The Gamblers Fallacy



The Sandstorm by Sean Huze

Sean Huze's play brings out a lot of emotions, but I don't know if they are the right ones. The play

has a lot of fallacies in it, the main one that sticks out is "Appeal to Emotion." He is using your

emotions against you to sum up a war that is very complicated. Multiple times the author suggests

that the Marines don't want to be there. This might be true but the author fails to recognize that this

is a very small select group of the Marine Corps. He plays a fallacy here called a, "Hasty

Generalization." This fallacy takes a small sample of a large group and then bases the facts of the

smaller sample on the entire group. Other than that the story appeals to emotions by involving

gory details and facts, somehow trying to undermine the war, and in a small way saying it's not

worth it because this is what's happening to people. The story in the end where it talks about the

Marines leaving the town and the author putting all that mushy gushy stuff in there, he continues

to use fallacies and fails to use common sense. Again, using the appeal to emotion fallacy, the

author forgets to add any amount of common sense. For instance, the fact that they are soldiers,

and that soldiers never see the whole picture. So when higher up calls for them to go and take

care of business somewhere else, like an uprising of insurgents which is a bad thing, they freak

out and feel like they are abandoning those people. In all reality they probably sent some more

Marines in to protect those people. And even if they didn't, they obviously had something more

important to take care of. In essence I was disgusted with this play because rather than use facts

the author relies on pity and emotion to grab the audiences attention.