If you're reading this, you're likely a frequent enough user of the Internet to have been exposed ("subjected" might be a better word) to the vicious arguments, debates and disagreements that often spread like wildfire across the comments sections of newspapers, blogs and social networks. Ali Almossawi, fed up and tired of blocking out the comments sections, chose to review some "rules of the road" for logical debates. His project began--logically--as a website, but quickly took off; 650,000 page hits later, we have An Illustrated Book of Bad Arguments.
Each explanation of a mistake--which he calls "an abuse of reason"--takes up a page at most, and is illustrated with anthropomorphized animals. The "appeal to fear" fallacy, in which the speaker "plays on the fears of an audience by imagining a scary future that would be of their making if some proposition were accepted," is coupled with a picture of what looks to be the white-collar, harried, school-principal relative of Frog from the Frog and Toad children's books. "Guilt by association" features a donkey, also dressed for work, pointing at a poster of a bulldog dictator, trying to discredit an idea that was embraced by a socially demonized individual. Each of the selected missteps here should be avoided by anyone seeking to win an argument on more than bluster. Time will tell if it reaches those who could benefit most from its lessons, but this slim volume is nonetheless a whimsical, straightforward primer on good online discourse. --Matthew Tiffany, LCPC, writer for Condalmo and psychotherapist