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Comment by danielvf | Hacker News Reader

Note that he is not suing Ford the manufacturer, but a local dealership, and he is not suing them for the truck ending up with Jihadists, but because the dealership said they would remove the decals before selling the vehicle.

Both being much more reasonable than the what the headline implies.

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I'm not sure which headline you're reading, but the one here references both "Ford dealer" and "truck with logo" (I had to shorten from "truck with company logo" to fit Hacker News' 80 character limit)

It's easy to interpret the "after" in your headline as "because". But the real "because" is because the dealer didn't remove the decal, not because it ended up in Syria.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post_hoc_ergo_propter_hoc

edit: why the downvote?

I guess it's because this fallacy is not relevant to the topic. The association of "after" with "because" in cases like these is not about fallacious reasoning, it's because particular two things were chosen and put together to form a headline, and it doesn't make sense to create a headline like this if you only want to connect the two things with a temporal relationship (one came after another).

> But the real "because" is because the dealer didn't remove the decal, not because it ended up in Syria.

In a causal sense, the ending up in Syria seems to be a key actual cause, as does the fact that the decal was still present.

Both are probably key points legally, too, as one is the alleged omission, and the other the alleged mechanism of harm, both of which are important to the legal action.

Tlrobinson, at the time I commented, both the original article headline and the title here did not say "dealership". I'm guessing your title had been overwritten by the original article headline. No worries.

Nope, it definitely always said "dealer". I remember the original title being exactly 86 characters because HN told me so, and it still is. I removed "company" so it would fit in 80 characters.

regardless, thank you for the concise tl;dr

I find this really strange. The first thing dealerships do to cars is peal off them emblems, particularly if they are from another dealership. Pretty crappy overall, but at the end of the day he probably signed something that said he was selling it, "as is".

We have a term for someone who assures a counterparty that they're going to do something, knowing that the contract says they don't have to, and then fails to do it...

Is "liar" the term you had in mind?

"Oh teller of untruths, your trousers are combusting..." (Stolen from my kids, who stole it from online somewhere.)

Really poorly written article.

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