Colorado snow job

A Colorado snow job

Few arguing techniques are so annoying, maddening, and widespread as the either/or logical fallacy, which finds perhaps its consummate expression in the "love it or leave it" charge.

A recent letter to the editor of the Denver Post that I wrote, and which the Post published (12/27/06), elicited a hand-written, home-delivered letter oozing anger. The letter plugged into the oh-so-common either/or logical fallacy, probably the most prevalent of all logical fallacies.

In my letter to the Post, I criticized the snow and ice removal efforts in Colorado. The Post had shown in an article published a few days beforehand that these efforts simply don't stack up to efforts in cities like Chicago, New York, etc.

In fact, a few weeks earlier, I had sent an e-mail to several Denver Post reporters suggesting that the Post do such a comparison. It's possible that my e-mail inspired the original story, which showed that Denver trails Chicago, Pittsburgh, New York, etc. by a wide margin in terms of the number of plows per highway lane mile.

In any case, here is my original letter, followed by the angry response, followed by my response to the response:

Dear Denver Post:
Mayor John Hickenlooper and Gov. Bill Owens act as if Denver's clear shortcomings in snow removal, as compared to cities such as New York and Chicago, are only a liability during a massive storm.

In fact, beefing up metro Denver's snow-removal fleet would improve road conditions and increase safety during smaller snowfalls. A former East Coaster, I dread even the tiniest of storms here because of a totally inadequate approach to snow removal.

In eastern Massachusetts, after 4 inches of snow and in 25 degree temperatures, major highways would immediately be down to bare pavement. Here, given exactly the same conditions, drivers typically face an ice-skating rink.

The bottom line: Too few snowplows and too little money spent on keeping roads clear means snow gets packed down to ice before plows can get there, even with small snowfalls.

The response, from the angry individual who went so far as to track down my address and pop for a 39-cent stamp:

"Hi,
I'm from Massachusetts. If you like Massachusetts so well, move back there! PLEASE!!!!

If you won't move back, then stop complaining!!!

Either enjoy what Colorado has to offer or move. Whining is not an option."

Of course, there are multiple alternatives to the either/or options I'm given. The most obvious of these is to lobby for better snow and ice removal efforts that will make Colorado a better, and safer place to live.

Casting me as a "whiner" is also a classic, and simplistic, rhetorical maneuver -- an attempt to put the critic on the defensive simply for being critical (see my "Criticizing critics of the critic" blog entry for more on this).

Notice the implied violence in the statement, "Whining is not an option." It's as if the letter writer is making my decision for me in terms of what my options allegedly are, or not -- or else!

In the end, employing either/or logical fallacies and ad hominem attacks are an attempt to shout down an argument rather than to engage an argument in a thinking manner. They are the non-thinking person's easy way out. Sadly, this is pretty much the standard approach to argumentation for a sizeable number of Americans, with the Bill O'Reilly, conservative talk radio crowd the prime exemplars.

Colorado snow myths

I love Colorado (I could go on and on about what I love about it -- but I won't. At least not in this blog entry). I don't want to move back to Massachusetts. But some things are better back east. Clearly, one of these is snow and ice removal.

The difference is particularly apparent during "piddly" snowfalls, say between 2 to 5 inches. Road crews dump a lot of chemicals on the roads in Massachusetts -- and there are simply more plows on major highways there.

Yes, your car rusts more quickly, and more salt flows into the environment in Massachusetts. On the other hand, I suspect your chances of totaling your car during a relatively minor snowfall are dramatically lower in Massachusetts than in Colorado.

I'm an experienced and very good winter driver. But it's just plain ridiculous that a non-storm here in Colorado, at least along the Front Range, turns driving into a white-knuckle affair. It doesn't have to be this way, and life would be better, and safer, for all Coloradoans if more effort and money were invested in keeping roads free of ice and snow here.

The typical response to such charges -- other than "love it or leave it," is that, well, it's sunny here in Colorado, and the sun melts the snow more quickly than back east. In fact, one hears this claim so often here, one might be forgiven if one actually began to believe that, miraculously, the flakes fly in Colorado under cloud-free, blue-sky conditions!

Yes, there is more sun here. However, the last time I checked, the following things significantly mitigate the impact of the sun on snow along the Front Range, which receives more annual snowfall than much of Eastern Massachusetts:

1) Extremely short days in: November, December and January.
2) Very low sun angles during the same months.
3) Snow that, unbelievably, falls in: a) cloudy conditions; b) during the night.
4) Too few plows and de-icing chemicals placed on the roads too late, which means the snow is quickly packed into hard ice; ice doesn't melt quickly, even in sunny conditions!

These basic realities are glossed over by the simplistic "it's sunny in Colorado" crowd. It just isn't that simple, though, of course, the world's black-and-white crowd wants us to think it is.