelve Steps, to show that his bombastic cult religion nonsense is completely unnecessary?"
       (FYI: I am one of those hands.   :-)     And I'm not the only one...)

    • In his second book, Bill Wilson wrote about confessing all of one's sins (Step Five) by saying:

      The real tests of the situation are your own willingness to confide and your full confidence in the one with whom you share your first accurate self-survey.
       Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions, William G. Wilson, page 61.

      First accurate self-survey? Says who? Bill Wilson was assuming a lot in declaring that newcomers to A.A. had never done an accurate self-assessment before. How would he know? But then, Bill always assumed that alcoholics were just immoral bums who needed to be reformed with his version of spirituality. Bill Wilson assumed that all A.A. newcomers were strangers to real religion, people without any real morals or spirituality — they were even atheists or agnostics — who knew nothing about God and who had never done any introspection before. Bill also wrongly assumed that wallowing in guilt and only listing negative things — all of one's "defects of character", "moral shortcomings", and "wrongs" — constituted "an accurate self-survey".

    Also see the Bait And Switch Con Game web page for an example of Bill Wilson using Petitio Principii to convince people that they must believe in his beliefs.


  • Hidden Assumptions
    Hidden assumptions are much like the previous two kinds of assumptions, Assume The Major Premise, and Petitio Principii, Assume Facts Not In Evidence, but in this technique the assumption is so subtle that it isn't even mentioned.

    Television infomercials that sell stock market trading computer programs, or options or FOREX trading programs, all try to foist numerous hidden assumptions on the viewers:

    • They assume that stocks, contracts, or other pieces of paper will routinely go up and down in price in neat cycles, and that you will be able to choose a stock, option, or futures contract that will conveniently do so for you.

    • They assume that you or their computer program will be able to pick the correct stock or option and buy it at the lowest price, and then sell it at the highest price. In other words, they assume that you or their program will be able to "time the market".

    • They assume that there is something called a "cash flow" that you can just dip into, as if it were a river of money, and you can just scoop out buckets for yourself. There is no such thing in the financial markets. The reality is that there are a lot of sharp, experienced, professional traders who are buying and selling pieces of paper while haggling over every penny.

    • They often tell you that you can place stop losses on every order. That is true, but you still lose money before the stop loss takes effect. It stops the loss from getting even worse; it doesn't stop you from losing money. And stop loss orders don't always take effect as soon as you wish. In big stock market crashes (like 1929 and 1987), people had to wait a long time, a seeming eternity, while they watched their stock sink like the Titanic, before their sell order was finally filled by a willing buyer — filled at a very low price. (Often, there just aren't a lot of willing buyers around in a stock market crash. Everybody is trying to sell. And you can't sell something until someone else wants to buy it from you.) That infomercial implies that you will only lose a little bit on bad trades because of stop loss orders, while making big profits on lucky trades. ("Stop your loses; let your winnings run.") But that isn't necessarily true or always even possible. And they assume that if you lose a little on one trade, that you will make it up on the next trade. That isn't necessarily true, either. If your luck is bad, you can stumble from one losing trade to another until you run out of money.

    • The infomercial makers assume or imply that the computer program is looking at the same things as the market. It isn't. Computer programs track current trends in prices — in other words, by analyzing the past, up to just a few seconds ago — but the big institutional investors and traders are always buying and selling things based on their vision of the future, as determined by such arcane factors as the prime interest rate, the price of oil, housing starts, unemployment figures, retail sales, and various economic measurements like business profit predictions and the Consumer Confidence Index. The big boys are always looking at the future, while the computer program on your dinky little computer is reacting to the present and past prices.

    • The infomercial makers assume or imply that their computer program can predict the future. Oh really? If it can, why isn't everybody using it?

    • They assume that your trades won't ever influence the market — that your buy and sell orders won't drive prices up or down, no matter how large your orders are. They even assume that ALL of the buy and sell orders of all of the other people who also bought the same computer program won't drive the prices up or down, and that you won't end up in a race with them to see who can get their orders executed first. The infomercials don't mention the fact that if the computer program tells every program user to buy the same stock or option at the same time, the price of the stock or option will jump sharply, and then it won't be a bargain any more.

    • The talking heads in infomercials assume that leverage is good, and that you will profit from it. They happily declare that you can buy stocks, options, and futures contracts on margin — meaning, putting up, in cash, only a small fraction of their actual cost. That allows you to profit by several times as much money if your gamble pays off big. But it also allows you to lose several times as much money if the trade goes sour. In highly-leveraged deals, you can easily lose more than your total investment, and end up owing the broker large sums of money. (Remember Long Term Capital Management.) The salesmen don't mention that ugly fact.

    • The infomercials assume that you can win at the financial markets trading game, even if you are a beginner, just because you bought an easy-to-use computer program. Those TV commercials imply that the big boys in the financial markets are too stupid to buy the same computer program and use it (if only to see what the dumb thing says), and that the big boys are too stupid to hire lots of smart young computer programmers to write even better programs for them (which they have already done).

    • The infomercials assume that it is easy to be right.
      Many billions of dollars worth of stocks, bonds, options, and futures contracts are bought and sold every day, and every trade is between two people or companies, one of whom buys and one of whom sells.
      Curiously, both parties in every trade believe that what they are doing is the best thing to do.
      Every time you buy, the guy who is selling is convinced that you are making a mistake.
      Every time you sell, the buyer is convinced that you are making a mistake.
      If you are a beginner who is trading against experienced professionals, who is more likely to be right?


  • Assume Futures or Future Results
    Stack the deck in an argument by assuming that certain future events or future results will occur.

    For example, a political candidate can be dismissed with this argument: "Sure, Joe Blow is a great guy and he has some good issues and he says some good stuff. But he can't win, so there is no point in seriously considering him as a candidate."

    Obviously, if nobody will seriously consider Joe as a candidate, he can't win.

    (And now, in 2009, do you remember how many people said that the young, black, Junior Senator from Illinois couldn't possibly really win the Presidency, so his campaign was just a joke, and shouldn't be taken seriously?)


  • Fallacy of Presupposition
    Ask for an explanation of something not yet established:
    "If evolution is true, then..."
    Since the study of evolution is a work in progress, one can always find a point of controversy, and challenge the other person to demonstrate that it is true, while assuming that failure to do so proves the entire matter false.


  • Affirmation of the Consequent
    Improperly validate the key element of an implication:
    "The Bible says God's people will be happy; we are happy; therefore the Bible speaks truthfully."

    A.A. does it like this:
          "RARELY HAVE we seen a person fail who has thoroughly followed our path. To thoroughly follow our path requires absolute abstinence from drinking alcohol. If somebody drinks, then he isn't thoroughly following our path.
          "But this one guy didn't drink, so he did thoroughly follow our path, and he stayed sober, so that proves that the program works to keep people from drinking."


  • Irrelevant Conclusion (Ignoratio Elenchi)
    It's a conclusion that does not follow from the argument:
    "Jehovah's Witnesses have the true religion because only we do so much door-to-door preaching."
    If you point out that Mormons also preach in this way, you'll be told that they don't do as much of it, or that their religion is obviously false.9

    Likewise, "Alcoholism is bad, really bad, so A.A., which is intended to save alcoholics, is good."
     That is bad logic. There is no evidence that the A.A. cult religion actually saves anyone.

    That bogus logic is no different than,

    • "Drug addiction is bad, really bad, so Scientology is good."
       (Scientology has a front group called "Narconon" that claims to save drug addicts by using Scientology "principles" on them.)

    • "Cancer is bad, really bad, so the Nazi Party is good."
       (The Nazis really did want to wipe out cancer. See The Nazi War on Cancer by Robert N. Proctor.)

          A.A. missionaries like to brag about the scientific studies that have found that there is a genetic factor in alcoholism. They then claim that those studies support the A.A. disease theory of alcoholism. That is another irrelevant conclusion.
          The fact that some genes affect a person's susceptibility to alcohol addiction does not make alcoholism a disease any more than my genes for blue-green eyes prove that Blue-Eye-ism is a disease. And I also have the genes for premature graying of the hair, and that isn't a disease either.
          Just because someone is more prone to alcohol addiction does not make him powerless over alcohol or unable to control his actions, and it does not make habitual alcohol consumption a disease.


  • Confusion of Beliefs with Facts
    This includes
    • Substitution of Beliefs for Facts,
    • Insistance that "Beliefs Trump Facts", as if "It's what I believe" is the final answer to an argument,
    • and "Belief Equals Truth", as if something is true because somebody believes it.

    Dogmatic religious sects with bizarre beliefs are notorious for using this logical fallacy. When you present a true believer member of such a church with facts that contradict his beliefs, he answers, "Well, what we believe is...", and that is supposed to be the end of the argument — the final answer on the subject. The fact that they believe something supposedly makes contradictory facts irrelevant and invalid — contradictory facts are just minor irritants to be ignored and discarded.

    An aspirin commercial portrayed a man declaring, "Last year I had a heart attack, right there where she is standing. If it hadn't been for Bayer aspirin, who knows? I believe that Bayer aspirin saved my life."
     No actual medical evidence is supplied to show that aspirin really saved him from death by heart attack, and the commercial doesn't actually say that Bayer aspirin saved the guy's life. We just get his uninformed "belief". (Besides, is that guy for real, or is he just an actor reading a script?)
    (Note that this is also an example of Sly Suggestions and Proof By Anecdote.)

    A woman who was campaigning for John McCain in Florida declared, "You've got to understand how bad it will be if we get Obama, and I firmly believe that."
     NPR (National Public Radio), Morning News, 3 November 2008.
    That woman's firm belief is not evidence of anything — other than evidence of what her strongly-held opinions happen to be.

    When a person who is skeptical of Alcoholics Anonymous declares, "The Bible does not say that God will make you quit drinking and restore you to sanity and take care of your will and your life for you and remove all of your defects of character just because you 'turned your life over' and confessed all of your sins to your sponsor."

    A 12-Step believer answers, "What, don't you believe that God cares about you and wants you to be healthy and happy?"

    The answer is, "It doesn't matter what I believe about God's feelings and desires, the fact remains that the Bible still does not say that God will do the 12 Steps for you."

    (In fact, the Bible actually specifically bans several of the practices that are embodied in the 12 Steps.)

    Another A.A. advocate declared:

    "I am a firm believer that if someone is ready and is truly an alcoholic of the desperate sort that I was, within this program there is a solution that works."
     http://www.soberrecovery.com/forums/alcoholism-12-Step-support/149124-aa-cult.html

    There, the writer uses both Lying with Qualifiers and Confusion of Beliefs with Facts to declare that the 12-Step program works, he believes, if...

    A variation on this logical fallacy is, "I'm sure that...", as in,
    "I'm sure that President Bush had the legal authority to spy on thousands of Americans and tap their phones without a warrant."
    One political hack's convinced opinion, no matter how sure he is, doesn't change the facts of the matter, or change what is actually in the laws of the USA.


  • Substitute Feelings For Facts
    Declare that you feel that something is true, and act like that is supporting evidence.

    • "It was the right thing to do. I firmly believe in it."
    • "I feel that he is a good man. He has a good heart."

    The "good heart" argument is one that George W. Bush uses often. When one of Bush's political appointees proves himself to be totally incompetent and unqualified for his job, Bush answers, "He has a good heart."

    Likewise, President Ronald Reagan used this technique when he declared, "My heart tells me that we did not trade arms for hostages, although my head tells me that we did."

    And G. W. Bush did the same thing again: After the Intelligence Community released a National Intelligence Estimate that clearly stated that Iran was not building nuclear weapons, and had abandoned their nuclear weapons program many years ago, Bush declared, "I still feel that Iran is a threat."


  • Confusion of Abstractions with Reality
    This includes Confusing the Map with the Territory. (The territory is the real land; the map is an abstraction drawn on a piece of paper.)

    We humans are very good at making abstractions to reduce big complex things to small manageable simple ideas. Unfortunately, we are prone to making the error of confusing our abstractions with the actual thing that they represent. Then,

    • "Fighting for the Flag" equals defending one's country from an enemy. (They are not the same thing at all.)

    • A funny colored area on a paper map is suddenly worth fighting for, even if "we" do not own it (like Vietnam and Iraq).

    • In a stock market television program, a pundit declared that the current condition of the stock market was, "Liquidity seeking things of value."
       "Liquidity" is an abstraction, a relative measure of how much money is easily available for loans or purchases of stocks and bonds. Liquidity is not a hairy animal like a bear or a bull that prowls Wall Street seeking something to eat.
      Now there may have been a few people or institutional investors who were seeking something of value to buy — there are usually at least a few bargain-hunters around — but "Liquidity" was definitely not roaming The Steet. In fact, the sub-prime mortgage debácle soon shattered the confidence of "The Market", and left it very illiquid. (In other words, those people who had some money decided that they would rather keep it than give it to some fast-talking con-artists.)


  • Circular Reasoning (Circulus in Demonstrando)
    Support a chain of arguments by the arguments it contains, as in:
    "The Bible is true because it is written by God. The Bible tells us how God wrote the Bible. God doesn't lie, as the Bible tells us, so He wouldn't write a book that is false, would he?"

    Likewise,
    "If reading were not supposed to be illegal, then it wouldn't be against the law, would it?"

    Or,
    "Smoking marijuana is bad because it is against the law.
    Smoking marijuana is against the law because it is bad."

    Or,
    "You can get rid of the excessive noise from the Olympus E-510 camera's Four-Thirds sensor by running a noise-reduction program that will unfortunately erase all of the fine picture details along with the noise."
    "But you can get the fine detail back at the expense of noise."
    "Besides, the noise isn't that important."

    Or,
    "The Alcoholics Anonymous program works great for the rare few people for whom it works great."

    Or,
    "It is okay to lie and exaggerate how many lives A.A. really saves, in order to promote A.A. and get people to join A.A. — the end justifies the means — because A.A. is a wonderful organization that has saved so many lives...."


  • Appeal to Evil
    Appeal to and arouse the worst parts of people's character. Hate-mongering, demagoguery, rabble-rousing, and similar methods of crowd manipulation can best be accomplished by appealing to the low, base, worst side of people's character — to the faults, vices, fears, and weaknesses of the audience. Various crowds can be wooed by appealing to their greed, anger, jealousy, vanity, fears, racism, sexism, hatred, or lusts.

    • In his classic book on mass religious movements, The True Believer, Eric Hoffer wrote:

      Hatred is the most accessible and comprehensive of all unifying agents. It pulls and whirls the individual away from his own self, makes him oblivious of his weal and future, frees him of jealousies and self-seeking. He becomes an anonymous particle quivering with a craving to fuse and coalesce with his like into one flaming mass. Heine suggests that what Christian love cannot do is effected by a common hatred.1
              Mass movements can rise and spread without belief in a God, but never without belief in a devil. Usually the strength of a mass movement is proportionate to the vividness and tangibility of its devil. When Hitler was asked whether he thought the Jew must be destroyed, he answered: "No.... We should have then to invent him. It is essential to have a tangible enemy, not merely an abstract one."2 F.A. Voigt tells of a Japanese mission that arrived in Berlin in 1932 to study the National Socialist movement. Voigt asked a member of the mission what he thought of the movement. He replied: "It is magnificent. I wish we could have something like it in Japan, only we can't, because we haven't got any Jews."3
      1. Heinrich Heine, Religion and Philosophy in Germany (London: Trubner & Company, 1882), p. 89.
      2. Hermann Rauschning, Hitler Speaks (New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1940), p. 234.
      3. Fritz August Voigt, Unto Caesar (New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1938), p. 301.
      The True Believer, Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements, Eric Hoffer, pages 89 to 90.

    • Senator Joseph McCarthy and his lawyer Roy Cohn used fear of Communists to terrorize the nation and build their careers. They became such vicious demagogues with their "black lists" of names and their accusations of people being Communists, or "Communist sympathizers", or "fellow travelers" that fear of Senator Joseph McCarthy and his staff of mad-dog anti-Communists replaced fear of Communism in many people's minds...

    • Racists inflame their audiences by complaining about all of the "special privileges" that the blacks get through government programs, and complaining that the blacks are "taking over."

    • White Supremacists and Neo-Nazis routinely preach hatred of blacks and Jews, and arouse fear of them by accusing them of giant conspiracies and horrible crimes.

    • Some other politician might appeal to a crowd by arousing their laziness and greed, by promising pork-barrel projects that will put them on easy street. This tactic is routinely used on millionaire industrialists who are promised more lucrative government contracts and lower taxes.

    • Preachers routinely use fear of death and fear of Hell to manipulate their audiences.

    • Some preachers seek to induce disgust and homophobia in their audiences, to make them hate and fear homosexual people. Note that there is always a veiled game of one-upmanship going on in those tirades: "We are special. We are more holy than those other people because we don't do the disgusting things that homosexuals do..."

    • Other evangelists preach hatred of abortionists and women who get abortions, and incite followers to shoot doctors and bomb clinics, in the name of "Preserving Life."

    A.A. appeals to some bad characteristics, too:

    • Arouse fear of death:
      • "You must either work a strong program or else you will die drunk in a gutter."
      • Unless each A.A. member follows to the best of his ability our suggested Twelve Steps to recovery, he almost certainly signs his own death warrant.
         Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions, William G. Wilson, page 174.
      • To one who feels he is an atheist or agnostic such an experience seems impossible, but to continue as he is means disaster, especially if he is an alcoholic of the hopeless variety. To be doomed to an alcoholic death or to live on a spiritual basis are not always easy alternatives to face.
         The Big Book, William G. Wilson, page 44.
      • "None of us in Alcoholics Anonymous is normal. Our abnormality compels us to go to AA... We all go because we need to. Because the alternative is drastic, either A.A. or death."
         Delirium Tremens, Stories of Suffering and Transcendence, Ignacio Solares, Hazelden, 2000, page 27.

    • Appeal to vanity, egotism, and lust for power:
      • "We Alcoholics Anonymous people are special, very special. We are so special that we are God's Chosen People. Only unto us has God given the magic gift of healing alcoholics."

      • "I'm so holy that I spend all day, every day, 'Seeking and Doing the Will of God' and practicing these principles in all my affairs (including all of my affairs with my mistresses, just like Bill Wilson did)."

      • "After you have 10 or 20 years of Time, you are like unto a saint, respected, obeyed, and admired by the young. You can have an entire stable of young sponsees doing your bidding."

      • "We really are Chosen. Our years of getting beaten down by alcoholism have prepared us for leadership roles. Now that we number in the millions — not just us, but all of the Twelve-Step groups — we can become a force for change."
         — One of the A.A. faithful, "sharing" at a meeting.

        (Presumably, after the peaceful, non-violent coup d'etat, we can have a wonderful alcohol-free country run by a fundamentalist theocracy, just like Iran. Our new Fearless Leader will be the Ayatollah Anonymous, who will enforce the teachings of the Prophet, Bill Wilson.)

        By the way, did anyone else notice the conflict between "becoming a force for change" and the ban on getting involved in outside issues — Tradition Ten? That "we number in the millions" phrase means just one thing: enough registered voters to swing an election. That's politics, not recovery.

        Did anyone else notice the embedded egotism and arrogance? Only the alcoholic 12-Steppers are qualified for leadership roles, because of their years of bottle-training. Only they can be "a force for change".

        And why do we need such big changes now? Apparently, it's because the normal people who were running the world, and keeping things together, for all of those years while we were busy drinking ourselves to death weren't "The Chosen People", and they weren't religious enough, and they haven't been doing a good enough job of running the country in a moral fashion. But just watch the changes after us brain-damaged alcoholics and drug addicts and religious fanatics seize power.
         "Boy, will the ordinary people have to kiss our asses now. The shoe's going to be on the other foot now... We're really gonna be a force for change now..."

      The part that I still haven't been able to figure out is: "Exactly how does excessive alcohol consumption prepare us for leadership roles?"

      And which is better for future leadership, whiskey, wine, or beer? What did Dubya drink?

      Oh, and do you get bonus points for 20 years of snorting cocaine?

    • Indulge the true believers' love of absolutes:
      • "Bill Wilson was inspired by God when he wrote the Twelve Steps and the Big Book — Bill asked for, and received, Guidance from God, so every word in the Big Book is unquestionably true."
      • "A.A. practices the Oxford Groups' Four Absolutes — 'Absolute Honesty, Absolute Love, Absolute Unselfishness, and Absolute Purity'."
      • "Alcoholics Anonymous is the only possible way to overcome a drinking problem."
      • "You must totally abstain from drinking, or you will be a drunkard — 'One drink, One drunk.'"
      • Alcoholics Anonymous is The Only Way.

    • Indulge lust for sex:
      • "Newcomers are easy marks. They are just freshly detoxed, their heads are still cloudy, and they are very shaky and confused and insecure, so they are easy to fast-talk and pick up."
      • "Every meeting is a cattle call. It's a good place to pick up women even if you aren't an alcoholic or an addict."
      • "Once you have (or can claim to have) enough years of sobriety, you can start sponsoring all of the delicious young things that you want in your bed. Just walk up to them after their first meeting, and ask them if they want the help of a sponsor. And if anyone objects to your behavior, just point out that you have more Time than they do."
      • "Heck, in Mike Q's Midtown Group, the old-timers get their pick of the new underage girls. The girls are even assigned to their new sponsors by the group's elders."

    With all of those great selling points, do you think we can attract some new members to our "little fellowship"?


  • Appeal to Higher Principles
    You must do something, or we must support a certain course of action, because some Higher Principle requires it:

    • Social Darwinism teaches us that the big and strong people should eat the small and weak people, because it will improve the species. It's Mother Nature's sacred law, The Survival of the Fittest. There is no sense in helping the small, weak, sickly people, because it will only let them reproduce and pollute the gene pool.

    • The Pope declared that Spain and Portugal should seize all of the native American people's lands because they were heathens and "in rebellion against The One True God", and Spain and Portugal had the moral duty to Christendom and God to convert the natives to Christianity.

    • Manifest Destiny teaches us that white men in the U.S.A. should kill Indians and steal their land because it is the white man's God-given destiny to dominate the continent and build a great nation (— a great white Christian nation, that is).

    • Likewise, Israel currently argues that they have God-given right to steal the Palestinian people's land and water because God gave that land to some Jewish ancestors 4000 years ago — and they didn't lose the deed to the Romans 2000 years ago, like Moses and Jeremiah predicted that the Lord would make happen, if the Israelites weren't good enough:

      "If you ever make idols, the LORD will be angry, and you won't have long to live, because the LORD will let you be wiped out. Only a few of you will survive, and the LORD will force you to leave the land and will scatter you among the nations." (Deuteronomy 4:26-27)

      "Israel, today I am giving you the laws and teachings of the LORD your God. And if you don't obey them all, He will put many curses on you.   ...
      The LORD will let you be defeated by your enemies, and you will scatter in all directions."       (Deuteronomy 28:15,25)

      They sacrificed their sons and daughters in the fire. They practiced divination and sorcery and sold themselves to do evil in the eyes of the LORD, provoking him to anger. So the LORD was very angry with Israel and removed them from His presence ...
       2 Kings 17:17,18

      The LORD said,
            People of Judah, I am the LORD your God, but you have refused to obey me, and you didn't change when I punished you. And now, you no longer even pretend to be faithful to me.   ...
            You have disobeyed me by putting your disgusting idols in my temple, and now the temple itself is digusting to me. At Topheth in Hinnom Valley you have built alters where you kill your children and burn them as sacrifices to other gods. I would never think of telling you to do this. So watch out!
       Jeremiah 7:28 and 7:30-32

      The LORD said,
            I destroyed the land because people disobeyed me and rejected my laws and teachings. They were stubborn and worshiped Baal, just as their ancestors did. So I, the LORD All-Powerful, the God of Israel, promise them poison to eat and drink. I'll scatter them in foreign countries that they and their ancestors have never heard of. Finally, I will send enemy soldiers to kill every last one of them.
       Jeremiah 9:12-16

      Speaking of which, in chapters 2, 3, 7, 13, 17, 20, and 25 of the Book of Deuteronomy, Moses says that the Lord our God commands us faithful followers to practice religious bigotry, racism, mass murder, genocide, and ethnic cleansing, in order to keep people from worshipping the wrong God (which meant, "any God besides the blood-thirsty monster that Moses liked").

      • "We met Sihon and his army in battle at Jahaz, and the LORD our God helped us defeat them. We killed Sihon, his sons, and everyone else in his army. Then we captured and destroyed every town in Sihon's kingdom, killing everyone, but keeping the livestock and everything else of value." (Deuteronomy 2:32-35)
      • "The LORD our God helped us destroy Og and his army and conquer his entire kingdom of Bashan, including the Argob region. His kingdom had lots of villages and sixty towns... We completely destroyed them all, killing everyone, but keeping the livestock and everything else of value." (Deuteronomy 3:3-7)
      • "... you must destroy them without mercy." (Deuteronomy 7:3)
      • "... you must stone them to death. ... Don't show any pity." (Deuteronomy 13:8-10)
      • "You may hear that some worthless people there have talked everyone there into worshipping other gods... ... you must take your swords and kill every one of them..." (Deuteronomy 13:13-15)
      • "... kill all the men. Take the women and children as slaves..." (Deuteronomy 20:14-15)
      • And then the book of Numbers gives us helpful instructions at this point — it tells us to kill everyone in a neighboring city, even the baby boys, except for the virgin girls, whom we shall keep and turn into our sex slaves:
         "Moses became angry with the army commanders and said, "I can't believe you let the women live! They are the ones who followed Balaam's advice and invited our people to worship the god Baal-Peor.   ...   You must put to death every boy and all of the women who have ever had sex. But do not kill the young women who have never had sex. You may keep them for yourselves.   ...
        Moses and Eleazar followed the LORD's instructions, and listed everything that had been taken from the Midianites. The list included   ...   32,000 young women who had never had sex.         (Numbers 31:14-35)

        If Moses' army kept 32,000 young virgins for themselves, then they must have slaughtered a couple of hundred thousand other people — older women, younger girls, men, boys, and infants. If Moses were alive today, he would be taken to the Hague and put on trial for war crimes, right beside Slobodan Milosevik. "Genocide" is the only name for such racist immoral conduct.
      • "Whenever you capture towns in the land the LORD your God is giving you, be sure to kill all the people and animals. ... If you allow them to live, they will persuade you to worship their disgusting gods, and you will be unfaithful to the LORD." (Deuteronomy 20:16-18)
      • "The LORD your God will help you capture the land, and He will give you peace. But when that day comes, you must wipe out Amalek so completely that no one remembers they ever lived." (Deuteronomy 25:19)

      And then chapter 21 of Deuteronomy, verses 11 to 14, handily teaches us how to make sex slaves out of the surviving enemy women: If she is beautiful enough to make you want her, then cut her hair and fingernails, dress her in Israelite clothes, and give her a month to mourn for her dead husband or father (whom you killed). Then you can drag her into your bed and keep her as your sex slave for as long as you wish (they call it, "marry her"). If you grow tired of her, you can get rid of her at any time you wish (they call it "divorce her"). But if you have had sex with her — "if you have slept with her as your wife" — then you have destroyed her cash value — you have "dishonored her", and you cannot sell her into slavery any more. You will have to give her her freedom — just boot her out into the streets when you are done with her.

      Oh well, I guess that's just the price of getting laid while keeping people from worshipping the wrong god.

    • Old Nazis tell us that the S.S. had a noble spiritual mission to elevate the human race by protecting and enhancing the purity of the white, blue-eyed, Aryan race. Eliminating the Jews, Blacks, Gays, and Gypsies, and preventing them from further contaminating the gene pool, was only a part of that great program.

      "And then did the heroic S.S. soldiers smite the disgusting Jewish villages in the land of the Ukraine, completely destroying them all, killing everyone, but keeping the livestock and everything else of value, for the LORD was with them: Gott Sei Mit Uns."

    • Communism teaches us that we must overthrow the rich people and seize all of their property and kill them all and spread Communism everywhere because Dialectical Materialism teaches us that the Revolution of the Proletariat is inevitable — the "Force of History" cannot be stopped.

    • For the sake of "Welfare Reform" and "Compassionate Conservatism", we should kick all of the single mothers off of welfare. It will "teach them to be responsible."

    • In Alcoholics Anonymous, you must quit drinking because God wants you to, so that you can then spend the rest of your life "seeking and doing the Will of God." (Which, according to the Old Testament, might be "Kill all of your neighbors who are not Jewish, except for the virgin girls, whom you may keep as your sex slaves.")


  • Appeal to Authorities (Argumentum ad Verecundiam)
    Cite and quote all kinds of authorities to support your statements. Also seem to obtain support from famous people who are not present to state their actual opinions.
    • In Herman Melville's classic novel Moby Dick, the crew begged Captain Ahab to stop his suicidal monomaniacal persuit of the white whale. Captain Ahab dismissed the crew's sane advice with the statement:
            "There is one God who is Lord over all the seas, and there is one Captain who is lord over all the Pequod. Now get back to your post."
    • Religious proselytizers argue, "Einstein believed in God. Do you think you are smarter than Einstein?"
    • "The Bible says that there were giants in the Earth in those days, so of course dinosaurs lived at the same time as people."
    • Another appeal to an authority: "Professor I.M.A. Bore of the Philadelphia Institute of Phrenology states that Green Eggs and Ham is the most beneficial breakfast there is. Who are you to claim that you know more than Professor Bore?"

          I want to conclude with a word about "You gotta believe it 'cause it's in the Bible." You can bet your bottom dollar that the person saying it is not referring to the Sermon on the Mount. Rather he has in mind a passage you have no business believing in — one, for instance, supporting homophobia or gender inequality.
          No one says, "You gotta believe it 'cause it's in Shakespeare" or Dante or Goethe or Pushkin. Although not as much as the Bible, these writings still have a lot of authority for a lot of people. The difference is they have no doctrine of authority.
          Why, for Christians, should the Bible alone have a doctrine of authority, especially when such doctrines demand either a literalist approach which is unacceptable or something which waffles hopelessly?
          Why does the Bible need a doctrine of authority? To compel our allegiance? To make us believe something our reason, experience and conscience reject? How can anything outwardly command us that has not first inwardly claimed us? Besides, nobody thinks all biblical passages are of equal worth, that each represents an axis on which our whole faith pivots.
     William Sloan Coffin, The Heart Is A Little To The Left; essays on public morality, page 50.

    William Sloan Coffin served for eighteen years as Chaplain of Yale University, was Senior Minister of Riverside Church, and is President Emeritus of SANE/FREEZE: Campaign for Global Security.

    And yes, I know, that is another appeal to authorities.

    Another kind of appeal to authorities is Name Dropping, where the speaker liberally salts and peppers his speech with the names of the famous, rich or powerful people, as if movie stars and millionaires have all of the wisdom of the world.

    In A.A. history, Dr. Frank Buchman was of course the champion name dropper. He spent his whole life in pursuit of the rich and famous, and dropped their names all over the place.

    In A.A., the rap is:

    • "Well, Bill Wilson wrote in his second book that if you don't do the Twelve Steps, you are signing your own death warrant, so you had better do all of the Steps all of the time if you want to live.
    • "Joe Blow has twenty years of sobriety, so when he says that six times seven is 48, you'd better believe he's speaking from a wealth of experience."
    • "Bill Wilson wrote in the Big Book that alcoholism is a spiritual disease, so it's a proven fact.
    • "Dr. William D. Silkworth" said that alcoholism is a disease coupled with an allergy, so there is no question about it."
    • "Professor George E. Vaillant of Harvard University says that all alcoholics should join A.A., even though it doesn't work, so they should, of course, for their own spiritual well-being."

    A variation on Appeal to Authorities is to get a fake expert to say what you want people to hear. Use some bozo who got his Ph.D. from a diploma mill, and call him the greatest expert on the subject in the country, and have him spout your party line. That's what the current anti-abortion movement is doing with their pseudo-scientific claims that abortions harm women's health and drive them to suicide. Their "expert", the "greatest authority on the subject", got his degree from a "non-accredited institution", and his "research" is little more than a collection of anecdotes. (See Bill Moyers, PBS, 20 June 2007.)

    Another variation on the Appeal to Authorities technique is to falsely quote things that were never said or written, as in "Professor Bore declared in his encyclopedic History of Western Thinkers that unthinking obedience was the easiest path to happiness", when Prof. Bore never said any such thing.

    Bill Wilson used this stunt when he declared that William James wrote in his Varieties of Religious Experience that spiritual experiences came from "compression at depth". James never said anything like that.


  • Appeal to Force (Argumentum ad Baculum)
    It is an exploitation of fear: "If you don't believe what we're saying, you will be destroyed by God!"

          "You must have faith. It's very important that you believe. Little Susie didn't believe in Santa Claus, so God got mad at Susie and turned Susie's father into an alcoholic who got drunk and beat her. So you'd better believe in Santa if you don't want that to happen to you."
    (And yes, that example also uses the Proof by Anecdote propaganda technique.)

    Similarly, if you won't join Alcoholics Anonymous, then the Big Bad Booze Bogeyman will get you:

    • "Alcohol is cunning, baffling, and powerful" and wants to kill you.
    • Your addiction wants to kill you.
    • Your disease wants to kill you.
    • You are powerless over alcohol, so you will relapse and die drunk in a gutter.
    • Your inevitable fate outside of Alcoholics Anonymous is "Jails, Institutions, or Death".


  • Appeal to the People (Argumentum ad Populum)
    Claim that something is obviously true because most people are convinced that it is true.
    "Can you deny that the Bible is the most widely distributed book of all time? Can you deny that most people in this country are Christian? That proves that what we are saying is true."

    And:
    "A.A. is considered to be the most successful sobriety program of all time. Most people believe that A.A. is the best solution for alcoholism."

    Ignore the facts that there was a time when most people believed that the snake pit was the best treatment program for mental illness, and that there was a time when most people believed that the Earth was flat.


  • Appeal to Numbers (Argumentum ad Numerum)
    Argumentum ad Numerum maintains that the more people who are convinced about something, the more likely it is to be true, and the more people who do something, the more right it is. This trick is close to the trick of "Everybody knows" — "Everybody knows that we are right."

    • "He is admired by thousands of loyal followers."
    • "Millions of bottles sold."
    • "As seen by millions on TV."
    • "Billions of burgers served."
    • "A mighty army of the Lord."
    • "It's the fastest-growing form of music."

    Frank Buchman and his Oxford Groups / Moral Re-Armament organization used this propaganda technique constantly — they invariably bragged about how many thousands of people had attended their latest house party or convention, and about how many people had been converted by their latest mission.

          I am speaking today to the millions across the world who in these anxious days are increasingly looking to Moral Re-Armament as the one hope for the future.
     Frank Buchman, 29 October 1939, Remaking the World: The Speeches of Frank Buchman, Frank Buchman, pages 151-154.

    But there was a flaw in their logic:

    "In their recent American tour, the Groups on at least three occasions — Detroit, Louisville, and Phoenix — found the work of conversion far harder in towns where they had previously worked: still more significant, at Louisville, where two years previously hundreds had made their surrender, they found only eleven who had remained in any sense active members."
     The Groups Movement, The Most Rev. John A. Richardson, pages 26-28.
    Morehouse Publishing Co., Milwaukee, Wis., 1935.

    Likewise, A.A. supporters claim that Alcoholics Anonymous has more than 2 million members in more than 153 countries world-wide, and they say that more than 13 million copies of the Big Book have been printed, and then they say that those numbers prove that A.A. is a really good organization, and that all of Bill Wilson's religious beliefs must be true and correct, and that the Twelve-Step program must really work great.

    Such an illogical argument ignores the fact that Hitler had far more than 2 million Nazis, and Stalin had far more than 2 million Communists, but those weren't good organizations, out to save the world. They also sold lots of copies of their books, Mein Kampf and The Communist Manifesto, but neither Communism nor Nazism was a good philosophy for the betterment of the world, in spite of their many fanatical true believers. And neither of their systems worked, either, in spite of their large numbers of members.

    Likewise, Scientology and the Moonies also have large numbers of members, and they also sell lots and lots of books, but that doesn't make them good cult religions, either.

    The large numbers proved nothing except that it is possible to hoodwink a lot of people.

    And A.A. is a complete failure as a treatment program for alcoholism. It has a very low success rate and a very high death rate. All of the bragging about how many people attend the A.A. meetings is pretty meaningless in the face of the A.A. failure rate and death rate.


  • Dismiss by Numbers
    This is just the opposite of Appeal To Numbers: Dismiss facts or arguments that you don't like by claiming that they represent very small numbers of people or things.

    For example, when I complain that a certain computer program or feature or piece of hardware does not work correctly with the Linux operating system, the manufacturer invariably answers that not very many people run Linux, so he doesn't need to bother making his product work right with Linux.

    Likewise, when I ask for other things to work correctly, and have all of the features that I need to make them useful, the maker often answers that not very many people care about that feature.

    The same thing applies to politics. Politicians say (in so many words):
          "Not very many people really care about that issue, so we won't bother to do anything about it."
    (Never mind what is actually right or wrong...)


  • Appeal to Averages
    The speaker appeals to an average that is false or irrelevant.

    For example, a serial killer might declare, "I may have kidnapped, raped, and murdered half a dozen pretty girls, but there are 150 million American women whom I did not harm in any way, so I really have a very good record, on average."

    A Congressman or Senator might declare, "Okay, so I got caught taking 100 bribes. But there were 10,000 bribes that I did not accept. (The other Congressmen got them.) So I'm really 99% honest. Really. Honestly."

    A.A. members use the same technique often: "Oh, yeh, there may be a few cases where sponsors rape their sponsees, and there may be a few thirteenth-steppers preying on the newcomers, and there may have been a few cases where the sponsors told their sponsees not to take their medications, and then the sponsees died, but on average most people get through A.A. without getting raped or killed."


  • Appeal to Antiquity (Argumentum ad Antiquitatem)
    Validate a proposition by its age.

    • "Give me that Old Time Religion."

    • "People have been worshipping this way for thousands of years."

    • "The Bible has survived for so long that it must be true!"
      Compare the Bible to the Illiad, Gilgamesh, or the Vedas. They are all older.

    By the logic of Argumentum ad Antiquitatem, we should all be worshipping the ancient Egyptian gods like Ra — He's far older than Jesus Christ.


  • Dismiss by Antiquity
    This is the opposite of the previous technique. Dismiss, discount, invalidate, or reject something because it is old. This technique falsely assumes that things are bad or untrue or invalid just because they are old.

    • "I can't believe that you are still using that old stuff."
    • "Man, that's really old. You don't still believe that stuff, do you?"
    • "That's really out of date. Why don't you get some recent studies?"


  • Appeal to Novelty — Newness (Argumentum ad Novitatem)
    Claim that the newness of a statement proves its validity. This is just the opposite of Appeal to Antiquity. This stunt assumes that the newest thing is the truest thing.

    Jehovah's Witnesses say: "Yes, there have been errors in the past, but we receive 'New Light' from Brooklyn, and so 'the light keeps growing brighter'. You see how this brings us closer to truth?"

    Bill Wilson and other A.A. boosters often used this trick to argue that Alcoholics Anonymous was wonderful because it was a great new method of treating alcoholism; not that it was just a recycled old cult religion that had nothing new or original.

    In all, about two hundred cases of hopeless alcoholism have been dealt with. As will be seen, about fifty percent of these have recovered. This, of course, is unprecedented — never has such a thing happened before.
     THE ONE HUNDRED MEN CORPORATION Prospectus

    We are going to know a new freedom and a new happiness.
     The Big Book, 3rd Edition, Into Action, pages 83-84.

    ... the A.A. group is to be understood as an unusually intimate primary group which sponsors, in a potent learning situation, a new way of life — a new subculture.
     Alcoholics Anonymous: An Interpretation, Milton A. Maxwell, Ph.D., writing in
    Society, Culture, and Drinking Patterns, David J. Pittman and Charles R. Snyder, editors, page 582.
     Milton A. Maxwell was a member of the Board of Trustees of Alcoholics Anonymous World Services, Inc..

    Cult religion is not a new subculture. It's a very, very old thing.

    What is really funny is that today A.A. boosters also like to call A.A. treatment of alcoholism "traditional treatment", and declare that it is the dependable, old, tried-and-true method, so they are trying to use both Appeal to Novelty and Appeal to Antiquity on us at the same time. They are simultaneously trying to claim that Alcoholics Anonymous is the latest, greatest, and best new invention and also the dependable traditional safe old thing.


  • Dismiss by Novelty
    This technique is just the opposite of the previous one. Invalidate a proposition by its newness. This technique falsely assumes that things are bad or untrue or invalid just because they are new.

    • "Oh no, I'm not going for any of that new nonsense. If it hasn't been tested and proven true for a very long time, then it can't be trusted."

    • "People haven't been using that new method for very long, have they?"

    • "And that was invented, when, last year?"

    • "And how many millions of people has that medicine cured so far?"


  • Appeal to the Exotic

    Try to make people believe that something is good because it came from distant lands or secret traditions or foreign cultures. Like it was hidden in the Cave of the Ancients in the Himalayan Mountains by celibate monks for ages, but now we have the secret.

    For example: "American tourist discovers an Ancient Herbal treatment for hair loss on a chance trip to India".
    Funny that India has even more bald old men than the USA does.

    Similarly, women are bombarded with ads that proclaim that the French women have secret skin treatments that make them look forever young. I wish it were true....

    And a cream for cracked, dry, skin advertizes: "a skin-softening formula known to ancient Mid-Eastern civilizations." So haven't we made any improvements in skin softeners since ancient times?


  • Appeal to Tradition
    Argue that people should do something or believe something because that's the way it has been done for a very long time — it's traditional.
    • "It's the way we've always done it."
    • "It's our culture."
    • "It's customary."
    • "It's traditional."
    • "It's an ancient belief among our people."
    • "You can't upset everybody by breaking with tradition."
    • "It's a process that's been going on for a long time."
    • "If it was good enough for grandpa, it's good enough for us."
    • "It's the stuff that made America great."
    • "The Founding Fathers believed it."

    Treatment centers that use 12-Step quackery on alcoholics and drug addicts like to call 12-Step-based treatment "traditional treatment", even though Alcoholics Anonymous is really only 70 years old, which makes it far from traditional. Burning girls at the stake for witchcraft, and putting the town drunkard in stocks and pillory, now that's traditional treatment.


  • Appeal to Poverty (Argumentum ad Lazarum)
    Exploit the misconception that money corrupts.
    (The real proverb is, "The Love of Money is the root of all evil.")

    "A.A. is just a poor non-profit organization, so it must be a good organization."
    (Actually, A.A. has a lot of money, and is committing serious crimes to get more.)


  • Appeal to Wealth (Argumentum ad Crumenam)
    This item is just the opposite of the last one — argue that something is right because it is so rich and powerful and successful:
    "Well, Micro$uck software must be great stuff — just look at how rich Bill Gates is."

    The converse is:
    "If you're so smart, then why aren't you rich?"


  • Appeal to Common Folk
    Argue that your man is just a regular guy, and what he says is just common folk wisdom.
    "There ain't nobody here but us good old boys."

    George W. Bush uses this technique often, in claiming that he is not "an elitist" and not "one of the elite" (in spite of the fact that he was born into a very rich family, attended Yale University, and joined Skull And Bones, one of the most elite, exclusive and powerful fraternities in the world).

    Bill Wilson used this stunt often:

    We are average Americans. All sections of this country and many of its occupations are represented, as well as many political, economic, social, and religious backgrounds.
     The Big Book, 3rd Edition, William G. Wilson, page 17.

    Then Bill tried to pass off his crazy cult religion that he got from the fascist Hitler-praising Dr. Frank Buchman as "regular American":

    We represent no particular faith or denomination. We are dealing only with general principles common to most denominations.
     The Big Book, 3rd Edition, William G. Wilson, page 17.


  • Appeal To Stupidity
    Flaunt an anti-intellectual attitude, and belittle knowledge, wisdom, intelligence and education.

    This technique is closely related to "Common Folks" — "There ain't nobody here but us stupid common folks. I'm just a regular ignorant Joe, just another man of the people."

    Radio and TV commercials say,

    • "I'm no brain surgeon."
    • "I'm not a rocket scientist."
    • "I don't know how it works, but I know that it works."
    • "I'm no computer whiz but..." (But I'm smart enough to figure out how to give my money to a fast-talking salesman.)
    • "I'm so stupid that I can't tell the difference between margarine and butter."
    • "I'm so stupid that I can't tell the difference between real wood siding and plastic, or between real leather and plastic."
    • "I'm so stupid that I can't tell the difference between real orange juice and chemical soup."
    • "My dog is so stupid that he can't tell the difference between soy beans and bacon."
    A corollary to this technique is contempt for people who have some intelligence or education. Preachers have been known to declare, "Those elitist people have fancy talk and big words and clever arguments, and they try to make us feel like fools — but they are the real fools " simple faith is better."

    Unfortunately, lots of politicians win elections with this one:
    "Ah'm no intellectual. Ah'm just a hard-workin' man of the people. Mah voters don't know nuthin', and neither do Ah. Ah wouldn't be caught dayed with any fancy book-larnin' in me. Back home in Muckshoe, Tayexus, we don't need nuthin' but that good Old-Time Religion..."

    Acting President George W. Bush was born an instant millionaire and went to Yale University and the Harvard Business School, but now he cleverly pretends to be just a "common folk" dumb hick from Texas, just one of the down-home common people, not one of those digusting "effete" Democrats who know how to read books. Bush says, "I don't read newspapers" and "I don't do nuance."

    And Alcoholics Anonymous says,

    • "Nobody is too stupid to get the Program, but some people are too intelligent."
    • "Stop Your Stinkin' Thinkin'."
    • "Your best thinking got you here."
    • "Utilize, Don't Analyze."
    • ... we agnostics and atheists chose to believe that our human intelligence was the last word... Rather vain of us, wasn't it?
       The Big Book, 3rd Edition, William G. Wilson, We Agnostics, page 49.


  • Antirationalism
    Antirationalism is another propaganda trick that is similar to anti-intellectualism, but different in a critical way. Antirationalism promotes the idea that there are no such things as valid, reliable facts or hard evidence, just various conflicting opinions. Speakers who are pushing antirationalism argue that "It's just my opinion versus your opinion, and it's all so controversial that we can't really know anything for sure."

    A variation on this technique is the old line,
    "Oh heck, you can never really know for sure what caused it... Maybe it was this, or maybe it was that...",
    or
    "Who knows? Maybe it's true. You can never know anything absolutely for sure."

    That is just a dodge to avoid admitting the truth. Yes, we can know some things for sure:

    Life isn't all just a vague mystery where maybe one thing is true, or maybe a different thing is true, and everybody has their own opinion, and nobody knows anything for sure.


  • Appeal to Desperation
    Argue that we Must do something, that we cannot just do nothing, and since we don't know what to do, let's do what I want.

    Twelve-Step-oriented recovery counselors use this strategem a lot. They argue that "Perhaps the Twelve-Step programs aren't giving us as high a success rate as we would like, but they are the only game in town. We can't just stop treating the alcoholics and drug addicts — we have to do something — so let's continue to push all of our patients into 12-Step meetings, because it's the only thing we've got."

    Actually, the 12-Step meetings are not the only thing available. There are SMART, SOS, WFS, and MFS meetings, just for starters. And the most successful program of all is people simply quitting alone, on their own, saving their own lives by themselves. But the 12-Step true believers stubbornly ignore that. And of course the counselors ignore that — their jobs are threatened by the successful do-it-yourselfers.


  • Argue from Ignorance (Argumentum ad Ignorantiam)
    Claim that an idea should be considered valid because there is nothing to prove otherwise:
    "Nobody ever proved that the miracles in the Bible didn't occur, did they?"

    And A.A. members argue, "Well, nobody has ever proven that the Twelve Steps cause people to commit suicide, have they? So the Twelve Steps can't be harmful to people's mental health."

    Actually, Dr. and Harvard Prof. George E. Vaillant, Class A Trustee of Alcoholics Anonymous World Services, came pretty close to proving it. He showed that A.A.-based treatment of alcoholics produced a higher death rate than any other method of treating alcoholics.


  • Appeal to Pity (Ad Misericordiam)

    A clever defense lawyer will argue, "Look at the poor defendant. He has already suffered so much, there is no point in convicting him of his crimes, in spite of the evidence against him."


  • Exploit Wishful Thinking

    Tell the audience whatever they wish to hear, rather than some unpleasant truths. Many a politician has won an election by using this technique:

    • "Oh heck, the oil isn't going to run out. There is an unlimited supply of oil down there, just waiting for us to find it. You don't need to start planning for a future without cheap oil."

    • "Globalism will bring us a worker's paradise where everybody is happy and rich. It doesn't matter if all of the factories in America get shut down and sold to China. We don't need those old "smoke-stack industries". We can all make a good living by shuffling around pieces of information on computer screens in the wonderful new 'Information Age'."
      (Except for all of the "service workers", like the janitors and burger-flippers, who will get minimum wage...)

    • "Global warming? What global warming? We don't need to worry about our enormous rate of burning fossil fuels. It's wonderful, how much we get to use. Our standard of living is defined by how much energy we use up. The more, the better."

    • "If we fight the terrorists and other Moslems over there, it will keep them from attacking us over here. We are safe."

    • "Jesus is on our side. He isn't even disturbed by the 30,000 children we have killed in Iraq, because we are in a holy war against Islam and a little collateral damage is unavoidable."
      (Jesus didn't really say, "Whatever you do unto the least of these, you do unto me.")

    • "Calerpa taxifolia isn't going to destroy the entire ecology of the Mediterranean Ocean. Don't worry. There is nothing to get excited about."

    Many a guy has gotten laid by using this technique too:
          "Oh yeh, baby. Of course I'll love you forever. No doubt about it. Let's do it."


  • It's Too Terrible To Tell
    The essense of this technique is:
    "We know a truth, but it is too terrible to tell, and to do so would harm too many innocent people, so we can't say it, and you shouldn't say it either."

    This argument was used by the Church in Rome during the Middle Ages to declare that you couldn't tell the truth about all of the crimes and sins of the Church — burning millions of women and girls as witches, molesting the alter boys, selling everything from indulgences to Bishop's offices, and using the Grand Inquisition and heresy trials to silence the critics — "You can't criticize the Church, because if you do, it will destroy the faith of the weak people, and then they won't be able to get into Heaven."

    Politicians routinely use this technique, too. They believe that we can't hear the truth about things like global warming or peak oil, because if the people really knew the whole truth about what is going on, the people would panic and society would fall apart. The powers that be think that the truth about those things is too terrible to tell, so the politicians don't tell us the truth.

    Today, with A.A., the rap is:
    "You can't tell the truth about Alcoholics Anonymous. You shouldn't expose:

    — because if you do, it will make a bunch of the weaker alcoholics relapse and die drunk, and it will all be your fault. If you tell the truth, you will be 'doing an immense disservice to those who are trying to achieve sobriety'."


  • Argue from Adverse Consequences
    Put pressure on the decision maker by pointing out the dire consequences of an "unfavorable" decision. This includes the Slippery Slope argument.

    • "If we let Viet Nam go, then all of Southeast Asia will fall to Communism like a row of dominoes going down. Then we won't be able to stop Communism. We will lose the whole world."

    • If we curb the power of corporations, we will destroy the American business environment. We can't tell corporations that they don't have God-given civil rights like freedom of speech and freedom to influence voters, or else all of the corporations will flee to foreign countries that treat them better. (Countries like China, Malaysia, Indonesia, Korea, Singapore, Thailand, Mexico, Guatemala, and El Salvadore — the countries to which they have already moved their factories.)

    • Likewise, we can't enforce environmental protection laws against those same corporations, or else they will move to foreign countries that have no such laws, and that will be the end of America.

    Bill Wilson used this technique a lot, and Alcoholics Anonymous still does — constantly. Do what they say, or else you will die in agony:

    • Unless each A.A. member follows to the best of his ability our suggested [MY required] Twelve Steps to recovery, he almost certainly signs his own death warrant. His drunkenness and dissolution are not penalties inflicted by people in authority; they result from his personal disobedience to [MY] spiritual principles [cult religion practices].
       Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions, William G. Wilson, page 174.

    • "You must go to meetings for your entire life, do the Twelve Steps, and get a sponsor, or else your fate will invariably be 'Jails, Institutions, or Death'."

    • If we skip this vital step, we may not overcome drinking.
       The Big Book, 3rd Edition, William G. Wilson, page 72.

    • In the Big Book, Bill Wilson described a man (who looked an awful lot like Bill Wilson) who became an obsessed religious maniac, spending all of his time with A.A. busy-work, going to meetings and recruiting more members (and not getting a job):

      Though the family does not fully agree with dad's spiritual activities, they should let him have his head. Even if he displays a certain amount of neglect and irresponsibility towards the family, it is well to let him go as far as he likes in helping other alcoholics. During those first days of convalescence, this will do more to insure his sobriety than anything else. Though some of his manifestations are alarming and disagreeable, we think dad will be on a firmer foundation than the man who is placing business or professional success ahead of spiritual development. He will be less likely to drink again, and anything is preferable to that.
       The Big Book, 3rd edition, William G. Wilson, Chapter 9, The Family Afterwards, pages 129-130.

      In other words, the solution is to let him act crazy, even if his behavior is "alarming and disagreeable."

      • Don't bother him with mere reality, or ask him to be sane and responsible.
      • Don't nag him to go get a job.
      • Just let him neglect his family and irresponsibly devote his entire life to Alcoholics Anonymous.
      — Because if you don't, he might drink again, and "anything is preferable to that."


  • Argue from Beneficial Consequences
    This is just the opposite of Argue from Adverse Consequences. In this case, argue that people should do what you wish because they will benefit if they do so.

    For example,

    "You should believe in God because it will be beneficial to you to do so. You will get feelings of peace and serenity from knowing that you are on the right side of the question. You will get into Heaven after you die."

    That is bad logic. The reason for believing in God is because one believes that there is such an entity. What benefits someone might get from such a belief is a very different issue.

    Alcoholics Anonymous uses this technique too:

    • "You should just accept and believe all of the A.A. teachings, and Work A Strong Program, no matter how strange, outlandish, illogical, or heretical the A.A. practices really are, because working the A.A. program will make you sober, happy, and spiritual."
    • "It doesn't matter whether the Steps make sense to you. Just do them and you will get a new life."
    • "Keep Coming Back! It Works!"


  • Apply Time Pressure
    Apply time pressure to get someone to do something.

    Advertisements and commercials use this trick all of the time:

    • "This offer is only good for 5 days."
    • "Don't miss this unique opportunity."
    • "This sale ends on Sunday."
    • "Only three days left."
    • "Buy XYZ today. The price will go up tomorrow."
    • "First come, first serve. The early birds will get the best items."
    • "Hurry. When it's gone, it's gone."

    Bill Wilson used this trick to tell prospective recruits that they had better join A.A. quickly, before they were killed by their "severe affliction" without even realizing what was happening — "many are doomed who never realize their predicament." (The Big Book, 3rd & 4th Editions, William G. Wilson, page 92.)


  • The Real Scotsman Fallacy
    This logical fallacy discards facts that conflict with a sweeping generalization. It is a kind of observational selection.

    The Real Scotsman Fallacy works like this:
    Joe: "All Scotsmen play golf."
    Fred: "But look at Brian MacGregor over there. He's a Scotsman, and he doesn't play golf."
    Joe: "Ah, but if he were a real Scotsman, he would play golf."

    Alcoholics Anonymous uses that fallacy like this:
    Stepper: "Alcoholics Anonymous is the only way for an alcoholic to overcome alcoholism. All alcoholics simply must join A.A. and work a strong program if they wish to live.

    Critic: "But look at Terry over there. He didn't join A.A., but he recovered from alcoholism anyway. He has more years of sobriety than lots of you steppers."

    Stepper: "Oh, but he isn't a real alcoholic. If he were a real alcoholic, then he wouldn't be able to quit drinking without Alcoholics Anonymous and doing the Twelve Steps."

    "If you can get sober, and stay sober, without Alcoholics Anonymous, then you were never really an alcoholic, just a 'heavy drinker'."


  • Inverse Real Scotsman Fallacy
    This is very much like the Real Scotsman Fallacy, but works 'backwards'.

    "Steve B." explained it this way:

    If I say I can spot homosexuals because they wear pink shirts, and it turns out they are homosexuals, then I'm right and that proves my system of identification is sound.

    But if I'm wrong and they turn out not to be homosexuals, then I just say "Yes they are, because all people wearing pink shirts are homosexual whether they show any actual signs of homosexuality!" So I'm still right.

    Similarly,

    1. Declare that Joe Blow is an alcoholic because he acts like an alcoholic.

    2. If someone responds, "No, he isn't an alcoholic. He doesn't drink alcohol at all. He never drank."

      The answer is, "Yes, he is so an alcoholic, even if he isn't 'a practicing alcoholic', because he is displaying 'alcoholic thinking'."


  • Inconsistency
    The way that data is analyzed, or logic is applied, is inconsistent.

    For example,

    • Congress bases military budgets on worst-case scenarios, but it thriftily ignores scientific projections of environmental dangers because those dangers are not "adequately proven".

    • Likewise, marijuana and LSD are outlawed, and dealers of those drugs receive very harsh prison sentences, because "they might be dangerous", or "they might lead to harder drugs."
      But dealers of tobacco and alcohol, the two deadliest drugs in America, do not even get a traffic ticket, in spite of the fact that:
      • The annual death toll from tobacco is 420,000 Americans per year.
      • The annual death toll from alcohol is 100,000, plus about 17,000 in drunk-driving automobile accidents (40% of all fatal automobile accidents).
      • The annual death toll from LSD is zero.
      • The annual death toll from marijuana is zero.

    • Rich people argue that we should not give money to poor people, because it acts as a disincentive for them to work hard and accomplish things for themselves. But those same rich people demand repeal of the inheritance tax so that their children can inherit hundreds of millions of dollars untaxed, and they don't see that as a disincentive for their own children to work hard and accomplish things for themselves.

      • The dogmatic fundamentalist true believers say that our scientists are all wrong — even evil — when they talk about evolution;
      • and the believers say that our scientists are immoral when they want to use stem cells to cure our diseases;
      • but then they expect our scientists to be a bunch of real geniuses whose ingenuity and technology is going to save our lives when the world's oil supply runs out. ("Don't worry, they will come up with another great invention and another technological quick fix, just like always.")
      • And, when those true believers get sick, they don't hesitate to run to the hospital and get medical care from those doctors who believe in science, evolution, and stem cell research.

    • America is a land of freedom and inalienable rights that are listed in the Bill of Rights. But if the acting President or the Attorney General labels you an enemy of the people, then you don't have any rights.
      That is not written in the Constitution, but that's how Bush and Ashcroft read it anyway.

    • Poor young black men who steal $5000 worth of stuff are put in prison for several years because "they are a danger to the community", while rich white men in expensive business suits who steal $50,000,000 get a year of hard time plus some community service because they were "non-violent" when they stole all of the little old ladies' retirement money.

      Think: Ivan Boesky and Michael Milken.
      Boesky, who was the bigger villain of the pair, got reduced time by snitching on Milken, and then both only served about two years... (Ironically, Boesky is now retired to his yacht in the Caribbean, while Milken has been doing a lot of social work, apparently trying to make some amends.)

      Watch the Enron investigations for some new villains who will be forced to retire to their winter palaces in Aspen, rich, now that their big pump-and-dump stock swindle is over,

      • Ken Lay with at least $37,683,8872 (perhaps as much as a few hundred millions of dollars),
      • Jeff Skilling with something between $63,000,000 and $70,000,000,2
      • Andrew Fastow with $60,600,000,2
      • Michael Kopper with $10,000,000,2
      • Lou Pai with something between $62,936,552 and $250,000,000,2
      • Rebecca Mark with $79,000,000,2
      • Tom White (acting Pres. G. W. Bush's Secretary of the Army) with $14,000,000,2
      • Ken Rice with $70,000,000,2
      while the employees of Enron and the subsidiaries like Pacific Gas and Electric (in Portland, Oregon) that Enron bought and sucked dry, now have no retirement funds at all left. Nothing. And many of those retirees are just too old to go back to work. So what do they do? Join the homeless people, I guess.

      But those smiling, well-dressed, suit-and-tie, white-collar criminals weren't "violent" when they stole Grandma and Grandpa's retirement funds.

      And the U.S. government isn't going to replace their retirement funds is it? — Not even the part that was given to the politicians, mostly Republicans, in "campaign contributions". The Republicans are talking about spending the wealth of the nation on a war with oil-rich Iraq, not on taking care of our own old people.

      The Republicans were all for an extremely expensive bailout of the savings and loan institutions, which happened after, and was caused by, the Republicans deregulating banking, but they won't do a thing for the retirees who got burned by Enron after the Republicans deregulated the natural gas industry.

    • I have many more, far too many to put on this page. Inconsistency just seems to be The Way of the American Politician. Benjamin Franklin once quipped that consistency was the hum-drum of little minds. If that is so, then our politicians in Washington D.C. must be world-class geniuses.

    A.A. dogma and literature are loaded with inconsistencies and contradictions. For example,

    • We learn from the Big Book that if someone abstains from drinking for thirteen years without going to A.A. or doing the Twelve Steps, and then relapses, it proves that you can't do it without A.A.. But if someone quits drinking for only six months by going to meetings and doing the Twelve Steps, then that proves that A.A. and the Twelve Steps work.
      (Even though the vast majority of Bill Wilson's new A.A. members either did not quit drinking or soon relapsed, and even though half of the authors of the original Big Book stories returned to drinking, Bill still insisted that his "spiritual" program for sobriety worked great. And Bill Wilson considered all of the non-members who didn't quit drinking as proof that you can't do it alone.)

    • Likewise, according to A.A., if someone does the Twelve Steps and quits drinking, then that proves that the Twelve Steps work for making people quit drinking. But if someone does the Twelve Steps and then relapses, it doesn't prove that the Twelve Steps make people drink.

    • If someone killed himself with alcohol, Bill Wilson considered him a failure and a real loser. But if someone killed himself with tobacco, Bill Wilson considered him "a most effective member of A.A.", someone whose "more serious ailments were being rapidly cured".

    • When someone comes to A.A. meetings and then quits drinking and stays quit, A.A. gleefully claims the credit for the success. But when someone comes to A.A. meetings and then drinks himself to death, A.A. says that it isn't responsible for the failure.

    • And I have plenty more...


  • Compare Apples To Oranges

    This is similar to the previous item, inconsistency, but has special twists of its own.

    In a radio commercial for a tax preparation service (Spring 2005), we heard:

    "Jackson-Hewitt's average refund is $400 more than the average IRS refund."

    Well of course it is. They are comparing apples to oranges. The average refund from the IRS includes all of the poorest people in the country. You have to actually make some money before you need a professional tax accountant to prepare your tax forms for you, and can pay for it. The average Jackson-Hewitt customer is lots richer than the average minimum-wage janitor or burger-flipper, so of course they get larger refunds. The commercial tries to imply that the larger refund is due to the Jackson-Hewitt accountants' skill in finding deductions, but I suggest that it is due to their customer's higher incomes and higher withholdings, and hence, larger refunds due.

    Over in "the recovery community", one A.A. defender announced:

    I am appalled at such blatant misconstrual of the program of Alcoholics Anonymous. AA is Spiritual, true, but not religious. An edition of Webster's defines the two as follows:

    1. Religion - any system of faith or worship; the outward manifestation of belief in a Supreme or Superior Being; love and obedience toward God; piety; monastyic vow or state; conformity to Biblical precepts; devotion; fidelity.
    2. Spiritual - incorporeal; not material; possessing the nature of qualities of a spirit; mental or intellectual; pure; holy; heavenly-minded; not lay or temporal; ecclesiastical; relating to matters of a sacred nature; not worldly; the spiritual nature as oposed to physical.

    Another edition of Websters (which leaves the Biblical concept out) says:

    1. Religion - The worship of God or gods. A belief; a system of doctrines of faith and worship.
    2. Spiritual - Not material; Relating to the moral feelings; Pure, holy, sacred.

    But note that the writer was comparing a noun to an adjective. So of course the noun "religion" sounds much more solid and material than the adjective "spiritual".

    If we compare the adjective "religious" to the adjective "spiritual", some of the important distinctions vanish. In fact, the words become synonyms:

    religious: (The American Heritage Dictionary, Second College Edition, 1982.)
    1. Of, pertaining to, or teaching religion.
    2. Adhering to or manifesting religion, pious.
    3. Extremely faithful, conscientious: religious devotion to duty.

    spiritual: (The American Heritage Dictionary, Second College Edition, 1982.)
    1. Of, relating to, consisting of, or having the nature of spirit; not tangible or material.
    2. Of, concerned with, or affecting the soul.
    3. Of, from, or pertaining to God.
    4. Of or belonging to a church or religion; sacred.
    5. Pertaining to or having the nature of spirits; supernatural.

    And Random House says:

    Spiritual (Random House Unabridged Dictionary, Second Edition, 1993.)
    1. of or pertaining to sacred things or matters; religious; devotional; sacred.

    As the judge said in the case of Grandberg v. Ashland County, a 1984 Federal 7th Circuit Court ruling concerning judicially-mandated A.A. attendance:

    The distinction between religion and spirituality is meaningless, and serves merely to confuse the issue.

    The converse of comparing apples to oranges is equating them — declaring that they are the same thing — the logical fallacy of False Equality.


  • Special Pleading
    Special pleading typically refers to the Will of God. There are other "special pleadings," like the Communist's "Force of History" or a misguided environmentalist's "Mother Nature", but God's Will is still the most popular excuse for doing some horrible things.

    Don't do something because I tell you to do it, but rather, do it because it is the Will of God, and God will be happy if you do it for Him.

    • "Quit drinking",
    • "Do The Twelve Steps",
    • "Shove the Twelve Step religion on every sick person you can get",
    • "Blow Up The World Trade Center and kill thousands of innocent people",
    • or "Launch a Blitzkrieg 'Shock And Awe' bombing campaign on Bhagdad and kill thousands of innocent Iraqi civilians with cluster bombs and the indiscriminate use of overwhelming American firepower"
    ... Heck, everybody's just doing the Will of God.

    An Israeli newspaper even quoted George W. Bush as saying that God told him to attack Afghanistan and Iraq...

    "God told me to strike at al Qaeda, so I struck them; then God told me to strike at Saddam, so I did."

    Usually, if someone says that God told him to go kill somebody, and then he actually goes and does it, we lock that dangerous nut-case up in a mental hospital for a very long time...


  • Self-Sell
    This one is so simple and slick that it is brilliant: Instead of trying to cram a particular attitude or belief down the throats of some unwilling recipients, get them to convince themselves of the validity of your ideas. Do something like ask them for their help in promoting a good thing, so that they ask themselves,
    • "How can we convince the general public of the virtues of this program?"
    • "How can we get people to support this worthwhile cause?"
    They will sell themselves on the idea as they try to sell it to others.

    For a humorous example of this, see the movie "Cold Turkey" which starred Dick Van Dyke, who acted as a preacher who had to make his whole town quit smoking. The local Neo-Nazis were a particularly tough bunch to get to quit. Van Dyke won them over by enlisting them as smoking-ban enforcers. Their only request: "Can we wear arm-bands?"

    Another twist on Self-Sell is that whenever a cult sends members out recruiting, those recruiters will end up selling themselves on the cult's dogma when they try to convince others of the truth of the cult's teachings. Smart cult leaders know this, and get new converts out recruiting, fast. It's called "Actionizing." A.A. calls it your "Twelfth Step."

    The Big Book gives us a clear example of that in the autobiographical story The Vicious Cycle. The author, James Burwell, a former skeptic and unbeliever, described setting up a new A.A. group in Philadelphia, after having been a member in New York City:

    When I started to tell the boys how we did it in New York and all about the spiritual part of the program, I found that they would not believe me unless I was practicing what I preached. Then I found that as I gave in to this spiritual or personality change I was getting a little more serenity. In telling newcomers how to change their lives and attitudes, all of a sudden I found I was doing a little changing myself.
     The Big Book, 3rd Edition, Jim Burwell, The Vicious Cycle, page 249.

    (Yes, that brainwashing program is powerful and works well, doesn't it? It even works on you while you are using it on others...)


  • Repetition for Emphasis (Argumentum ad Nauseam)
    Drive home an unproven point by repeating it so often that it might become accepted by rote.

    Adolf Hitler declared in Mein Kampf that effective propaganda must confine itself to a few points and repeat them over and over. Hitler wrote:

    It [propaganda] must repeat those points over and over again until the public believes it. The principles behind propaganda are the same principles of mind control, hypnotic suggestion, and mental programming: distraction and repetition. With propaganda, distraction draws attention away from information that is true and directs attention to information that is false. Repetition of the false information imbeds it in your subconscious mind so that your acceptance of its truth becomes a conditioned response. You accept this information as true without thinking whenever it is presented to you again.

    "If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State."
     Joseph Goebbels, Nazi Minister of Propaganda

    "See, in my line of work you got to keep repeating things over and over and over again for the truth to sink in, to kind of catapult the propaganda."
     George W. Bush

    Alcoholics Anonymous has a standard list of unproven (and even disproven) assumptions that they constantly repeat:

    • A.A. is the best, the time-tested, the proven way to recover from alcoholism.
    • Keep Coming Back, It Works! (If you make it work...)
    • Alcoholics need the Twelve Steps to teach them spirituality. They didn't know anything about God before they met the Alcoholics Anonymous recruiter.
    • The Twelve Steps are a great program for quitting drinking.
    • Nobody can do it alone. You need your support group.
    • Alcohol is cunning, baffling, and powerful, and wants to kill you.
    • The Twelve Steps are "simple spiritual principles" (rather than cult practices).
    • God is pleased when you do Bill Wilson's Twelve Steps.
    • "RARELY have we seen a person fail, who has thoroughly followed our path..."


  • Reification
    Treat something abstract as real.
    "I know there's a God; I've felt him in my life."
    This statement can be explained in several ways that do not require an actual god to exist.

    By that faulty logic, it would be equally valid to say that if I feel nervous while walking in creepy dark alleys in bad parts of town at night, that proves that Satan and vampires are real:
    "I know they are real; I've felt them breathing down the back of my neck at night."


  • Take Undeserved Credit

    This is a favorite of politicians. If anything good happens while they are in office, they are quick to take credit for it. (They rationalize that they might as well, because if anything goes wrong, they get the blame for it.)

    Using this technique, Republicans like to claim that Ronald Reagan somehow 'caused' the fall of the Berlin Wall and the break-up of the Soviet Union, not internal weakness, corruption, and a crumbling infrastructure in the Soviet empire.

    Frank Buchman's cult used this technique often. Even today, their web site says:

    Buchman's story starts with a small-town American who sets out "to remake the world" and in the attempt affected the moral and spiritual condition of thousands of people at every level of society throughout the world. From war-torn Europe to civil war in China, from the rise of black nationalist independence movements in Africa to the civil rights hotbed in the U.S, in the lives of great leaders such as Mahatma Gandhi, Konrad Adenauer, and Harry Truman — Buchman's remarkable influence kept turning up.
     Advertising for Frank Buchman, A Life, by Garth Lean
    https://secure.iofc.org/shop/en/resources/shop/?room=3&product=47

    Frank Buchman does not get the credit for every civil rights movement in the world just because one of his followers showed up there and parrotted slogans.

    Bill Wilson and A.A. use this technique constantly. If anybody quit drinking after having attended even just a few A.A. meetings, Wilson and A.A. were quick to claim or imply that the recovery was caused by A.A. and the Twelve Steps. (But when those people relapsed later, A.A. had nothing to do with that. 'A.A. caused the sobriety, but it didn't cause the relapse.') Bill Wilson even took the credit for the sobriety of people who finally quit drinking several years after Bill encouraged them to quit.

    Likewise, another A.A. promoter, Nan Robertson, wrote in her book, "Getting Better Inside Alcoholics Anonymous", that most of the newcomers to Alcoholics Anonymous had already quit drinking, but she credited their sobriety to A.A. anyway.


  • Create A Granfalloon
    A granfalloon is some distinction or difference which sets members of a group apart from other people who are not part of the group. The purpose of creating a granfalloon is to engender a feeling of "Us versus Them."

    Sometimes a granfalloon can be a small, trivial difference, and still work. When Hitler was still just a minor fledgeling politician, just beginning to build up his Nazi party, he dressed his followers in brown shirts. Some critics laughed and pointed out that they looked ridiculous. But rather than discouraging Hitler's followers, the criticism made them cling to their group and made them feel more committed to Hitler. Hitler gained a loyal, hard-core cadre just for the price of a few brown shirts.

    In the book Soul of A New Machine by Tracy Kidder, the author describes how a smart manager organized teams of young computer geniuses, and set them to competing against each other in the creation of a new computer. The hardware designers were called "The Hardy Boys", and the programmers of the machine's internal software, the microcode, were called "The Micro-Kidders." The competition between them was so intense that they worked day and night, seven days a week, to finish the design and make the machine work. All of them argued that they weren't going to let the other guys on their team down, and they weren't going to let the other team outdo them. But the only real difference between the two groups was which part of the design they were working on. But that one tiny difference was enough to cement their loyalty to their group.

    Andrew Carnegie demonstrated the same cleverness in eliciting greater output from one of his steel mills. He asked the foreman how many units of steel the day shift had produced. Carnegie wrote the answer with chalk in large numbers on the sidewalk where the workers entered the plant, and then simply walked away without explanation. When the night crew came to work, they saw the number on the sidewalk, and asked what it was. Someone told them. The night crew beat that number by a little bit. Early in the morning, Carnegie erased the day crew's number, and chalked in the night crew's output. The day crew saw that number on the sidewalk when they came to work. They worked even harder, and beat the night crew's output. Carnegie chalked in that number. The following night, the night crew beat the day crew again, and Carnegie chalked in that number. That contest of playing off the day crew against the night crew continued for weeks, while output steadily rose. Carnegie never said a word about the workers having to increase their productivity — he just played one group off against another, using no distinction between the two groups except that one worked during the day, and one worked at night.

    In a beautiful demonstration of creating a granfalloon, teachers who wanted to educate a class about racism created a new, artificial, racial distinction: they separated the class into blue-eyed and brown-eyed people, and declared that the brown-eyed people were superior to the blue-eyed people. "Everybody knows" that blue-eyed people are dishonest and lazy, and can't be trusted, and lie a lot, while "everybody knows" that brown-eyed people are hard-working, honest, and trustworthy... By the end of the day, the two groups almost hated each other, even though it was just a mild one-day demonstration of discrimination. (It's enough to make you wonder about our two-party system of Democrats and Republicans hating each other — how much of their hatred and partisan bickering and investigation of sexual affairs is based on nothing more than the political equivalent of eye color?)

    A current television commercial for Prilosec® uses a variation of this trick: They ask, "So which day are you on?" and a bunch of people proudly hold up several fingers. The commercial creates a feeling of being "one of the club" among those people who take the medicine. The granfalloon is taking Prilosec.

    Alcoholics Anonymous obviously uses alcoholism as a granfalloon, to separate their group from everybody else. Every member introduces himself like, "Hi, my name is Harry, and I'm an alcoholic." Then outsiders, non-alcoholics, are called "normal people", "regular people", "normies", or "earth people", and everybody knows that you can't trust them to be accepting or understanding...

    Likewise, A.A. uses membership in A.A. itself as a granfalloon. Those who do The Twelve Steps are "one of us", the people who understand, the members of the right religion, "The Friends of Bill", while those who don't do The Steps are the other people, those "dry drunks" who aren't our friends and who cannot be trusted.

    In the Big Book, an A.A. member says of a non-member:

    "You poor guy. I feel so sorry for you. You're not an alcoholic. You can never know the pure joy of recovering within the Fellowship of Alcoholics Anonymous."
     The Big Book, 3rd Edition, page 334.


  • Spin Doctoring
    Often, how people take the news depends on how you present it.

    The TV series The West Wing recently gave us a beautiful illustration of that. The administration had a problem with some new, improved equations for computing the threshold of poverty. The problem was that the new equations said that there were two million more poor people than the old equations did. Nobody wanted to face the next election with two million more poor people than there were when the President took office. Everybody around the White House was stuck in a loop of, "We want to fix the equations, but we don't want there to be more poor people." Then they took the problem to Toby, the resident political hack spin doctor:

          "Did I ever tell you about the guy who had a batch of pink salmon that turned white? He canned it up and printed on the label, 'Guaranteed not to turn pink in the can.'
          "So the equations have been broken for fifty years? What was the matter with all of the previous administrations? Why didn't those lazy bums fix the problem? This is outrageous! Thank God we finally have a President who is doing his job!
          "Remember: 'White Salmon, guaranteed not to turn pink!' By God, I can sell anything!"

          In March of 2006, Microsoft found that its new operating system, Vista, was so buggy that they wouldn't be able to bring it to market for the 2006 Christmas season. They publicly announced yet another postponement of the release date until after January of 2007, the umpteenth one in four years of slipping schedules. Putting the best spin-doctor's smiley-face on the situation, Microsoft spokesman and project manager James Allchin said that the Vista delay was the "right thing" to do. (NY Times, 2006.03.27)
          As if they had any choice in the matter.
          The most unintentionally hilarious quote, however, came from Microsoft marketing executive Brad Goldberg, who told Ziff Davis Media's Microsoft Watch blog that, since people won't be able to get new Windows computers for Christmas in December, there will be another Christmas in January: "January has emerged as almost a second Christmas, with gift cards, sales, etc. It's a new trend." (Washington Post "Personal Tech" 2006.03.27)
          Oh yeh, right.


  • The Semi-Attached Figure
    "If you can't prove what you want to prove, demonstrate something else and pretend that they are the same thing." — Darrel Huff (How to Lie with Statistics, p. 74.)

    For example, if you can't prove that your nostrum can cure the common cold, advertise that a well-known "independent testing laboratory" has proven that it can kill umpteen zillion germs in a test tube in just a few minutes. Advertise those results by showing a picture of a doctor in a white coat reporting the results. Don't bother to mention the bothersome little fact that killing germs in a test tube isn't the same thing as killing them inside of people. And don't bother to mention the fact that the germs that got zapped in the test tube were something other than cold germs... The real meaning of the one true fact — that the nostrum simply killed some unidentified germs in a test tube, gets lost in the hype. That's a semiattached figure.

    (And, if you think about it for a minute, plain old Clorox bleach is great for killing germs in a test tube, but if you drink the stuff to get over a cold, you won't...)

    Similarly, you can easily think of some popular household cleaners whose advertisements imply that your family will be much healthier and more disease-free because their product kills lots of germs on contact. Nobody asks whether those unfortunate germs were actually harmful to humans. The vast majority of bacteria and microbes are really totally harmless, which is why we are still alive. In fact, recent studies have shown that the constant, habitual use of germ-killers on everything, everywhere, is just breeding super-bugs who are immune to our antibiotics, which is a real medical disaster. But an ad that says, "Laboratory testing has shown that our kitchen cleaner kills 300% more germs on contact" sure sounds good, doesn't it?

    Darrel Huff noted:

    There are often many ways of expressing any figure. You can, for instance, express exactly the same fact by calling it a one per cent return on sales, a fifteen per cent return on investment, a ten-million-dollar profit, an increase in profits of forty per cent (compared with 1935-39 average), or a decrease of sixty per cent from last year. The method is to choose the one that sounds best for the purpose at hand and trust that few who read it will recognize how imperfectly it reflects the situation.
     How to Lie with Statistics, Darrel Huff, page 82.

    For example, if you run a store, and buy an item for 99 cents every morning, and sell it for $1.00 every afternoon, you are only making a 1% profit on sales, which sounds terrible. But in a year of doing that, you make a 368% return on investment (365*100/99), which sounds like you are making out like a bandit.

    In another example of the semiattached figure, in a management-labor dispute, the management questioned the workers about their gripes against the union. They collected every trivial complaint that had ever been lodged against the union, added up the numbers, and announced that 78% of the workers were "against the union." Obviously, there is a huge difference between disagreeing with the union about something or other, at one time or other, and being against the union representing the workers.

    "Flying in airplanes must be growing increasingly dangerous, because 500 times as many people were killed in airplane crashes last year (2001) as were killed in 1910."
     That completely ignores, of course, the truth that the Wright Brothers and friends were the only people flying in 1910, and the September 11, 2001 terrorism that caused multiple airplane crashes was an exceptional situation.

    Recently, the NBC Evening News used this trick to sensationalize a story about teenagers buying alcohol over the Internet (9 August 2006). They declared that "One in 10 teenagers knows another teenager who has illegally ordered liquor online."
    That sounds pretty impressive, and it hints that one in 10 teenagers is getting supplied alcohol by another teenager who gets it through the Internet. It sounds impressive, until we realize that if the average teenage knows 100 other teenagers, then only 1 in 1000 teenagers needs to have bought alcohol through the Internet just once in order for that NBC statement to be true. (And if the average teenager knows more than 100 other teenagers, then even fewer teenagers need to have bought alcohol through the Internet.) And just because a teenager knows someone who once bought alcohol through the Internet doesn't mean that he got any of it.

    When Peter Howard defended the cult leader Frank Buchman and his Moral Re-Armament organization in the booklet Fighters Ever (November, 1941), Howard used the trick of the Semi-Attached Figure in his story about the controversy over drafting Buchman's Moral Re-Armament followers into the British army during World War II. The Buchmanites claimed that the MRA men were all "lay evangelists of an established religion", and as such, should not be drafted, and they got 174 Members of Parliament to sign a motion that asked that the MRA men be given special exemptions to the draft. Peter Howard wrote in his book that "the elected representatives of more than 11,000,000 people" opposed drafting MRA members. Peter Howard implied that all 11 million of those British people were unanimous in their support of draft exemptions for the MRA men, which was nowhere near the truth.15

    Furthermore, those 174 Members of Parliament had been elected on the basis of other issues than drafting MRA members, so those 11 million represented British people had never really voted on that particular issue at all. And then, when the whole of the British Parliament voted, and decided not to give the MRA men any special exemptions, Peter Howard did not bother to write that "the elected representatives of all 40 million Britons decided to draft the MRA men just like everybody else".


  • Use Exact Numbers
    The human mind has the f