• Welcome to the new Internet Infidels Discussion Board, formerly Talk Freethought.

Finally - a conspiracy theory I can get behind! (birds are fake)

P

Patooka

Contributor
Joined
Apr 5, 2004
Messages
6,738
Location
Sydney
Basic Beliefs
aaa
FOX news, famous for its meticulous research and investigative skills has discovered a new conspiracy. That the US government since the 1950s has been systematically replacing all birds with surveillance drones.



It gets better. FOX Nation released a special where they spent an entire episode debunking the notion that birds aren't real. If only that had put as much research as they did proving birds are in fact real in finding out if it was all satire...

www.thebiglead.com

Fox News Took the 'Birds Aren't Real' Guy Seriously

On Friday night, Fox News had Peter McIndoe on Jesse Watters Primetime to discuss the Birds Aren't Real movement. Unfortunately, it appears no one told the sho
www.thebiglead.com www.thebiglead.com

Fuck me this is beautiful.
 
IMHO, that any network felt it was they had to debunk such utter hogwash is a fitting but sad commentary on the US public.

I am surprised and pleased that Fox got it right.
 
It's a more plausible story than the Q-Anon story about harvesting babies for the adrenochrome in their blood -- to be used as a youth restorer.
Although my friends do tell me that my hair looks darker and my build a bit more slender....
 
Shadowy Man said:
As crazy as it sounds it’s still more likely than the flat earth.
Click to expand...
I'm a firm believer that the flat-earth is a hoax... something that started as a joke and then kind of turned into an Andy Kaufman like reality. Birds as drones... since the 50s?! Man, the size of those 1950s birds must have been huge!

September 21, 1958 Newspaper
3 members of a family picnicking were crushed to death by a very large bird. Police indicated that there was nothing suspicious at all about the animal that apparently fell from the sky and landed on the family and leaving behind a 10 foot deep crater. The Police also indicated looking elsewhere if we knew what was "for our own good".
 
FOX Nation: "Our exhaustive research confirming the reality of birds is a testament to our unimpeachable reporting on all other matters."
 
Gospel said:
FOX Nation: "Our exhaustive research confirming the reality of birds is a testament to our unimpeachable reporting on all other matters."
Click to expand...
I’ve started calling this kind of logical fallacy “argument from exception to the rule”. Perhaps there’s already a formal logic version of this fallacy but if so I don’t know what it’s called.

The idea being one can negate an entire conclusion if one finds a single exception to the argument. Statistical outliers nullifying the correlation.
 
Shadowy Man said:
Gospel said:
FOX Nation: "Our exhaustive research confirming the reality of birds is a testament to our unimpeachable reporting on all other matters."
Click to expand...
I’ve started calling this kind of logical fallacy “argument from exception to the rule”. Perhaps there’s already a formal logic version of this fallacy but if so I don’t know what it’s called.

The idea being one can negate an entire conclusion if one finds a single exception to the argument. Statistical outliers nullifying the correlation.
Click to expand...
It's cherry picking.

"The average height of Australian men is 176cm"

"Well that can't possibly be true, because my brother is 185cm tall"
 
bilby said:
Shadowy Man said:
Gospel said:
FOX Nation: "Our exhaustive research confirming the reality of birds is a testament to our unimpeachable reporting on all other matters."
Click to expand...
I’ve started calling this kind of logical fallacy “argument from exception to the rule”. Perhaps there’s already a formal logic version of this fallacy but if so I don’t know what it’s called.

The idea being one can negate an entire conclusion if one finds a single exception to the argument. Statistical outliers nullifying the correlation.
Click to expand...
It's cherry picking.

"The average height of Australian men is 176cm"

"Well that can't possibly be true, because my brother is 185cm tall"
Click to expand...
Yeah it’s kind of like cherry picking. But rather than basing a conclusion on a subset of the data it’s nullifying a conclusion based on the outliers. Maybe they’re too similar to be distinct but they feel different enough in my mind to be two different things, even if only subtly.

Your example isn’t quite either. Cherry picking would be stating the average height of men is XX after measuring only a professional basketball team. Mine is more like saying that men aren’t taller than women on average because I can find a woman taller than a man.
 
Shadowy Man said:
bilby said:
Shadowy Man said:
Gospel said:
FOX Nation: "Our exhaustive research confirming the reality of birds is a testament to our unimpeachable reporting on all other matters."
Click to expand...
I’ve started calling this kind of logical fallacy “argument from exception to the rule”. Perhaps there’s already a formal logic version of this fallacy but if so I don’t know what it’s called.

The idea being one can negate an entire conclusion if one finds a single exception to the argument. Statistical outliers nullifying the correlation.
Click to expand...
It's cherry picking.

"The average height of Australian men is 176cm"

"Well that can't possibly be true, because my brother is 185cm tall"
Click to expand...
Yeah it’s kind of like cherry picking. But rather than basing a conclusion on a subset of the data it’s nullifying a conclusion based on the outliers. Maybe they’re too similar to be distinct but they feel different enough in my mind to be two different things, even if only subtly.

Your example isn’t quite either. Cherry picking would be stating the average height of men is XX after measuring only a professional basketball team. Mine is more like saying that men aren’t taller than women on average because I can find a woman taller than a man.
Click to expand...
I agreed that there are some differences, and that it might be useful to have different names for the different shades of cherry picking involved in these various examples; But they all entail selecting a small subset of the data and discarding the bulk of it, so they're all cherry picking, even though they have differences in feel.
 
A spokesbird was asked for a comment and replied "Volo, ergo sum".
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom