ORLY-EP0122A - Communism was just a Red Herring

Welcome to ORLYRADIO #122a recorded Friday August 12, 2016 - where we dismantle the current events for your edutainment through mostly rational conversations that make you go ‘Oh Really’! I’m your host Andy Cowen, with my usual suspects, David O’Connor, Fred Sims, Daniel Atherton, and Stephen Griffith

Audience Feedback From Previous Shows:

From The Atheist Amazon, Stacy Reebrul on our Facebook page:

I was just listening to EP 0117A again. Something I learned brought me back to when you were talking about the black man who was found hanging in the park down south. It was said that most people don't commit suicide in public. Now I'm not an expert, but I've recently learned that 1/3 of suicides are committed in public places. Sometimes, suicidal people go to a place where they have happy memories. It may be a way of the person trying to talk themselves out of the act. The other reasons they do it is to let the world know that it let them down and a way to make people remember them. We have dealt with hangings, self-inflicted gunshot wounds, suicide by train, and suicide by cop.
I learned this a couple of months ago when a fellow officer decided to jump off the cliffs of the Palisades Interstate Parkway. His suicide was very public. And he knew it would be. He knew what kind of response he would get from jumping at that particular site. And everyone in the department had to go through critical incident stress debriefing and talk to counselors.
I'm not stating that the man mentioned on your show wasn't murdered. I'm just pointing out the fact that it happens more often than is thought.
Love the show, guys.

We make mistakes. Please, if you find one, pause the podcast, and send us a note. orlyradiopodcast@gmail.com or phone it in 470-222-6759

This Week in History:

Sources: http://www.history.com/this-day-in-history

August 12, 1990 - On this day in 1990, fossil hunter Susan Hendrickson discovers three huge bones jutting out of a cliff near Faith, South Dakota. They turn out to be part of the largest-ever Tyrannosaurus rex skeleton ever discovered, a 65 million-year-old specimen dubbed Sue, after its discoverer.

Amazingly, Sue’s skeleton was over 90 percent complete, and the bones were extremely well-preserved. Hendrickson’s employer, the Black Hills Institute of Geological Research, paid $5,000 to the land owner, Maurice Williams, for the right to excavate the dinosaur skeleton, which was cleaned and transported to the company headquarters in Hill City. The institute’s president, Peter Larson, announced plans to build a non-profit museum to display Sue along with other fossils of the Cretaceous period.

In 1992, a long legal battle began over Sue. The U.S. Attorney’s Office claimed Sue’s bones had been seized from federal land and were therefore government property. It was eventually found that Williams, a part-Native American and member of the Cheyenne River Sioux tribe, had traded his land to the tribe two decades earlier to avoid paying property taxes, and thus his sale of excavation rights to Black Hills had been invalid. In October 1997, Chicago’s Field Museum purchased Sue at public auction at Sotheby’s in New York City for $8.36 million, financed in part by the McDonald’s and Disney corporations.

Sue’s skeleton went on display at the Field Museum in May 2000. The tremendous T.rex skeleton–13 feet high at the hips and 42 feet long from head to toe–is displayed in one of the museum’s main halls. Another exhibit gives viewers a close-up view of Sue’s five foot-long, 2,000-pound skull with its 58 teeth, some as long as a human forearm.

Sue’s extraordinarily well-preserved bones have allowed scientists to determine many things about the life of T.rex. They have determined that the carnivorous dinosaur had an incredible sense of smell, as the olfactory bulbs were each bigger than the cerebrum, the thinking part of the brain. In addition, Sue was the first T.rex skeleton to be discovered with a wishbone, a crucial discovery that provided support for scientists’ theory that birds are a type of living dinosaur. One thing that remains unknown is Sue’s actual gender; to determine this, scientists would have to compare many more T.rex skeletons than the 22 that have been found so far.
Separated by 50 years, two Hollywood icons were lost as this day in 1964 Ian Fleming, creator of James Bond, passed away and in 2014 Lauren Bacall passed away.
In the year 30 B.C. Cleopatra took her own life following the defeat of her forces against Octavian, the future first emperor of Rome
In 1953, Less than one year after the United States tested its first hydrogen bomb, the Soviets detonate a 400-kiloton device in Kazakhstan. The explosive power was 30 times that of the U.S. atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima, and the mushroom cloud produced by it stretched five miles into the sky. Known as the “Layer Cake,” the bomb was fueled by layers of uranium and lithium deuteride, a hydrogen isotope. The Soviet bomb was smaller and more portable than the American hydrogen bomb, so its development once again upped the ante in the dangerous nuclear arms race between the Cold War superpowers.

-BREAK- Logical Fallacy

http://www.logicalfallacies.info/relevance/red-herring/

Red Herring

Explanation

The red herring is as much a debate tactic as it is a logical fallacy. It is a fallacy of distraction, and is committed when a listener attempts to divert an arguer from his argument by introducing another topic. This can be one of the most frustrating, and effective, fallacies to observe.

The fallacy gets its name from fox hunting, specifically from the practice of using smoked herrings, which are red, to distract hounds from the scent of their quarry. Just as a hound may be prevented from catching a fox by distracting it with a red herring, so an arguer may be prevented from proving his point by distracting him with a tangential issue.

Example

Many of the fallacies of relevance can take red herring form. An appeal to pity, for example, can be used to distract from the issue at hand:

“You may think that he cheated on the test, but look at the poor little thing! How would he feel if you made him sit it again?”