False Dichotomy Watch: Jack Shafer Edition

This at Sullivan yields the following quote from Jack Shafer at Slate:

Our spirited political discourse, complete with name-calling, vilification—and, yes, violent imagery—is a good thing. Better that angry people unload their fury in public than let it fester and turn septic in private. The wicked direction the American debate often takes is not a sign of danger but of freedom. And I'll punch out the lights of anybody who tries to take it away from me. [link]

Wow. I generally don't spend much time on the fallacies in my critical thinking class, because I don't think learning about them is all that important. But here's a case in which one really ought to know about false dichotomies.

Needless to say, we have little reason to believe that the only two options are:

(a) Angry people unload their fury in public

and

(b) That anger festers and turns specific in private.

For one thing, there are clearly other, superior options--like doing neither (a) nor (b). But also, there's little reason to believe that expressing anger is actually cathartic. We have as much informal evidence that venting anger just makes it worse (and JQ tells me that she's read studies that suggest that the latter is so...though you know how psychology goes...)

Shafer says a lot of other dumb things in the piece, but I'm running to class. Here are a couple of the dumber, though:

For as long as I've been alive, crosshairs and bull's-eyes have been an accepted part of the graphical lexicon when it comes to political debates.

Uh...huh? Since when? I mean, I don't remember this, and I follow politics pretty closely.

and:

Any call to cool "inflammatory" speech is a call to police all speech, and I can't think of anybody in government, politics, business, or the press that I would trust with that power.

Whew. That last one is a real stinker. Unfortunately, 'police' is ambiguous there, as between something like 'keep an eye on' and something like 'have the authorities keep an eye on.' Shafer pretty clearly means the latter, but his claim is only true if we mean the former. But, cutting to the chase: no, asking people to stop saying false and outrageously inflammatory things (like, oh, say, "The President is a Muslim who seeks to destroy the country") is in no way a call to have the authorities keep an eye on or approve all speech. If I say "you shouldn't go to that large drunk in the corner and falsely tell him that Smith is sleeping with his wife," I am not saying that the government should prohibit such speech. I'm saying that it makes you an assh*le if you say that stuff, and you shouldn't do so.

Nobody here is saying that it should be illegal to say that the President is a Muslim, or the Manchurian Candidate, or the Antichrist; rather, we're saying that you shouldn't say those things, and that you're an assh*le if you do.