When I was a boy, my grandfather used to lament the growing influence of circus performers in American life. By “circus performers” I mean the whole class of people who perform tricks for a fee. Actors, jugglers, singers, dancers, bearded ladies, the whole range of people we lump into the bucket labeled “entertainers.”

Calling them entertainers disguises a bit of reality. Calling them artists is lunacy on stilts. My grandfather would say, “It used to be understood that these people were the scum of the earth, a necessary evil. They stayed on the fringes of society with whores, pimps and gamblers.”

The one reason to bring it up is to equate entertainers with pimps and whores. The other reason is it strikes me we have a similar problem with lawyers. it is not that they exist, it is that they exist in great numbers and seem to have over run the place. Anyway, that came to mind while reading this piece over at The American Thinker.

With much disgust, I discovered that National Review Online has officially mainstreamed Holocaust denial. By publishing Charles C.W. Cooke’s blog that pronounces that it “is a damn shame” that a California school district caved to pressure and withdrew an assignment requiring students to argue that the Holocaust did not occur, NRO is supporting the dissemination of an unbelievably offensive ideology that was formerly only espoused by psychotic tyrants such as Iran’s Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

Unlike the vast majority of respected opinions on the subject, Cooke bases his abhorrent position on claims that “There really is no better way of teaching critical thinking” than allowing debate on whether or not the Holocaust in fact occurred. Seriously?! As a practicing attorney for 26 years who developed critical thinking skills throughout my education, I feel confident in asserting that Holocaust denial has absolutely no place in the development of that skill set. And it certainly has no place in any classroom that desires to teach anything other than perverted ideologies and anti-Semitism -– period.

For starters, I’ve grown weary of this over the top drama queen act. I tend not to read much written by women for exactly this reason. If you have been made physically ill by an objectionable opinion, you should probably just kill yourself. Then we have the strange use of scare words. “Unbelievably offensive” is supposed to be a click past “really offensive” but could mean anything. It is scary sounding gibberish

Putting aside the ticky-tack complaints, what made me laugh is the the bit about being a practicing attorney for 26 years. This appears to be her, but I’m not positive. Lawyers have a habit of referring to themselves as authorities on things well outside their area of expertise. Entertainers suffer from this same defect. They think pretending to be others on stage makes them experts on everything. In most cases, they are uncommonly stupid. Lawyers think that passing the bar adds a dozen points to their IQ.

Lauri with an “I” is one of 1900 attorneys at her firm and she is not a partner nor is she on partner track. I make that assumption based on her title and the bio. Big shot attorneys I know tell me that when you’re on partner track, you get the flowery bio on the website. Plus, she is a woman. A woman attorney? Really? I’m sure she is a great gal, but she is not spending her day splitting atoms or solving complex puzzles. She pushes paper around an office and fills out forms.

Now putting aside these mean things I just wrote about poor Lauri, she is bragging about her critical thinking skills in the middle of committing a common logical fallacy, argumentum ab auctoritate. In addition to that, she is wrong. If you want to teach people how to puzzle through arguments, you give them tough arguments, maybe even impossible ones. The Kobayashi Maru is an example. Of course, she also commits the most common logical fallacy, which is argumentum ad populum. The “vast majority of respected opinions on the subject” can be wrong. Just ask Galileo. It’s why we don’t put math up to a vote.

I doubled over laughing at this bit of dimwittery:

And he does so in a completely inane way. 

Great debate topics start from the other side of the status quo:  “The United States should be a communist country”; “The eugenicists had a point”; “Sharia law would be good for the West”; “War is always wrong”; “9/11 was an inside job.”  Why would we exclude one of the most significant events of the twentieth century from the rule?

Why? Because the Holocaust is not up for debate!

I think if I were running White & Chase, I’d demand she stop writing for publication. My fear would be that our clients would read it and realize we have hired an unlettered dufus. Cooke is British and he is talking about the traditional way of debate taught to British school boys. Staking out ludicrous or absurd positions goes back to what I mentioned above with the Kobayashi Maru. By giving students an impossible position to defend, you force them to exercise those, wait for it, critical thinking skills.

Shakespeare has Dick the Butcher utter the famous line, “The first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers,” in ‘Henry VI. It is often repeated as an insult to lawyers, but it was actually a compliment. Without lawyers, you can not have the rule of law. But, there’s a limit to everything. Just as having some jugglers and bearded ladies is necessary to the running of a sane and civil society, you need to have some lawyers to administer the law. Things start going wrong when you have too many of these people and that’s where we find ourselves.

All that said, I don’t think we should be having primary school children debate the Holocaust. They are not ready for it and the teachers, in this case a Muslim fanatic, are not qualified to manage it. You also have to throw in the fact that Holocaust deniers are deeply weird people. The Holocaust Industrial Complex has warped a fair bit of thinking in America, but the antidote to that is not embracing the batshit crazy ideas of Holocaust deniers.