Miscellaneous desk
< September 20	<< Aug \| September \| Oct >>	Current desk >

Welcome to the Wikipedia Miscellaneous Reference Desk Archives
The page you are currently viewing is a transcluded archive page. While you can leave answers for any questions shown below, please ask new questions on one of the current reference desk pages.

September 21

Little big curiosity

Hello. I turn to Wikipedia so that it can come to my rescue let's say, can help me better understand the object of my curiosity. Now, with the understanding that the thing itself has no value as obvious, the image in the link depicts Arizona's fake electors casting their “votes” for Trump in 2020. If you look at the image, I even tried to enlarge it but could not understand much, to cast this fake vote these “electors” had to write down the candidate's name? It looked like this to me. Granted that this is a curiosity for its own sake, but still a curiosity, I would like to understand more if possible and I rely on the good heart You Users. Thank you very much. https://eu.azcentral.com/story/news/politics/arizona/2022/01/22/how-arizonas-trump-electors-planned-deliver-him-victory/6604574001/ Andreoto (talk) 13:20, 21 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Arizona's electoral votes look [like this]. If you are looking at handwritten votes, it is just garbage. Ignore it. As with the question above, states usually place all votes in one certified letter to Congress. 75.136.148.8 (talk) 15:15, 21 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]

By "handwritten votes” are you referring to the image in the link i.e. the fake electors who cast their votes by writing the name?151.44.148.9 (talk) 18:57, 21 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Are you referring to the article that is hidden behind a paywall? 75.136.148.8 (talk) 01:36, 22 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Yes. Exactly. 93.65.152.244 (talk) 03:00, 22 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Passports

Today, I went to the post office for a passport renewal. I’ve noticed that you have to take an oath. Then, I found out that you’re supposed to take one when you get your passport the first time. Do you have to take an oath every time you renew your passport? TWOrantula^TM (enter the web) 17:59, 21 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]

What country? "Fuck me, how much?" is the traditional British oath. DuncanHill (talk) 18:01, 21 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]

That depends entirely on which country you are a citizen of, and that country's laws and regulations. Cullen328 (talk) 18:03, 21 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]

The OP says he's American, so American federal law and/or policies would apply. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 22:03, 21 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]

As a US citizen living outside the USA I find that my passport needs to be renewed every 10 years at a US embassy or consulate that will require personal attendance, showing the expiring passport and a renewal fee in cash. It seems they regard the oath I gave over half a century ago in another country as persistently binding so I have never been asked to repeat it. The requirement may have been different for the OP who renewed at a post office and not at an embassy. Philvoids (talk) 11:05, 22 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Currently renewing my passport in Australia. No oathing involved, except at the sloppily designed website I am forced to use. HiLo48 (talk) 11:32, 22 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]

This [1] says

Before a passport is issued to any person by or under authority of the United States such person shall subscribe to and submit a written application which shall contain a true recital of each and every matter of fact which may be required by law or by any rules authorized by law to be stated as a prerequisite to the issuance of any such passport. If the applicant has not previously been issued a United States passport, the application shall be duly verified by his oath before a person authorized and empowered by the Secretary of State to administer oaths.

which suggests the in person oath only needs be before the first passport so you could probably make a fuss and refuse an oath after your first passport if you really wanted to. That said I cannot find any info on what this actual oath is or even if it's generally administered on most first applications. I assume it's just to confirm that the information in your application is true etc.

(Most stuff related to US passports and oaths seem to refer to the Oath of Allegiance (United States) which is required for naturalisation not a passport. Someone who isn't a US citizen would need to take such an oath before they can be naturalised which of course means they need to do it before they can get a passport. But that's a somewhat different thing and isn't part of the passport process per se. Instead it's the certificate of naturalisation which is required for the passport.)

That said various embassy sources talking about a first passport do mention an appointment [2] or interview [3] so there's definitely room for an oath. Interesting enough, the US code suggests that someone issued a passport when they were a baby would theoretically not need to make an oath, at most only their parents. (Although the NZ one suggests the process might be the same one for anyone applying for the first time once over the age of 16 as someone who's never had a passport.)

Nil Einne (talk) 07:43, 24 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Oh, this is just swearing that you've told the truth on your application? That's completely different from what it sounded like in the thread.

My guess is it would be an "oath or affirmation"; I've never heard of any time you had to "swear" for an official US government reason that you didn't have the opportunity to instead "affirm". Presumably this was originally meant to accommodate those who took a strict view of Matthew 5:34. --Trovatore (talk) 22:29, 24 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Neither of my passports required oaths. I'm a citizen of the UK and one other Commonwealth country. Citizenship requires an oath or pledge (or one by your parents if you are getting your citizenship only via them). Passports require citizenship, but no separate oath. Komonzia (talk) 18:53, 22 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]

The current PDF form to apply to renew a passport is DS-82 04-2022. Above where the applicant will sign is a statement:

I declare under penalty of perjury all of the following: 1) I am a citizen or non-citizen national of the United States and have not performed any of the acts listed under "Acts or Conditions" on page 4 of the instructions of this application form (unless explanatory statement is attached); 2) the statements made on the application are true and correct; 3) I have not knowingly and willfully made false statements or included false documents in support of this application; 4) the photograph submitted with this application is a genuine, current photograph of me; and 5) I have read and understood the warning on page 4 of the instructions to the application form.

But adults renewing passports usually do so by mail, and that is the intended purpose of DS-82. Perhaps the original poster used a different form because, for some reason, the application had to be filed at a post office.

This, of course, isn't exactly an oath, but I expect the penalty for falsehoods would be similar.

Jc3s5h (talk) 22:51, 24 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]

When I got my first passport at age 10, the clerk had me raise my right hand and asked, "Do you swear allegiance to the United States of America?" But I have not since been asked anything of the sort. —Tamfang (talk) 18:27, 4 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]

What is the name of this fallacy?

Weed is illegal
Cigar is legal and its worse than weed.
Both are drugs.
So both must be legal.

The thing is that he picked a side (weed must be legal for being less harmfull then a legal drug), but the other side can be picked (cigar must be illegal for being more harmfull than a illegal drug).2804:1B3:9700:B438:DC3:8910:3C:AA15 (talk) 20:39, 21 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]

There's implied premises (from being in the shared society etc). Let me write this as a more formal chain of logic -- I am using the active because you used it, as in "[generally all] A are B", but you could also do this with something like "[generally all] A should be B".) Begin with the definitions (you can draw Venn diagrams to follow along):

Cigar is a type of drug; weed is a type of drug. -- define "drugs" as our universal set in this exercise, cigars and weed will be individual elements.
Some drugs are good and some drugs are bad mmkay? -- This is me saying that "drugs" is an ordered set, with a quantity like "good-for-you"ness, in which drugs that are "bad" are below some threshold number. So for this example, we'll say the "good-for-you" scale is from -10 to 10, and drugs rated -1 or below are "bad", while those 0 or higher are "not bad". All drugs have a rating and must be either bad or not bad (The Law of the excluded middle, so the set of "bad-drugs" joined with the set of "not-bad-drugs" makes up our universal set of all "drugs", with no overlap.)

Now let's lay out our premises in this abstract, formal argument, beginning with the ones you noted:

cigar is legal.
weed is illegal.
Cigar is worse than weed. -- (worse = a drug that is more bad, per the "good-for-you" quantity we defined. So in my example scale in my note, if weed rates 2 in badness (which by my definition is not a "bad drug"), then this premise means that cigar must be 1 or lower.)

Now I will add a final implied premise, that of society's law, which you'll see will be critical if we want to do anything useful:

All bad-drugs are illegal ("not legal"). -- (Just as with "bad" and "not bad" drugs, all drugs must be either legal or illegal; this premise states that the "bad drugs" set lies entirely within the "not legal" set in your Venn diagram.)

(Note also that neither you nor I ever specify in our premises whether weed or cigar a "bad drug" or "not-bad-drug".)

Given all these premises, can we now draw conclusions that stem from the legality and illegality of cigar and weed? We know from my final society's-law premise that if cigar were a "bad drug", it would automatically be illegal. (However, observe that if weed were a "not-bad drug" it would not imply that it were legal or illegal.) So we can make this syllogism (based on the Law of the Excluded Middle from our strict definitions of bad/not bad drugs and legal/illegal -- remember Venn diagrams if you get lost):

Cigar is a legal-drug;
All bad-drugs are illegal;
Therefore cigar is a not-bad-drug.

So now if you think about our "good-for-you"ness quantity scale again cigar being "not bad" means it rates 0--10, and if it's worse than weed then weed must rate 1--10, so it also must be "not bad":

Cigar is a not-bad-drug;
Cigar is worse than weed;
Therefore weed is not-bad-drug.

BUT, what does weed being a "NOT-bad-drug" tell you about whether it is legal or illegal, going all the way back to my society's-law premise in the beginning?

To try to conclude something of the legality of weed in this simple constructed example is a type of formal fallacy, although I'm not sure what the specific name is. SamuelRiv (talk) 22:04, 21 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]

And your example of reversing the argument can be done by changing my "implied in society's law" premise above to its inverse: instead of "bad drugs are illegal", if one says "good (not-bad) drugs are legal" as your implied premise, then you can do the same argument (which will imply weed is bad because it is not legal) to lead to a similar nonconclusion about whether cigars should be legal or illegal.

However, if you use both of those implied premises of society, that both "bad drugs are illegal" and also "not-bad drugs are legal", then these two will imply "cigar is not-bad" and "weed is bad" respectively, and thus "cigar is worse than weed" creates a logical contradiction. If you use your Venn diagrams (every thing is sets) and think about the excluded middle again, however, you'll see why using both premises is a contradiction from the very beginning. SamuelRiv (talk) 22:28, 21 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]

And if you use neither of my implied premises of society, you can't do anything with formal logic with just the premises laid. The reason for this is that there are no other premises that show the connection between "bad drugs" and "legal drugs" -- what relationship they have with each other. If you can think of any other premise that includes both "bad/good drugs" and "legal/illegal drugs" in it (or two premises that share a third property), you can choose that instead and then you should be able to follow a logical argument again. SamuelRiv (talk) 15:03, 22 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]

(ec)Every sentence in that argument is flawed. One flaw is the statement that marijuana is illegal. The degree of its legality is defined by various state and federal laws. Another is the opinion that cigars are "worse than" marijuana. Another is defining them as "drugs", which would be decided by law, not by the author's personal opinion. And another is the assertion that both "must be legal". Clearly, the legality of each item has been defined by law. Even forgetting that there's no statement of which country this applies to. I might say the fallacy is "starting with dubious assumptions to reach a dubious conclusion." ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 22:10, 21 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]

The validity of a given syllogism concerns the question whether, given that the premises are valid, the conclusion follows logically from these premises. So the following syllogism is valid: P1: The Moon is made of green cheese. P2: Some Moon rocks are stored in Houston Texas. C: Therefore, some green cheese is stored in Houston Texas. Scientists generally believe that P1 is false, which has been confirmed by elaborate testing of the Moon rocks brought back by the Apollo 11 mission and other missions. (I doubt this included tasting them, though.) But this does not invalidate the argument itself. A classical syllogism has only two premises, but I think we can apply the same criterion to an argument with more than two premises. The cigar–weed argument of the OP is IMO defective in at least two respects. The first one is that there is an implicit, omitted premise, namely: For a substance to be illegal, it must be worse than all legal substances. (I interpret "must" here as "ought to", an obligation of lawmakers, not a logical necessity.) Granting this premise, though, as pointed out by others above, the conclusion still does not follow. The premises combined allow a world in which cigars "must" be illegal and weed remains illegal. All this does not answer the OP's question for a name to this type of defect. --Lambiam 07:46, 22 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]

I haven't thought it through very carefully, but I assume it's just Jumping to conclusions, something we should all be wary of.

I can construct a simpler equivalent statement, if that helps: South Street, Kent is north of North Street, Kent, therefore both are in the south. Some concepts involved are logical consistency and point of view. Maybe begging the question? I don't think anybody mentioned the third possibility, which that weed should be legal but cigars illegal (South Street might be in the north while North Street is in the south). Card Zero (talk) 12:01, 22 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]

The premises do not contain material that can be used for reasoning about the deontic status of the legality of weed. If our knowledge of the world is that cigars should be illegal and weed is illegal, this includes possible worlds in which weed should be legal. The premises also allow for another possibility no one mentioned, to wit that cheese is illegal but should be legal. --Lambiam 19:22, 22 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Well, the involvement of morality is accidental, and purely decorative. We're instructed to assume that cigars (or the variable named cigar) is "worse" than weed, and it's implicit that this is the same as "more harmfull" and that items more harmfull than an unknown threshold are labelled "must be illegal". So given these conditions, and the four possible combinations of legal/illegal against cigar and weed, three of those combinations are allowed, and all we know for sure is that the combination cigar is legal and weed must be illegal is ruled out. Card Zero (talk) 15:38, 23 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Looking online, it seems like most people only bother with naming the informal fallacies. I'd guess that since any invalid syllogism (that's deductive non-probabilistic(?)) can be reduced to a contradiction or tautology, it seems to be just called a formal fallacy, non sequitur, or invalid argument (see e.g. IEP).

Of course, the notion that one can apply formal categorical deduction to the inherently metaphorical and fluid structure that is natural language is itself a fallacy (which oddly I can't find a name for in our stupidly long list of informal fallacies -- the closest I can come up with is the ad-hoc-named (as they all are) noncentral fallacy, which gets the essential point across.)

The reason I gave OP a detailed formal analysis is because OP asked for a formal analysis of the logic in their question. The actual person they were talking about will almost certainly not change a single thing about their opinion once one points out the logical fallacy in their specific wording -- they might just slightly change their wording future, however. SamuelRiv (talk) 15:35, 22 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]

The only question by the OP that I see is "What is the name of this fallacy? ". I see no mention of an actual person having an opinion. --Lambiam 19:31, 22 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]

As has been pointed out, the only way to check whether something is legal is to check the law. As Baseball Bugs puts it, The degree of its legality is defined by various state and federal laws. The next thing to check is whether the lawyer who is quoting the law to you has a "Conflict of Interest". Lord Falconer certainly did when he claimed that "custom" associated with royal marriages was stated by the Marriage Act to remain unchanged. What the Act actually says is that the law relating to royal marriages remains unchanged - Falconer wasn't speaking as an impartial High Court Judge but as a member of Tony Blair's government. These pronouncements say more about how gullible the government thinks the population is than about the actual law. This section has been so beautifully argued that one wishes that the bald claim in Wedding of Prince Charles and Camilla Parker Bowles "that a civil marriage would in fact be valid" could be dissected in the same manner. Most people are fair and reasonable, but whoever wrote in this morning's News International

~~They are working for themselves. They are not working for the Royal Family. They are hanging onto their royal titles and people are seeing them for what they are.~~

clearly is not. So let's give Harry a warm welcome when he comes for the 2024 WellChild awards tomorrow week. An invitation was recently extended to readers to apply to the High Court to view the papers in the case against Camilla Parker Bowles (case no. AC-24-LON-002619). Has anyone done this? I think we will all be interested to know how the case is progressing. 82.32.75.206 (talk) 18:30, 22 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]

This has no relevance whatsoever to the question, which is not about whether something is legal, or how to find out whether something is legal, but about the name of a fallacy. Or are you are proposing to name it the "Wedding of Prince Charles and Camilla Parker Bowles fallacy"? --Lambiam 19:37, 22 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Lambiam, I've struck the tirade. It's just WP:LTA/VXFC riding one of their favorite hobby horses. Feel free to follow WP:BMB and remove their utterings on sight. Favonian (talk) 18:40, 23 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]

What I was talking about (I am the op) is that he is using the fact that weed is also a drug, and a "even worse drug" (cigar) is legal to say weed is illegal. But you could use the same argument saying that weed is a drug that is illegal and cigar is also a drug and "is even worse" so cigars must be legal.
Basically....
1-Right now A work like X
2-Something similar B works like Y.
Just those 2 arguments alone dont say anything if this types of things need to work like X or like Y. The guy pick a side without giving any information why and tell everything must work like that.

The fixed version of the argument without the fallacy I want the name would be one of those:

1-Cigar is legal and should be legal because of A, B and C.
2-Cirgar is worse than weed.
3-Weed is illegal
4-So weed must be legal.

or (if the guy was pro cigar being illegal)

1-Weed is illegal and must be illegal because of A, B and C.
2-Cigar is legal.
3-Cigar is worse than weed.
4-So cigar must be illegal.
— Preceding unsigned comment added by 2804:1B3:9700:B438:1943:8952:7B61:5EB0 (talk) 20:21, 22 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]

In the first of the two, did you mean to write, "4-So weed must be legal."?

If A, B and C argue that weed is a pretty bad substance and that such substances must be illegal, there is no fallacy. --Lambiam 21:25, 22 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Yes I meant to write that. Corrected. 2804:1B3:9700:B438:165:DA1C:DC58:2EB5 (talk) 21:39, 22 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]

That's what 2804:1B3:9700:B438:DC3:8910:3C:AA15 said originally. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 22:00, 22 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]

If you look at my answer above -- and I had to clean it up a bit -- it does explain how all this works in a syllogism. As I outline, you need to specify the implied premise that makes the relationship between legality of drugs and badness of drugs, and then you can proceed deductively. Your instinct about the logic is correct -- it is a formal deductive fallacy -- and as say in my later comment, they're usually all called the same thing.

The switch that you do between your first set of arguments and the second set in this comment, is what I outlined in my responses above by using the logical inverse of "society's" implicit premise: "bad drugs are illegal" inverts to "not-bad (or good) drugs are legal", and then you can follow the different premises for deduction to again come to a contradiction. SamuelRiv (talk) 22:35, 22 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]

It's hilarious how people get so worked up about something they apparently know very little about, or pretend not to. Acid? Mitsubishis/AK-47s/Rolls Royces? Pub grub/high-quality coke? Shrooms (Liberty caps/Mexicana)? Mephedrone? K? DMT? Squidgy black? Massive nugs of hilarious, revelatory skunk? Tried them all, and I still enjoy raving to techno into the dawn with the ghost of Aldous Huxley. Actually, I once tried reading the opening chapter of The Doors of Perception quietly to myself in the reception area of a police station whilst on probation: and a burly copper appeared and stood silently at the front door, ready to turn people away, while doors banged very loudly and ominously throughout the building. It's as if people were aware of what I was thinking. Most strange. MinorProphet (talk) 21:57, 24 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]

PS Please do not feed the trolls. MinorProphet (talk) 21:57, 24 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]

PPS The devil smokes cigars, the gods smoke weed. MinorProphet (talk) 21:57, 24 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]

If you take the first three as being "true", the fourth thing does not follow logically. Why? Because legislators do not necessarily use logic to arrive at their conclusions. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 22:38, 24 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]