Part of the thicket we have to cut through to think clearly and reasonably about political discourse and events is the near wall of entangled rationalizations and defensiveness. Self-contradiction gets separated from hypocrisy only by insight into an individual’s mind and motivations. Or as Tom Delay justified himself to the court yesterday when he evaded […]
Shitty Arguments
That is the technical term – shitty argument – a type of informal logical argument first identified by Aristotle in his Logic, as part of his discussion of sophistical arguments. A shitty argument may be shitty because it is a particular manifestation of “bad” – that is, so shameless that the perpetrator of it is […]
What Gingrich Meant When He Called Obama an Anti-colonialist
Certainly you recall it. We had some discussion of it here, and here, and here, and here. The curious question at the root of the whole discussion was what it means at this p0int in history and the evolution of world culture to call someone an “anti-colonialist” and mean it as a pejorative? What does […]
Same World, Next Year
I’m an ambivalent blogger, my engagement with the world always tenuous. Though as a child I was a very shy, I am not that now. But according to the Myers-Briggs assessment, I am an introvert. This news will shock a lot of people. But the Myers-Briggs definitions of introvert and extrovert are different from the […]
Perspective, Ideology, and Academic Freedom
In an essay at The New York Times online, We’re All Conservatives Now, Stanley Fish seeks to reconcile the concerns of both Right and Left about the American university. Contrasting the complaints of the right wing David Horowitz to the the left wing visions offered in the recent “Academic Freedom in the Post-9/11 Era” (edited […]