Perhaps you should point out which logical fallacies there are, and precisely where he has committed them. Right now, you have given us a question ("how many can you find?"). In essence you're insinuating that there are logical fallacies, without finding any or making any specific claim.

Anecdotes are "trumping" data? Which data? The original article relies upon two isolated quotations, and a link to a gov't study which does not support its claims.

Martin came to Zimmermans neighborhood looking like a gangsta and behaving like one to some extent.

Looking like a gangsta? Do you mean "black"? He was wearing a hoodie, like about 25% of young people at any given time.

Also, how was he behaving like a gangsta? He walked away rapidly from a confrontation ("I won't run but I'll walk real fast").

Zimmerman didn't pick up the gun when he saw the color of the intruders skin; he was already carrying.

Zimmerman had the gun in his car and was driving to Target. He saw Trayvon, then called the cops and said "[Trayvon] looks like he's on drugs or something" after just looking at the kid from a distance. Then he got the gun from his car, put it in his belt, and chased down the kid.

There is no way to tell if someone is on drugs by just looking at them from a distance. I have extensive experience with hard drug addicts and I could never tell if someone was on drugs before talking to them. I've known about 10+ severe addicts quite well who held down jobs and worked while doing drugs, and who managed to conceal their addiction from everyone. The only exception is if someone has done alot of meth, in which case they become twitchy, which is obvious from afar. Even in that case, however, the average meth addict is not particularly aggressive and is far less dangerous than the average drunk person.

I think Zimmerman was acting under the influence of stereotypes.

So, is that a command to "back off" and "let the real professionals handle it" by the civilian dispatcher who has no authority? No
So, is it an "established fact"? No

Yes, it is an established fact. You're being way too literal and are misinterpreting the intent and meaning behind the dispatcher's sentence.

In standard English there is a kind of understatement which is very common and universally understood. For example, I encountered a friendly but unintelligent young woman earlier today and mentioned to a friend that "she's not the smartest person in the world". This did not mean that she had an IQ of 215 which would place her just shy of the smartest person. It meant she was dumb. It was a kind of understatement which is understood by everyone.

Similarly, the statement "we don't need you to do that" is a friendly way of saying "don't do it." For example, if my boss observes someone at work doing something pointless or a waste of time, he might say "we don't need you to do that" because it's more polite than outright commanding them to stop. The meaning would be understood by everyone because that kind of understatement is part of standard conversational English.

The difficulty with peak oil people is that they do not understand how the economy adjusts. Their entire theory of collapse/decline is based upon an incorrect understanding of the economy as a static entity which was built up over decades and will collapse with any changes. In fact the economy more resembles an intelligent organism which is always adapting, seeking out, making changes, evolving.

Most of peak oil doom and energy descent theory is based upon 4 simple fallacies: 1) assuming exponential growth for quantities which are not growing exponentially (like population or energy usage); 2) ignoring alternatives and substitutes; 3) assuming a non-adjusting economy, or assuming the economy will not adjust to alternatives; 4) conflating resources with reserves.

Most importantly, energy decline theorists do not understand the price mechanism. This is their main source of difficulty.

No, no, no....

1. Liebig's Law of the Minimum. It only takes one critical resource failure to slow the entire train.

It looks like you might have been reading The Oil Drum or something similar.

The peak oil community is using an incorrect analogy when they apply Liebig's Law of the Minimum to "society". Liebig's law of the minimum refers to limitations on plant growth for lack of essential nutrients; it does not refer to "society" or "the entire train". Unlike plants, society can utilize alternatives whereas plants will die without phosphorous. We are not running out of alternatives and probably won't for billions of years.

Still using fossil fuels for the vast majority of our energy production (see No. 1).

This is because fossil fuels haven't begun to run out yet, so there has been no need yet to begin the gradual transition to alternatives.

Where's your personal nuclear power plant / fuel cell?

Why is it necessary to have a personal nuclear power plant?

Where, in fact, is your gen III nuc plant - the one with 1970's technology?

About 50 miles away from me, connected via a grid.

I wonder how many of them take apart their iPhone looking for the pixie dust.

Most of the iPhone is made out of silicon, which is the most abundant element in the Earth's crust by far and constitutes something like 60% of the volume of the Earth's crust. We will probably never use more than 0.001% of the silicon available to us, since human population is stabilizing. Also, we are not "using up" silicon at any rate whatsoever, since the silicon remains after the iPhone has been disposed of and could be re-mined later. We have enough energy and silicon available to us to cover the Earth in a miles-deep layer of iPhones. Obviously I'm not saying that's desirable or even possible, but we wouldn't "run out" of silicon or energy.

The article you linked is a misleading op-ed with no references to support its facts.

Germany and France sell electricity to each other based upon varying demand; however France has been the larger exporter of electricity over the last 10 years.

I say this not to defend plantation slavery as anything objectively good, but to note the irony that someone who defends FoxConn's treatment of workers while holding views antagonistic toward actual plantation slavery is being very hypocritical because on balance, these workers have it even worse. I'm white and if I had to choose between being a field slave in the South vs working under the conditions the FoxConn workers do with the sort of future that awaits them, hands down I'd choose to be a slave. At least then the master's tyranny would end at sun down.

You're very mistaken about the relative conditions of plantation slavery compared to developing countries' low-wage labor. Plantation slaves made no money whatsoever, and their imputed income from consumption was certainly less than 10% of the $400/mo which Foxconn workers earn. In addition, plantation slaves were frequently beaten severely for non-performance. Most of the slaves did not even survive the journey to the new world, because of harsh conditions on the slave ships. Those who did survive and had the misfortune to end up in the Carribean, usually lived about 5 additional years because of overwork.

Your notion that plantation slave owners "cared more" about their slaves is absurdly incorrect. In many places of the carribbean, the ratio of freemen to slaves was something like 1:10, which posed the constant risk of violent slave rebellion, so violent suppression was necessary and continuous. The slave owners did not "care" about their slaves as they generally worked them to death within 5 years.

As an aside, I've noticed that much criticism of the industrial revolution and of industrial development more generally, is based upon extraordinary over-estimation of the quality of life before the industrial development. There is a great deal of romanticizing (especially on the far left) of subsistence-farming life, of medieval conditions, of village agriculture, and (in this case) of plantation slavery, of all things. All of those modes of life imply an annual income of $300-$400 and severe back-breaking physical labor.

On every step of the way to industrial development, conditions for workers are better than they were previously. The Chinese people lining up for these jobs are not stupid. They are aware that the alternative is village agriculture, and that village agriculture work is harder and far worse paid.

Urine is natural. Do you want to swim in it? Poop is natural. Do you want to live in it?

I'm a coprophile, you insensitive clod!

It appears to me that the problem here (wrt to both economics and climate models) is the assumption that we cannot predict anything if we cannot predict everything. That is all wrong. Although it is impossible to model any complex system in all its attributes with precision, that doesn't imply that we can't make any precise predictions whatsoever or that we're reduced to statistical guesses as Loki_1929 claimed. Even in complicated systems, there are some inferences which are non-obvious and which offer precise, accurate predictions, even if they do not predict the entire future state of the complex system.

For example, it may be impossible to predict weather because of its chaotic features, but this does not imply that there are no precise and regular features of climate. For example, the Earth will maintain an energy balance in the long run despite irregularities caused by weather. Although we cannot predict the weather, we can make some predictions about climate with near certainty.

Similarly with economics. It cannot be predicted when a recession will occur, or what the stock market will do tomorrow. But some things can be predicted with certainty. For example, it can be predicted with absolute precision that the purchase of T-Bonds by the Chinese government will cause the trade deficit to increase also and by the same amount, provided that other international debt purchases remain constant. Also, it can be predicted with certainty that a decrease in the bank reserve ratio will cause a proportional increase in the general price level. Also, it can be predicted with certainty that an increase in labor productivity will cause wages to rise and not unemployment. These predictions are highly accurate, and are not at all obvious (in fact the last one is actively disputed by many people).

The problem with both economics and predictions of future temperatures, is that theorists will attempt to make predictions even of things which they know can't be predicted with certainty. They figure that their guess is better than nothing. Thus economists will attempt to predict recessions, and weather forecasters will attempt to predict tomorrow's temperature. When the predictions fail, people unfamiliar with those disciplines will jump to the conclusion that "well the whole thing is just fucked then; it's too complex" and that we know nothing about either economies or future temperatures. But that is all wrong. Unfortunately those same people will subsequently ignore predictions which really are quite certain. At least with weather and climate, the disciplines are separated. With economics, predictions about recessions are grouped under the same label as (for example) trade theory.

Comparing economics to a real science is almost a mortal insult due to the lack of rigor in economics.

This is totally wrong. Economics is definitely a real science and is extremely rigorous. The problem is that economists have not successfully communicated which things they really know with certainty and which they're guessing about. With climate, climatologists have not successfully communicated the difference between weather (which cannot be predicted well) and climate (which can). In both cases, they have not successfully communicated that they do know some things with great precision even about very complex systems.

http://www.gallup.com/poll/148745/political-ideology-stable-conservatives-leading.aspx

Self-identified conservatives outnumber liberals in the USA by a ratio of about 2:1, and this has been stable for decades. Moderates also outnumber liberals by almost 2:1. People on the liberal end of the spectrum make up only about 20% of the population.

The USA is a center-right country.

And forgive me, but recycling is detrimental to the environment, are you fucking daft?

Nope, read it again. I said that recycling of paper and glass has no value. In fact it has very little value, because recycling paper and glass uses almost as much energy as manufacturing new paper and glass.

I said that biofuels, local food, and organic food are positively harmful.

Aluminum recycling matters, but it's an exception.

See I can make lots of assertions too.

Yes, but the trick is to make true assertions.

2) Really? There's no shortage of land? Right, let me magic up some more land out of nowhere that nobody lives near.

How about the Sahara as a landfill for Europe and Africa? Or the high desert in the American southwest? Or northern Canada? Or the desert in the middle of Australia? Or vast areas of central Asia as in Mongolia?

Bear in mind that garbage in landfills is not spread out evenly over a wide land area. Garbage is compacted and stored as a large cube.

If we took all the wastes from all people in the USA for 1,000 years, it would occupy about 1.8 cubic miles. Of course, we couldn't have a cube going up into the air for 1.8 miles, so we would likely spread it out over an area of 20 square miles or so. This would occupy about 0.0007% of the land area of the US for 1000 years' worth of garbage.

Those food scraps in the landfill become permanent volume. Ever higher mounds.

If this were true, then throwing your organic garbage into the landfill would be effective carbon sequestration and would reduce CO2 in the atmosphere.

The small amount of attrition that occurs is into methane, which is a potent greenhouse gas.

Since 1996, the EPA has required all large landfills to capture and burn landfill gas, thereby converting it into CO2, just the same as if it had been composted.

Tiny bit of effort, huge benifits to everyone!

Nope, there are no benefits to anyone from composting. Whether you throw your organic garbage in the composting bin or the trash, it just ends up as CO2 in the atmosphere. It makes no difference.

Since 1996, the EPA has mandated that all large landfills have gas recovery and burning mechanisms which convert landfill methane into CO2. The result is that greenhouse emissions are CO2 in both cases, and are the same whether you compost something, or throw it in the garbage.

As a Canadian, the standard selfish American "fuck that shit" response to this kind of stuff is always humorous.

I would laugh at Canadians and Europeans (and American liberals) if it weren't so sad. Whereas typical Americans are selfish and say "fuck that shit," Europeans and American liberals actually care about the issue, but then engage in worthless symbolic gestures like mandatory composting, recycling, local food, organic food, etc, which either have no effect or make the problem worse.