hell’s handmaiden

O’Leary apparently thinks Stanley Fish makes sense, and perhaps he does… but not here.

To be fair, O’Leary isn’t responding to, or quoting, Fish directly but is citing Dinesh D’Souza’s TownHall portrayal of Fish’s thought, so perhaps it is just D’Souza who doesn’t make sense. But I’m not sure how to make the call. Fish, after all, is a post-modernist literary theorist which means he, by association with his calling, rates well below, say, therapists and crystal healers on the ’scum’ scale and well above MENSA on the mental masturbation scale. On top of that, Fish has made a career of saying stupid things. I wonder if O’Leary praises the idea ( as parsed by Brad DeLong ) that “people who think differently should be hated, terrorized, and scorned’? I wonder if she agrees that “There’s No Such Thing As Free Speech: And It’s a Good Thing, Too“? Still… benefit of the doubt and all, what does he, supposedly, have to say that so impresses O’Leary?

A cognitive bias is something that our minds commonly do to distort our own view of reality. Here are the 26 most studied and widely accepted cognitive biases.

Popularity: 1%

Why worry about the burden of proof… why argue about the burden of proof when all you really plan to do is assert what you want to believe and call it true?

If he does, he may be saying only that he has as much right to take ‘God exists’ as basic as his critic does to take sense data or truths about the world as basic. Perhaps that is all Plantinga wishes to do. The upshot is then to claim that the believer and his critic are in the same boat. They agree on some formal account-that there are basic propositions and propositions derivative from them-but there is no way to adjudicate claims as to what propositions, materialiter loquendo, can function as basic. The skeptic is simply wrong if he thinks some version of empiricism is beyond dispute or, worse, that it is part of the formal theory.

The @ssh@l@ who took his TB on a world tour now resides in a hospital room in Colorado. He’s feeling apologetic.

“I don’t expect for people to ever forgive me. I just hope that they understand that I truly never meant to put them in harm,” he said, his voice cracking.

Quarantined TB patient: ‘I hope they forgive me’

That’s nice, but I doubt TB cares much.

I’m not going to spend much time on Andrew Speaker, Civilian Bunghole of the Week, but I do want to note that…

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed…

The unanimous Declaration of the thirteen united States of America

Sound familiar?