November 26, 2013

"So... we should all just be thankful we don't live in France, right?"

"French pharmaceutical company HRA Pharma has just released a warning stating that the morning-after pill 'Norlevo' is completely ineffective for women weighing over 176 pounds. The pill even begins to lose effectiveness for women weighing 165."

The effort at humor in the headline deploys a logical fallacy that has a name. Can you name it?

It's the Fallacy of Accent. The fallaCEE of acksSAHN.

(To learn the names of 76 fallacies, get "76 Fallacies," which only costs 99¢ in Kindle. (Also in paperback.)

13 comments:

Anonymous said...

Totally and completely ineffective for men at any weight. I did a study, so its true. Have the cocktail napkin to prove it.

Anonymous said...

So, according to today's posts, 176-pound women are double-screwed, as it were: no orgasms and no abortion from the pill.

I wonder if Cosmo can do a study correlating women's orgasms to their weight. Just because.

Bob said...

Well, it's not like there's any fat Frenchwomen, right? They're all thin, elegant, smoke, and have hairy armpits.

Scott M said...

The effort at humor in the headline deploys a logical fallacy that has a name. Can you name it?

Yes. It involves the French.

SGT Ted said...

Classic. Not much of a headline or news for that matter, as chemical medicines have always depended on a minimum amount to weight ratio for effectiveness. They'll make a pill that works for the fatties, don't worry.

ErnieG said...

I don't know the formal name of the fallacy, but it's the one in which a boy, learning that one in five people in the world is Chinese, tried to guess which one of his siblings it was.

ErnieG said...

After checking Wikipedia, I learned that the fallacy is an example of faulty generalization: a fallacy of defective induction, reaching a strong conclusion from weak premises.

PB said...

176 pounds is known as birth control

Wince said...

Now, that's a cure for the Great Orgasm Deficit: 76 Phalluses.

Known Unknown said...

176 pounds is known as birth control

Not if she's 6-10.

FleetUSA said...

The Christmas Story: the box contained a "fra-gi-lay"

zefal said...

"I am not Spock" isn't just the title of Leonard Nimoy's biography!

zefal said...

Autobiography!