Projection and logical fallacy
Notorious idiot Gregg Easterbrook, whose “Tuesday Morning Quarterback” column on ESPN.com is the only periodical I can think of that requires a regularly scheduled accompaniment of next-day corrections (he calls it “Reader Animadversion”), makes a curious assertion in his penultimate piece on the 2006-2007 season:
The popularity of American-style football is likely to grow internationally – gridiron is taking off in Mexico at the moment, for instance. Not only is football fun to watch and to play, most of the world continues to admire the United States and look up to us – it’s our foreign policy the world disdains; the American dream remains beloved almost everywhere. As democracy expands and more nations liberalize, more nations will long to become like the United States. And since football resides near the core of American culture, more people internationally will want the sport. They will reason, “America is strong and free and prosperous, America loves football, maybe football somehow helps you become strong and free and prosperous.”
Emphasis added.
I looked in vain through the 10,315 words that follow that sentence for some indication that Easterbrook wrote it facetiously. Presumably he would also argue that people in the rest of the world drink Coca-Cola and eat at McDonald’s because they think Americans’ love of fast food and soda are what make us strong and free and prosperous.
At the risk of stimulating his famously hair-triggered libido (he reminds us, creepily and endlessly, that his compromise with his Baptist upbringing “is to be pro-topless but anti-gambling”), I must say it’s pretty unlikely that everyone else in the world is as susceptible to the cum hoc ergo propter hoc (”with this, therefore because of this”) logical fallacy as he is.
Correlation does not imply causation, but when my blood pressure ticks downward in two weeks I’m pretty sure I’ll have TMQ’s off-season hiatus to thank.
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