There’s a segment of our society that is exceptional in their employment of logical fallacies. One can only marvel and wonder why this is so, since they’re equally adept at self-professing their intelligent superiority.

One fallacy they’re especially adept with is the faulty generalization; taking an anomalous situation or event, and alleging universal applicability. For example, a policeman shoots an innocent, and immediately, all policemen are evil, and murderers. This leads to truly inane conclusions, such as, defunding the police. All of them. And voila, a perfect illustration of the faulty generalization. This is importantly recognized as a logical fallacy, for conclusions derived from faulty generalizations are definitionally illogical. In other words, they’re insane.

Today's iteration of the fallacy postulates that because of dubious conduct of a relatively few of the 40,000 Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents, they’re all bad, and the agency should be defunded and disbanded. This one is slightly easier to understand, though, since they’re the same crowd who had no problem with open borders for four years, allowing all types of dubious and nefarious characters into the country, with no vetting. This fact underscores how crucial ICE is, because in many of our cities and even states, local law enforcement is proscribed from detaining them, even after they’ve committed additional crimes, and local judiciary has a revolving door for such.

One would think that those who self-identify as superlatively intelligent and moral would recognize their illogic. I really wish they would, because when a problem cannot be correctly identified due to faulty logic, proposed solutions are equally inane and elusive.

Richard Larsen

Pocatello