Posts Tagged ‘Howard Kurtz’

The No True Vampires Fallacy

Friday, October 16th, 2009

Ace of Spades points to Howard Kurtz, Horror Movie Retard:

Ever watch a horror movie where there’s tons of vampire-shit going down — bitten necks, bodies drained of blood, wolves suddenly baying in suburban subdivisions, mysterious nosferatu-looking cats who just took over the local funeral home?

And for almost an hour of the film’s running time, no one will even utter the word “vampire.” They keep suggesting serial killers, animal attacks, and maybe the power lines are sending out strange radiation which is making the wolves all bitey.

Because, in the movie’s fictive universe as in real life, vampires don’t exist (well… except for this one time), so it seems insane to even postulate the existence of such things. Better to claim that maybe all these transparently-vampirish shenanigans are the work of “some local kids trying to scare us.”

Enter Howard Kurtz, Horror Movie Retard. He sees a lot of vampy kind of stuff happening all around him, but he’s furiously groping for alternative explanations.

In Howard Kurtz’ world, “liberal media bias” is as insane to posit as the existence of vampires, so despite glaring evidence of liberal media bias, he can only guess that maybe there’s a rabid wolf out there that somehow can drain blood from its victims.

An interesting counterpoint to Hume’s Maxim, as described in the Michael Shermer piece, How Thinking Goes Wrong, that I pointed to a bit back.

The weird thing is, of course, that while there are many reasons from physics, chemistry, and biology why vampires can’t exist, at least in the forms attributed to them by the popular culture, there is absolutely no reason at all why the news media can’t be biased, on way or the other.

Oh, except that liberals are always good, right, evidenced based, and cool, while conservatives are ignorant, superstitious, racist fools. There really is no liberal bias, because that’s not bias at all, that’s just good common sense.

I keep forgetting.