Measuring Democracy

The use of fallacies in the media are everywhere. A classic rhetorical fallacy is one appealing to an authority. This is the claim that an assertion is true because of the authority or superiority of a person making the claim. In this article, the author submits that it must indeed be true that Hillary Clinton is subverting the authority of the Commander in Chief, as long as “El Rushbo” is saying it. The quote from Limbaugh is meant to be actual evidence that Clinton is working around Obama, when really, the author provides little to no proof on the matter.

An example of a logical fallacy can theoretically be found in some assumptions of the democratic peace theory. If I claim that democracy leads to either free trade or trade isolation, and I find that it does lead to free trade which leads me to submit that it does not lead to trade isolation is an example of “affirming the disjunct”. This is when a disjunct is claimed to be false because the other disjunct is found to be true, i.e. “A or B: A, therefore not B”. Just because I found that free trade may be a consequence of democracy does not mean isolationist policies never happen.