Shopping For Logical Fallacies

 

I went shopping for logical fallacies

Since I felt I should own some myself,

And as I love castles and palaces

‘The Appeal to Tradition’ was first off the shelf,

And though I was almost spoilt for choice,

I decided to give ‘Bring back hanging’ a voice,

And in truth I can’t see any reason,

We shouldn’t, for murder and treason. 

But some people argued and disagreed,

And I felt a great, over powering need,

To sneer in contempt at such people as these,

So I bought an ‘Ad Hominem’ package to please

All those sensible people who feel as I do,

For we are the many and they are the few. 

Though I bought an ‘Appeal to Authority’

To have up my sleeve, just in case,

Although my side are in the majority,

We cannot afford to lose face

So I’ll back up my claim,

For this is not a game,

It is seeking to prove what is true. 

And all those who say that hanging is wrong,

Are potentially terrorist killers, I said,

If you listen you’ll hear the true words of their song,

Saving their own sort is really their thing,

It’s not that they don’t want the innocent dead,

They’re just psychos themselves, who do not wish to swing.

They may look sopping wet with their hearts all a bleeding

And speak of ‘good killers’ such as women ill used,

By violent husbands who raped and abused,

But ignore them, such tactics are very misleading,

I bought one myself, it is called ‘Special Pleading’.

So I’ll say it again we must take up the rope

Else the poor and the needy and those without hope,

Will move on from acts of petty crime,

To more heinous acts, with the passage of time,

Yet now I don’t want this idea to be right.

And feel rather guilty and can’t really cope

For when the assistant was out of sight,

I stashed in my rucksack a ‘Slippery Slope’.

Peter Hitchens Goes Travelling To The Yorkshire Coast

 

I’m not a tourist, make no mistake,

I only go travelling for mind broadening’s sake,

I shan’t go near anything others enjoy,

Don’t count me in with vile hoi polloi,

Don’t call me a ‘Wezzy’ or ‘Come Fuh’Day’,

I’m up here from Oxford for CULTURE, not play,

Though I might take one in at the Theatre Round,

Or nip up to Bempton, where puffins abound,

And spot the lone albatross, doing his thing,

Midst the crowds of more common birds all on the wing,

For I feel that our minds must be truly alike,

Though he glides on the currents and I on my bike.

I’m certain I know what the albatross knows,

By disdaining the ways of his friends and his foes,

He has brought himself fame, made a lonely career,

In this dull, cold, unsuitable northerly sphere.

 

Some of CS Lewis’s Meditation in a Toolshed woven into a poem

I was standing today in the toolshed,

The sun was shining outside,

And through the crack at the top of the door,

There came a beam of light.

From where I stood, that beam so bright,

With the motes of dust floating in it,

Was the most striking thing in the pitch black place,

As it streamed through the gloom at the side of my face,

I was seeing the beam not seeing things by it.

Then I moved and the beam fell onto my eyes,

And then in an instant the scene that I’d seen

Disappeared, though not without trace,

I saw no shed and above all no beam,

But instead, I saw things with it,

At the top of the door, as I’d not seen before,

Inside an irregular cranny,

Green leaves in the breeze on the branches of trees

And beyond that, far distant, the sun in the sky.

And in that moment I knew

Something new, and something wise,

About a particular point of view,

And how looking along a beam at the motes

And seeing by the beam in my eye,

Give two very different impressions, both of them possibly true. 

Yet it was not with Mathew 7:3

That I pondered on different ways that we see,

I thought of more recent thinking habits,

And how we seem frightened admitting

Our view is purely our own

And when we’re caught in the glare we stare

And freeze, blinking like so many rabbits,

For fear our peers will sneer and groan

And point out how it’s unfitting

For our sort to approve

Of this unscientific thinking,

We’ve grown scared of what we can’t ‘prove’

But what is specific to science

That has such faith and puts such reliance

On the outside perspective, alone?

For has science itself not shown

Or shed it’s brilliant light 

Changing the way we say what is known

By proving the particle and the wave

Are simultaneous ways to behave?

Steinway Clothes

https://youtube.com/playlist?list=OLAK5uy_lDK3KfchGE_fIlPpTUg1DxfJinBqnmuMc&si=UEbxrO1tc8h7lq6F

Your clothes, 

Those cotton jersey pull-ons pile

Upon the long closed Steinway,

While I sort them into T shirts, trousers, sweaters, socks,

Leaning over some great box 

Of ‘baby wipes’ and ‘toilet roll’.

Where once was Chopin, King, John Field,

In garments now you are revealed,

Washed and dried, load after load, 

And who you were, is, on the whole

Lost, except within the spaces,

In the grooves,

Of old LPs 

And on the shiny silver faces

Of more recent, old CDs.

Even memory now moves

Within a childhood long before

You started down the happy road

Of fast becoming who you were.