2011-06-21
Explanation
This single-panel comic plays with logical fallacies and absurd statistical reasoning. A banner at the top reads: "Fun fact: Anything that happened prior to 1945 can be made to look bad by referencing atomic bombs." Below, a man earnestly argues to a woman: "I'''m just saying. Nuclear wars before women'''s suffrage: 0. Nuclear wars after women'''s suffrage: 1."
The joke is a textbook example of the "correlation implies causation" fallacy (cum hoc ergo propter hoc), taken to an absurd extreme. The man is implying that women'''s suffrage somehow caused nuclear war, simply because women gained the right to vote before the first nuclear weapons were used. Of course, the two events have no causal relationship whatsoever -- the correlation is purely coincidental and chronological. The comic highlights how any historical development that preceded 1945 can be made to seem dangerous by noting that nuclear weapons came afterward, which is both logically meaningless and rhetorically effective on the gullible.
The votey extends the exchange: the woman says, "That'''s sexist," and the man responds, "So is radiation poisoning." This non-sequitur doubles down on the absurdity -- radiation poisoning is not sexist in any meaningful sense, but the man continues to draw ludicrous connections between unrelated concepts, committing to his flawed logic with complete confidence. The comic works as both a parody of bad-faith argumentation and a demonstration of how statistical cherry-picking can make any position sound superficially plausible.