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Anne Moffat: Reductio ad Hitlerum

Our MP, Anne PickingMoffat has historically been a thought-free, nodding dog for whatever hare-brained, knee jerk, reactionary guff the current government has dreamt up.

However, lately she's excelled herself in lack of thought, research, tact and insight when she conflated problems with the recent Scottish Ballot Paper with the principle of PR, and in doing so, compared the new First Minister to Hitler:

Did not proportional representation give Germany Adolf Hitler? To a lesser degree, we have been given the hon. Member for Banff and Buchan (Mr. Salmond). Can that be a good example?
Source

To pick off the obvious problems:

  1. There's the obvious kneejerk against Labour's current bête noir — sour grapes for losing power in Scotland, mixed with the fear resulting from her own constituency being part of that shift.
  2. Then there's the simple fact that proportionality delivers an overall result that is closer to the will of the people. That it tends to upset entrenched parties that benefit from the current system obviously leads to even the more reasonable of her Hon Friends decrying it.
  3. Next, we can note that previous AMS elections had very few spoiled papers. And even this time round, the new STV system had a remarkably low spoilage rate. So bitchy comments about this particular election's validity are either supremely premature and ill-informed, or are directed at another target.
  4. Finally, Ms Moffat has shown herself prone to making logical fallacies. In this case, the Reductio ad Hitlerum, generically expressed as Adolf Hitler (or the Nazi party) supported X; therefore X must be evil/undesirable/bad, etc. As X can include building motorways, painting watercolors, owning dogs and vegetarianism, this is clearly a fallacy. In the online world, this is known as the Corollary to Godwin's Law: the citing of Hitler in an argument ends the argument, with the citer being deemed to have automatically lost.

Voting record via TheyWorkForYou

How Anne Moffat voted on key issues since 2001:

Out of that lot, I strongly disagree with her on just about every single one; exceptions being Smoking Bans and Gay Rights.

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martin's blog | 3918 reads  
 
 

Sheffield Jobs (not verified) wrote on Tue, 2007-10-30 00:05

If you think Scottish Politicians are bad, look to England!

Scottish politics are a welcome change to the current English caberet Cabinet!

I seriously have considered moving to Scotland purely to escape the clutches of Labours hysterical 'fairness for all' drives, and although it sounds like this MP is indeed a very poor example, there are many worse in the current London Government!

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