True believers did not stop insisting that former State Department official Alger Hiss and journalist I.F. Stone were completely innocent of being Soviet spies once the evidence piled to Everest levels. Howard Zinn's FBI file, then, is not going to convince the Left that the "people's historian" was really the Kremlin's historian. Read my column @ Human Events that demonstrates that the Left is too heavily invested in the group lie on postwar domestic subversion to bail out now.

You need to go back to college, Dan. You missed classes on introductory logic and critical thinking.

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Description of Poisoning the Well

This sort of "reasoning" involves trying to discredit what a person might later claim by presenting unfavorable information (be it true or false) about the person. This "argument" has the following form:

1. Unfavorable information (be it true or false) about person A is presented.
2. Therefore any claims person A makes will be false.

This sort of "reasoning" is obviously fallacious. The person making such an attack is hoping that the unfavorable information will bias listeners against the person in question and hence that they will reject any claims he might make. However, merely presenting unfavorable information about a person (even if it is true) hardly counts as evidence against the claims he/she might make. This is especially clear when Poisoning the Well is looked at as a form of ad Homimem in which the attack is made prior to the person even making the claim or claims. The following example clearly shows that this sort of "reasoning" is quite poor.

Before Class:
Bill: "Boy, that professor is a real jerk. I think he is some sort of eurocentric fascist."
Jill: "Yeah."

During Class:
Prof. Jones: "...and so we see that there was never any 'Golden Age of Matriarchy' in 1895 in America."

After Class:
Bill: "See what I mean?"
Jill: "Yeah. There must have been a Golden Age of Matriarchy, since that jerk said there wasn't."

Examples of Poisoning the Well

1. "Don't listen to him, he's a scoundrel."

2. "Before turning the floor over to my opponent, I ask you to remember that those who oppose my plans do not have the best wishes of the university at heart."

3. You are told, prior to meeting him, that your friend's boyfriend is a decadent wastrel. When you meet him, everything you hear him say is tainted.

http://www.nizkor.org/features/fallacies/poisoning-the-well.html

You know what? I think the first post to this thread is trying to "poison the well". Heh.

Great column, Dan.

"The history-class meme about the postwar crusade against domestic subversion is that anticommunists crudely mistook liberals for Communists. But as the cases of Howard Zinn and so many other reds-mistaken-for-liberals demonstrate, Communists themselves counted on liberal gullibility to view real Communists as garden-variety liberals."

You hit the nail on the head!

"It is no coincidence that the people most fervently denouncing charges that Howard Zinn was a Stalinst are the same people who would be the least troubled by Zinn’s membership in the late totalitarian cult."

Exactly! They speak out of both sides of their mouths, simeltaneously maintaining that Zinn was not a member of CPUSA, but what's really wrong with if he was?

He didn't do it, not that he did anything wrong.

"He didn't do it, not that he did anything wrong."

That about sums it up. Come to think about it, so many controversies, such as Clinton-Lewinsky and the people demanding Bradley Manning's release this weekend, fall into this category.

An Observer wrote,

"You know what? I think the first post to this thread is trying to "poison the well". Heh."

If the first post was a PTW fallacy, and if you're arguing that that somehow absolves Mr. Flynn's, who is a professional writer who should know better and who should be arguing in a straightforward manner using sound logic and not taking rhetorical shits on dead people who cannot defend themselves, that would be a Two Wrongs Make A Right fallacy.

Apparently, conservatives don't like empirical science, sound logic, and don't particularly care about fallacies, if these posts are any indication.

Post number one suggests that Dan claims Zinn is a liar. 2. Therefore any claims person A makes will be false.

I don't think Dan accused Zinn of lying outright. He suggests he is a propagandist for the Communist movement as he is almost certainly a communist and his magnum opus does its best to look at US History in the light least favorable to the US. This is indisputable to honest people who have read Zinn's fomentations dressed up as history. It's fine to bring less happy aspects of US History into the discussion, but Zinn's work is the opposite of the flag-waving, we-can-do-no-wrong variety of history. As such, it and he are crap.

PMA does kind of have a point. I was hoping to see a little more evidence of Zinn's complicity with Communist ideology in the article.

Having said that...what little I've read of Zinn's works suggests to me that he was a poor historian and definitely had a biased and negative view of the United States...poisoning the well as it were for his own purposes. It wouldn't be a leap to describe him as a "Useful Idiot".

Yes, he's dead and can't refute your arguments, but his work stands as a proxy as to the silliness he espouced.

And PMA, you lump all Conservatives together, falling victim to the very thought process you tried to refute. Too funny.

NR, you're right, that last paragraph was crude and unfair. There are many conservatives I deeply respect and admire (including every known member of my extended and immediate family).

PMA: You commited the typical "liberal illiteracy" fallacy, which is when a liberal can't read or watch anything or pay attention to what someone _actually_ says because they are so aggitated at someone not being a liberal.

Another fallacy all liberals and only liberals commit is the "fallacy fallacy," accusing dissenters of being really dumb, downright ignorant of plain facts, oblivious to basic rules of right reasoning, etc. This is often the only way a liberal can process the fact, without having a breakdown, that some people might possibly disagree with them sometimes. Tendency toward this fallacy is, sadly, truly the result of a disorder (highly correlated with clical self-righteousness) that prevents liberals from truly communicating with anyone not giving off strong "I'm one of you" signals.

Swifty, who handed you Michael "Savage" Wiener's script? Jesus, man, really? "Truly the result of a disorder", "highly correlated with (clical?) self-righteousness"...this is really embarrassing, and I didn't even write it.

Non sequiturs can be fun, but this is a little over the top, don't you think, Swifty, my boy? Care to address the substance of the assertions that were made? Dan Flynn, a professional writer and political commentator, used an inane Poison The Well fallacy against defenseless dead people (and I'm assuming some poor asses actually paid him to do so), advanced nothing in the piece, the impetus of which was fueled no doubt by the fact that he's an extreme ideologue (ideology making corporate-worshiping peasants fall for stupid ideas with no empirical basis) and market fundamentalist, and you're ignoring all of that and accusing me of an "illiteracy" fallacy? Oh Kay.

This whole thing reminds me of the old McCarthyism chestnut.

For the life of me, I cannot get liberals to calm down long enough to answer me one simple question.

Was Joseph McCarthy bad because he FALSELY accused people of being communists who were in fact, not communists, or because he RIGHTLY accused people of being communists who were?

It's such a simple question, and yet they can never answer it. The reason they can't answer it is because time has shown that Tailgunner Joe was pretty much on the right track.

By the way, the same people who think Communists should be allowed to work at the State Department during the midst of a Cold War with Communism, think that a public school counselor who doesn't approve of gay "marriage" should be fired. Just google "Donald Mendel".

One of the major differences between the Right and Left is that if you disagree with the Right, you have an opposing view. But if you disagree with the Left, they want you eviscerated.

The former represents liberty, the later fascism and shows how Marxist/Leninist theory has transformed progressivism with a winner take all thug mentality.

Here is the deal, PMA, you may have taken an informal logic class once in your life, but that doesn't make you smart, it probably just made you more of a smarty. Dan did not commit the PtW fallacy. I suspect that you do not understand how rhetoric and logic relate, and I also suspect that you lack self-knowledge. If GWHBush had been a member of an American Nazi party in the 1950s, would that be worthy of an article, or would such an article be necessarily poisoning the well? Let's pretend that Zinn had said that political activism, not truth, was the goal of his scholarship--then, would his communist membership be an important historical fact putting his work in context?