Friday, June 14, 2019

Perhaps The Best Example Of Fallacious Journalism You'll See Today

Journalism used to be about getting to the facts and reporting on them. Now it's far more about political correctness and feelings, and the facts be damned.

Here's a lovely example of a journalist looking at facts and imposing her ideological world view with a whopper of a logical fallacy right off the bat, never-mind the facts, she had an agenda to push, facts be damned:

The Toronto Star: Blowback to the word genocide proves the national inquiry report was right

Basically a progressive, politically-driven report by the "National Inquiry into Murdered and Missing Indigenous Women and Girls" was recently issued that named violence against Canadian indigenous women over the years to be an act of genocide.

Analysis of the facts indicate otherwise, and many people pointed out the facts and how these varied and separate acts of violence, while reprehensible, simply do not amount to any actual established definition of genocide.

The journo decided the existence of opposition to the report's findings proves the report's findings was correct.

It really doesn't work that way.

The argument is sort of a combination of the Fallacy of Opposition and Kafkatrapping - any denial of the assertion apparently proves the assertion.

Instead of declaring if others oppose her position that must mean its right, simply by virtue of the existence of people opposing it, she could have looked at the facts, which are pretty well known.

Instead of acts of genocide, indigenous women over the time period looked at were almost all killed or murdered in either of the following situations:


1. Killed by their domestic partner, which while reprehensible and plainly wrong, isn't genocide, it's spousal abuse that the government of Canada does in fact prosecute and punish the murderers when possible; or


2. Killed by an unknown sexual partner/opportunistic killer. Most of those who were killed were murdered while working in the sex trade, which unfortunately exposed them to potential killers by nature of the fact that they were plying an illegal trade that involved getting into vehicles with unknown persons, going to unknown places, not letting other people know where they were going or who they were with, and being in an extremely vulnerable position all the while and unfortunately being murdered. Again, reprehensible and wrong, but still not an act of genocide, nor does blaming colonialism work for either situation, but since leftists now believe Canada is a colonial nation and therefore bad, it's better to blame the nation collectively than the wrongdoers themselves, many if not most of whom are indigenous peoples.

Considering the fact that Canada's indigenous population is growing and expected to almost double by 2036, if this is genocide, Canada has done a piss-poor job of it, because well, Canada is simply not committing genocide against its indigenous population and these women's murders are not acts nor evidence of genocide no matter how much the progressives wish to believe them to be.

While its an important act to seriously prosecute those who commit crimes against indigenous peoples and devote resources towards prosecuting such crimes, to call random acts of murder and spousal abuse leading to death genocide is simply inappropriate and an attempt to mischaracterize a very real problem to get attention, and it completely devalues the word genocide and victims of actual genocides.

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