Argumentum Ad Plausible

I'm a rational guy.  That's how I think.  I look at things from a very logical perspective (well... most of the time).  Cause and effect, process flows, statistical analysis, and temporal contingencies are all intellectual friends of mine.  My enemies are, naturally enough, logical fallacies.

I made a handy and humorous little chart that is a quick overveiw of many common logical fallacies a while ago (you can download it here).  The sad thing is how easy they are to slip into.  And how easy we, as humans, nod our heads when we hear a totally illogical statement.  This is especially true if we hear it as a part of a joke or in defense of something we believe in.  Politicians can't communicate at all without using them...

I just read a little article by Morgan Freeburg as he defines a new class of logical fallacy, "Argumentum Ad Plausible".  Here is how he describes it:

"A logical fallacy that used to occur only sporadically, but requires a name now that we’re living it every single day.
It is a theory of events related to each other by cause-and-effect; the person advancing the theory, who in the realm of reality is not known for respecting cause-and-effect, mistakes its plausibility for its proof. 'See, we sit down with our enemies to talk out our differences with them, and war is avoided. It could happen!'
And when it doesn’t — when reality runs up against theory, and it turns out they disagree — the exuberant demonstrate that sanity has deserted them, or avoided them for the time being, by declaring that reality lost and theory won. 'See, never mind what you saw happen just now, what’s supposed to happen is this…' and then they recite the same sequence of events again.
It is an insistence on engaging in experimentation, coupled with an intellectual disability to engage in true experimentation."

Fantastic!  Basically, this is a sub-set of the good, old standby Argumentum Ad Nauseam, where you just keep saying the same thing over and over as your argument.  Add a dash of Post Hoc and Use/Mention fallacies for flavor...  Poof!  There it is!  I can't tell you how many times I have heard this exact verbal mess from people who should know better - it's nice to have a new name to go with that familiar, yet ugly face...