Fallacy: Slippery Slope
This is an excellent example of the slippery slope fallacy, in which the arguer attempts to start domino effect of logic, in which one thing will dramatically cause many other events to occur. Typically, these arguments are borderline ridiculous, and the slippery slope is, in my opinion, one of the easiest fallacies to pick out while simply listening to someone make their point. In this example, “Slippery Slope Guy” plays the comic role of exaggerating this fallacy to humorously poke fun at politician and other public figures that use this fallacy in their own speeches. His argument is insane: if we give immigrants a driver license, they will suddenly be able to be the doctor of our President. Ummm … right. This kind of logic is hyperbolic to say the least.
Fallacy: Post Hoc
In the Post Hoc fallacy, it is assumed that because A occurred and then B occurred, A therefore caused B. On the contrary, just because two things occur does not mean they caused each other. Correlation does not cause causation, as my AP Statistics teacher has explained many a times. This fallacy reminds me of my Stats class in a lot of ways: for example, the post hoc fallacy is similar to the concept of confounding variables, in which an experiment may not produce valid statistical results because other variables had an effect upon the different levels of the experiment. In the same way, the post hoc fallacy can try to prove causation, but it cannot be made valid since other factors most likely had to do with the result.
Fallacy: Red Herring (and being completely ignorant)
The red herring fallacy is used to distract from the original problem or question, in hopes of avoiding answering it. In this pageant example, the idiotic girl doesn’t know how to answer the question so she rambles about Iraq, world peace, and Mexican education instead of answering the question about children not being able to find the US on a map. The history behind the name of this fallacy comes from fox hunting in Europe, where they would sometimes attempt to distract the hunting dogs by having them smell smoked red herring instead of the fox trail. See what I did there? I started talking about the history of the fallacy instead of continuing my argument because I didn’t know what else to say, so this in itself was a lovely example of the Red Herring Fallacy.
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