Will We Hold It Wednesday – S&P 1,440 Edition

And yesterday's Daily Show did point out something interesting about Romney – he is getting stupider…

This is some pretty intense stuff – good to be aware of:  

 

Deploying Shock Troops Against Blog Posts

 

By Guest Author – September 26th, 2012, 7:00PM

BR: In the post last week Fisking McArdle, there seemed to be a concerted, coordinated Troll effort both here and at naked capitalism to counter the factual criticism of McArdle with bad arguments and poor rhetoric.

As someone who spends lots of time looking at patterns, the response looked totally non-random. Don Druid gives a solid explanatory as to why that is,

It is an important enough point that I am elevating his comment to a post of its own.

~~~

I’ll freely admit that I never read this blog until the eXiled directed me here. However, many of the comments made by ‘readers’ look very familiar.

You’ve certainly noticed that as soon as your link went up, a bunch of mysterious comments appeared following the same pattern:

1) Dubious compliments for you and your site, often with false claims of long-time readership (good catch on one of these very early in the comments);

2) False statements that “all of this is already known”, “nothing to see here”, etc. about the facts on McArdle;

3) False statements that “both sides do it”, “everyone does it”, etc. about McArdle’s naked conflicts of interest;

4) False statements accusing you of being a Democratic partisan, designed to draw discussion away from McArdle;

5) False statements arguing that there is effectively no such thing as a conflict of interest[!], and that McArdle’s financial interests in the subjects she covers mean nothing.

Awfully suspicious, isn’t it?

It’s almost as if these comments were crafted around a single playbook, with dos and don’ts handed down from above.

Of course, if you keep an eye on Facebook ads, you’ll see the Kochs and their various shell organizations constantly putting feelers out for people to contribute to “online presence” for their anti-rule-of-law goals and missions. Heck, the Kochs even run a summer camp at GMU on this topic, described in the article about McArdle, to which a number of my friends in graduate and professional schools were invited this year (all declined).

As was done with McArdle, the Kochs attempt to recruit students and young professionals and boot-camp them into this sort of false public pseudo-intellectual propagandizing.

I’m pretty certain that the young shock troops have been deployed here and elsewhere to defend McArdle with the various lies and smears you can find in the comments made by others above.

Thanks for taking them on – I’ll keep reading.

Here’s the playbook:  http://cryptome.org/2012/07/gent-forum-spies.htm

Can’t speak to the playbook but the pattern listed in the post closely corresponds to two very common logical fallacies, both of which are actually a form of red herring:

1. The tu quoque fallacy; e.g., http://www.fallacyfiles.org/tuquoque.html
Corresponds to items 3 & 4 in the pattern list. This fallacy is a classic red herring that attempts to turn criticism back on the the critic by a “you also” or “your side does it too” rejoinder. It is a fallacy because whether someone else does whatever is at issue is completely irrelevant to the truth of the original criticism or claim.

2. ignoratio elenchi; e.g., http://www.fallacyfiles.org/redherrf.html
Corresponding to items 1, 2 and 5 in the pattern list, this is the ultimate red herring, what Aristotle considered a major root of all fallacy: an argument that essentially ignores the conclusion it is supposed to be reaching, scattering shiny objects and other verbal debris as distractions along the path to nowhere.

Good morning!

VXX/StJ – Sure, once they split, shorting them long-term would seem to be the play.  

Eating the Future/Scott – Nice way to explain bonds. 

Cool site Randers. 

Karma/StJ – I don't know why he thinks that won't come back to "haunt" him – the one time he was given power, he was a crazy socialist!  

Universe/StJ – Size of a pinhead – makes you think….

Stories/Shadow – That's status quo.  No one ever gets in trouble for it so it continues or even gets worse every year. 

AAPL/Hoss – You are very welcome, I think it's a great help to everyone to discuss these in detail once in a while and you are really getting a feel for the play – that makes me very happy.  

GOOG/Diamond – How could they not know.  There are only several sources for the raw data and, theoretically, GOOG should be updating on a regular basis.  Unless they have no good relationships with their data vendors, you would think one or two might mention AAPL is gathering the data.  I can't believe GOOG can be that oblivious…

Pair/Diamond – I would not short GOOG and I doubt I would do naked long on AAPL but I suppose you can sell the AAPL 2015 $500 puts for $66 and buy the GOOG 2014 (no 2015 yet) $700/600 bear put spread for $34 and you net $32 even if GOOG is a total fail and if they both crash horribly, you can still make $34 if GOOG hits $600.  When 2015s come out you can roll but AAPL 2014 $400 puts are $17 so you should realize a profit (if AAPL stays over $666) well before the 2014 bear spread expires worthless.  

AAPL/Diamond – Every time I look at their numbers, they look cheap.