JackLewis.net

When doing a curl, you grip the dumbbell, you lift, then let it back down. It’s a fairly simple concept. Gravity pulls the weight down, you pull it up and (if you’re doing it right) when you lower it, you go slowly, defying gravity the whole time. The key is Tension.

It’s not about the weight, but the resistance. Go fast and gravity does most of the work for you. Go slow and every inch of the movement costs you something. The slower you go, the harder the muscle works, and the harder it works, the more it builds. Nobody ever built a bicep by letting gravity do the reps for them.

Tension is not the enemy of exercise. Tension is the point of exercise.

Read more

The Booger Head

Every other creature in this bestiary wears a disguise. The Enthusiastic Ambivalent pretends to be a Skeptic. The Pontificating Ignoramus pretends to be an Expert. The Compassionate Hatemonger pretends to be a Guardian. On down the line, each one has a false identity, a costume that lets them believe they’re something nobler than what they actually are.

The Booger Head has no costume. He knows exactly what he is. He doesn’t care.

Read more

The Angry Sloth

Her timeline is a war zone. Every post is an emergency. The government is destroying democracy. Children are being put in cages. The planet is on fire. Fascism is here. If you scroll back far enough (you won’t have to scroll far) you’ll find that last week’s extinction-level crisis has already been replaced by this week’s, with no apparent resolution to either.

Now check her real-world activity. Has she attended a city council meeting? No. Written a letter to her congressman? No. Volunteered for a campaign, organized a neighborhood watch, donated to a legal fund, or done literally anything that requires standing up from the couch? Also no. But she is furious, and she needs you to know it.

Read more

There’s a difference between an insult and a logical fallacy.

When Donald Trump Jr. stood at a Saudi business summit in October 2025 and called No Kings protesters “older and fatter,” that was mockery. The room already agreed with him. Nobody in Riyadh was deciding whether American protesters had a point. He was playing to a friendly crowd. Rude, sure. Not a fallacy.

When mainstream outlets spend a news cycle calling a president “fascist,” “racist,” and “mentally defective” to millions of voters still forming opinions, that’s something else. The audience can be influenced. The label can replace the argument. And if the label sticks, the argument never has to be engaged at all.

That’s what separates the fallacies in this article from schoolyard name-calling. A personal attack only works as a logical fallacy when it targets someone in front of an audience that could have been persuaded by their argument. No audience, no fallacy. Just rudeness.

That’s today’s category. In Parts 1, 2, 3, and 4 we covered fallacies that dodge the point, rig the question, cook the books, and substitute pressure for proof. Those at least pretend to be about the argument. Today’s fallacies drop the pretense. They’re about you.

Read more

If you’ve been following American politics for the last few years, you’ve watched the word “existential” get beaten to death. Existential threat. Existential crisis. Existential danger to our democracy. Biden used it. Harris used it. Every cable news anchor with a teleprompter used it. They used it so often, and so loosely, that your average American who wasn’t already familiar with the term would be forgiven for concluding it means “imaginary.”

They do this with everything. Oligarchy. Anti-democracy. Fascism. They grab a word and bludgeon the public with it until the word loses all meaning. And there’s an irony so thick you could cut it with a knife: the people screaming about oligarchy are funded by billionaires. The ones screaming about anti-democracy spent years trying to remove a democratically elected president. And the fascism crowd is demanding that everyone march in lockstep or be denounced. Is it ironic? Un-ironic? Both. The words are accurate. They’re just aimed at the wrong people.

That’s what every fallacy in this article does. In Parts 1, 2, and 3 we covered arguments that dodge the point, rig the question, and cook the books. Today’s fallacies skip the evidence entirely and apply pressure instead. An authority said it. Everyone believes it. It feels true. It’s always been that way. It’s only natural. None of these are reasons to know something is true. They’re reasons to feel like you don’t need to check.

Read more

I saw a meme once of a stern-looking cop leaning into a car window. The caption: “Looks like you’ve had a bit too much to think.”

In Part 1 we covered fallacies that dodge the point. In Part 2 we covered fallacies that rig the question before you can answer it. Bad Evidence fallacies are sneakier than both, because they actually look like they’re doing the work. They come with numbers. Studies. Historical precedents. Personal testimony. They feel like proof. They just aren’t.

These are arguments that mishandle or fabricate evidence. They don’t dodge the question or rig the frame. They answer the question with data that doesn’t actually support the conclusion. And they’re harder to catch, because you have to check the evidence instead of just the structure.

Read more

There are only two kinds of people in the world: those who believe in false dichotomies, and Purple Penguins.

If that sentence made you pause, good. You just felt a False Framing fallacy doing its work. The sentence has the structure of a reasonable claim. The options are set. But they’re rigged before you even get to evaluate them. There’s no third choice, no “wait, those aren’t the only two options,” no room to step back and question the setup.

That’s False Framing. And it’s more dangerous than the Misdirection fallacies we covered in Part 1, because misdirection at least lets you see the real argument before it changes the subject. False Framing makes the real argument invisible. It rigs the question so that any answer you give concedes the point.

Read more