Best If Sold Yesterday

There are four of us in a field across from my house with Halloween coming on. A green four-door Buick glides to the east along Evans, a half block to the south.

"Hey, Nickie!" says one. Nickie is am voluptuous classmate who lives in the next street south. We all gallop over, yank open three doors in greeting.

Mr Dobson, at the wheel, is no Nickie. He is a bit unnerved.

"Whatta you boys want?"

Sorry, we mutter variously, and shut his doors.

Now, left to my own devices, I would have recognized Mr Dobson, uncle of the Hembrees, who lived precisely at the location where be was stopped when we accosted him. He also, needless to say, drove a 4-door Olds, identical with the one Nickie drove.

But I substituted general knowledge for my own private empirical sense.

This habit of hanging the rip cord of your thought processes up on a community static line is common, and it can be quite useful to those with anything to sell.

Recently one of those nasty pinch-beaked parrots in the Texas legislature informed an intrepid interviewer all about them immigrants, and their nefarious terrorist plots, and "it's common knowledge" that 82% of the births in a Houston hospital are to one of 'em.

Another sample of what is called 'argumentum ad populum' came up on the Rachel Maddow Show, when she pointed out the logical flaw of a buffoon on Faux Noise responding to a claim by referencing his audience numbers, as if he must be righter the more fools who watch his program.

And I have seen it, yes, plenty of times. There was an old technique utilizing a key ingredient of online chat groups, that being, invisibility, to declare during an argument that "countless" have privately written to him in support of his position but they were too afraid of his opponent to say so publicly in the group. He had cornered a high percentage of abject cowards, and reckoned that as giving strength to his argument.

The need for making such points is simply that he has no other.



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