The Skeptics Circle #6: Thanks, I needed that!

The last couple of days have been rather eventful here at Respectful Insolence. Logical fallacies, like the post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy, have been floating through the comments of one of my posts in a vain attempt to "prove" that giving women the right to vote leads to the loss of freedom and an "accelerated shift towards socialism" (as one anonymous commenter put it) or, as the anonymous commenter's inspiration Vox Day had put it, an "obvious connection between the female franchise and the West's continental drift into socialism." (Never mind the pesky possibility that women's achieving suffrage could just as well have been an effect, not a cause, of increasing liberalization.) Not satisfied, Vox launched another broadside at me and others, this time using a strawman and a false analogy when he talked about the Swiss and pretty much every other Western nation not letting resident aliens vote as "evidence" that universal suffrage doesn't necessarily make a nation more free. Never mind that nowhere did I make the claim that universal suffrage did necessarily make a nation more free (although that could be an interesting argument) and never mind that there is a huge difference between excluding resident aliens from voting and excluding full citizens from voting on account of gender!

But I tire of Vox, as (no doubt) do you. Apparently he's decided to ignore me without ignoring me, by trashing me but not bothering to link me, perhaps in response to my sarcastic thanks to him for pumping up my hit count the other day. As a self-proclaimed Mensa member, he's proof positive that intelligence tests don't measure reasoning ability very well. It's hard for me to imagine that he's in the same organization that a very old and dear friend of mine is.

Fortunately, there is finally relief for all this bad reasoning and credulous acceptance of dubious assertions right here: The Sixth Edition of the Skeptics' Circle has finally been posted at Socratic Gadfly! After dealing with Vox, I need a dose of reasoned and rational (and--dare I say?--skeptical) blogging, given all the logical fallacies that have washed over this blog from outside sources over the last couple of days, and the Circle is just the place to get my fix. In fact, if there are still any stragglers coming over here referred from my first post lambasting Vox, please stay and check out the Circle. Then go and check out earlier editions. They may even teach you how to recognize some of the fallacies in Vox's "reasoning" with respect to women's suffrage.

And then come on back in two weeks, when the Seventh Edition will be hosted by Thoughts from Kansas on April 28.