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by
Lydia Chávez
On Wednesday morning, two workmen were fixing some of the screws in the office sign on 22nd Street that belongs to Kaushik Dattani, a tax preparer and property owner in the Mission.
Tuesday had not been a good day for him as protesters held two actions in front of his office, drawing attention to his tenant evictions.
See this and other Mission SNAPS from the day here.
Founder/Executive Editor. I’ve been a Mission resident since 1998 and a professor emeritus at Berkeley’s J-school since 2019 when I retired. I got my start in newspapers at the Albuquerque Tribune in the city where I was born and raised. Like many local news outlets, The Tribune no longer exists. I left daily newspapers after working at The New York Times for the business, foreign and city desks. Lucky for all of us, it is still there.
As an old friend once pointed out, local has long been in my bones. My Master’s Project at Columbia, later published in New York Magazine, was on New York City’s experiment in community boards.
Right now I'm trying to figure out how you make that long-held interest in local news sustainable. The answer continues to elude me.
More by Lydia Chávez15 Comments
The guy is a law abiding citizen, probably an immigrant (name), just trying to pursue the American dream. Only to get harassed by a bunch of angry, aggressive, spiteful white Americans. He probably feels intimidated.
I’ve said it once, and I’ll say it again. Hate the game, not the player.
I find myself wondering what these activists really want. Zero no-fault evictions? No rent increases ever? Mandatory rent reductions? Lifetime leases?
Now suppose they got all that, and repealed Costa-Hawkins and Ellis as well. Then what? Do they seriously believe that there would be any new rentals offered?
What property owner in his right mind would then offer a unit for rent. The entire rental market would vanish.
If there is a need for the poorest city residents to be subsidized, then that should be funded by the city, and not on the backs of individuals like Dattani whose only crime, as far as I can see, is his determination that some of his properties are not viable as rentals.
The rest of the market should be liberalized, to end these wars and bad behaviors.
Reductio ad absurdum.
Correct, marcos. John’s posts would make excellent source material for a college course on logical fallacies. He’s a veritable encyclopedia of “dislogic..”
His ubiquitous presence here, and his aversion to fact and logic, suggest he understands that the prime function of the propagandist is to dominate discourse, and not to convince through actual logic or facts.
Change the subject from your fallacious argument to my comment on it, conceding the fallacy of your appeal.
You are now starting to understand the distinction that I outlined.
No need to explicitly thank me for the clarification.
A false argument similar to reductio ad absurdum often seen in polemical debate is the straw man logical fallacy. A straw man argument attempts to refute a given proposition by showing that a slightly different or inaccurate form of the proposition (the “straw man”) has an absurd, unpleasant, or ridiculous consequence, relying on the audience not to notice that the argument does not actually apply to the original proposition.
The fact that you think a “reductio ad absurdum” is a logical fallacy shows that you have a flawed knowledge of logic.
I can only assume that two beers shares that fallacious view although he did not express it so unequivocally as you did.
A RAA is a valid form of logical argument. It is used to disprove a premise P by showing that P logically entails a conclusion C. If C can then be shown to be false, then P must be necessarily false as well.
The false form of a RAA is the much-overused expression “straw man” where C does not follow from P, and so C is really a distraction or red herring used mischievously to discredit P.
In this case, I was simply asking PAM (or anyone) a question as to what these activists seek, ideally, as there appears to be no rational limit to what they want.
Apparently neither you nor anyone else can answer that question.
Dominate and cloud the discourse and when that fails, beg the question by changing the subject.
Here, “John” (or is it Phil?) takes the latin for the logical fallacy of reducing an argument to its most absurd and pretends that it means “your argument is absurd,” and then changes the conversation to something else that Phil thinks is absurd.
Absurd? Exactly. With pandering politicians, the rent board, non profits, free advocacy lawyers, and a melange of misfit protesters, it has turned into the Rent Control Industrial Complex ™ in this city.
I suspect that many people who supported rent control in 1979 and look at it now would probably assess the outcome as absurd.
Schmucky protestors probably messed up his sign. Defacement/destruction of property, that’s what them hooligans probably did. Hypocrites.
Nothing that you speculate about happened.
Don’t let reality get in your way of name calling, however.
Freedom of assembly equals hooliganism. The condition of a sign (which in this instance was untouched except by workers removing and replacing it) is more important than people trying to save their home. Nice world you live in.
How do you know they didn’t mess it up? Were you there? No. Probably did. Hooligans.
Either way, it seems like a non-story.